From jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au  Fri Oct  1 07:17:39 1999
From: jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au (Jon Patrick)
Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 17:17:39 +1000
Subject: Excluding data
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 28 Sep 1999 11:56:00 +0100."
 <Pine.GSO.4.03.9909281146180.22992-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.OCT.1999.171739.1000.>

ON Tue, 28 Sep 1999 11:56:00 +0100 (BST)  Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
said

    On Sun, 26 Sep 1999, Jon Patrick wrote:

    > Let's agree to differ. My position is that if can't be shown to be
    > non-basque then it is basque.

    Too strong for me.  I prefer this view: if there exist reasonable
    grounds for *suspecting* it may not be native Basque, then we should
    exclude it.

    > If it can't be shown to be modern then it is old.

    Far too strong for me.
<snip>

    > How old is anybody's guess.

    Precisely, and not good enough for my purposes.

Larry, I think it is useful for us now to agree to differ on these points and
move on to new topics
cheers

Jon
______________________________________________________________
The meaning of your communication is the response you get


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Oct  1 08:07:54 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 09:07:54 +0100
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19990928170655.009a6810@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.OCT.1999.090754.0100.>

On Tue, 28 Sep 1999, Roslyn M. Frank wrote:

> [LT]

>>> The female given name <Maite> is
>>> the usual Basque equivalent of the Spanish name <Maria Teresa>,
>>> resulting from an accidental similarity in form between this name and
>>> the Basque word <maite>, which I would gloss as `beloved', not as
>>> `love'.

> To my knowledge the nickname for all my friends who are called Maria
> Teresa is Mari Tere sometimes spelled Maritere.

Yes; this is also possible.  But I have met more than one woman named
`Maria Teresa' in Spanish but called `Maite' in Basque.  All of them are
women who are now over 45 years old; that may be significant.

> Moreover, although I know that first names are often reduced
> phonologically when abbreviated, your derivation of Maite from Maria
> Teresa seems a bit strained, that is, based on my experience. In it
> you propose that the first and middle name both have undergone major
> reduction. I'm not saying that it's impossible, just that it's more
> complicated.

I *did not say* that `Maite' was a reduced form of `Maria Teresa'.
I said that `Maite' was often used as a Basque equivalent of the Spanish
name, purely because of a resemblance in sound.

The Basque equivalents of Spanish names are variable in nature.  For
example, the medieval Spanish male name `Fortun' came into Basque as
the non-obvious `Orti', a name no longer in use, but the source, via the
medieval patronymic <-z>, of the familiar Basque surname `Ortiz'.
The Spanish male name `Jose Maria' comes into Basque commonly as `Joxe
Mari', but also frequently as the less obvious `Txema'.

> The test would be to see whether Spanish speakers from Andalucia
> recognize Maite as being composed of Maria Teresa or whether they
> would say that it sounds like a Basque name.

Spanish-speaker from Andalucia?  What would they know about it?
I think the test is to ask some Basque women called `Maite' whether
their Spanish name is `Maria Teresa'.  I don't suppose all of them will
answer "yes", since the name has perhaps now acquired an independent
existence in Basque, but I've already met some who did answer "yes".

> We also need to remember that under Franco there was an approved
> list of given (Christian) names and Basque ones were not included
> (nor were many others).

Indeed, but we are mainly talking here about colloquial Basque versions
of Spanish given names, and these were in use before and during the
Franco era.

> So far I haven't found a single native Spanish speaker (or Basque
> one) who "recognized" Maite as an abbreviation of Maria Teresa. But
> I've only asked a dozen speakers so far.

Ask a few more.  You'll find some.  Try older Basques.

> Then on your gloss of "maite" as "beloved", fine. But keep in mind,
> also that in English it is common for the expression "love" to be
> used as a form of address for another person, not just a female one,
> right, Love?

Sure, but why is this relevant?

Basque <maite>, in its definite form <maitea>, is of course a common way
of addressing a sweetheart of either sex.  It is literally `(my)
beloved', even though it is functionally roughly equivalent to English
`love' here.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Oct  1 15:10:08 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 16:10:08 +0100
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19990928173038.0098b820@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.OCT.1999.161008.0100.>

On Tue, 28 Sep 1999, Roslyn M. Frank wrote:

> [LT]

>>>> And <bat> `one' is pretty clearly derived from earlier *<bade>.

> Does your last statement mean that you would argue that *<bade>
> should be the reconstructed form and that <bedera> derives from
> *<badera> and then that later went through vowel assimilation to end
> up as <bedera>?

Yes.  This is Michelena's analysis, and I endorse it.  (Basque <bedera>
= `one apiece', `one each'.)

> Also, does this mean that you would consider <bederen> and <bedere>
> as further evidence for reconstructiing *<bade> as the proto-form.
> And does it follow that you would consider <bederen> and <bedere> as
> additional supporting evidence for the following statement made by
> you, namely, "the well-supported observation that final plosives in
> lexical items are almost always secondary in Basque (probably
> absolutely always)?

These items don't have final plosives, so they are not directly
relevant.  But northern <bedere(n)> `at least', `as for' very likely
also contains the same stem.

> An aside. Doesn't the combination "probably absolutely always"
> strike you as semantically confusing? I thought "always"  was
> "always" and by its own nature admitted no exceptions. Hence, it
> wouldn't ever need a modifier/qualifier like "absolutely" whereas
> "probably" undermines the entire edifice.  Just trying to translate
> your meaning/intention.

I had just written `almost always', so I then wrote `absolutely always'
to emphasize my statement.  Poor style, no doubt, but native to me.

> Returning to the topic. Stated differently, isn't the "well
> supported observation" you mention above based, in part, on the
> elimination of such commonplace examples as <bat> "one"  that if
> accepted as "evidence" would prove the contrary? It is the
> reconstruction that eliminates the attested form from consideration
> as "evidence," right? In summary, the word <bat> "one", according to
> your analysis, shouldn't be listed as a monosyllabic root-stem in
> Jon's list.

The position is this.  Modern Basque contains a modest number of lexical
items ending in a plosive /t/ or /k/.  Very many of these are either
obvious loan words (like <ganibet> `knife', from Gascon) or obvious
expressive formations (like <zirt-zart> `decisively').  After these are
eliminated, only a few remain, and in most of these the final plosive is
clearly of secondary origin, as in western <bart> `last night' (from
<barda>, preserved in the east), and western <bost> `five' (from
<bortz>, also preserved in the east).

Since this leaves only a couple of plosive-final items unaccounted for,
we may reasonably surmise that these too contain plosives of secondary
origin.  In fact, it's not easy to think of an example other than <bat>
`one'.  But the apparent derivatives like <bedera> `one each' and
<bederatzi> `nine' seem to point to an original *<bade> for this word.

Note also that <bat>, unlike most other numeral names, is postposed to
its head -- and postposed items in Basque frequently undergo irregular
reductions in their phonological material.

As for whether we should count <bat> as an original monosyllable, well.
In many other cases the evidence that a modern monosyllable derives from
an earlier disyllable is overwhelming.  In this case, I think the
evidence is deeply suggestive, but rather less than overwhelming.  So it
depends on how strong you judge the evidence to be.  My own view is that
the evidence is probably just about good enough to reconstruct *<bade>,
and so I wouldn't count the word as a monosyllable.  But another
specialist might genuinely disagree with me, and hence count the word as
a monosyllable.  I wouldn't object to that, but I am pretty confident
that it will turn out to be the only monosyllable ending in a plosive --
at least among the words meeting my criteria for probable native and
ancient status -- and hence that it will stand out sharply from the
other words in the list.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Fri Oct  1 20:19:11 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 15:19:11 -0500
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19990928170655.009a6810@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.OCT.1999.151911.0500.>

	I've heard many times [including from a couple of women named
Maite] that Maite is an abbreviated form of Maria Teresa and tried to
figure out how you could get Maite from that name. The closest thing I
could think of was "Mari Tere", which are used separately in Spanish but,
as far as I know, not together.
 	I imagine that what may have happened was that Spanish speakers
asked what the name meant in Spanish and the parents just threw out Maria
Teresa because of the superficial resemblance. Although Maite is pretty
different from Maria, there isn't much else in Spanish that's close in
phonological terms.
	A similar thing has happened in the US Southwest where Spanish
Jesus is often "translated" as "Jesse", Fernando as "Freddy", Concepcion as
"Connie", Luz as "Lucy", Angeles as "Angie" or "Angela", Jesusa as "Susie"
or "Susan"

[snip]

>We also need to remember that under Franco there was an approved list of given
>(Christian) names and Basque ones were not included (nor were many others).

>So far I haven't found a single native Spanish speaker (or Basque one) who
>"recognized" Maite as an abbreviation of Maria Teresa. But I've only asked a
>dozen speakers so far.

>Then on your gloss of "maite" as "beloved", fine. But keep in mind, also that
>in English it is common for the expression "love" to be used as a form of
>address for another person, not just a female one, right, Love?

>Agur t'erdi,
>Roz

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Oct  2 01:19:24 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 21:19:24 EDT
Subject: Change and What Remains
Message-ID: <FRI.1.OCT.1999.211924.EDT.>

I wrote:
<<Simply bringing up "ceaseless change" tells us nothing about whether enough
"remained" of ancestor so that it could co-exist with the daughter.)>>

In a message dated 9/26/99 5:00:40 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk replied:
<<Sure.  But your position appeared to be that absence of change in a
living language was a serious possibility, and that's what I was
objecting to.>>

Just to untangle the two issues:  the absence of change was always a pure
hypothetical.  The coexistence of ancestor with daughter language is
obviously a separate question.

I hypothesized a language that did not share any of the (300?) "innovations"
that went into the UPenn tree.  When you stated that an ancestor cannot
co-exist with a daughter, I did my best to conform to that 'rule' by
hypothesizing a string of "languages".   Others questioned the parent
/daughter statement before I did.

If you look back at the thread, you'll see that "ceaseless change" was used
to support your no-parent-with-daughter position.  And with regard to that,
let me write again that bringing up "ceaseless change" tells us nothing about
whether enough "remained" of the ancestor so that it could co-exist with the
daughter.

Regards,
Steve Long


From iglesias at axia.it  Sat Oct  2 20:35:32 1999
From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi)
Date: Sat, 2 Oct 1999 13:35:32 PDT
Subject: Manx language
Message-ID: <SAT.2.OCT.1999.133532.PDT.>

Some time ago, there was a discussion in which Manx Gaelic was mentioned.

As I remember, the gist was that the originally "normal" Q Celtic language
(a form of Gaelic) was drastically simplified as a result of contact with
Germanic languages, first the Old Norse of the Danes and later English,
which also provided the spelling system. The process was described by
someone as a form of "creolisation". The process was compared to the effect
that the Norman conquest had on English.

Does anyone remember in what context this question was raised or are there
any other comments on Manx?

Regards
Frank Rossi
Bergamo, Italy
iglesias at axia.it


From roz-frank at uiowa.edu  Sun Oct  3 04:03:34 1999
From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank)
Date: Sat, 2 Oct 1999 23:03:34 -0500
Subject: Excluding Basque data
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9909300847200.25900-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SAT.2.OCT.1999.230334.0500.>

At 09:33 AM 9/30/99 +0100, Larry Trask wrote:
[snip]

>So tell me: how do my principal criteria of early attestation,
>widespread distribution, and absence from neighboring languages "have
>the effect" of biasing my results on phonological form?

Could you share with us once more precisely what these criteria are? I seem
to recall that earlier you listed them but I can't locate that email.

Could you also define more precisely what you mean by "widespread
distribution"? For example, what would an unacceptable distribution be?
Present in only the Gipuzkoan and Bizkaian dialects? Present in the
"northern" dialects of Iparralde (French Basque region) but not in any of
the other dialects? Or contrarily would you argue that the phonology of a
term used in all dialects always should takes precedence over one that is
limited to one dialectal variant only?

Izan untsa,
Roz

************************************************************************
Roslyn M. Frank
Professor
************************************************************************
Department of Spanish & Portuguese	
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242
email: <roz-frank at uiowa.edu>
fax: (319)-335-2990


From Odegard at means.net  Sun Oct  3 00:45:01 1999
From: Odegard at means.net (Mark Odegard <Odegard@means.net>)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 00:39:01 -6
Subject: NEWS re Black Sea Flood
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.003901.6.>

On 30 Sep 99 at 14:28, Larry Trask wrote:

> But how could the Black Sea have been a freshwater lake during a period
> when it had no outlet to the sea?  The Black Sea has a number of major
> rivers flowing into it, and presumably has had these for a very long
> time.  Rivers carry salt.  If they carry it into a lake with no outlet,
> then the lake just gets saltier and saltier: witness the Caspian Sea,
> which is in just this position.

Eventually such lake will turn quite saline, as with the Great Salt
Lake or the Dead Sea. But it does take time, and depends on the
quantity of fresh water flowing into it. My reading indicates the old
Pontine Lake was slightly brackish, with something of the quality of
a bracing mineral water: 'hard', but drinkable. Even today, the
surface waters of the Black Sea are 'fresher' than the deep waters
fed by the inflow from the Med.

The waters of the Caspian are nearly fresh up near the Volga, with
increased salinity as you progress southward. Even in its most salty
parts, the Caspian is still not yet as salty as the ocean. There was
an issue of the National Geographic on this a couple or three months ago.

Mark Odegard mailto:odegard at means.net
17 2nd St NE, Box 68
Waukon, IA 52170-0068
319-568-2142


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Sun Oct  3 00:47:05 1999
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 00:47:05 -0000
Subject: Possessives
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.004705.0000.>

[ Moderator's note:
  If Mr. Trask wishes to address any substantive issue raised in the following,
  I will post such a response.  However, since this discussion is degenerating
  quickly, I am calling a halt to further posts on the topic.
  --rma ]

Dear Larry and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 1999 10:22 AM

> On Mon, 27 Sep 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote:

> [LT]

>>> OK; some facts.  First, Beekes does not use the term `possessive
>>> pronoun' at all in the passage cited by Ryan: he uses only the term
>>> `possessive', which no one can object to.  Hence Ryan's rather snide
>>> comments are pointless.

>> [PR previously]

>> Well, fact: Beekes does not use "determiner";

[LT]
> Indeed, but not relevant.  You were maintaining that Beekes agreed with
> your characterization of items like `my' as possessive pronouns.  But he
> does not.

[PR]
It is obvious to me and to any IEist who has read Beekes that you are
entirely unfamiliar with his work, and are arguing, as you normally do,
purely from your standpoint of your argument.

"The Possessives" in Beekes are in section 15.3.3; Section 15 is "The
Pronoun"; 15.2 is "The Non-Personal Pronouns", including 15.2.1 "The
Demonstratives"; 15.3 is "The personal pronouns"; and preceding "The
Possessives" at 15.3.3 are 15.3.1 "The (Non-Reflexive) Personal Pronouns";
and 15.3.2 "The Reflexive".

Two things should be obvious to everyone from this method of organization:

1) Beekes considers "possessives" a subcategory of personal pronouns, and

2) Beekes uses "possessives" as a shorthand for 'possessive pronouns' in the
same way he uses 'reflexives' as a shorthand for 'reflexive pronouns'.

If Beekes classed "possessives" as 'determiners', he would surely have
discussed them under 15.2!

[PR previously]
>> fact: "possessive" is
>> defined in AHD as: "of, pertaining to, or *designating* a noun or
>> pronoun case that expresses belong or other similar relation".

[LT]
> Like most general-purpose dictionaries of English, the AHD is presenting
> a very old-fashioned view of English grammar.  In fact, the AHD is
> perhaps slightly better at defining grammatical terms than are some
> other desk dictionaries, but its definitions are still, in general, not
> acceptable for linguistic purposes.

[PR]
I believe you sincerely think your views are only "modern" ones whereas I
regard your views as just one view among many different new and many more
old views.

>> [LT]

>>> Second, Beekes is talking about PIE, while I was talking about English.

>> [PR previously]

>> So what?

[LT]
> "So what?"?  Well, Mr. Ryan, it may come as a surprise to you that the
> grammatical facts of all languages are not identical.

> In English, possessives like `my' are clearly determiners, and not
> pronouns.  But the same is not true of all languages.

> In Basque, for example, possessives like <nere> `my' exhibit *none* of
> the properties of determiners and cannot be regarded as determiners.
> Instead, the Basque items are case-marked NPs.

> The grammatical status of possessives varies widely among languages, and
> what is true of PIE need not be true of any other language.

[PR]
Well, Professor Trask, it surely will come as no surprise to you that I
resent strongly being chided for ignorance of facts that would be known to
anyone (including me) who participates on this list --- particularly when
the insult is unrelated to the discussion under hand.

One of the principal benefits of terming this class of words "possessive
pronouns" is that it enables us to identify comparable classes of words in
IE, English, and Basque --- even though the details of their employment may
differ.

And I notice you sidestepped the issue of terminology with Basque. You
certainly cannot call <nere> a possessive pronoun because, according to your
dictionary, possessive pronouns are "determiners'. So if <nere> is not a
determiner, it cannot be a possessive pronoun. And an entry for "possessive"
as a word class (as opposed to a case) does not exist in your dictionary. So
just what is <nere>? I hope you will not tell us that "space considerations"
forced you to omit a category that is necessary to describe the word classes
in the language of your speciality, Basque!

[ moderator snip ]

>> [PR previously]

>> Possessive pronouns (BT = Before Trask)  have two forms: an
>> adjectival use: 'her', etc. and nominal use: 'hers'.

[LT]
> Also wrong, though indeed once widely believed.

> Items like `my' have no adjectival properties and cannot be classed as
> adjectives.  Look at two adjective frames:

> the ___ book
> That book is ___.

> These slots accept adjectives, like `big', `red', `new', `expensive',
> `dirty', `interesting' and `terrible'.  But they don't accept items like
> `my':

> *the my book
> *That book is my.

> Instead, `my' goes into slots like this one:

> ___ new book

> Among the other words that go into this slot are `the', `a', `this' and
> `some': in other words, the class of determiners.  QED.

[PR]
QED? The only thing you have demonstrated is that *you* prefer the play the
"slots" over other methods of analysis!

It must be frustrating to you and Comrie that terms and definitions contrary
to those your prefer are "indeed once widely believed". I think it should be
obvious from our discussions and the linguists I have mentioned that the
"once" is blindly wishful thinking on your part.

The essential quality of any adjective is that it designates a subcategory
of a catgeory of objects. 'Black dog' can be represented logically as a
small circle ('black') within a larger circle ('dog'). Possessive pronouns
can be represented logically in exactly the same way. Of course, this is
exactly the same situation as when nouns are used attributively: "newspaper
account".

Your "slot analysis" is interesting; but we can say, with equal accuracy,
that possessive pronouns are a class of nominals that stand for other
possessive NP's ('my' = 'the speaker's', etc.); and that they have two forms
depending on whether they modify another NP (attribute) or constitute an
independent NP.

I think your basic problem is that you need to take a serious look at your
definition of 'adjective'.

<snip>

[PR previously]
>> Now, if we say 'His was nice', the 'his' stands for a possessive N
>> like 'John's'. The 'his', or 'her(s)', must have a nominal referent;
>> and it stands for ('pro') this nominal referent.

[LT]
> The interpretation is not relevant.  When we are doing grammatical
> classification, we must look at the grammatical behavior.  And `my'
> behaves like a determiner, not like a pronoun.  It is semantically
> *related* to a pronoun, of course, but that's a different matter.
> The noun `arrival' is not a verb because it's related to the verb
> `arrive'.

[PR]
Perhaps not when you're playing the 'slots' but that is not the only game in
town by a long shot!

I sincerely feel sorry for you if you cannot see that.

[PR previously]
>> Now I have no great objection to terming "her" a "possessive
>> determiner" but using this terminology eliminates the interesting
>> connection with pronouns, which I find superfluously
>> disadvantageous.

[LT]
> Well, does applying the label `noun' to deverbal nouns like `arrival',
> `decision' and `creation' also seem to you "superfluously
> disadvantageous"? ;-)

> These things are nouns because they behave like nouns, even though they
> are related to verbs.  And items like `my' are determiners because they
> behave like determiners, even though they are related to pronouns.

 [PR]
I remember the first manifestations of the 'slot system' as opposed to
teaching grammar in the training I received as an aspirant foreign language
instructor.

This 'grammarless' method of teaching language was then extended to English
instruction in the US, and the terrible language skills of today's youth are
directly attributable to this method of instruction, IMHO.

Frankly, I prefer science to gambling.

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/Athens/Forum/2803/index.html and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit
ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim
meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun Oct  3 07:11:19 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 03:11:19 EDT
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.031119.EDT.>

>larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:

<<  I think they tend rather to support the idea that Linear A was used to
write a language quite different from Greek, and that Linear B was merely
cobled so as to produce something in which it was possible to write Greek.  A
system invented from square one for writing Greek would surely have done a
better job.  >>

-- mea culpa, I was unclear.  You've summed up exactly what I meant to say.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun Oct  3 07:13:04 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 03:13:04 EDT
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.031304.EDT.>

Speaking of which, it's interesting to see the degree of archaism in the
Mycenaean Greek of the Linear B tablets.  Some of the vocabulary is
strikingly close to the PIE originals.

An enormous pity we have so little written, and that that doesn't include
anything but economic documents -- some poetry or epics would be very
valuable.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun Oct  3 07:16:05 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 03:16:05 EDT
Subject: SV: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.031605.EDT.>

>lmfosse at online.no writes:

> Aartun analyses Linear A as a Semitic language. His work has been critiziced
> from certain quarters here in Norway. I don't know of any reviews of his
> books.

-- I certainly find that more credible than hypothesizing that Linear A is
used to write any IE language -- certainly any IE language of the 2nd
millenium BCE.

Linear B, modified to do better with Greek, still mucks up the inflectional
system something fierce.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun Oct  3 07:17:59 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 03:17:59 EDT
Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language)
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.031759.EDT.>

>Georg at home.ivm.de writes:

>True enough. But this is possible because the morphological systems of these
>languages are still transparent enough to do this. >>

-- it could be worse, of course.  Look at the problems with Afro-Asiatic...
and then imagine we had to do it from _current_ Afro-Asiatic languages!


From colkitto at sprint.ca  Mon Oct  4 07:50:17 1999
From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 03:50:17 -0400
Subject: Contributions by Steve Long
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.035017.0400.>

I've only just read the first part of Larry Trask's posting, so this is a
bit impertinent, but there is a comment that can be made right away on one
of his points.

>Is Scots a variety of English or a separate language?  Well, a number of
>Scots have argued that it is a separate language, and, if it had not
>been for the Act of Union in 1707, we might all recognie Scots as a
>distinct language today.  But, because of that Act, we don't.  There are
>no linguistic considerations here: just political ones.

Actually, there is a linguistic consideration.  Scots used to have a large
number of distinctive lexical items, differentiating it from "English".
Many of these are now rare in everyday speech, thus reducing the amount of
differentation.

Due to the Act of Union (what about the Union of the Crowns?)  Perhaps.


From Georg at home.ivm.de  Sun Oct  3 09:50:29 1999
From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 11:50:29 +0200
Subject: Perfective-Imperfective (2) - Habitual
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9909301035460.25900-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.115029.0200.>

>However, I query the rest, which raises a familiar point, discussed by
>Comrie in his book: how often does an action have to be performed in
>order to be habitual?  There can, of course, be no absolute answer to
>this: habitual actions just shade off into occasional actions, with no
>sharp dividing line.

>Take a real case.  My friend Alex never buys or carries cigarettes, and
>she normally doesn't smoke at all, but every once in a while -- maybe
>once a week at most, generally less often -- she accepts a cigarette
>when she's with friends who are smoking.

>Now: does Alex smoke?  I would say she doesn't, but possibly not
>everybody has the same intuition.  Next time I see Alex, I'll try to
>remember to ask her if she smokes.  My guess is that she'll say "no",
>or, at best, "once in a while".  I'll be very surprised if she says
>"yes".

While it is correct to say that there simply is a continuum between
occasional and habitual actions, best grasped by a prototype approach. And
what these prototypes are is in most cases language-specific, no, let's say
culture-specific.
In a world where habitual smoking is often close to plain addiction, often
paired with the notion that the smoker may not be able to fully control
this behaviour, suffer from the fact of being one etc. etc., and the habit
of smoking is the focus of public discussions and stuff, the statement "She
smokes" will put the person considerably closer to the "habituality" end of
the continuum, than, e.g. the statement "She eats fish".
"Does she eat fish ?" (I'm inviting for a party and intend to serve some as
the main attraction)
"Does she smoke ?" (I'm inviting for a party and some Americans will be
among the guests [;-)])
Also, the question "Do you smoke ?" has definitely different values on the
habituality-scale when asked by my doctor, or by someone after an opulent
dinner offering a dessert cigar.

St.G.

PS: I smoke like a fish.

Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
+49-228-69-13-32


From Georg at home.ivm.de  Sun Oct  3 11:51:56 1999
From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 13:51:56 +0200
Subject: Contributions by Steve Long (long ;-)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9909301701010.25900-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.135156.0200.>

LT:

>Well, Steve Long will doubtless be bemused to find himself the subject
>of discussion on this list.  But Lloyd Anderson has made it so, and,
>since Lloyd has quoted me repeatedly in his posting, I guess I might
>respond to a few of his points -- especially since I think that Steve
>and Lloyd are both gravely wrong on certain fundamental points.

>I think both have fallen badly into the reification fallacy.  The
>reification fallacy lies in inventing a name, and then concluding that,
>since we have a name, there must exist something "out there" for the
>name to refer to.

>In the linguistic case, the fallacy lies in assuming that names like
>`English', `German' and `Italian' must designate actual entities in the
>real world, because the names exist.

Once in a while one should say when some posting really hits the bull's
eye, and this statement does. Excellent. Like what followed.

>[Pete Grey]

>>> Imagine a situation where a group of spakers of a language go and settle
>>> elsewhere, where substrate and other factors make their language change
>>> swiftly, while those who stayed at home enjoy a very much slower rate of
>>> change.    After some years, and political upheaval, we can see a situation
>>> where the settlers are deemed to be speaking a different language from that
>>> which they brought with them years before.

I confess that I, learning about the thread entitled "Can parent and
Daughter coexist [which I haven't been able to follow], intuitively thought
about such a scenario to say "yes", but I'm happy to admit that I'm glad I
haven't.

LT:
>Is the English of 1999 "the same language" as the English of 1998?

In the spirit of your argument: no, 'course not. But one
attitudinal/sociological factor should not be overlooked: Though changes
have taken place, 1999 English speakers *think* they are using the "same"
language as they were doing a year before. And, of course, the changes in
any individual's ideolect will indeed be infinitesimal (but some speakers
will have died, taking their ideolects with them into their graves,
mass-media will have introduced new lexical items into the speech of many
people aso. aso.). I simply suspect that there are two meanings of "same"
here. Maybe it will be useful to speak of a more mathematical "sameness"
(never observable between even the speech of two individuals from one
family, or maybe even between two days for one individual) and a more
"fuzzy" notion of "prototypical" sameness. Of course, 1998 and 1999 English
are not "same-1", but they are of course more "same-2" than 1999-English
and 1799-English, or English and Scots, which in turn are more "same-2"
than English and Dutch, next English and Danish, E. & Gothic, E. &
Lithuanian etc.
To require the notion "same" only for the idealized situation ("same-1") is
one extreme, the other extreme being to use "same" for English and
Tokharian.
For the latter "historical identity" will be a term which may be put to
some usefulness, provided it is never confused with "same-1", but, then,
who will ever do so ?

LT:

>Take a real case in this vein.  Is modern Greek "the same language" as
>ancient Greek?  If not, where's the cutoff point?  And why do we call
>both of them `Greek'?  But, if you think they are the same language,
>then what's your response to the observation that Pericles and an
>Athenian taxi-driver couldn't understand each other at all?

Correct. Straightforward identity is not the thing. But "historical
identity". In the Greek case, we can illustrate this with the following:
ever since the other Ancient Greek "dialects" were ousted by Attic (yes,
there is Tsakonian, but this is only an example), the language has been
transmitted in the "normal" way, i.e. from parents to child (simplified !),
with every new generation *intending* to speak the "language" (it's time to
introduce the quotes here ...) of the preceding one, *aiming* at their
norm, yet introducing change after change etc., we all know that.
In the Greek case, no sizable group of speakers worth speaking of has ever
seperated from this "mainstream" of vertical descent with every generation
being convinced to speak just the language of the older one(s). When such a
seperation does occur, it doesn't have to involve physical seperation of
the migration type, cultural reassignments of subgroups without physical
dislocation of whole groups may suffice. Such a seperation, however it does
come about (it doesn't have to be a historical "catastrophe", contact may
simply peter out for hosts of reasons), will lead to speakers interpreting
their we-group as different from "them", gradually leading to an
interpretation of any differences in linguistic usage between "us" and
"them" as marking "different languages", however close their lects may be
in purely linguistic terms (this is currently happening in Yugoslavia, as
Larry noted; the opposite does also occur: witness the overnight extinction
of language with 2 1/2 Mio. speakers recently. Cannot happen ? Has
happened: Moldavian; I'm not properly informed whether this has happened to
Tadzhik yet).
This has, of course, also linguistic consequences. Innovations spreading in
"their" variety are no longer copied in "our" one, since "we" simply don't
talk to "them" any longer, or less often aso. (This is, btw., the gist of
the wave-model, so hotly debated long ago, but in reality not in opposition
to any stammbaum-model: they are just two aspects of the same thing).
Now, in the first scenario, separation-free vertical continuity with
maintained group-identity, it is hard to avoid some "sameness"-metaphor,
for which "historical identity" might well do the job.
What about "sameness" after seperation ? Of course, speakers of seperated
varieties will foster the same ideology, namely that they simply continue
to speak like their ancestors did, mostly blaming "them" for not to. Of
course, there is also some degree of "sameness", but for this the
"relatedness"-metaphor is generally used, involving at least the following
assumptions:
There is "historical identity" between the lects under discussion; however,
since more than one variety ("language", i.e. the conglomerate of
linguistic, but mostly also political, cultural and ideological notions
which leads people to single out such a construct, giving it a single name)
may claim the right for this kind of "sameness", and the coexisting
varieties may thus not be chronologically ordered in the way we can treat
the speech of Pericles and our Athens taxi driver (nobody could understand
Pericles today without learning his lg.).

This doesn not answer the cardinal question whether a parent language and
its daughters may coexist, yet, since every language of thursday is a
changed variety of wednesday's language, this appears meaningless. But not
quite.
If we, for a moment, abstain from any attempt to "define" a "language",
which seems to be as impossible as to define any term of everyday language
in scientific terms, a different approach might bring about that there are
possibilities where to speak of coexisting parents and daughters  could
after all make some sense.
I have in mind not "languages", but linguistic *items*. By "item" (a term
used in David Nettle's interesting new book on "Linguistic Diversity") I
understand, very loosely "defined", just everything languages are made up
of (I know that views of "languages" as "sets" consisting of "elements" are
grossly simplified and not at all adequate, but few people will deny, I
hope, that some aspects of language may well be treated this way; certainly
the lexicon is by and large describable as a set with elements), words,
morphemes, accent patterns, syntactic rules, everything one could describe
and put a name on. Now, I do maintain that, with linguistic *items*, parent
and offspring can coexist, and often do. A simple example: the Germanic
words for "king" are derived from a reconstructable Proto-Germanic item
*kuningaz, which, by definition "no longer exists". Yet it was borrowed
early into Finnish, where it survives to this day as /kuningas/.
Discounting the small difference this example still presents, I hope the
picture is clear: a parent and its offspring may coexist, and of course
there are more and better examples where, in a given family, forms may
exist, which simply haven't underwent any significant change since earliest
times. Or take Italian /akwa/ against, say, French /o/. Of course, the
French does not go back to the Italian (neither the "languages", nor these
"items", but the parent form of French /o/ was, at times, /akwa/; this
remained unchanged in Italian; the items are certainly not "same-1", but
"same-2" they are, and Italian speakers still copy the form, which French
speakers have changed so dramatically over the centuries. Of course, one
could insist on our inability to assert "sameness" on the level of each and
every phonetic detail of vowel openness or V-1 time, or prosody and stuff,
but there is a level of abstraction (the phonological one), where the
notion "same" for Latin aqua and Italian /akwa/ makes sense.
So, on the item level, parent and offspring can coexist, and they often do
(in some close-knit language families, like e.g. Turkic, they very often
do, i.e. what has to be reconstructed for the proto-lg. is very often
attested largely or totally unchanged in some modern language).

To sum up: since the notion "language x" is a fuzzy notion, discredited by
the very fact of the inevitability of constant day-to-day language change,
more so by the nonlinguistic motives which often lead to the reification,
as Larry said so brilliantly, of "languages", the question of whether
parent and daughter *language* can coexist is meaningless or, consequently,
to be answered in the negative, as Larry did.
On the level of single linguistic items, this is not necessarily so, only
if one insists on /aqua/ being uttered by Cato the Elder and /acqua/
uttered by Luca Cavalli Sforza have no right whatsoever to being treated as
"the same" item on whatever level of abstraction.
The question, whether "language" A and B, sharing this and that set of "the
same" items are the "same language" or not, or after which precise amount
of divergence-increasing changes they cease to be is not really a
meaningful question of linguistics, it may even not be a meaningful
question for philosophers. Constructivism takes care of most of these
pseudo-problems.

St.G.

[ moderator snip ]

Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
+49-228-69-13-32


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sun Oct  3 13:21:07 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 14:21:07 +0100
Subject: Fwd: Re: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19990929211028.009a0970@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.142107.0100.>

On Wed, 29 Sep 1999, Roslyn M. Frank wrote:

>> [LT]

>>>> And <bat> `one' is pretty clearly derived from earlier *<bade>.

> Larry, is this theory on *<bade> yours or did you glean it from some
> other souce? And if it isn't yours, could you share with us who
> first came up with it and when? Did that person use the same
> explanation?

The comparison of <bat> with <bederatzi> `nine', and the consequent
suggestion that <bat> must derive from something of the form *<bad->,
was first made by Henri Gavel early in this century.  The further
comparisons with <bedera> `one apiece' and other items, and the proposed
reconstruction *<bade>, were put forward by Michelena, in his book
Fonetica Historica Vasca, p. 134 and p. 235.

I can claim no credit here, but I do endorse Gavel's and Michelena's
suggestions.  But note that, for lack of compelling evidence, Michelena
did not regard the reconstruction *<bade> as secure, but only as a
plausible suggestion.  This reconstruction is nothing like as secure as
some others, like *<ardano> `wine'.

Incidentally, this last word might intrigue the IEists on the list.
Basque is unusual among European languages in showing no trace of the
widespread `wine' word.  Its *<ardano> (with a number of regional
reflexes in the modern language) has often been compared with Albanian
<ardhi> and Armenian <ort>, both `wine', the suggestion being that the
`wine' word spread across Europe, displacing an older widespread word
from all but these three languages.  Don't know if there's anything in
this.

The Basque word is securely recorded from the 12th century, making it
one of the first Basque words to be recorded outside the ancient
Aquitanian materials.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Sun Oct  3 08:58:54 1999
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 08:58:54 -0000
Subject: accusative and ergative languages
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.085854.0000.>

Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: Ralf-Stefan Georg <Georg at home.ivm.de>
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 1999 3:51 PM

First let me say that I am happy that R-S has again joined our discussions.
Though we infrequently agree, he always contributes a fresh thought or two
which stimulates me to re-examine my premises.

<snip>

[PR previously]

>> Pat interjects: (after I once again pointed out that no split-free erg lg
>> is known, but split-free nominative lgs do exist):
>> Oh, so "our" type of languages, accusative-type, can be *split-free* but
>> "their" type of languages, ergative-type, cannot be. Akkusativ ueber alles!

[R-S]
> So much to say here. Overlooking the rhetoric, involving national
> stereotypes and an allegation of racism on my side,

[PR interjects]
Ralf-Stefan, ease up. Do I have to put in a 'funny-face' whenever I attempt
to say something funny?

First, I understand the distinction between "ueber alles" and "ueber
a/Allen". Second, I would not dare to stereotype you; for me, at least, you
are unique, a rara avis. Third, since almost everyone agrees that 'race' is
a term which signifies *nothing* (of course, I do not think so but please
let us leave that aside), 'racism' is only a misdemeanor not a felony; and,
I certainly do not think you are a 'racist' on the basis of anything you
have written that I have read --- in any case.

[R-S continued]
> I should at least say
> that I think I said more than once that I find the notion of "ERG/ACC
> "type" of languages" rather unfruitful and only marginally meaningful.
> Also, I'm not claiming that "our" languages (maybe the "Standard Average
> European" ones) are entirely free of ergative structures. Larry has pointed
> out marginal ergativity in English by drawing attention to the behaviour of
> the -ee suffix. There is also marginal ergativity in German, as I found out
> recently (no, I don't know whether this has been noticed before by someone,
> but it probably has); for your amusement, here it is: look at the verbal
> prefix /zer-/ (roughly translatable as "asunder" othl.), denoting that some
> object is dissolved or dismembered by the verbal process. When prefixed to
> a transitive verb, you'll find that the Patient is the undergoer of
> dissolution: zerstoeren, zerschlagen, zersaegen aso. aso., when the verb is
> intransitive, it is S which is dissolved/dismembered: zerfliessen,
> zergehen, zerschellen, zerspringen aso. (those may be fewer). Maybe there
> are more prefixes of this kind, but I haven't majored in German like you,
> so you could look for more.
> The message is that, if you look hard enough, it will be possible to find
> more "hidden ergativity" is languages commonly held as split-free ACC,
> though you usually have to look harder here than in so-called ERG lgs. when
> you are after instances of accusativity. So far, the empirical fact that no
> split-free ERG language seems to be known, othoh split-free ACC lgs. do
> exist, is still valid and to shatter it, you'll need empirical work showing
> that it is not correct.
> Defending ideology by trying to allege that the opposite position is also
> mere ideology is not the way to win over people. In this case it is
> ideology (yours) against empirical facts.

[PR]
All good points. I am wondering how you would react to the proposition that
'passive' in ACC languages fulfills a roughly analogous role to 'splits' in
predominantly ERG languages? 'Splitting', AFAICS, seems to be a method of
fine-tuning the indication of directness (and intentionality) of the
agentivity, and I am wondering if other mechanisms in ACC languages are not
really functionally if not formally equivalent.

The fact that some ERG languages have what appears to be a 'passive' is,
IMHO, not a valid objection to this proposition.

[PR previously]

>> What you seem not to be able to grasp because of your unfamiliarity with
>> languages like Sumerian is that the ergative "subject" is frequently NOT
>> EXPRESSED. And, I am not even sure that "subject" is a useful term to
>> apply to relationships between ergative and nominative languages.

[R-S]
> I'm not trying to appear as an expert on Sumerian, which I happily admit
> not to be, though I'm pretty much convinced that the examples I gave from
> this language earlier this year managed to show that Sumerian is not a
> pure, split-free ERG lg. They were from the literature, part of which you
> recommended yourself, and you could not show that I misunderstood something
> found there due to my lack of knowledge of the language. But, then, every
> grammar is only a secondary source, and the real answer will, here as
> elsewhere, only be found in the primary data of the texts themselves.
> That "subject" is frequently not expressed in Sumerian is irrelevant to the
> question (in fact to any question surrounding any kind of ergativity
> debate). It can be left unexpressed in quite a range of languages, be they
> dominantly ERG or ACC. On the question, whether "subject" is a useful term
> here, a lot has been said during this thread, which I won't try to repeat
> here. I'm with you that it maybe a potentially misleading term, only
> insofar a host of definitions of this traditional term are on the market.
> But once we get our definitions clear, there should be no real reason for
> not using this (or any other traditional) term in this discussion.

> OK, nuff said, I'm looking forward to your book on ergativity ;-)

[PR]
As you may have intuited from the ongoing discussion of the "superordinate"
verbal category, it may not be possible to reach agreement on a definition
or even a term for which a definition is needed!

My 'hidden agenda' is that, because I believe I can see that CVC(V) roots
can be analyzed into S-V combinations, I am almost forced to consider the
relationship between S and V primary, and V with A secondary.

Now, let me say, just for the record, that, of course, there is no
relationship between S and SUBJECT as we have been discussing it.

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/Athens/Forum/2803/index.html and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit
ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim
meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sun Oct  3 14:11:49 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 15:11:49 +0100
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <007201bf0b6f$86fbfd80$a803703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.151149.0100.>

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

> True.  Paul Arnold thought Linear A was Proto-Basque, but he used a
> number of non-ancient words to translate the texts.

Ah, I don't know this work.  Is it possible to provide a reference to
it?

I've read F. G. Gordon's 1931 book Through Basque to Minoan, which is an
absolute scream.  Gordon seems unaware that Basque possesses such
ornamental features as morphology, syntax, and rules of word-formation,
and he is also unaware that not all modern Basque words existed
thousands of years ago, in the same form and with the same meaning.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Sun Oct  3 09:18:02 1999
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 09:18:02 -0000
Subject: Perfective-Imperfective (2) - Habitual
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.091802.0000.>

Dear Miguel and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv at wxs.nl>
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 1999 5:48 PM

> "Patrick C. Ryan" <proto-language at email.msn.com> wrote:

>> As for soler, a Spanish expert would have to make a judgment here but I
>> suspect strongly that soler in the present tense can be exactly rendered
>> by *another* English idiom:

>> 'to be used to V+ing', as in

>> 'Lisa is used to smoking', which looks at habituality from its affect on
>> the agent.

> That would be "Lisa esta acostumbrada a fumar".  "Lisa suele
> fumar" can be translated as "Lisa usually smokes", or simply
> "Lisa smokes".

Thank you for your input.

My Spanish dictionary (Simon and Shuster's International Dictionary 1973),
although admittedly not a scholarly one (at circa 1600 pages, it is not
exactly a pocketbook either), in the listing under <soler>, glosses it as
"to be in the habit of, be accustomed to".  And, of course, under
"accustomed", the first listing is <acostumbrado>.

Is it therefore appropriate to say that:

'Lisa suele fumar'

can be interpreted as: 'Lisa is accustomed to smoking'?

And if 'Lisa is used to smoking' is equivalent to 'Lisa is accustomed to
smoke', is it possible, in some contexts, for 'Lisa suele fumar' to be
interpreted as virtually equivalent to 'Lisa esta' acostumbrada a fumar'?

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/Athens/Forum/2803/index.html and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit
ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim
meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)


From edsel at glo.be  Sun Oct  3 14:51:43 1999
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 16:51:43 +0200
Subject: Pre-Basque phonology (fwd)
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.165143.0200.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Even though it may no longer be relevant, I wonder if this message ever got
sent.

[ Moderator's note:
  I've checked the incoming archives; this message was never received before.
  --rma ]

-----Original Message-----
From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
To: Indo-European at xkl.com <Indo-European at xkl.com>
Date: Friday, September 24, 1999 4:20 AM
Subject: Re: Pre-Basque phonology (fwd)


[snip]
>As far back as we can reconstruct, the best choice is an original
>*<aho>.  The origin of this is beyond our powers of recovery.

[Ed Selleslagh]

What about Lat. <anu-> (o-stem), which has a basic meaning of 'ring/ring
shaped'? The semantic proximity seems obvious, like the association of the
letter O with an open mouth.

Intervocalic -n- > -h- or -zero- is common in Basque (The latter also is in
Galician/Portuguese: Lisbona > Lisboa, and not only for -n-: Salavedra >
Saavedra [Oldhall], palacio > paço).

[snip]

>[on Basque <sei> `six']

>> But I think in another venue you argued that <sei> was a loan word
>> in Euskera.

>No, I did not.  Quite the contrary: I have several times argued
>*against* the proposal, put forward by several other people, that <sei>
>is borrowed from Romance.  The problem is the phonology.  The Latin for
>`six' was /seks/, and all the descendants of this in Romance varieties
>in contact with Basque have a final sibilant, as far as I know, as in
>Castilian /seis/ and French /sis/.  Now, when Basque borrows a Latin or
>Romance word containing a final sibilant, it *always* renders that
>sibilant with some sibilant of its own, without exception.  So, Latin
>/seks/ should have produced a Basque *<zetz> or something similar, while
>Castilian /seis/ should have produced a Basque *<seits> if borrowed
>early or *<seis> if borrowed late.  But the only Basque form recorded
>anywhere is <sei>, and hence I conclude that a borrowing from Latin or
>Romance is impossible.

[Ed]

Maybe it was a very early loan from a pre-Roman/Latin local Italic (or
Celtiberian?)?

Remember two things:
1. Lusitanian (Cabeço das Fraguas) looks a lot like Q-Italic.

2. 'six' is 'sei' in Italian, wich is also from Latin, like 'seis' in
Castilian. Of course, Italian was not in contact with Basque (unless some late
Romans already spoke something that began to look like it), but some northern
Italic, or maybe Celtic (but in any case IE, like Cantabrian??), language may
have been.

So, even though Romance must probably be excluded, it may still be a loan from
a related local language. Unfortunately, we know very little about most

Ed.


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sun Oct  3 16:09:14 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 17:09:14 +0100
Subject: Basque 'sei'
In-Reply-To: <37f4993c.3120963@mail.wxs.nl>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.170914.0100.>

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:

[LT]

>> Second, there's the problem of the sibilant.  Basque has two contrasting
>> voiceless alveolar sibilants: a laminal, notated <z>, and an apical,
>> notated <s>.  Now, in early loans from Latin, Latin /s/ is almost always
>> rendered as the laminal <z>.  The same is true at all periods of loans
>> from Gallo-Romance: the laminal /s/ of Occitan and French is rather
>> consistently rendered by the Basque laminal <z>, not by the apical <s>.
>> In contrast, the apical /s/ of Ibero-Romance is equally consistently
>> rendered by the Basque apical <s>.

> But Gascon-Be'arnais is Ibero-Romance in many ways, including
> it's apical <s>.

Very interesting.  I didn't know that.

But how old is this apical /s/ in Gascon?  In his inadequately
celebrated article `Lat. S: el testimonio vasco', Michelena points out
that the ending <-os> ~ <-osse>, so common in Gascon place names,
corresponds regularly to Basque <-otz> ~ <-oze>, just as the related
Aragonese <-ue's> does.  This suggests strongly that the laminal <z> was
the ordinary equivalent of Gascon and Aragonese /s/ at an early stage,
and hence that the apical pronunciation of /s/ in modern Gascon must be
a later development there, just as it appears to be in Ibero-Romance.
So, any attempt at deriving Basque <sei> `six' from Gascon would have to
see the borrowing as rather late.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Sun Oct  3 16:21:01 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 12:21:01 -0400
Subject: NEWS re Black Sea Flood
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9909301425280.25900-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.122101.0400.>

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Larry Trask wrote:

> But how could the Black Sea have been a freshwater lake during a period
> when it had no outlet to the sea?  The Black Sea has a number of major
> rivers flowing into it, and presumably has had these for a very long
> time.  Rivers carry salt.  If they carry it into a lake with no outlet,
> then the lake just gets saltier and saltier: witness the Caspian Sea,
> which is in just this position.

Your question makes sense, and I don't know the answer to it.  I just
checked a map of the Pleistocene glaciation, and it didn't get nearly far
enough south to cover the Black Sea area, or I would have thought that to
be the explanation.

Whatever the explanation, we know that the fish, etc. in the earlier Black
Sea were freshwater type creatures.  At the time of the flood in question,
there is an abrupt and wholesale change in the life-forms in the Black Sea
to salt-water species from the Mediterranean.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Sun Oct  3 16:24:43 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 12:24:43 -0400
Subject: SV: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <01BF0B6A.7B5266E0.lmfosse@online.no>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.122443.0400.>

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Lars Martin Fosse wrote:

> Aartun analyses Linear A as a Semitic language. His work has been critiziced
> from certain quarters here in Norway. I don't know of any reviews of his
> books.

If Linear A is a Semitic language, it doesn't appear to inflect in the
manner known from e.g. Hebrew and Arabic, i.e. by inserting inflecting
vowel melodies into the consonant frame of the lexical item.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com  Sun Oct  3 16:43:53 1999
From: 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com (Damien Erwan Perrotin)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 18:43:53 +0200
Subject: re pre-greek language
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.184353.0200.>

There is many problems about the pre-greek languages of the Aegean, and
Linear A is only one of them.
Linear A is autochtonous and cannot be derived from cuneifor or
hieroglyph, so it must have evolved from local pictograms and thus
reflects the language it was first designed for (even if it was not
perfect). But that is not the main reason for thinking that the
indigenous language of Crete was not Greek.
First, there is an handfull of late inscription in the Greek script
transcripting a local language (notably at Phraisos) which has not been
dechiphered.
Second there is medical egyptian payrus quoting a formula "in the
language of keftiou", while not vocalized, this formula is not Greek.
Third there is the toponymy of Crete (and of a great part of mainland
Greece. This toponymy is not Greek. The problem is that a number of
place-names can be interpreted as IE, while not greek : thus
knossos : the hill (Irish cnoc, Old English hnec)
Argissa : the white place (from *arg-)
Gortyne : the closed place (IE *ghert-).

these toponyms are found in the central mediteranea area, up to Etruria
(Crotona, Cortuna), but that could an effect from the sea people
invasion or not.
fourth, Greek borrowed words from other languages, notably technical
terms as well as words related to an "aristocratic way of life"
(bathroom, whore...). At least one of these tongues was etruscan-like
(Greek opuiein versus Etruscan puia).
fifth : at least one Aegean language was recorded : lemnian, known
through a rather obscure stele. It seems close to Etruscan.
So, it is unlikely (at best) that Greek was the only language in the
region even during classical times, and unlikelier that it was the
tongue of the minoan state(s)
Personnally, I would favor a peri-indo-european etruscan like hypothesis
(because of the toponymy, but proofs are lacking for that.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun Oct  3 16:48:23 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 12:48:23 EDT
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.124823.EDT.>

<< X99Lynx at aol.com

>And the term "designed for a language" assumes something about the skill and
>purpose of scribes who were matching symbols to meanings

-- Other scripts of the era match the sounds of the languages for which they
were developed very well.  Why should early Greeks be any dumber?


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Sun Oct  3 11:53:19 1999
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 11:53:19 -0000
Subject: PIE vs. Proto-Language
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.115319.0000.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: Ralf-Stefan Georg <Georg at home.ivm.de>
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 1999 3:13 PM

<snip>

> St.G. (on Pat's assumption that "most linguists" favor monogenesis of
> language):

[R-S]
>>> I'm flabbergasted. I would like to know *one* of those, who did/does what
>>> you claim "most linguists" do.

[PR previously]
>> Of course, I have no real way of knowing but I presume this writer might:

>> "The hypothesis of the monogenesis of language is one that most linguists
>> believe to be plausible. Indeed, the appearance of language may define
>> modern <em>Homo sapiens</em>." Philip E. Ross (Staff writer) in "Hard
>> Words", pp. 138-147, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, April 1991.

{R-S]
> Not knowing the staff writer of ScAm, nor his credentials in the field of
> lx., I won't comment on this part. But there is a non sequitur here.
> Indeed, it might be right to "define modern homo sapiens" inter alia by the
> capability of speech. This has, however, nothing to do with the question
> whether the actual *systems* (languages) people have been using for all
> those millennia derive from one and only common ancestor. Humans are
> endowed with the capacity of learning, processing and handling linguistic
> systems, but nothing tells us that this capacity should have led to its
> actual exploitation once and only once in the history of humankind. The
> statement as above once more confuses language (as a cultural artefact)
> with the biological makeup of modern man. The fact that certain primates
> have the ability to use certain tools for simple operations does not mean
> that every observable instance of tool use in certain primate groups is due
> to transmission from an original "invention of tool use" (though I hasten
> to add that *some* very intricate patterns of tool use among primates are
> known to be transmitted by teaching-and-learning-processes, often viewed as
> emergent culture among primates).
> Again: homo sapiens is a biological species endowed with certain
> intellectual abilities, among which the ability to develop, learn and
> handle such a complicated thing as language is possibly the most remarkable
> one. The next step, from homo sapiens to, say, homo loquens is not I
> biological one, but a cultural one. Nothing prevents us from assuming that
> it could have happened more than once, maybe even often, or, in short:
> language is a tool.

[PR]
I am afraid that we will not be able to settle this question to the
satisfaction of either of us.

So much hinges on at what point we begin to regard the noises that early man
was making as 'language'. As another thread on this list attests, that does
not seem to be a question that all can answer with consensus.

I am convinced by the genetic evidence that modern humans are, at least,
principally descended from a single ancient (pre-)human stock, whether out
of Africa, which I think likeliest, or from another place.

Was this ancient group capable of 'language'? I think so but I would not
unequivocally assert it. It justs seems to be the simplest scenario, hence,
possibly, the most probable.

If you believe that a scenario of 'language' developing in separated human
groups (hence unrelated except indirectly by the biological potential to
develop it) is preferable,  then tell me, if the original stock (presuming
you buy the genetic argument) was capable potentially of language, what
prevented that potential from being realized? Would you go so far as to
assert that 100(-150) ya there was *NO* language?

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/Athens/Forum/2803/index.html and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit
ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim
meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Sun Oct  3 18:53:53 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 13:53:53 -0500
Subject: NEWS re Black Sea Flood
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9909301425280.25900-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.135353.0500.>

	Possibly it was a temporary lake created by melting glaciers, liek
Lake Bonneville

>On Mon, 27 Sep 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

>> The incoming salt water, more dense than the fresh water it
>> displaced, plunged to the bottom of the lake bed, transforming it
>> into a sea where the depths support no life.

>But how could the Black Sea have been a freshwater lake during a period
>when it had no outlet to the sea?  The Black Sea has a number of major
>rivers flowing into it, and presumably has had these for a very long
>time.  Rivers carry salt.  If they carry it into a lake with no outlet,
>then the lake just gets saltier and saltier: witness the Caspian Sea,
>which is in just this position.

>Larry Trask

[ moderator snip ]

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Sun Oct  3 19:30:59 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 14:30:59 -0500
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <001001bf0b7f$25d177a0$d405703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.143059.0500.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

[snip]

	Nicknames beginning with Mari- seem considerably more popular in
Spain than in Latin America. Maribel, Marisol, Mariluz, Marilu, Maricarmen
seem almost stereotypically Peninsular. Maritza & Marisa [Maria Isabel]
seem to be exceptions, in that they are quite common in Latin America.
	Chema, Chepe [Jose], Pepe, Charo, Chayo [also < Rosario], Pancho
and Paco are common in Latin America.
	It makes me wonder if Mari- names didn't become nationally popular
in Spain relatively recently

>I am very surprised at Prof. Pineros' puzzlement: We have Murcian friends
>(Murcian Spanish is very close to Andalusian) : one is called Maite, short for
>Maria Teresa, the other one called Maica, short for Maria del Carmen. I do
>know what their real given name is, I'm not guessing. The reduction is of
>course the dropping of the intervocalic r of Mari.  By the way, Maica's
>daughter is also a Maria del Carmen, but they call her Mai (probably a
>reduction of Mari)! I'm quite sure she never intended a Basque name, because
>she and her family strongly dislike the idea that Spain is plurilingual. They
>even object to Spanish being called Castilian.

	Mai [or May] is also a nickname for Margarita in Latin America

[snip]

>I am not surprised at all at these extreme reductions: just think about Paco
>from Francisco, Chema from Jose Maria via Josema, Charo from Rosario, Concha
>from (Inmaculada) Concepcion, Chalo from Gonzalo. The remarkable thing is that
>they obey rules that look rather Basque than Castilian : F > P,
>diminutivization by palatalization of the sibilant,...

[snip]

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Sun Oct  3 19:35:04 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 14:35:04 -0500
Subject: Updates regarding UPenn tree
In-Reply-To: <LPBBJHPIGJGDEKDCLOBFKEJMCEAA.mclasutt@brigham.net>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.143504.0500.>

/hw/ > /f/ does happen in a Scottish dialect of English

>Are there any actual examples of *hw >*f in PGmc post-Grimm (other Dr
>Crist's guess at *penkwe > *finhw- > *finf)?  It would seem that the
>alveolar /n/ might preclude any assimilation of /hw/ to /f/.  Just thinking
>off the top of my head.

>[ snip ]

>Actually, it occurs to me that this change might just as easily have been
>post-Grimm's Law as pre-.  *penkwe would give *finhw- by Grimm's Law and
>by the raising of /e/ before nasals.  It could readily be the case that
>learners would mishear /hw/ as /f/ in this environment, reanalysing it as
>*/finf/, which is the correct PGmc reconstruction. I can't think of any
>problem with this right off.

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Sun Oct  3 20:17:45 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 15:17:45 -0500
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <007201bf0b6f$86fbfd80$a803703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.151745.0500.>

	There is a compilation of Cretan vocabulary by R. A. Brown. I've
always wondered how it was received by specialists
	Here's a bit from my notes
	Brown relies heavily on Hesykhios, pointing out that there are 224
Cretan citations in his compilation and that 25% of them are non-Greek,
with some showing connections with pre-IE and pre-Semitic sources.
	He states that 40% of Cretan place names are pre-Greek. He adds
that some "formative elements" are shared with Anatolian place names
	He sees elements of common substrate in Greek, Anatolian and
Armenian and that a common substrate may have been spoken in the Aegean,
Greece, Crete, Anatolia and the Balkans
	He cites Classic historians on the early/pre-history of Crete
	He claims there are no obvious connections between Eteo-Cretan,
Cypro-Minoan and Lemnian
	He sees no Semitic place names in Crete and no Semitic influence
except for Linear B sa-sa-me and ku-mi-na and 3 pot terms that show up in
Ugaritic [but no other Semitic languages]
	There are terms that are cognate with pre-Greek, with pre-IE
substrate [including Etruscan]
	He includes examples of Praisian and Eteo-Cretan inscriptions
	There is an inscription from Psychro/Psuxro that ends with 3 Linear
A type symbols,which may be mere imitations
	The phonological inventory given for Eteo-Cretan is
a e i o u [short and long]
ai oi au eu
t/d
k/g
p/b or f/p
s
S/tsw
r l m n
y w [semi-vowels]

	He feels that Linear B came from a "mainland version" of Linear A.
he notes that A & B share about half their signs
	Based on Linear script and loan words, the phonological inventory
for Minoan is
a e i o u
ai oi au eu
stops were contrasted as non-marked, palatalized and labialized
they were voiced, unaspirated unvoiced and aspirated unvoiced
e.g. /t/ /ty/ /tw/
labial stops may have shifted /p > ph/, /b > p/
the only voiced vs unvoiced contrast in stops occurs in dentals with
alternation of t-d-l in Greek borrowings
liquids were syllabic l r m n
consonant clusters were limited to possible /s + stop/
/stop + r, l/ is common
/ps/ is common

[ moderator snip ]

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From sarant at village.uunet.lu  Sun Oct  3 21:27:04 1999
From: sarant at village.uunet.lu (Nikos Sarantakos)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 22:27:04 +0100
Subject: Pre-Basque phonology (fwd)
In-Reply-To: <007301bf0b6f$87a24fa0$a803703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.222704.0100.>

At 20:12 30/09/99 +0200, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv at wxs.nl>
>Date: Thursday, September 30, 1999 4:08 AM

[ moderator snip ]

>>This root has initial ku-, which we can assume gives /k/ in Greek
>>(unlike labiovelar *kw and palatal + glide *k^u, which merge into
>>/p/, at least before /a/ and /o/).  There are no counterexamples,
>>as far as I know.

>[Ed Selleslagh]
>I already suspected something of the kind. Thanks for the clarification.
>What do you mean by 'there are no counterexamples'? Do you mean of 'kuV-
>becoming /p/ in Greek'?

Sorry to reveal my ignorance once again -but I am somehow puzzled
about the etymology of <kapnos>.
According to my  IE-loyal dictionary, <kapnos> comes from <*pap-nos>
which would come from IE *k(w)ep- meaning "smoking, boiling",
cf. sanskr. kup-yati "it is boiling" etc.

Now, don't misunderstand me -I do want to believe the mainstream
IE theory (although, as I said, I have the hunch Greek is older
than believed) but I can't buy this etymology. I would like to,
but I think it is full of holes. And this is not the first Greek
word that I have seen being put into IE shoes that (in my
rustic opinion) just don't fit.

nikos sarantakos


From mcv at wxs.nl  Sun Oct  3 21:25:33 1999
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 21:25:33 GMT
Subject: Pre-Basque phonology (fwd)
In-Reply-To: <007301bf0b6f$87a24fa0$a803703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.212533.GMT.>

"Eduard Selleslagh" <edsel at glo.be> wrote:

>I already suspected something of the kind. Thanks for the clarification.
>What do you mean by 'there are no counterexamples'? Do you mean of 'kuV-
>becoming /p/ in Greek'?

Yes.  At lease the kvas/cheese word (*kuat-) is apparently not
attested in Greek.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Mon Oct  4 02:46:13 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 22:46:13 EDT
Subject: PIE vs. Proto-Language)
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.224613.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/03/1999 2:30:03 AM, Georg at home.ivm.de writes:

PR quoted:
<<"The hypothesis of the monogenesis of language is one that most linguists
believe to be plausible. Indeed, the appearance of language may define modern
Homo sapiens." Philip E. Ross (Staff writer) in "Hard Words", pp.138-147,
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, April 1991.

<<Not knowing the staff writer of ScAm, nor his credentials in the field of
lx., I won't comment on this part. But there is a non sequitur here.
Indeed, it might be right to "define modern homo sapiens" inter alia by the
capability of speech. This has, however, nothing to do with the question
whether the actual *systems* (languages)....>>

Yeah.  And this multi-meaning of the word "language" can be a real problem in
the discussion of broader language issues among list members here.  In
correspondence with certain linguists, I've noticed a laudatory habit of
being precise about the way the word is being used - the physiological event,
the act of communication, speech versus the written word, and (once again)
the Saussurian distinction between the act of speaking and as a specific
"system of language" maintained by members of an identifiable speech
community.  As I've pointed out before, "language" among biologists can refer
to any behavior that has a communicative effect without regard to species.
My impression is that the quote re monogenesis above refers to the
distinction often made by paleobiologists - language as the emergence in
humans of speech capabilities that other primates were/are not
physiologically capable of.   The current issue in this area circles around
what evidence in fossil finds suggests the emergence of physiological
features that would make human speech complexity possible.

Regards,
Steve Long


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Mon Oct  4 03:13:20 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 23:13:20 -0400
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <37f59ce3.4056048@mail.wxs.nl>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.231320.0400.>

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:

> Sean Crist <kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu> wrote:

>> First of all, the script appears to be designed for a language with a much
>> simpler syllable structure than that of the Indo-European languages.  The
>> best guess is that Linear A represents a language whose syllables were
>> something like the type of modern Japanese or Hawaiian, i.e. mostly
>> CV-type syllables, unlike IE which allows very complex onsets and codas
>> (e.g. English "splints", where one syllable has the structure CCCVCCC).

> Not necessarily.  While the language for which Linear A was
> invented is unlikely to have had complex consonant clusters, it
> doesn't follow that it had only CV-type sylables.

I know; that's why I said 'mostly', and also why I picked the example of
Japanese, which does have a limited set of syllable codas.

> The only
> options available at the time were complex logosyllabic systems
> like Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform or Egyptian and Anatolian
> hieroglyphics or simple open syllabaries (in their stripped down
> version, consonantal alphabets), as used in the Semitic Levant.
> The Cretans chose the latter system.

That's assuming that any of these systems had an effect on the development
of Linear A.  I don't think we know this; as far as we know, it developed
in isolation (but I could be mistaken, because I haven't looked thoroughly
into this.)  I think it's been suggested that Egyptian might have had an
indirect effect, but only as a kind of stimulus diffusion, not thru the
dirrect borrowing of specific symbols.

> Except, oddly enough, in the case of t ~ d (assuming this was
> taken over from Linear A: there's nothing special about Greek /d/
> (as opposed to /g/, for instance) which might have prompted
> this).  So we're looking for a language that had at least two
> kinds of dental stops (not necessarily /d/ and /t/), and maybe
> two kinds of velar stops too (Lin. B <kV> vs. <qV>), but could
> get by with single <p> for the labials.  Another characteristic
> is the lack of distinction between /l/ and /r/, and possibly two
> kinds of sibilants (Lin B. <s> and <z>).  (The other consonants
> of Lin B. are <j>, <w>, <m> and <n>).

Yes; I wasn't going into this much detail.  If I'm remembering right,
Linear B also occasionally represents kh- separately from k-.  Just a few
odd glitches in the system.

It's hard to know exactly what to make of this.  Possibly, some of these
symbols had quite different values in Linear A, and whoever worked out
Linear B made the best use of them he/she could, despite apparently being
unwilling to come up with wholly novel symbols.  There were apparently
enough extra symbols around to represent a some of the Greek contrasts,
but not all of them.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Mon Oct  4 03:44:13 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 23:44:13 -0400
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.19990930194157.00727758@l.pop.uunet.lu>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.234413.0400.>

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Nikos Sarantakos wrote:

> My own personal unscientific gut feeling is that Greek is certainly
> not autochthonous, but possibly much older than generally
> acknowledged.

It depends on what you mean by that.  In a sense, all of the currently
living Indo-European languages are of the same 'age', in that they all
develop from the same prehistoric language which had its final unity at
some prehistoric date (i.e., before the split of Anatolian from what
became the other IE languages).

Or perhaps you mean that the Greek-speaking presence in what is now Greece
goes back further than e.g. 2100-1900 BCE.  The most widely accepted view
is that the destruction of sites which we find in that period represent
the invasion of speakers of an early form of Greek.  The preceding
cultural tradition in Greece is substantially different.  Given that the
latest date of PIE unity is around 4000 BCE (again, pace Renfrew), there's
only so much of a time range to play with; you might manage to make a case
that the Greeks were in Greece a little earlier, but not massively
earlier.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Mon Oct  4 04:07:34 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 00:07:34 EDT
Subject: NEWS re Black Sea Flood
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.000734.EDT.>

I quoted:
<< The incoming salt water, more dense than the fresh water it
displaced, plunged to the bottom of the lake bed, transforming it
into a sea where the depths support no life.>>

In a message dated 10/03/1999 1:00:44 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:
<<But how could the Black Sea have been a freshwater lake during a period
when it had no outlet to the sea?  The Black Sea has a number of major
rivers flowing into it, and presumably has had these for a very long
time.  Rivers carry salt.  If they carry it into a lake with no outlet,
then the lake just gets saltier and saltier: witness the Caspian Sea,
which is in just this position.>>

It's a valid point.  I don't know what the scientists involved would say, but
my guess is that they would say it's a matter of degree.

Salinity is the relative concentration of ions dissolved in the water.
Salinity in lakes is not only increased by lack of outflow, but also by the
chemical composition of the inflow and the geology it passes through.  And
another factor is the amount of climatic evaporation.   The Great Salt Lake
is an example of especially high salinity due to the chemical makeup of the
surrounding area - which includes the famous Bonneville Saltflats.   The
Caspian Sea is an example of a closed lake or inland sea where the evidence
is of a large reduction in water level even in historical times.  You'll see
the climatic factor sometimes phrased as "salt lakes only occur in arid
regions."

The Black Sea is fed by rivers that don't flow through regions of high
aridity, evaporation or especially concentrated salineous chemical deposits.
So at least the inflow would tend to be less preconcentrating than those of
heavily saline lakes like the Great Salt Lake or the Dead Sea.  Climatic
evaporation would also seem to have been less of a factor, especially in the
north.  So the relative salinity of the Black Sea 'before the flood' might
still be conjectured to have been less than ocean-high levels of the entering
Mediterranean.

Regards,
Steve Long


From iglesias at axia.it  Mon Oct  4 14:34:02 1999
From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 07:34:02 PDT
Subject: Manx Language
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.073402.PDT.>

After sending my original message, I found the reference I had in mind,
which is as follows and goes back to the end of January 1999:

" JoatSimeon at aol.com:

>The general rule would seem to be that a thin stratum of immigrant
>conquerors loses its language and takes up that of the majority.

The experience of Old Norse speaking invaders/settlers in the Hebrides
and the Isle of Man seems to bear this out.  In Lewis and Harris, the
Vikings, if it is safe to call them that, were temporarily dominant
enough to leave a large number of Norse placenames on the ground, which
have survived to the present in Gaelicized form.  Furthermore, the
Gaelic of the islands has some eccentric phonological features, such
as pre-aspiration of voiceless stops and devoicing of voiced stops,
which appear to be a Norse legacy.  Otherwise, the Norse language
didn't survive there.

The situation on Man seems to have been more complex and a lot more
interesting.  Manx Gaelic lost a lot of grammatical features that
Irish and Scottish Gaelic have retained, such as the copula, which
was replaced by the substantive verb, the distinction between the
palatal and non-palatal consonant series, the autonomous [unspecified
subject] verb forms, most declensional forms, and so on.

All these losses have been noted in semi-speakers of certain Irish
and Scottish Gaelic dialects which are on the verge of death.  The odd
thing about Manx is that these were features of the language way back
when it was still vital and intact, in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Why these signs of "decay" in a vital Gaelic dialect?

The interesting theory lays this at the feet of the Norse,  who
politically dominated the island ca. 900.  After a few generations of
intermarriage, there would have been three languages going: Norse,
Gaelic, and Norsified Gaelic (with all the defects of modern semi-
speakers).  The speakers of proper Gaelic would have been people of
low status with whom the Norse did not see fit to intermarry, while
the speakers of "broken" Gaelic would be the offspring of higher status
Norse-Manx alliances.  These families would have continued to dominate
the island, and after some generations have lost their Norse, by which
time their "broken" Gaelic would have become established as the prestige
language.

If this scenario is true, a corollary to the rule "that a thin stratum
of immigrant conquerors loses its language and takes up that of the
majority" would be that a slightly thicker stratum transforms the
majority language as they adopt it.  Was this what happened to English
after 1066 and all that?

Dennis King "

My reference to "creolisation" was partly right and partly wrong. It was
right in the sense that the message was sent in a context related to "IE as
a creole" and wrong in the sense that Manx was mentioned as an example of
"superstratal influence".

Any other comments

Thanks and regards
Frank Rossi
Bergamo, Italy
iglesias at axia.it


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sun Oct  3 18:36:51 1999
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 19:36:51 +0100
Subject: NEWS re Black Sea Flood
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.193651.0100.>

Larry said:
> But how could the Black Sea have been a freshwater lake during a period
> when it had no outlet to the sea?  ...: witness the Caspian Sea,

On the other hand, witness the Sea of Galilee, which remains fresh.  An
outlet to drain salt away does not have to go the sea.

Peter


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Oct  4 07:53:36 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 08:53:36 +0100
Subject: Basque 'sei'
In-Reply-To: <Pine.A41.3.95q.990930002729.48160A-100000@aix1.uottawa.ca>
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.085336.0100.>

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999 s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca wrote:

> I remain agnostic regarding whether SEI is a Romance loanword or not, but
> I stand by my earlier statement: there is no phonological reason why /sei/
> couldn't be a Romance, or more specifically, Gascon loanword. See below.

> I refer you to Rohlfs again: he clearly states, a few paragraphs
> before mentionning the shift of final -s to -j, that Gascon /s/ is
> apical, and is realized just as /s/ in Ibero-Romance is. Hence we
> would indeed expect it to be borrowed as /s/ and not /z/ in Basque.
> (This fact is confirmed by the ALF, where the transcription is
> phonetic rather than phonemic: Gascon (s) is almost always apical).
> Basque /sei/ is therefore what would be expected if we were dealing
> with a loanword from Gascon.

Perhaps, but how old is the Gascon phonology?  As I've pointed out
elsewhere, place names appear to show Gascon /s/ corresponding to Basque
laminal <z>, not to apical <s>.  Recall that Latin /s/ was almost
invariably borrowed as Basque <z>, and so it appears that the apical /s/
of Ibero-Romance and Gascon is at least a post-Roman development.
But just how late could a Gascon word for `six' be borrowed into Basque?
After all, the Basque names for `7, 8, 9, 10' and so on are decidedly
non-Romance.

With respect, I don't think the facts of modern Gascon are necessarily
relevant, since the Basque word is certainly not borrowed from modern
Gascon.  Is there any possibility of dating any of the relevant Gascon
phonological developments?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Oct  4 09:11:06 1999
From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max Wheeler)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 10:11:06 +0100
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.101106.0100.>

-- Begin original message --

> From: "Roslyn M. Frank" <roz-frank at uiowa.edu>
> Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 17:08:57 -0500

> The test would be to see whether Spanish speakers from Andalucia recognize
> Maite as being composed of Maria Teresa or whether they would say that it
> sounds like a Basque name.

> So far I haven't found a single native Spanish speaker (or Basque one) who
> "recognized" Maite as an abbreviation of Maria Teresa. But I've only asked a
> dozen speakers so far.

-- End original message --

Well, so Maite isn't short for Maria Teresa in America. Big deal! It's pretty
universal in Spain, including, evidently, among people who have no connection
with the Basque country and have no reason to suppose that _maite_ is a
meaningful element in Basque.

Max
______________________________________________________________
Max W. Wheeler
School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer
BRIGHTON BN1 9QH, G.B.

Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975 Fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 Email: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk
______________________________________________________________


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Oct  4 09:16:53 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 10:16:53 +0100
Subject: Change and What Remains
In-Reply-To: <64791ba8.2526b79c@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.101653.0100.>

On Fri, 1 Oct 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> Just to untangle the two issues:  the absence of change was always a
> pure hypothetical.  The coexistence of ancestor with daughter
> language is obviously a separate question.

I don't see how.  A living language never remains identical from one
generation to the next.  See below.

> I hypothesized a language that did not share any of the (300?)
> "innovations" that went into the UPenn tree.  When you stated that
> an ancestor cannot co-exist with a daughter, I did my best to
> conform to that 'rule' by hypothesizing a string of "languages".
> Others questioned the parent /daughter statement before I did.

> If you look back at the thread, you'll see that "ceaseless change"
> was used to support your no-parent-with-daughter position.  And with
> regard to that, let me write again that bringing up "ceaseless
> change" tells us nothing about whether enough "remained" of the
> ancestor so that it could co-exist with the daughter.

Sorry, but, with the best will in the world, I can't understand this.
What is the force here of `enough'?

The English that I speak is, in a reasonable sense, a daughter of the
English my parents spoke.  And the English the young people are speaking
back home, which is already noticeably different from my own, can be
regarded as a daughter of the English I speak.  In that sense, I
suppose, a language can co-exist with its own daughter.  Is that what
you mean?

My 22-year-old niece has acquired some of the vowel changes collectively
known as the Northern Cities Shift.  As a result, her vowel system is
conspicuously different from mine, and I occasionally have trouble
understanding her.  Her parents (my generation) have no trouble
understanding her, because they're exposed to the youngsters' speech all
the time, but they don't talk like her.  But I don't get home very
often, and, when I do get home, I'm startled by the young people's
English.

All of the several generations can talk to one another, just as I could
talk to my grandparents when they were alive.  But my grandparents
didn't sound exactly like my parents, either.  And my Aunt Catherine,
who's now pushing 100, sounds remarkably different from the youngsters,
and even from me.

As I said, ceaseless change.  The incomprehensible English of King Alred
is separated from us by scarcely more than forty generations.
Chaucer's speech, separated from us by no more than 25 generations,
would also be utterly incomprehensible to us.  Even Shakespeare, only
about 16 generations ago, would probably be largely incomprehensible to
us if we could hear him speak -- and some specialists believe we would
not be able to understand him at all.  What will our descendants, 20 or
25 generations from now, make of the sound recordings we'll be leaving
them?

So, apart from the trivial case of me and my niece, how can a language
co-exist with its own descendant?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Oct  4 09:47:44 1999
From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max Wheeler)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 10:47:44 +0100
Subject: Manx language
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.104744.0100.>

-- Begin original message --

> From: "Frank Rossi" <iglesias at axia.it>
> Date: Sat, 02 Oct 99 13:35:32 PDT

> As I remember, the gist was that the originally "normal" Q Celtic language
> (a form of Gaelic) was drastically simplified as a result of contact with
> Germanic languages, first the Old Norse of the Danes and later English,
> which also provided the spelling system. The process was described by
> someone as a form of "creolisation". The process was compared to the effect
> that the Norman conquest had on English.

> Does anyone remember in what context this question was raised or are there
> any other comments on Manx?

-- End original message --

I can't tell you the original context of the discussion, but the situation
you describe doesn't seem applicable to Manx, which was not 'drastically
simplified' except possibly, by some speakers, in the last stages (20th
century) of language death. The toponymy of the Isle of Man has a very large
Norse element, but the general vocabulary of Manx may not have a lot more
Norse in it than entered other Goidelic varieties. It has a considerable
amount of Norman French, and, of course, Early Modern and Modern English, but
there again not in proportions vastly different from those in, say, Welsh.

Some loss/regularization of grammatical irregularities (e.g. weakening of the
mutation system, gender marking) is characteristic of late (i.e.
19th-20th-century spoken Manx) but this could be taken to be characteristic
of language death rather than creolization (which implies a stage of
'inadequate learning' by non-native speakers).

Max
______________________________________________________________
Max W. Wheeler
School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer
BRIGHTON BN1 9QH, G.B.

Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975 Fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 Email: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk
______________________________________________________________


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Oct  4 13:19:59 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 14:19:59 +0100
Subject: Excluding data
In-Reply-To: <E11XomM-0000Ue-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.141959.0100.>

On Fri, 1 Oct 1999, Jon Patrick wrote:

> Larry, I think it is useful for us now to agree to differ on these
> points and move on to new topics

Fine by me, Jon, but I note that you have not yet proposed any
alternative criteria for identifying native and ancient Basque words,
nor have you yet explained why you think my criteria are less than
ideal.  No comments on these points?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Oct  4 14:15:10 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 15:15:10 +0100
Subject: Excluding data: Azkue's dictionary
In-Reply-To: <E11XomM-0000Ue-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.151510.0100.>

Before we abandon this thread, I might make a few comments on Azkue's
1905 dictionary of Basque, which Jon Patrick is using to set up his
database.

This dictionary offers some advantages as the source of a database, but
also a few drawbacks.

On the plus side, it is pretty comprehensive.  Very few Basque words
recorded at all before 1905 are missing from it.  It includes virtually
all words used in writing before Azkue's compilation; it includes a
number of words reported by linguists and lexicographers even though
they are absent from the written texts; and it includes a sizeable
number of words collected by Azkue himself in his investigations.
Until the completion of the Basque Language Academy's new dictionary,
Azkue's will remain the most nearly comprehensive Basque dictionary we
have.

Moreover, Azkue is punctilious about recording provenances.  Not only
for each word, but for each distinct sense of a word, Azkue records the
region in which, as far as he knows, the form and meaning are attested.
This is valuable information.

A further virtue is that Azkue enters bound morphemes, something that
few Basque dictionaries do -- though Azkue's accounts of these are not
always satisfactory.

But there are also major drawbacks.

First, the dictionary contains a number of errors.  Some of these are
ghost words resulting from typos, from Azkue's mishearing of a local
word, or from his misunderstanding of an inflected form in print.  These
errors number at least some dozens, though most of them were later noted
by Michelena in his article on the dictionary and in other writings.
These errors really need to be corrected in any large-scale use of the
book.

Second, Azkue, who rather fancied himself as an etymologist, included
entries for a fair number of non-existent words, of which the most
infamous is his putative *<iz> `water', which has probably been seized
upon by more delighted comparativists than any single genuine Basque
word.  These little fantasies are never overtly marked as such, though
most of them are identifiable by some such annotation as "now reduced to
a radical" or "no longer in use as an independent word".  Any entry with
such an annotation should be discarded.

Third, when -- as so often -- a word exists in several regional
variants, Azkue enters each variant separately in its own alphabetical
place, and he hardly ever provides cross-references.  Consequently, any
attempt at using his dictionary without heavy editing will lead to
multiple entries for single words.  This is potentially a serious
problem: for example, the Basque word for `strawberry' exhibits at least
twenty regional variants.  This is admittedly an exceptional case, but
very many words exhibit two to six regional variant forms, and accepting
Azkue's headwords without suitable editing will produce badly skewed
results.

Fourth, Azkue generally provides only a single headword for homophones
of unrelated meaning.  This too will skew the results, though in a
different direction from the preceding.

Finally, of course, Azkue makes no attempt at reporting dates of first
attestation -- a grievous shortcoming for certain purposes, including
mine.

These shortcomings add up to potentially formidable difficulties in
compiling a useful database from its headwords.

I suggest that a much better dictionary for the purpose is Sarasola's
1996 dictionary.  This is not so comprehensive as Azkue, but the words
excluded are those which are only marginally reported anyway.  In
contrast to Azkue, Sarasola provides dates of first attestation, and he
also gathers regional variants under a single headword, with
cross-references where necessary.  Moreover, he lists the known senses
in the order in which they are attested -- a very valuable feature for
historical work.  I consider it unlikely that many attested Basque words
which are genuinely native and ancient are excluded from this
dictionary.  The sole obvious shortcomings are that Sarasola is much
less explicit than Azkue in recording the regions in which each word is
attested, and that the book does not enter bound morphemes.

I suggest that, for any study of ancient Basque words, Sarasola's
dictionary is a better choice than Azkue's, though it might be usefully
supplemented by the information in Azkue, especially for provenances.
But, of course, Sarasola's dictionary is written entirely in Basque,
which is not very convenient if you can't read Basque.  Azkue's, in
contrast, is Basque to Spanish and French.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From alderson at netcom.com  Mon Oct  4 20:08:16 1999
From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 13:08:16 -0700
Subject: Contributions by Steve Long
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.990930110255.7581A-100000@unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
 (message from Sean Crist on Thu, 30 Sep 1999 12:19:30 -0400 (EDT))
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.130816.0700.>

On 30 Sep 1999, Sean Crist wrote:

> Of course, people had noticed that there were certain things shared by Italic
> and Celtic; it had certainly been previously proposed that Anatolian was an
> 'aunt' to the other IE languages, etc.; but there was previously no way of
> pursuing the question in a systematic and unified way.

[ snip ]

> You obviously missed my post where I corrected myself on this point.  There
> were actually two characters added which were crucial to forcing Celtic and
> Italic into a single sub-branch.  Even before those two additional characters
> were added, Italic and Celtic were always next to each other on the tree; and
> on two of the best runs, an indeterminate structure was produced for which
> one resolution was an Italo-Celtic grouping.  So the tree was already on the
> verge of an Italo-Celtic grouping before these additional characters were
> added.

I've now read the technical report in which the early results were published.
As it appears from Mr. Crist's comments on the UPenn tree, further work has
continued to refine the original results.

Is the list of characters published anywhere electronically accessible?  I'd be
curious to see what the definitions for the Hittite vs. the world codings were
--it may very well be that a different view of laryngeals, for example, would
change the outcome greatly.

I have a larger problem with the tree as a whole, now that I know more of the
details:  Only one language from each sub-family was used to provide input, and
I believe that *this* choice may very well have biased some results.  I would
be much happier if the Italic and Celtic languages were not from the respective
"Q" branches thereof.  Does any of the papers provide information on how long a
run of the program to interpret the characters actually runs (rather than the
theoretical O(<mumble>) specification)?  How much time would be added by data
from other languages?

								Rich Alderson


From roz-frank at uiowa.edu  Mon Oct  4 22:49:39 1999
From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 17:49:39 -0500
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <37f8b200.9461948@mail.wxs.nl>
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.174939.0500.>

At 06:58 PM 9/30/99 +0000, you wrote:
>"Roslyn M. Frank" <roz-frank at uiowa.edu> wrote:

>>So far I haven't found a single native Spanish speaker (or Basque one) who
>>"recognized" Maite as an abbreviation of Maria Teresa. But I've only asked a
>>dozen speakers so far.

>In Catalonia it's certainly common.  I know several Maite's
>(Maria Teresa's) and a Maipe (Mari Pepa, i.e. Maria Josefa).

Interesting. I need to widen my sample!!
Roz

>=======================
>Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
>mcv at wxs.nl


From roz-frank at uiowa.edu  Mon Oct  4 23:46:57 1999
From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 18:46:57 -0500
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9910010851400.25900-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.su
 sx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.184657.0500.>

At 09:07 AM 10/1/99 +0100, Larry Trask wrote:
[RF]
>> Then on your gloss of "maite" as "beloved", fine. But keep in mind,
>> also that in English it is common for the expression "love" to be
>> used as a form of address for another person, not just a female one,
>> right, Love?

[LT]
>Sure, but why is this relevant?

>Basque <maite>, in its definite form <maitea>, is of course a common way
>of addressing a sweetheart of either sex.  It is literally `(my)
>beloved', even though it is functionally roughly equivalent to English
>`love' here.

Let us agree to disagree about which form is the common used as a form of
address, one with a "definite article" or one without. Clearly we have have
different views about this situation as was demonstrated in the case of our
earlier discussion on whether <beltz> was a proper nickname for a bear,
rather than <beltza>. From your previous comments, you do not wish to
concede that in such circumstance the <mugagabe> unsuffixed form is often
used.

Contrarily, there is no question, as I believe I've said before, that when
translating from French of Spanish Basque speakers will add the "definite
article" to what is the unsuffixed form of the word in the Romance
languages. But that is a different case. In the case of nicknames there are
circumstances in which the suffixed form is common and there are also many
cases where both forms can be encountered.

I think part of our disagreement might be caused by the existence of two
slightly different definitions of what is meant by the words "the common
way of addressing someone." If one calls out to another and addresses the
person with a nickname, that word will not necessarily take what is called
the "definite article." I think you may have cited a couple examples of
this yourself. The problem is complicated further by the fact that the
"distal demonstrative" in Euskera has been appropriated as a "definite
article" but that role is still not identical to that of a "definite
article" in a language such as Spanish or English where, conceptually,
there *are* definite and indefinite articles.

If, on the other hand, one writes a letter, there is clearly the option of
using the "definite article" along with their "nickname" when "addressing"
the person.

Then there are many examples of the numens who populate Basque folklore and
mythology. The (nick)names of many of these beings, e.g., Praka Gorri "Red
Pants", appear without the definite article. However, I might refer to this
same character, when writing in Euskera, in a given sentence as Praka
Gorria. But when I do, I've changed the status of his (nick)name to
something like "The One with Red Pants." It can be done, the "definite
article" can be added, but when it is the name takes on a different nuance
of meaning.

In summary, I don't think one can come up with a hard and fast rule that
covers all the individual cases. And when one turns to the so-called proper
names the waters become even muddier. So, let's just agree to disagree on
this particular point.

Roz

************************************************************************
Roslyn M. Frank
Professor
************************************************************************
Department of Spanish & Portuguese	
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242
email: <roz-frank at uiowa.edu>
fax: (319)-335-2990


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Tue Oct  5 00:11:48 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 20:11:48 -0400
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <54aad6e4.25250d30@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.201148.0400.>

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> But this is precisely the same objection that was made to Linear B as Greek.
> And as you observe it is the common reason given for the difficulty in making
> out the nuances of Mycenean as it appears in Linear B: <<Linear B is actually
> a very bad script for representing Greek; it doesn't represent the
> distinction between voiceless, voiceless aspirated, and voiced stops.>>

> Just as Linear B might be bad for Greek, Linear A might be worse.  But that
> definitely does not mean it is not Greek.  And the term "designed for a
> language" assumes something about the skill and purpose of scribes who were
> matching symbols to meanings and perhaps sounds when writing technology was
> primitive to say the least.

OK, then, why can't we read it if it's Greek?  Linear A and Linear B have
many of the same characters.  If both are Greek, the only way this could
have happened would be if the scribes at some point decided to keep the
same characters, but give them all new values, much as if we decided that
starting tomorrow, we're going to start using the letter <f> to represent
[a], etc. I can't think of any other case in history where such a thing
has happened; it's hard to see why anyone would do such a thing.

Also, as I already said, based on the distribution of the characters in
the Linear A writings, it looks like the Linear A languages doesn't
inflect by adding suffixes to the end of the word.  How can it possibly be
Greek, then?

> <<If the sound values in Linear B are any indication, it appears that an
> extemely large number of the Linear A words end in -u, whatever this means
> (in any case, it isn't what you generally find in IE languages).>>

> As you note this is evidence but not conclusive.  A shift in vowel sounds
> (e.g., from -u to -i or -oi) that might have prompted the change from A to B
> would actually work the other way.

But we know that no such change happened in pre-Greek.  Attested Greek
[oi] generally represents PIE *oy, etc.; _not_ earlier *-u.

> It is also another thing to muddy the waters with a certainty we simply don't
> have.  This was the cardinal sin that happened with Linear B and it seems
> that we haven't learned our lesson yet.

If Linear A ends up being deciphered and turns out to be Greek, I'll say
that I was wrong and will change my view.  I don't know where you keep
getting this 'certainty' business; you're attributing a certainty to me
which I don't hold and which I never voiced. I'm simply correctly
reporting that based on our current state of knowledge, Linear A does not
appear to be Greek.

> Too much certainty about the
> ancioent past is probably a bad thing:

> <<In 1949 Ventris had sent out a questionnaire on Linear B to over 40 leading
> authorities on Aegean questions (including archaeologists, linguists and
> historians); he privately distributed the replies in 1950 as The Languages of
> the Minoan and Mycenaean Civilizations (known as the "Mid-Century Report").>>
> Not even one suggested that the texts might be in Greek.

> But most were CERTAIN it wasn't.

Yes; and when a convincing case turned up that they were wrong, nearly all
scholars in the area changed their views accordingly.  This is how
scholarly study progresses; there's no shame in the fact that the field
was once wrong on this question.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Tue Oct  5 00:27:54 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 20:27:54 -0400
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <007801bf0b7b$b6e7f100$783063c3@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.202754.0400.>

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, petegray wrote:

> Sean Christ wrote:

Actually, it's Crist, not Christ.  It rhymes with 'wrist'.

>> ... Linear A is not Greek
>> First of all, the script appears to be designed for a language .....  The
>> best guess is that Linear A represents a language whose syllables were
>> something like the type of modern Japanese or Hawaiian, i.e. mostly
>> CV-type syllables,

> This makes a number of assumptions, which can be questioned.
> Firstly, was the script "designed" for the language, or was it adapted, as
> cuneiform was for Hittite?

I could be wrong on this, but my understanding is that Linear A hasn't
been shown to have been directly borrowed from any other known script
system. To the contrary, we have some of the earlier local pictographic
system which it seems to have developed from.

> Secondly, can we really assume that the apparently syllabic nature of the
> script reflects the nature of the language?

We can't be sure, since we don't know what language Linear A represents.

> Thirdly, I believe no other scripts in that area at that time were truly
> alphabetic or capable of expressing complex consonant clusters (please
> correct me if I'm wrong here).   We have consonantal scripts with no vowels,
> and syllabaries.   Speakers of a non-semitic language with consonant
> clusters might have had a choice of Linear A or nothing.

This is assuming that the scribes were aware of other writing systems and
borrowed one, as opposed to coming up with a wholly novel system.  Even if
it's the case that Linear A was borrowed, I think we at least need to say
that it was greatly remodelled from whatever earlier system we decide to
connect it with.  Whether the scribes in question would have likely to
independently think up the idea of an alphabetic writing system is
something I don't know.

> Fourthly both Maori and Japanese write a final vowel -u where the syllable
> is in fact often dropped.    If linear A is a syllabary, some sort of final
> vowel has to be written.   How nice, if there were some consistency in
> Linear A,  writing -u for a final vowel that was not to be pronounced!

It's true that final -u usually drops off after a voiceless consonant in
Japanese, but it's transparently true that it's still phonologically
present (i.e., this is not just a dummy vowel in the Japanese writing
system). For example, it's true that the -u isn't pronounced in _neko
desu_ "It is a cat", but it _is_ pronounced in _neko desu ne_ "It is a
cat, isn't it?"

We don't know anything about this sort of low-level detail for the Linear
A language, so we can't say what phonetic fate -u might have had there.
It's surely possible that it deletes, but we don't know.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
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From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Tue Oct  5 00:35:49 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 20:35:49 -0400
Subject: Updates regarding UPenn tree
In-Reply-To: <LPBBJHPIGJGDEKDCLOBFKEJMCEAA.mclasutt@brigham.net>
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.203549.0400.>

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote:

> Are there any actual examples of *hw >*f in PGmc post-Grimm (other Dr
> Crist's guess at *penkwe > *finhw- > *finf)?  It would seem that the
> alveolar /n/ might preclude any assimilation of /hw/ to /f/.  Just thinking
> off the top of my head.

Well, I'm not Dr. Crist yet; give me another year or so.  It might help if
I stopped writing on this list and wrote my dissertation instead. :-/

What we know is that PIE *penkwe somehow comes out in PGmc as *finf.  I
don't know right off of any other cases where PIE *p..kw comes out in PGmc
as *f..f.  Actually, I don't know right off of any other cases where a
word with PIE *p..kw survives into attested Germanic.  We might have to
say that this is a sporadic change if it just happens in this one word.

All I was saying was that I don't think this change necessarily has to be
pre-Grimm; I think it could be post-Grimm just as easily.  I'd be glad if
someone can correct me on this; it would mean we can tell more about the
relative chronology if we can say that it can't have happened that late.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From roz-frank at uiowa.edu  Tue Oct  5 00:52:13 1999
From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 19:52:13 -0500
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <l03130325b41ac4851d8d@[209.147.211.53]>
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.195213.0500.>

At 03:19 PM 10/1/99 -0500, Rick Mc Callister wrote:
>	I've heard many times [including from a couple of women named
>Maite] that Maite is an abbreviated form of Maria Teresa and tried to
>figure out how you could get Maite from that name. The closest thing I
>could think of was "Mari Tere", which are used separately in Spanish but,
>as far as I know, not together.
> 	I imagine that what may have happened was that Spanish speakers
>asked what the name meant in Spanish and the parents just threw out Maria
>Teresa because of the superficial resemblance. Although Maite is pretty
>different from Maria, there isn't much else in Spanish that's close in
>phonological terms.
>	A similar thing has happened in the US Southwest where Spanish
>Jesus is often "translated" as "Jesse", Fernando as "Freddy", Concepcion as
>"Connie", Luz as "Lucy", Angeles as "Angie" or "Angela", Jesusa as "Susie"
>or "Susan"

Obviously we have a number of different interpretations of what
happened/happens with this item. I wonder if Miguel (or someone else) could
speculate on whether the distribution of such highly reduced nicknames is
higher in Cataluyna. I'm not referring specifically to the "alleged"
reduction of Maria Teresa to Maite, but rather in general.

(An aside: now that I think about it, I do know someone from Catalunya who
calls his girlfriend "Mai".)

Phonologically speaking in other circumstances I don't think that Euskera
regularly looses the intervocalic /r/. That's my impression. I also don't
know what the relationship would be between the set of (unconscious)
phonological rules used to produce such nicknames and the set used for the
rest of the language.

Nor do I know if this is a topic that has been subjected to serious study.
Without having looked into the literature, I would suggest that what we may
be looking at is the question of whether there are different sets of rules
that are brought into play by speakers of a given language to produce items
belonging to different parts of the lexicon, e.g., phonoestetic expressions
(is that the right term?) versus "regular" words. Or stated differently, do
speakers have access to two different (although perhaps largely
overlapping) phonological repertoires that are then drawn into play by them
depending on the circumstances?

Has anyone done a cross-linguistic study of such forms? How similar are
these patterns cross-linguistically and/or what conclusions can be drawn
concerning the relationship holding between them and the standard
phonotactic rules of the same language?

For example in Euskera, as Larry has pointed out, emphasis is often
expressed not by just repeating the same word. For example, we find
<gorrigorri> "very red" (lit. "red, red"), but also there are many
instances in which the first letter of the second word/expression is turned
into an <m>, to produce compounds, e.g., <hikamika> "a falling out, tiff,
verbal fight," an
expression that I've always assumed came from <hi-ka>, from repeatedly
accusing the other person by saying "You (did this...).. You (did that)."
In this interpretation <hi> would be the second person pronoun. Actually
<hika> is often used to refer to the notion of "addressing the other in
<hi>, in the allocutive forms of the verb that that form of address requires.

A form like <esa-mesa-ka> based on the verbal stem of <esan> "to speak, to
say" refers to "gossip". Here the iterative suffix <-ka> with its often
gerundive force, is added to the compound <esamesa> to form a word in its
own right, a (de)verbal noun (?).

This last example,I believe, shows the way that a rule governing an
expressive formation (I refer merely to the addition of the <m> to the
second <esa>) in a given language can end up producing a "real" compound.
Obviously this creation is based on a real verbal stem in Euskera, i.e.,
<esa->, not on a purely phonoestetic or onomatopeic form. But the rule that
governs the insertion of the <m> comes from the "other" set of rules.

In this case the question would be, does this formation bring into play the
regular rules or are there subrules to these rules that can be accessed
which allow for expressive formations?

In short, are the two systems really as separate as they are sometimes
portrayed to be? A topic that has been brought up before on this list.

Comments?

Izan untsa,
Roz

************************************************************************
Roslyn M. Frank
Professor
************************************************************************
Department of Spanish & Portuguese	
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242
email: <roz-frank at uiowa.edu>
fax: (319)-335-2990


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Tue Oct  5 02:56:54 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 22:56:54 -0400
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <007201bf0b6f$86fbfd80$a803703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.225654.0400.>

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

> I like the comparison (BTW, is Kirisuto such a transcription of Crist?).

My login is kurisuto, which is the katakana-ized version of my family
name Crist.  "Kirisuto" is the katakana-ization of "Christ".

If I understand your post correctly, you're speculating (and I appreciate
the cautious terms in which you do so!) that there could be a connection
between Iberian and Linear A.  I can't rule this out, but of course such a
connection hasn't been shown, as you acknowledge.

I think this is probably a good place to make the following observation.
It is probably the case that during most of the long period of human
existence, the norm has been extreme linguistic diversity.  The phenomenon
of a language being spoken over a wide area is probably a fairly recent
one; I don't know that it ever happens except as the product of
empire-building.  When we go into places where there hasn't been a long
history of empires (e.g. New Guinea), what we find is that every little
village has its own language.  It wouldn't be surprising if every local
clan in prehistoric Europe similarly had its own language.

When the Indo-Europeans, Semites, etc. spread over a wide area, they
probably erased an enormous number of local languages in the process.  At
the beginning of the historical period, we can still catch glimpses of the
earlier diversity: Hattic, Hurrian, Etruscan, etc. don't appear to be
related to each other or to any other language we know.  Basque probably
represents the sole outcropping remaining from the earlier old European
diversity.

When we find these tantalizing bits of older languages just barely peeking
into the historical record, it's tempting to try to connect them with each
other. If we can actually establish a connection, that's great (and in the
Mediterranean basin, such connections might be somewhat more likely, since
transportation has always been relatively easier).  It's certainly not
wrong to make the attempt.  We should bear in mind, tho, that we should
expect to find cases of languages which can't be connected with anything.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From ECOLING at aol.com  Tue Oct  5 19:30:41 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 15:30:41 EDT
Subject: "six" and "seven" Mediterranean
Message-ID: <TUE.5.OCT.1999.153041.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/3/99 3:19:52 AM, mcv at wxs.nl writes:

>I don't think it's a Gascon borrowing, but surely there's more
>than just chance resemblance between the numeral names for "6"
>and "7" as found all over the Mediterranean:

>Egyptian:       sjsw (*sds-)            sfxw (*sp'3-)
>Berber:         sd.is                   sa (*sab-)
>Akkadian:       s^is^s^et (*s^id_s^-)   sebet (*sab3-)
>Indo-European:  swek^s ~ s^wek^s        sep(h3)tm
>Georgian:       ekwsi                   s^vidi
>Etruscan:       s^a                     semph
>Basque:         sei (*s^ei)             zazpi (*sasbi)

These are language families which for the most part are
thought to be unrelated or unrelatable, except for the first
three which are parts of Afro-Asiatic.

Agreed, this seems to be far beyond chance.
though any individual resemblance, when looked at in isolation,
may be reasonably taken as possibly just chance.

What are currently the standard accounts of these facts?

Borrowings?  in which directions and at what dates?
Plausible if trade was promoted by certain traders
at certain times, I guess.  Mycenaean?  Egyptian?  Phoenecian?
Predecessors of any of these?  Who?
Even for basic numerals????  It is known to happen.
Yucatec at least, among the Mayan languages,
retains numerals only up to 5, after that it is Spanish.

Or
Ultimate common origins,
     despite the fact that proto-languages are not yet constructible
     to relate all these four language families?

A mixture of the two explanations above?
Some additional explanations?

Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics


From ECOLING at aol.com  Tue Oct  5 19:30:58 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 15:30:58 EDT
Subject: Excluding Basque data
Message-ID: <TUE.5.OCT.1999.153058.EDT.>

In Larry Trask's recent reply on this subject,
I think most of the ground has been covered.
Larry does not feel that using a tagged database is superior to other methods,
though he does acknowledge that with a computer database one can
more quickly investigate alternatives. Some of us believe that is a very
substantial benefit, and that it does allow us more easily to search
for ways we may make biasing assumptions, and to explore alternative
hypotheses so the benefit is very substantial indeed.

People's bottom-line judgements simply differ on these things.
None of these judgements are a priori wrong,
and none of us has the right to assume that the alternatives are
a priori wrong.

>> Ruling out the question of bias in selection of data, by including
>> in the data set only that data which fit the criteria, as opposed to
>> grouping the data so that different analysis can be performed, does
>> deny the ability to analyze any assumptions which may, wittingly or
>> not, be embodied in the criteria.

>Sorry, but this makes no sense to me.

And to me, it is obvious, that flexibility in handling the data
under alternative assumptions sometimes makes all the difference,
between being able to question an assumption,
and being unable to question it effectively,
because of practical considerations of our thinking abilities,
or limitations of time, or whatever.

I think these kinds of issues have been adequately discussed,
and we are not likely to make further progress on them immediately.

***

Many of the rest seem to me to be preferences in choice of terminology,
which may have flavors we prefer one way or another.

***

On matters still worth discussing, at least for clarification:

>But, so far, neither you nor Jon Patrick nor anyone else has made a
>single substantive suggestion as to how my criteria bias the data.
>Instead, you just keep hinting vaguely that it might do so, but without
>any specifics.

No, I have repeatedly focused on one specific area where I could not merely
support the general concerns of others not to exclude too much,
but could add something from my own typological knowledge.
Namely...

Sound-symbolic words are
BOTH different in canonical forms
AND underrepresented in vocabularies etc.
and the coincidence of these two properties
means it is dangerous to exclude them.

As to sound-symbolic words,
Larry says he does NOT insist on their having the same canonical
forms as other vocabulary, does not exclude them on that basis.
(I surely thought he was using canonical forms as one of his
criteria for setting up his initial lists?  Was that not true?
I do not intend to go back into the extensive correspondence
to check on this.  Others can do so if they wish.)

In any case, another criterion is explicit or implicit in the
following:

>But, in fact, the vast majority of sound-symbolic items in Basque do
>*not* satisfy my other criteria.  Hence my approach will immediately set
>them apart from the words which are the best candidates for native and
>ancient status.  Once that's established, *then* these distinctive words
>can be investigated to determine their own phonological characteristics.

Notice in the way the middle sentence follows the first sentence
that Larry treats his approach (his criteria) as if his criteria were
pretty much the same thing as selection for "the best candidates for
native and ancient status".  Others of us believe that must always be
kept on the surface of awareness as an empirical question,
not taken for granted;  it is precisely a core question!

If what Larry says above about Basque is true of other languages
to a simlar degree, then should we conclude that sound-symbolic
items are NOT good candidates for native and ancient status,
in general?  That would seem to be implied by the paragraph
just quoted.  Yet to me that shows there must be something wrong
with the argument.

That is not to say we treat sound-symbolic
words exactly the same way as other words.
Just as the English "pavilion" from French "pavillon"
is the normal French development by the sound laws, and "papillon"
is a sound-symbolic form which has resisted a sound change,
so we might suspect Basque <pinpirin> may have not undergone all of the
sound changes which most of the vocabulary did in the history of
Basque, independent of the question whether it is a recent loan
or some primaeval vocabulary item inherited from 10,000 years ago.
So even the supposedly air-tight logic of sound laws cannot be
used unequivocally to include or exclude vocabulary from native
vs. borrowed categories.  A shocker, and not a wild card we want
to use without severe limits or controls, or else the entire enterprise
falls.  But a shocker we cannot escape by waving magic wands
or waving words.  It's a fact of reality.
(English "tiny", which went through the great vowel shift,
and "teeny", which did not go through the great vowel shift,
was retained or regenerated or reborrowed from a dialect,
would be a similar case,
unless the dialect-borrowing solution is adopted.)

(Trask says:
> I exclude sound-symbolic words like <pinpirin> `butterfly'
>from my initial list, not because I don't like their forms, but because
>they do not satisfy my primary criteria.  In the case of <pinpirin>, I
>exclude it because it is attested at all only in one small corner of the
>country.)

Among Larry Trask's other criteria were the distribution across all
of the dialects, not the occurrence in only a few.
As I took pains to point out in previous messages, that criterion is biasing.
However reasonable, even obvious, it may appear to a historical linguist
(including seeming obvious to me too, I may add)
it may still disproportionately bias against sound-symbolic words,
because of the spotty record of those
who record vocabularies in not collecting such words,
thereby reducing the number of dialects in which they are attested,
quite independently of whether they actually were used in those dialects.
The entire class of such words may not be recorded, or very few of them,
it is not simply that their recording is randomly slightly less full.

And this enormous underrepresentation can then indirectly lead to
initial conclusions on canonical forms which are
too simple and neat, too consistent,
including canonical forms which are
underrepresentative of sound-symbolic forms.

Such initial conclusions on canonical forms can then have
cascading secondary effects on inclusion or exclusion of additional
vocabulary in the lists.  Even if /bat/ (from the recent discussion of
/bade/ /bedere/ etc.) were the only form included with a final
stop consonant, being exceptional would not prove it is not part of
pre-Basque.  All (?) languages have more common and rarer forms,
and have peripheral forms, especially when the ambiguities of
fast speech and slow speech borderlines are considered,
and when a few short high-frequency items are considered.
Yet we must also pay attention to differences of canonical forms,
as they sometimes DO clue us in to different strata of vocabulary
which may be relevant in historical-comparative studies.

>I have proposed that obvious and recognizable sound-symbolic items, like
><tu> `spit', might reasonably be excluded at the outset.  But I'm not
>wedded to this, and I don't mind if others want to include them when
>they satisfy the other criteria.

How about if they do not satisfy the other criteria, or some of them,
and if the inclusion of such exceptional forms then
enters into the determination of what are true canonical forms,
and even what those other criteria should be,
and cycles back to affect judgements of what forms are exceptional or not,
or to what degree (frequency or structural),
and EVEN to affect which forms are included in the analysis?
It is indeed circular not in a bad sense, but should be recognized as
circular.

Larry says his criteria do not have any biases (I think he believes
they cannot, as he thinks he has formulated them), yet here he himself
says he is excluding a form, mentioning in this paragraph only that it
is sound-symbolic (as if that were a sufficient reason?
I do not want to assume that, but at least here no more was given).
I do not remember whether he gave any other reasons for
excluding <tu>?

Trask refers to this:
>...criticizing me for selecting criteria appropriate only
>to the task I have in mind, and not to other conceivable tasks that
>someone else might like to pursue.

Trask clearly believes his criteria are obviously
appropriate to the task he has in mind.
Others are not quite so certain that that is all his criteria do,
believe they may do some other things as well.

The matter of biasing assumptions is almost always very
difficult to analyze, because if it were easy, we would already
have solved it, by eliminating the unwarranted assumptions.

I have absolutely no doubts that Larry Trask's knowledge is in general
crucial to finding good candidates for proto-Basque forms,
but that is not the same thing as saying there may not be unknown biases
even in his work.  It's simply our status as fallible human beings
who are not omniscient.

>At the same time, no questions about the
>nature of Pre-Basque words can possibly be answered without first
>identifying the words that were present in Pre-Basque.

Seems self-evident, doesn't it?

Actually, this sort of statement is often not true of normal science.
We might answer some questions about the nature of pre-Basque words,
then make progress on identifying which words were present
in pre-Basque, then answer more questions about the nature of
pre-Basque words, including CHANGING some of the earlier
answers, then make more progress on identifying which words
were present in pre-Basque, excluding some we had previously
included and including some we had previously excluded.
It is the edifice AS A WHOLE which is ultimately evaluated.
There may not exist a step-by-step process
of getting there with anything like certainty along the way.
So we can use a step-by-step process WITHOUT assuming
certainty along the way.  Which is why it is so important to
be able to change assumptions EASILY.

>Adding to your
>database words that did not exist in Pre-Basque cannot offer the
>slightest assistance, and may well spoil the results.

Of course.  Everyone agrees in one sense, if they are mixed
with words which did exist in pre-Basque.
But who is omniscient enough to know in every case
which words did not exist in pre-Basque?
Larry is not claiming he is, explictly is not,
yet the method he proposes is stated in such absolute terms
("first" identifying the words that were present in
Pre-Basque) that it does appear to rely on omniscience.

It is simply not so straightforward.

>Is this such a
>difficult point to follow?

The last part about not wanting to add words that did not exist
in pre-Basque is not at all hard to follow, everyone agrees with it.

That does not logically force all of the other decisions that
Larry wishes to make in advance, though he is of course
right to make his own best attempt.

Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics


From ECOLING at aol.com  Tue Oct  5 23:15:36 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 19:15:36 EDT
Subject: Respect goes both ways!
Message-ID: <TUE.5.OCT.1999.191536.EDT.>

The obligation of respect goes both ways!
Yes it certainly does.
It is owed even to those with whom we disagree,
and even if they are not professionals in our field.
There is an obligation to gracefully acknowledge their
contributions where they are correct,
even if they are wrong about some other things.

I am once again extremely disappointed at the lack of respect
shown by members of my chosen profession for someone
who is not a professional in historical-comparative linguistics,
who has made some invalid points,
and also some valid points they have not been willing to acknowledge.

Two members of this list have replied to my post
defending Steve Long on certain limited issues only.
Since it is not really important who the individuals are
who have not shown the appropriate respect to Long,
I will for the most part not name names (only once,
when necessary for a citation from a person's other work).

Especially one of those who disagrees with Steve Long on some issues
appears to be changing the terms of discussion
in order to maintain their position that Steve Long is universally wrong,
(or if right, only trivially, meaninglessly so).
He denies the validity of a technical definition and
does not follow through the logical consequences of
that definition which he himself recognizes in practice.
Of course it is easier to criticize a target set up by the critic himself
for the purpose, than to criticize what others have actually said.

This same correspondent in a previous debate REPEATEDLY
changed the terms of discussion
from "what has Greenberg done"
to "what has Greenberg claimed he has done",
while denying he had so changed the discussion.
Of course it is easier to criticize the value of some things Greenberg
claims he has done than to criticize what Greenberg has actually done.

So what?
Certainly not part of co-operative content-focused
discussions or debates.

That kind of debating tactic needs to be seen for what it is.

***

Point 1 in defense of Steve Long on one specific

>> Family Tree representations can be much improved.
>
>Sure, but this is not news.  We linguists have realized since family
>trees were invented that they represent considerably less than the whole
>truth.  The literature is full of proposals for improving our trees.
>But it's hard.  Linguistic reality is so complex that highly realistic
>trees become imossible to interpret in a useful way.

My point was that Steve Long said family tree representations had some
problems, and that he was correct in one of the problems he identified,
specifically that as often displayed they can make it look as if there are
innovations on one branch, not on another,
without being explicit about whether this is the case or not.
Later discussions said BOTH that there could be innovations on
both branches, AND that in several cases there might not be innovations
on one branch.  This rather highlights the problem, does not dispose of it.

An appropriate response might be to say that the particular failure that
Steve Long was pointing to has been noted in the literature, and that
the solutions proposed are A, B, and C...
Of course there may be complexities, as noted in the quote above,
and of course if one pushes the level of detail sufficiently,
trees like any other visual diagram become impossible to interpret easily.
However, pointing that out is not a constructive
nor a respectful response to Steve Long.
Another respondent pointed out similarly that one cannot mark
EVERY innovation on the branches of a tree.  While obviously true,
that is not directly relevant to my point which was that SOME
should be marked (I did not specify that every one should be).
Presumably the ones marked should be the salient ones,
those considered most important or secure by the historical linguists.
It is also quite beside Steve Long's original point.

Since correspondents apparently believe that Family Trees can be
improved, it would not have hurt to say so.
Saying "it is a complicated matter" does not excuse one from the
obligation to promptly say one agrees when in fact one does agree.

The second correspondent's reply concerning Point 1. actually notes
that one can choose a middle-road position:

>If you want, you can just include the "best hits"  of the innovations in
>each branch,

That was a co-operative response, to the point of the substance.

But regarding especially the first correspondent's reaction on
this Point 1, ...

I would like to see where the particular respondents
were PREVIOUSLY gracious and respectful of Steve Long
in expressing publicly on the list that he was correct in ANY part of this
(and, just incidentally, respectful of the rights of our many silent readers
to have accurate information communicated to us by professionals).
Or can that not be acknowledged for fear it might lead someone
to treat something else Steve writes (right or wrong) with more respect?
What is the problem here?
Politics, it would seem.
As my teacher James McCawley once said,

"Madison Ave. Si,
 Pennsylvania Ave. No"

In other words, he was saying that advertising is OK,
but not political manipulation of the terms of debate.
(In a world in which we have seen even more abuses of marketing
than when Jim McCawley made that statement,
I wonder whether he would still maintain the
first half of the above quote without modification?)

***

Point 2 in defense of Steve Long on a second specific
(there were additional specific points beyond these two,
which the commentors did not choose to respond to
-- please go back to the original message defending
Steve Long for those points, I will not repeat them here)

I pointed out that Steve was correct in a very limited technical sense
that a language and its descendent
could exist AT THE SAME TIME
IF WE USE A DEFINITION of "SAME" vs. of "DIFFERENT" LANGUAGE
which was commonly being used on this list.
That is all.
It says nothing about  what happens if we use other definitions.
I was explicit in my earlier message:
"Using that definition, Steve was right."
(We can regard this as a PARADOX of the definition;
I wish I had used the term "paradox" in my earlier posts on this topic)

One of those correspondents I believe failed to mention
my explicit statement that I was not proposing my own definitions
but using definitions which had recently been used on this list?
At least, I missed mention of this if it was there.
The other said that was not his own definition, but see below
for evidence that it is in practice a part of his definition at least!
(And if it actually were a definition he did not use,
then his own definition would be non-responsive, non-co-operative,
irrelevant to that part of the discussion,
though it could be quite legitimate to explore his own definition
in a different part of the discussion, not pretending to be a response.)

[LA]
>> Parent and daugher languages can indeed in theory co-exist,
>> exactly as Steve Long said.

[response]
>No, they can't, as I'll try to show below.

[LA]
> I use here the definition of distinctness of "languages" preferred by
> most linguists, including the experts on this list, that is, fuzzily,
> "forms of speech which are mutually unintelligible".

[I could have stated that slightly better as a definition of "same language"
vs. "different language", but no matter]

[response]
>Sorry, but I don't think this is the definition of `languages' used by
>most linguists.  If anything, it's closer to the man-in-the-street's
>perception.  Linguists are aware that mutual intelligibility or the lack
>of it is only one of many factors which may help to determine whether
>varieties are best regarded as two languages or as a single language.
>I could cite examples for hours -- Chinese, Italian, Dyirbal -- but I'll
>leave that now.

The above seems to be EXACTLY THE REVERSE of the bulk of the
recent discussion which said that political and cultural reasons may lead
people to call very different languages by the same name,
as if they were the same language.  (Note the counterfactual.)
Folks-in-the-street are perhaps even MORE aware than linguists
of many of the other factors other than mutual intelligibility,
which they normally do not think of at all.

Unless of course the writer literally means as he writes
that mutual intelligibility is "one of many factors which may help to
determine whether varieties are best regarded as two languages
or as a single language".  Note the "one of", in which case the
response should have been not "NO, WRONG", but
"YES, WITH ADDITIONAL SPECIFICATIONS".

Even in that case, a co-operative response
would have been to very carefully craft examples in which the other
factors also operate in a way those who stated the paradox would
want them to, to try to see whether the paradox would still stand
with the more complex definition.  Manipulating the other factors
for descendents A vs. B of mother M can indeed be done, I feel sure,
so that B would be a "different" language by the more complex definition,
while A would be the "same" language as M by that more complex
definition.  But it is not my responsibility to do so.

And I think the objectors would still object,
because they would take even the tiniest change,
contrary to their own definitions of WHATEVER kind,
to force A and B to both be distinct languages from M
if either one were admitted to be so.  Not on an empirical basis,
but on a purely definitional basis.  Take the following as
evidence that they would object on a priori grounds,
not on empirical grounds at all!

>I stick by
>my claim that the following situation cannot exist among natively learned
>languages:
>
>          A
>         / \
>        A   B
>
>where the right branch has innovated and the left has undergone no change
>whatever.  This is true whether A and B are mutually intelligible or not.
>I am not interested in debating this point any further.

This looks like a refusal to deal in empirical facts,
rather choosing to define the problem away, by using the phrase
"undergone no change whatever".
Circularly, any language will change very slightly over the course
of only a few days.  So defining the problem away in this
case is completely uninteresting, because purely definitional.
I was dealing with an empirical situation, not with pure words.

If we treat the above position as an EMPIRICAL claim
then the following claim is almost certainly false:
**
that given two dialect areas of a language in different areas,
it is not possible that
over the same time span for each area,
one dialect can change almost not at all,
the other area change so substantially as to become mutually
unintelligible with the former beyond some measurable criterion.

**

I was not discussing other possible definitions,
I was discussing a common highly technical definition,
mutual intelligibility, about which I was completely explicit.
The paradox can almost certainly be reformulated,
whatever definition of "distinct language" one prefers,
as long as it is not circularly contorted to exclude the empirical
possibility that dialects of a language can change
at radically different rates.

I believe the political-cultural identifications of "language"
are much closer to the man-in-the-street's definition
than is the highly technical definition of mutual intelligibility,
which I believe most linguists do prefer
at least in some contexts of distinguishing language from dialect.
It is often mentioned, so at the very least, it is cavalier to simply
treat it as inappropriate.
Further, these two components of possible definitions
were contrasted in our earlier discussions.

It is extremely rude to discuss B and pretend to defeat A which was
explicitly clear and was not the same as B.
A good debating technique, perhaps effective
under some circumstances, but not forthright or co-operative.
Gracious co-operation requires that one discuss what
it is perfectly obvious that other people mean, not something one
substitutes for it.  It is certainly often simpler to try to ridicule
something people did not say than what they actually did say.

(One of the two correspondents also asked at the end of their message
where I got my degree.  Since that is of course irrelevant to the
content under discussion, it is ad hominem, and given the rest of this
supposed debate, I suspect it is a prelude to another avenue of attack,
to attempt to discredit someone who is defending Steve Long,
even if that defense is explicitly on only a couple of limited points.
So I answered the irrelevancy privately.)

One correspondent believes they have defeated the claim thusly,
while quoting at first from Pete Gray, who was trying to be helpful
by pointing out that a part of the disagreement might arise because
people were discussing different questions:

>[Pete Gray]
>
>>> Imagine a situation where a group of speakers of a language go and settle
>>> elsewhere, where substrate and other factors make their language change
>>> swiftly, while those who stayed at home enjoy a very much slower rate
>>> of change.
>>> After some years, and political upheaval, we can see a situation
>>> where the settlers are deemed to be speaking a different language from
>>> that which they brought with them years before.
>
>>> I suspect that [one contributor] is saying that the stay-at-homes are
>>> also speaking a different language, by definition;
>>> while some others are saying
>>> that if the changes are few enough, it should be defined as the parent
>>> language.   And of course, both sides are right - which is why there
>>> is so little understanding on both sides.
>>> The debate is ultimately based simply
>>> on our definition of what a single language is.

[response]
>But we have no such definition, nor do I believe that one is possible.

[LA]
>> If we now apply the definition to a situation of one mother M and
>> two dialects A and B, where one dialect A has changed so little in
>> say 100 years that we have no excuse for saying M and A are
>> different languages, by our standard definition of different vs.
>> same language, we must by that definition say they are the same
>> language (and NOT merely for political reasons, one of a zillion red
>> herrings in this discussion),

[respondent]
>Right.  So a language can co-exist with its own descendant?
>I don't think so, and I think this conclusion can be destroyed by what
>Llyod elsewhere calls "simple logic".

The correspondent now proceeds BOTH to evade the
common-sense version of what Pete Gray pointed to above,
and also to evade the technical formulation given earlier.

The common-sense version is that in the same time frame,
one dialect of a language may change so little that we consider it
for all practical purposes the same as its parent,
while another dialect of that same language can change substantially
so that we consider it a separate language.  (Presumably
when this happens, the social conditions causing the greater change
will also involve the kinds of political-cultural divides which would
trigger the correspondent's preferred definitions for "distinct
language", as for example if some of the speakers of the mother
language migrated to an area where they mixed with numerous
speakers of some substrate language, while other speakers of the
mother language did not so migrate or mingle.)

The more technical version of the same uses the technical definition
of mutual intelligibility used by some PROFESSIONALS
(note, not laymen) to define the same dilemma.

The correspondent also proceeds to use an example
WHICH DOES NOT FIT THE CONDITIONS LAID DOWN
above, and is therefore irrelevant to the paradox as it was
posed, as if that example were a counterexample.
The correspondent also proceeds to put words in my mouth
which are certainly contrary to what I would ever say,
and I think obviously contrary to what anyone else would want
to say, even to what any other sane person would believe
I would say, given my care to specify "mutual intelligibility"
as a technical definition I was using for the purposes of the discussion.

>Is the English of 1999 "the same language" as the English of 1998?
>I take it that Lloyd and Steve would at once answer "yes".

Probably I would, if we are talking about the same dialect.
I can conceive of very unusual circumstances in which I would
have to answer "no" if different dialects are concerned.
Even this initial posing of an example is not careful to state
"among people P" and "among the same people P" for earlier and later times,
is not as careful as my recent formulation of
the statement of the definitional paradox.
How Steve Long would answer I should not speculate about.
Lumping Steve Long and me is another sign of lack of care
and precision, and one manifestation of
lack of respect by the correspondent.

>So: is the English of 1998 "the same language" as the English of 1997?
>If you answered "yes" the first time, you must answer "yes" now.

No, that does not follow.  The relation is not transitive.

I am sure the correspondent knows perfectly well it is not transitive.
So why bring up this kind of an example and act as if the persons
being criticized believed the relation is transitive?

>But you can see where this leading.  If the answer is "yes", then, by
>transitivity, the English of 1999 is "the same language" as the English
>of King Alfred the Great 1000 years ago.  Are you happy with this?  The
>two varieties are not at all mutually comprehensible, since the changes
>in 1000 years have been dramatic.

And therefore,
since the correspondent knows I would not want to answer yes
(it is the most elementarily obvious conclusion from what I have written
previously) it is obvious that the relation I used the definition of
is not transitive, the correspondent has proven that.
Isn't that interesting!
The definition I made explicit was not a transitive definition
(which goes unremarked by the correspondent).
What an odd coincidence!
Surely I could not have been careful
enough to think this through in advance?
Nor knowledgeable enough to know this in advance?
Must be a coincidence.

The correspondent here is using a different definition,
and just incidentally, it seems to be a definition of "language"
more used by the man-on-the-street (i.e. a political-cultural definition).
I believe earlier discussions were explicit that this was more
the man-on-the-street's definition.

I have not previously accused the correpondent of being an ignorant
layman, though that is apparently what the correspondent is accusing
me and Steve Long of being (in more than one way).

The correspondent seems simply unwilling to face the fact that
one particular technical definition of
what makes two dialects distinct languages,
a definition used by some professional linguists
(and part of the definition used by almost all),
carries with it a paradoxical answer that yes,
what Steve Long said is in principle possible,
a language and a descendant distinct language can co-exist.

Inconvenient, perhaps, but a consequence of that technical definition.
Not my technical definition,
rather one used by many professional linguists
when using "same language" in an ideal sense,
not colored by political or cultural preferences of users.
And, just perhaps, co-operativeness would dictate that one should
propose another more easily operationalized definition.
Remember that for those who use that definition, they all recognize
that intelligibility is a matter of degree,
the fact that the definition necessarily involves fuzzy borderline
examples does not bother them, that is just the nature of reality.
But in the meantime, graciousness and respect for others
would dictate that one discusses USING that definition,
or admit that one's discussion is simply not relevant to the point raised
about the paradox.
(As stated above, even using what the commentor prefers as
a definition, the paradox probably remains in the same form.)

Here is the consequence of trying to deny the conclusion by
clever manipulations of words (quoted from my previous message).
The correspondent does not deal with this -- to do so would reveal
that the correspondent was changing definitions and thus not defeating
the claim actually made about the paradox, but some other straw-man
claim set up by the correspondent in order to knock it down.

[LA]
>Now if we wish to deny this conclusion,
>I can only see doing it by changing the definition of "same language",
>though that would be cheating,
>or by admitting explicitly that in this context we
>DO NOT MEAN THE SAME THING as we did in other contexts
>by "same language" and "different language".
>(In other words, that no matter how small the difference is between
>M and A, in this context of discussion we will insist they are not the
>same language. Probably because our symbol system, our family tree,
>is influencing how we think about reality, is substituting itself for the
>reality which it is supposed to faithfully represent!)

Evidence that this was the correct analysis of the strategy of debate
is provided by the absolutist phrase "undergone no change whatever"
used in one of the responses received this weekend.

One correspondent ends by saying:

>In sum, I firmly believe that the question `Are related varieties A and
>B the same language or different languages?' is one devoid of
>linguistic content.  And all discussions predicated upon the belief that
>this is a linguistically meaningful question with a linguistically
>meaningful answer are badly misguided.

Steve Long this morning sent me a reference to p.177 of Larry Trask's
"Historical Linguistics" where he claims to be quoting Trask to the effect
that 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."
Here it appears that Trask is indeed using just the criterion he says
he does not use, at least as a part of his definition which in this
case is a determining part.
Even if the quotation Long sent me is within a
context of a criticism of the technical "mutually intelligible"
definition, it still demonstrates that Trask CAN think logically
using this definition, and come to the exact same conclusion
as I believe anyone else.  Simply common sense.
If so, why does he refuse to do so in the present discussion on our
email list?
Is the reference Steve Long sent me correct, anyone?

Even before receiving this reference,
I wrote the following paragraph:
If the correspondent really believes there is NO acceptable technical
definition of "same language" vs, "different language",
then perhaps the correspondent should simply have said that
and declined to participate in this discussion.
Or hand their linguistic diploma back to the institution which granted it.
To discuss the question presupposes that one thinks the terms
actually mean something.  And the correspondent apparently actually
does think they mean something, witness the example about
modern English and the English of 1000.  We can't have it both ways.

The other recent correspondent replies to the defense of selected
limited points made by Steve Long by beginning:

>Your post is so very long that I am only going to respond to a few major
>points.  It's really hard to wade thru a post when it gets this long.

Length is necessary when the respondents change the definitions
and do other things which greatly confuse the discussion.
Returning to clarity, while being fair to everyone, is a lot of work.
I personally resent having to do that work.
But the issue of respect is important enough I am willing to do it,
repeatedly if need be, to deal with further red herrings.

This debate would have been very much shorter,
more amicable, and more productive, if the correspondents
had simply admitted, yes, Steve Long is correct technically
about points (a,b,c), and co-operatively discussed with him
what might be practically done about the problems he had identified,
how much information about common innovations might be
placed on the branches of a tree, that perhaps it is wiser to
NOT have a continuous line which could be regarded as a "stem",
or whatever else they wished to suggest.
It is perfectly appropriate to point out at the same time
that Steve Long was wrong about other points (d,e,f,...).

We got instead a stonewalling on every point that Steve raised,
as if his status as not a professional in this field required
that we demolish his every argument, whether the individual
arguments had merit or not.  Probably not in every case,
but this response was a massive pattern by some correspondents.

***

One of the correspondents writes:

>I think that Steve
>and Lloyd are both gravely wrong on certain fundamental points.

Notice the magisterial tone, "fundamental points",
unspecified even in what follows, like the Joe McCarthy hit list,
very much like the words "fundamentally flawed"
which have become a code among academics in reviewing books
for "worthless, unprofessional, do not read that author".

>I think both have fallen badly into the reification fallacy.  The
>reification fallacy lies in inventing a name, and then concluding that,
>since we have a name, there must exist something "out there" for the
>name to refer to.
>
>In the linguistic case, the fallacy lies in assuming that names like
>`English', `German' and `Italian' must designate actual entities in the
>real world, because the names exist.

I am absolutely not guilty of the simplistic error of reification in this
matter.
That correspondent can of course not quote any words I have
said which substantiate such a charge, since the correspondent
also uses language names ("English" or "German" or "Italian", for example).
Especially since the definition I was using explicitly denies it,
by laying down a criterion for "different language" which blocks
mere continuation of a language name by maintaining tradition,
and forces one explicitly to recognize instability, continuous change.

He is arguing against something it is perfectly legitimate to argue against.
BUT he is arguing against something I have not given any evidence
of believing.

I think the correspondent knows perfectly well
I have not made that error.
In which case I believe what he said is slanderous or libelous
(take your pick, email is a strange being).

It is also a red herring, because the definitional paradox
stands on its own.
(Even if I had made the error, which I did not,
it would be irrelevant to the logic of the definitional paradox.)

Progress in many sciences consists in recognizing that
seeming paradoxes are not so very odd after all,
that we may not have understood what some of the consequences
might be for definitions commonly used.

We could have avoided most of this by not trying to evade
the paradox with verbal slight-of-hand,
and that would itself have been much easier if
principles of respect for all were more generally adhered to.

Especially the obligation to try to find the positive and useful
in everyone's contributions.

***

Sincerely,
Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics


From alderson at netcom.com  Tue Oct 12 01:22:04 1999
From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 18:22:04 -0700
Subject: Apology to Pat Ryan and Larry Trask
Message-ID: <MON.11.OCT.1999.182204.0700.>

Recently, I received in the Indo-European input queue a message from Pat Ryan
which appeared to be a highly intemperate criticism of Larry Trask.  As has
been my custom, I sent a note to Mr. Ryan stating that I thought it beyond the
pale, and indicating that I would post it with an invitation to Mr. Trask to
respond to the substantive issues, but that I would then cut off any further
discussion on the topic.

Because of outside pressures, I had not been able to send out the list daily,
and wished to get things moving again.  I therefore published everything then
waiting in the queue, including the message in question, without waiting for a
response from Mr. Ryan; I thereby did him an injustice.  Mr. Ryan assured me by
return mail that the apparent intemperate remarks were intended as humorous,
and that he would have submitted a revised version of the message with explicit
"smileys" on the statements to which I objected had I given him the chance.

I apologize to Mr. Ryan for this, and to Mr. Trask for making him the apparent
victim of an attack which was not so intended.  Mr. Trask has responded, with
some forbearance and some explicitly marked humour; this response will be sent
out shortly.

Although I declared the thread closed, seeing only the potential for a long
exchange without interest to the readers of the list, even the two gentlemen
involved, I would like to reverse that decision.  Both writers have shown a
willingness to keep to the issues, and so long as that is true, the discussion
seems useful to me and, I hope, to the other readers of the Indo-European list.

								Rich Alderson
								list owner and
								moderator


From gordonselway at gn.apc.org  Wed Oct  6 01:41:00 1999
From: gordonselway at gn.apc.org (Gordon Selway)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 02:41:00 +0100
Subject: Contributions by Steve Long
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.024100.0100.>

At 3:50 am 4/10/99, Robert Orr wrote:
>I've only just read the first part of Larry Trask's posting, so this is a
>bit impertinent, but there is a comment that can be made right away on one
>of his points.

>>Is Scots a variety of English or a separate language?  Well, a number of
>>Scots have argued that it is a separate language, and, if it had not
>>been for the Act of Union in 1707, we might all recognise Scots as a
>>distinct language today.  But, because of that Act, we don't.  There are
>>no linguistic considerations here: just political ones.

>Actually, there is a linguistic consideration.  Scots used to have a large
>number of distinctive lexical items, differentiating it from "English".
>Many of these are now rare in everyday speech, thus reducing the amount of
>differentation.

>Due to the Act of Union (what about the Union of the Crowns?)  Perhaps.
===
[Though it is distinctly tangential, this may be of interest.  It also
reminds us that speech exists in communities, I suppose, and that different
forms of language, registers, &c may co-exist within one community -
whatever that may be : people who are in touch with each other?  people who
recognise each other when they meet?]

A complex story.

There are still differences at several levels (and some of them no doubt
enabled a master to identify where my family had recently come from when I
was a schoolboy, even though to a casual hearer I would probably have
seemed to speak standard RP English), some of which in specific cases
certainly parallel Gaelic idiom.  [Eg cia mar/what like?]

Given that the other family input into my idiolect is distinctly
'mummersetshire', I can effectively become incomprehensible (and weave a
fair number of local dialect peculiarities into my speech on occasion) in
both western English and south-western Scots (or indeed Ulster Scots).
Though it's easier to be the passive recipient than the active instigator
of discourse in Scots.  A definite problem can be my intonation, which may
be what can baffle people in England, even when the words and the 'accent'
are standard English.

There was a conscious change towards standard English after the
Reformation, possibly because there were no available translations of the
bible in Scots.  The metrical psalms were also in the same language, even
where they had Scots authors.

On the other hand, the language of civil administration and the law
continued to be Scots rather than English well after the Union (of the
Parliaments, that is).  The movement in 1603 was of folk off to London with
Jamie, not of the English to Edinburgh and beyond.  [And btw when the Edict
of Nantes was revoked by Louis XIV in 1685, the French calvinists moved to
England and parts of Ireland, rather than to Scotland where they would have
been among co-religionists, in any numbers.]

There certainly are distinct differences between the vernaculars in Glasgow
and London, and the differences in Scotland may be being cultivated.  Being
in an institutional distinct country may assist.

Gordon
<gordonselway at gn.apc.org>


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Oct  6 02:38:37 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 19:38:37 -0700
Subject: Contributions by Steve Long
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9909301701010.25900-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.su
 sx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.OCT.1999.193837.0700.>

At 05:34 PM 9/30/99 +0100, Larry Trask wrote:
>Is Serbo-Croatian a single language, or are Serbian, Bosnian and
>Croatian three different languages?  Well, until a few years ago,
>practically everybody, including the locals, was happy to agree there
>was only the one language.  But, since the breakup of Yugoslavia, things
>have changed: the locals are now insisting heatedly that there are three
>different languages.  No linguistic change led to this change of view:
>only political events did.  But now the linguistic changes are
>following, as the three groups scramble to distance their own speech
>from that of the others.

This actually accords with what one book on linguistic change suggested is
the *main* cause of language change: a social desire to differentiate one's
group from some other group.  (Unfortunately I cannot locate the book right
now).

>Right.  So a language can co-exist with its own descendant?
>I don't think so, and I think this conclusion can be destroyed by what
>Llyod elsewhere calls "simple logic".

>Is the English of 1999 "the same language" as the English of 1998?
>I take it that Lloyd and Steve would at once answer "yes".
>So: is the English of 1998 "the same language" as the English of 1997?
>If you answered "yes" the first time, you must answer "yes" now.
>But you can see where this leading.  If the answer is "yes", then, by
>transitivity, the English of 1999 is "the same language" as the English
>of King Alfred the Great 1000 years ago.  Are you happy with this?

There is another way out of this dilemma.  At least in many cases
substantial language change occurs in a *single* generation.  In the
history of English, one such case occurred during the Wars of Roses, and
separates Middle English from Modern English.

And it is occurring right now for the Blackfoot language, with older tribe
members speaking Old Blackfoot, and the younger ones speaking New
Blackfoot.  The changes are quite substantial, and include replacement of
vowel+glottal stop with a long/creaky vowel.

>Take a real case in this vein.  Is modern Greek "the same language" as
>ancient Greek?  If not, where's the cutoff point?

One of two places:
1. at some historical point where there was a major break between
successive generations.

2. at the point where any older dialects are not easily comprehensible to
someone knowing the modern literary standard language.  (Choosing the
literary standard here  deals with the issue of the subtle changes over
time in modern Greek).

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


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Oct  6 02:51:02 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 19:51:02 -0700
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <001001bf0b7f$25d177a0$d405703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.OCT.1999.195102.0700.>

At 10:05 PM 9/30/99 +0200, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:
>The Virgin Mary's role in (Catholic) Christianity has greatly increased over
>the centuries, especially in the 19th c., and it looks to me (no offense
>intended to people's religious convictions) that this is a consequence of the
>psychological gap left by banning Mari.

This may certainly have been part of it.  However, a large part of the
modern Marian treatment in Catholic Christianity goes back to the
assimilation of the Romano-Egyptian worship of Isis.  (Of course, if it
happened once it could happen more often, and we could have a major
composite here).

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


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Oct  6 03:10:29 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 20:10:29 -0700
Subject: re pre-greek language
In-Reply-To: <37F787C4.533E0C55@Compuserve.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.OCT.1999.201029.0700.>

At 06:43 PM 10/3/99 +0200, Damien Erwan Perrotin wrote:
>Third there is the toponymy of Crete (and of a great part of mainland
>Greece. This toponymy is not Greek. The problem is that a number of
>place-names can be interpreted as IE, while not greek : thus
>knossos : the hill (Irish cnoc, Old English hnec)
>Argissa : the white place (from *arg-)
>Gortyne : the closed place (IE *ghert-).

This could simply mean there were several layers of language replacement in
the area.  Certainly I think it likely that there *were* pre-Greek IE
languages in the general area of the Greek peninsula.  For one thing, I
think a route through the Balkans the most likely route for the entry of
Anatolian into Anatolia. (One Web site I found makes an interesting case
for some of the pre-Greek toponyms being from a language related to
Tracian, which combined with the above, puts two other IE languages in the
general area).

>these toponyms are found in the central mediteranea area, up to Etruria
>(Crotona, Cortuna), but that could be an effect from the sea people
>invasion or not.

Or they could be from an older incursion of IE speakers.

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


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Wed Oct  6 04:07:26 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 00:07:26 EDT
Subject: Mycenaean Scribes
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.000726.EDT.>

I wrote
<<And the term "designed for a language" assumes something about the skill
and purpose of scribes who were matching symbols to meanings>>

In a message dated 10/5/99 9:37:26 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com replied:
<<Other scripts of the era match the sounds of the languages for which they
were developed very well.  Why should early Greeks be any dumber?>>

Dumbness has nothing to do with it, of course.  Our first evidence of
Egyptian and Phoenician script are apparently pictograms and only later
acquired phonological equivalencies.  (See also, 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com
just wrote in a very informative post: <<Linear A is autochtonous and cannot
be derived from cuneiform or hieroglyph, so it must have evolved from local
pictograms...>>)

There's also the matter of your statement that early scripts "matched sounds
very well."  MCV recently pointed out, the sound matches were not necessarily
complete matches:

<< The only options available at the time were complex logosyllabic systems
like Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform or Egyptian and Anatolian
hieroglyphics or simple open syllabaries (in their stripped down
version, consonantal alphabets), as used in the Semitic Levant.>>

Another possibly that I haven't seen mentioned - I don't know what it would
be called - is where scribes are primarily transcribing with descriptors from
a foreign language.  I remember reading about a case of Italian warehousemen
during WWII being given German glossaries so that they could keep inventories
that could be read in German (transcribing from I guess inventories in
Italian.)  These warehousers did not have grammars and did not know German.
So when they came to something not in the glossary, they improvised, often
with Italian additions - a kind of written pidgin, I guess.

If Mycenaean clerks were similarly required to keep track of the kinds of
matters we see later in Linear B, then they may well have been asked to use a
foreign script to write in and the script may have represented a mixture of
Mycenaean and, say, Minoan.

Regards,
Steve Long

PS - Just as a very small matter of civility, it really isn't necessary to
imply a slur like "dumber" where you may have guessed I intended no such
thing.  I hope you understand why neither you or I would want to have our
conclusions re-characterized in those kinds of terms.


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Wed Oct  6 04:22:05 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 00:22:05 EDT
Subject: NEWS re Black Sea Flood
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.002205.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/5/99 10:17:47 PM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu wrote:
<<Possibly it was a temporary lake created by melting glaciers, like
Lake Bonneville>>

I'm on the road and don't have my books, but I believe that the basin of the
Black Sea was formed by continental drift.  It was part of a bigger sea that
included the Mediterranean many millions of years ago - the Telthys Sea (I
think).  The eventual reduction in sea level would have (I think) separated
it from the Med, many millions of years ago.

Glacial lakes are generally much younger, the Pleistocene ending only about
12,000 years ago.  E.g., the Great Lakes.  I'm not sure about the now extinct
(except for the GSL) Bonneville.

On Mon, 27 Sep 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com quoted a news release:
>> The incoming salt water, more dense than the fresh water it
>> displaced, plunged to the bottom of the lake bed, transforming it
>> into a sea where the depths support no life.

L. Trask wrote:
<<But how could the Black Sea have been a freshwater lake during a period
when it had no outlet to the sea?>>

Regards,
Steve Long


From mclasutt at brigham.net  Wed Oct  6 04:30:20 1999
From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin)
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 22:30:20 -0600
Subject: Updates regarding UPenn tree
In-Reply-To: <l03130335b41d5fbdb420@[209.147.211.53]>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.OCT.1999.223020.0600.>

Rick Mc Callister wrote:

> /hw/ > /f/ does happen in a Scottish dialect of English

John McLaughlin wrote:

>> Are there any actual examples of *hw >*f in PGmc post-Grimm (other Dr
>> Crist's guess at *penkwe > *finhw- > *finf)?  It would seem that the
>> alveolar /n/ might preclude any assimilation of /hw/ to /f/.
>> Just thinking
>> off the top of my head.

What are the details of this /hw/ > /f/ change?  Is it due to mishearing as
Crist suggests for PIE *penkwe > *PGmc *finf?  Is it a regular change or
conditioned?

John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
mclasutt at brigham.net

Program Director
Utah State University On-Line Linguistics
http://english.usu.edu/lingnet

English Department
3200 Old Main Hill
Utah State University
Logan, UT  84322-3200

(435) 797-2738 (voice)
(435) 797-3797 (fax)


From mclasutt at brigham.net  Wed Oct  6 05:02:01 1999
From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin)
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 23:02:01 -0600
Subject: NEWS re Black Sea Flood
In-Reply-To: <l03130332b41d56898bb7@[209.147.211.53]>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.OCT.1999.230201.0600.>

Rick Mc Callister wrote:
> 	Possibly it was a temporary lake created by melting glaciers, like
> Lake Bonneville
>

Living on the bottom of that former inland sea, I must correct your
understanding of Lake Bonneville.  It was not created by melting glaciers,
but by the accumulation of water by normal processes during the last
glaciation when the Great Basin was much more moist that it is today.  The
lake was drained by a natural disaster when an earthquake triggered a
massive landslide at the lake's outlet to the Snake River Plain.  The outlet
was opened by a sizable piece and the lake waters began flowing out at a
colossal rate, increasing the size of the outlet tenfold in a matter of
hours.  For six weeks (approximately) the efflux carved out the canyon of
the Snake River in Southern Idaho while the lake dropped by scores of feet
in depth.  This happened during about 10,000 BP around the end of the last
glaciation and the lake has been shrinking in size ever since as the climate
of the Great Basin dried out.  All the huge intermountain lakes of the last
glaciation in the Great Basin (Lahontan--western Nevada, Bonneville-western
Utah, and a score of smaller ones) went through a similar process--growth
during a cool, moist climate, death as the climate dried out and evaporation
exceeded precipitation.  If you want an example of a lake that might be
considered a true "glacial" lake, you need to use Lake Missoula (I think
that's the name, or it's at least close) in north central Montana.  It was
formed by glacial melt and held in place by a glacial "dam".  When the dam
occasionally broke during warming periods, the waters of Lake Missoula
scoured southeastern Washington to form the Scablands.

John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
mclasutt at brigham.net

Program Director
Utah State University On-Line Linguistics
http://english.usu.edu/lingnet

English Department
3200 Old Main Hill
Utah State University
Logan, UT  84322-3200

(435) 797-2738 (voice)
(435) 797-3797 (fax)


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Wed Oct  6 08:34:24 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 09:34:24 +0100
Subject: Excluding Basque data
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19991002225446.009b2e20@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.093424.0100.>

On Sat, 2 Oct 1999, Roslyn M. Frank wrote:

[LT]

>> So tell me: how do my principal criteria of early attestation,
>> widespread distribution, and absence from neighboring languages "have
>> the effect" of biasing my results on phonological form?

> Could you share with us once more precisely what these criteria are?
> I seem to recall that earlier you listed them but I can't locate
> that email.

OK.  I propose the following primary criteria.

1. Early attestation

The word should be recorded early.  I have proposed a cut-off date of
1600, since the first substantial literature appears in the 16th
century.  Someone else (Jon Patrick?) suggested 1700 instead.  This is
reasonable: the 16th-century texts are not numerous; they are all
written by clerics; and they are overwhelmingly religious, with many of
them being translations.  The 17th-century literature, in contrast, is
much more voluminous, and it includes the first lay writers, notably the
important Oihenart.  I'm happy with 1700, though I suspect it won't make
a great deal of difference.  But nothing later.

2. Widespread distribution.

There exists a fairly conventional system of dialect boundaries, and
words are commonly reported according to the recognized dialects in
which they are attested.  Since some dialects are smaller than others,
and also less well recorded, I suggest the following provisional
groupings:

	(a) Bizkaian
	(b) Gipuzkoan
	(c) High Navarrese, Salazarese, Aezkoan
	(d) Lapurdian, Low Navarrese
	(e) Zuberoan, Roncalese

Now, I suggest counting a word as widespread if it is securely attested
in at least four of these five groupings.  Insisting on attestation in
all five would be more rigorous, and is possible, but it would certainly
exclude an unknown number of good candidates for native and ancient
status.  For example, <(h)itz> `word' is universal except that it is
absent from Bizkaian, which has only the Romance loan <berba>.  We could
argue about the details, but I wouldn't like to relax the criteria much
beyond my proposal.

3. Absence from neighboring languages

Basque has borrowed a vast number of words from neighboring languages,
mostly from Latin and Romance, but also a few from Celtic and Arabic,
and also from Germanic, though all the Germanic loans seem to have
entered via Romance.  In contrast, very few Basque words have penetrated
into Romance.

This is the hardest criterion to formalize, mainly because there exist a
number of Basque words which *may* be borrowed but for which a secure
source acceptable to all has not been identified.  I suggest that, if
Agud and Tovar's etymological dictionary shows a widespread belief or
suspicion among specialists that a word is borrowed, then it should be
excluded -- even if the loan origin is not certain.  Caution is vital
here, in my view.

A decision must be made about the very few shared words which are
thought to be of Basque origin.  For example, everybody believes that
the Castilian and Portuguese words for `left (hand)' are borrowed from
Basque <ezker>.  A policy must be adopted here, but such words are
vanishingly few anyway, and the decision is most unlikely to have any
significant consequences.

These are my primary criteria.  I personally would like to exclude, in
advance, obvious nursery words like <ama> `mother' and obvious imitative
words like <tu> `spit'.  However, I agree that it may not be easy to get
general agreement as to which words "obviously" fall into one of these
categories.  Still, I am hopeful that appeal to universal properties of
such formations will allow me to exclude at least the most blatant
cases, such as my two examples: it is well known that words like <ama>
`mother' and <tu> `spit' occur in languages all over the planet.

> Could you also define more precisely what you mean by "widespread
> distribution"?

I've just done so.

> For example, what would an unacceptable distribution be?
> Present in only the Gipuzkoan and Bizkaian dialects? Present in the
> "northern" dialects of Iparralde (French Basque region) but not in any of
> the other dialects?

Both of these distributions would be unacceptable under my proposed
criteria.

> Or contrarily would you argue that the phonology of a term used in
> all dialects always should takes precedence over one that is limited
> to one dialectal variant only?

This raises another matter.  When -- as so often -- a word exists in
several regional variant forms, what form should go into the list?
My answer is that we should simply appeal to the known phonological
prehistory of Basque, and use the form which can be reconstructed as the
common ancestor.

For example, take the word for `wine', which has the following regional
variants:

	old B		<arda~o> (nasalized)
	B		<ardao>
	G, HN, Sal, Aez	<ardo>
	L, LN		<arno>
	Z		<ardu~'> (final vowel nasalized and stressed)
	R		<ardau~> (nasalized)

The combining form is <ardan->, as in <ardantza> `vineyard' (<-tza>
noun-forming suffix) and <ardandu> `ferment' (<-tu> verb-forming
suffix).  We therefore reconstruct *<ardano> for Pre-Basque, with
familiar developments leading to the attested variants and to the
combining form.

I hope this clarifies things.

Finally (this is not a reply to Roz, who I don't think has raised this
point), if anybody out there still believes that my primary criteria are
somehow likely to skew the results in some phonological way, or if
anybody thinks that there exist better criteria for the purpose of
identifying the best candidates for native and ancient status in the
language, let's hear about it.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Wed Oct  6 09:33:17 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 10:33:17 +0100
Subject: Scots
In-Reply-To: <021101bf0e3d$1a948c40$e78e6395@roborr.uottawa.ca>
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.103317.0100.>

On Mon, 4 Oct 1999, Robert Orr wrote:

> I've only just read the first part of Larry Trask's posting, so this
> is a bit impertinent, but there is a comment that can be made right
> away on one of his points.

>> Is Scots a variety of English or a separate language?  Well, a number of
>> Scots have argued that it is a separate language, and, if it had not
>> been for the Act of Union in 1707, we might all recognie Scots as a
>> distinct language today.  But, because of that Act, we don't.  There are
>> no linguistic considerations here: just political ones.

> Actually, there is a linguistic consideration.  Scots used to have a
> large number of distinctive lexical items, differentiating it from
> "English". Many of these are now rare in everyday speech, thus
> reducing the amount of differentation.

Yes, but I think the linguistic consequences have largely followed the
political ones.

Before the union of England and Scotland, many Scots were deeply
sympathetic to the idea that Scots was, or should be, a distinct
language from English.  If Scotland had remained independent, it is
possible that a standard form of Scots might have emerged, quite
different from standard English.  But the Act of Union put paid to these
ideas, as ambitious Scots moved south, with the result that the Scots
came to accept the standard language of England as their own standard.
I think the gradual disappearance of specifically Scots forms is mostly
a consequence of the political union.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From amm11 at hermes.cam.ac.uk  Wed Oct  6 09:51:19 1999
From: amm11 at hermes.cam.ac.uk (A. McMahon)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 10:51:19 +0100
Subject: Updates regarding UPenn tree
In-Reply-To: <l03130335b41d5fbdb420@[209.147.211.53]>
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.105119.0100.>

Yes; just to expand, hw > f is common in Aberdeenshire (North-Eastern)
Scots, in words like 'what', 'which' - and I think it can show up as a
bilabial fricative as well as the more common labiodental.

		April McMahon
		Department of Linguistics / Selwyn College
		University of Cambridge
		Cambridge, CB3 9DA, UK

		Tel: +44 (0) 1223 335830
		Fax: +44 (0) 1223 335837


On Sun, 3 Oct 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote:

> /hw/ > /f/ does happen in a Scottish dialect of English

[ moderator snip ]


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Wed Oct  6 08:06:37 1999
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 08:06:37 -0000
Subject: PIE vs. Proto-Language)
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.080637.0000.>

Dear Steve and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: <X99Lynx at aol.com>
Sent: Monday, October 04, 1999 2:46 AM

<snip>

> Yeah.  And this multi-meaning of the word "language" can be a real problem in
> the discussion of broader language issues among list members here.  In
> correspondence with certain linguists, I've noticed a laudatory habit of
> being precise about the way the word is being used - the physiological event,
> the act of communication, speech versus the written word, and (once again)
> the Saussurian distinction between the act of speaking and as a specific
> "system of language" maintained by members of an identifiable speech
> community.  As I've pointed out before, "language" among biologists can refer
> to any behavior that has a communicative effect without regard to species.
> My impression is that the quote re monogenesis above refers to the
> distinction often made by paleobiologists - language as the emergence in
> humans of speech capabilities that other primates were/are not
> physiologically capable of.   The current issue in this area circles around
> what evidence in fossil finds suggests the emergence of physiological
> features that would make human speech complexity possible.

Yes, this would be the interpretation of 'language' that I would prefer in
terms of the discussion of monogenesis.

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/Athens/Forum/2803/index.html and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit
ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim
meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)


From mclasutt at brigham.net  Wed Oct  6 13:20:38 1999
From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 07:20:38 -0600
Subject: NEWS re Black Sea Flood
In-Reply-To: <7bd3cfd4.25298206@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.072038.0600.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Steve Long wrote:

> I quoted:
> << The incoming salt water, more dense than the fresh water it
> displaced, plunged to the bottom of the lake bed, transforming it
> into a sea where the depths support no life.>>

> It's a valid point.  I don't know what the scientists involved would say, but
> my guess is that they would say it's a matter of degree.

> Salinity is the relative concentration of ions dissolved in the water.
> Salinity in lakes is not only increased by lack of outflow, but also by the
> chemical composition of the inflow and the geology it passes through.  And
> another factor is the amount of climatic evaporation.  The Great Salt Lake is
> an example of especially high salinity due to the chemical makeup of the
> surrounding area - which includes the famous Bonneville Salt flats.  The
> Caspian Sea is an example of a closed lake or inland sea where the evidence
> is of a large reduction in water level even in historical times.  You'll see
> the climatic factor sometimes phrased as "salt lakes only occur in arid
> regions."

> The Black Sea is fed by rivers that don't flow through regions of high
> aridity, evaporation or especially concentrated salineous chemical deposits.
> So at least the inflow would tend to be less preconcentrating than those of
> heavily saline lakes like the Great Salt Lake or the Dead Sea.  Climatic
> evaporation would also seem to have been less of a factor, especially in the
> north.  So the relative salinity of the Black Sea 'before the flood' might
> still be conjectured to have been less than ocean-high levels of the entering
> Mediterranean.

A note on relative salinity for the non-fluid dynamics people.  Water of
different salinities does not mix very well in any condition except over
long periods of time and exceptionally high current or wave activity.  The
Great Salt Lake is an example of this.  The lake is only several dozen feet
deep at its deepest point, but there are actually two lakes, one on top of
the other.  The lake we see is composed of a solution that varies from 10 to
30% salinity depending on the evaporation/precipitation ratio over the last
few years (we're in a higher precipitation cycle right now, so the lake is
rising and salinity is dropping--we in the Great Basin benefit from global
warming).  This lake is about two dozen feet deep.

The other lake lies beneath the other one and is composed of a heavy brine
solution that approaches 40-50% salinity (I'm remembering right now, so the
numbers may be off a little, but the relative salinity is right) and never
varies by precipitation cycle.  In fact, if this lower lake were ever
exposed to the air for any length of time, there would be a massive
explosion of dissolved hydrogen sulfide that would wipe out all life in the
Valley (about 2 million persons) like the volcanic CO2 gas cloud did in
Cameroon a couple decades ago.

These two layers don't mix.  They are virtually independent of one another.
One of the chemical companies around the lake (a major producer of magnesium
chloride, potassium sulfate, and road salt), actually uses this to their
advantage.  Their major brine collection ponds are about 30 miles away from
the main plant.  Instead of pumping the brine through pipes or running it
through surface canals, they have scoured an open trench on the lake bed.
The heavier brine from their first pond sinks into the trench and flows by
gravity along it until it reaches the plant site where it is pumped into
surface ponds.  Their loss through mixing with the upper lake water is only
about 1%.

What does this have to do with the Black Sea?  Well, 1) it demonstrates how
different salinity layers don't mix well in lakes, 2) heavier salinity water
sinks.  If the Black Sea had developed as a freshwater lake and was later
inundated by Mediterranean salt water, then the heavier sea water would have
settled to the bottom.  If, however, the Black Sea was a body of water with
greater salinity, then the influx of Mediterranean water would have floated
on top and not mixed with the higher salinity layer.  The layers of the
Great Salt Lake, however, developed different salinity layers without a
major influx of new water.  The lake naturally developed layers.  Could this
layered salinity have also happened in the Black Sea without postulating
radical influxes of new water?  Probably.  The sea invasion theory may or
may not be correct, but there are other natural explanations for different
salinity layers in inland bodies of saline water.

John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
mclasutt at brigham.net

Program Director
Utah State University On-Line Linguistics
http://english.usu.edu/lingnet

English Department
3200 Old Main Hill
Utah State University
Logan, UT  84322-3200

(435) 797-2738 (voice)
(435) 797-3797 (fax)


From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Wed Oct  6 17:16:45 1999
From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max Wheeler)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 18:16:45 +0100
Subject: Basque 'sei'
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.181645.0100.>

-- Begin original message --

> From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
> Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 08:53:36 +0100 (BST)

> But just how late could a Gascon word for `six' be borrowed into Basque?
> After all, the Basque names for `7, 8, 9, 10' and so on are decidedly
> non-Romance.

> With respect, I don't think the facts of modern Gascon are necessarily
> relevant, since the Basque word is certainly not borrowed from modern
> Gascon.  Is there any possibility of dating any of the relevant Gascon
> phonological developments?

-- End original message --

Firstly, just a reminder that it's misleading to speak of seis > sei as 'a
Gascon development' as if it were typical of ALL Gascon of ALL times.
According to Ronjat (I. 280) "altern. de tipe s/-i suivant liaisons en,,,pays
de Foix et quelques parlers aq[uitains] voisins" i.e. SE Gascon not adjacent
to Basque speaking region. He notes -s > -h in SW "aquitain" (i.e. Basses
Pyrenees, adjacent to Basque region), having noted on the previous page that
"les faits aq[uitains] S.-O. en liaison [sont] beaucoup plus recents que les
faits [du] l[anguedocien] occ[idental] plus aut" The rest of "aquitain" has
final -s unchanged. Luchaire (1879) on Pyrenean Gascon has abundant cases of
final /-s/ maintained, in dialect transcriptions. The only item I can see with
s-vocalization in any of his transcribed dialect texts is <mais> 'more' in
proclitic contexts before /j/ or /dZ/. Nothing similar in the documents he
cites. And <seis>, he notes, is often pronounced with an initial pal.-alv
fricative.

I think you need to be desparate to get Basque 15th-century <sei> 'six' out of
this. Even the Italian 'etymology' is less worse.

Max
______________________________________________________________
Max W. Wheeler
School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer
BRIGHTON BN1 9QH, G.B.

Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975 Fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 Email: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk
______________________________________________________________


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Wed Oct  6 17:12:51 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 18:12:51 +0100
Subject: Possessives
In-Reply-To: <003e01bf0d38$e5c536e0$239f113f@oemcomputer>
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.181251.0100.>

On Sun, 3 Oct 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote:

The moderator has -- mercifully -- pulled the plug on this thread, but
he has invited me to post a final comment.  Thanks, Rich -- I'll try to
be brief, by my standards.

> One of the principal benefits of terming this class of words
> "possessive pronouns" is that it enables us to identify comparable
> classes of words in IE, English, and Basque --- even though the
> details of their employment may differ.

Well, this reminds me of Abe Lincoln's little joke.  "How many legs does
a sheep have if you call the tail a leg?"  "Five?"  "No, four: calling
the tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."

Possessive items, in general, are "comparable" among languages only
insofar as they are translation equivalents.  Syntactically, they can
and do exhibit many different kinds of behavior, requiring them to be
assigned to various parts of speech, or sometimes to no part of speech.

The English possessives like `my' are determiners because they behave
like determiners.  They do not behave like pronouns, and so they are not
pronouns.  And they certainly don't behave like adjectives.

The Basque possessives like <nere> `my' exhibit none of the properties
of the Basque determiners and they cannot be classified as determiners.
They are also certainly not adjectives, since they behave nothing like
adjectives.  They are probably best regarded as case-inflected forms of
pronouns.

The Latin possessives like <meus> `my', on the whole, are probably best
regarded as adjectives, since they behave like adjectives in that
language.  They are certainly not determiners, and they don't look much
like pronouns, either.

Other languages use other strategies.  Some have no distinct possessive
forms at all, but simply adpose the free forms of pronouns to head
nouns.  Some use a particle to link a free pronoun to its head.  Some
use bound markers attached to head nouns, often markers bearing no
resemblance to free pronouns.  And some languages employ mixed
strategies with two or more of these in various combinations; examples
are Turkish and Jacaltec.

Classing all of these are "possessive pronouns" *tout court* is, at the
very least, unhelpful.

> The essential quality of any adjective is that it designates a
> subcategory of a catgeory of objects.

No, not at all.

This is a prototypical semantic property of adjectives in languages that
have them, but `adjective' is a syntactic category, not a semantic
category, and not all adjectives, even in English, have this property.

For example, consider `Susie is a mere child.'  Here the adjective
`mere' does not define a subclass of the class of children: children are
not divided into mere and non-mere varieties.  Or consider this one:
`Lisa is a heavy smoker'.  This time the adjective `heavy' does not
perform any subclassification of the set of smokers.  In fact, it
doesn't even apply semantically to smokers, or to Lisa: instead, it
applies to Lisa's habit.

> 'Black dog' can be represented logically as a small circle ('black')
> within a larger circle ('dog'). Possessive pronouns can be
> represented logically in exactly the same way.

For certain purposes, perhaps.  But this is not an argument that `my' is
a pronoun: rather, it appears to be a (feeble) argument that `my' is an
adjective -- which it is not.

> Of course, this is exactly the same situation as when nouns are used
> attributively: "newspaper account".

Indeed.  It begins to become clear that semantic tests are not very
useful for identifying syntactic categories.  But we linguists knew
that.

> I think your basic problem is that you need to take a serious look
> at your definition of 'adjective'.

Well, *one* of us certainly does. ;-)

[LT]

>> The noun `arrival' is not a verb because it's related to the verb
>> `arrive'.

> Perhaps not when you're playing the 'slots' but that is not the only
> game in town by a long shot!

> I sincerely feel sorry for you if you cannot see that.

You mean there's an Arkansas analysis in which `arrival' is a verb?
Most interesting.

[on the slot-and-filler approach]

> I remember the first manifestations of the 'slot system' as opposed
> to teaching grammar in the training I received as an aspirant
> foreign language instructor.

> This 'grammarless' method of teaching language was then extended to
> English instruction in the US,

I would hardly describe the slot-and-filler approach as "grammarless".
It is in fact a thoroughly grammatical approach.  Not so traditional, of
course, but certainly grammatical in nature.  Far more so than the
semantic approach which I dismissed above.

> and the terrible language skills of today's youth are
> directly attributable to this method of instruction, IMHO.

Dear me.  The linguistic shortcomings of our young people are to be laid
at the door of slot-and-filler grammar?

That's a new one on me.

Oh, by the way -- further bad news for the Arkansas school of linguistic
description.  I've recently written the entry on parts of speech for the
forthcoming encyclopedia of grammatical categories from Elsevier.  I'm
afraid my baleful influence is getting out of hand.  Doubtless the
nation's young people are in for yet another body-blow. ;-)

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From ECOLING at aol.com  Wed Oct  6 17:34:56 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 13:34:56 EDT
Subject: Africa vs. Americas, Multilateral Comparison
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.133456.EDT.>

In comparing Joseph Greenberg's work on
African language classification vs. on
Amerindian language classification,
it is of course important to note differences, partly in order to
discover whatever limitations there may be on the use of the
Multilateral Comparison technique.
Does its undeniable usefulness in the history of linguistics
tail off to very little after some approximate time depth?
Does its undeniable usefulness become much less under
certain kinds of social or linguistic conditions?

Herbert Stahlke is among those who have pointed out that
one must include in the techniques available to linguists
also those techniques which permit one to discover new
hypotheses for later more detailed examination.
Multilateral comparison has always been such a technique,
for hundreds of years
(and I hasten to add, though it should not be necessary,
that it long predated Greenberg and is independent of
any particular application of it, by Greenberg or by anyone else).
One cannot demand at the beginning of new hypotheses
that they arrive fully-formed from the head of Zeus,
complete with proofs to the most exacting standards of
long-established disciplines.

(As Thomas Kuhn says, most
of the work of most scientists consists in "mopping-up" small
details, new ideas are usually attacked, anomalies are not even seen,
are rarely collected to help open doors to new syntheses.)

So empirical studies of Greenberg's application of this technique
in his work on African language classification and in his work on
Amerind language classification are very important.
In this, we can treat the African vs. American as a variable,
and consider the different outcomes (of course trying to factor
out any other variables which are not essential to the technique
of Multilateral Comparison itself, but which are "accidental"
in the philosophical sense, accidents of how Greenberg may
have applied the technique in one vs. in the other instance.

John E. McLaughlin has taken a sceptical approach towards this,
claiming that the two situations are "apples" vs. "oranges".
(I attach below only the crucial parts of McLaughlin's most
recent posting in reply to Stahlke.)
I believe such an approach is not in the interests of science as a whole,
because it essentially tells us not to study a body of data available
to us.  It is also impossible for anyone to be so omniscient as to
know in advance that nothing fruitful can be derived.
I believe McLaughlin's urging us not to even study this question
is similar to or influenced by the general rejection of Greenberg's
work, and wish to remind readers that there was a similar reaction
at first to Greenberg's African language classifications.
(Which does NOT imply anything at all concerning the quality or
success of Greenberg's work on Amerind neither that it is of
the same quality or success, nor that it is not.)

Rather, the point of a study of the differences between Multilateral
Comparison applied to the African and the American contexts
is precisely to discover the empirical facts, whether the technique
works similarly or differently in the two contexts, with as many
specific detailed answers to this as possible.

We can imagine that there is a different time depth,
and I for one think this is a major variable, and agree with
McLaughlin and with many others on this:

[I have deleted the word "comparative" from the following
quotation, because Greenberg's method is not the comparative method.
But McLaughlin's use of it I think reflects in some way the general failure
of historical linguists to appreciate the real necessity for
both discovery procedures and testing procedures --
one should not confuse Multilateral Comparison with
much more detailed Comparative-Historical techniques.]

[JM]
>You have also hit upon the main problem with G's work--
>he IS trying to extend the [...] method [...] back to between 12 and 40k

It is not at all certain that the time depths are so different,
if one takes Africa as a whole, and considers substrate languages
or families (at least this is what I understand from some of Stahlke's
commentaries, and he should be a good source for this).
Nevertheless, within certain SUBSETS of the African materials,
the time depths will of course be less, as also within certain subsets
of the American materials.  Perhaps the technique of Multilateral
Comparison will be useful within such subsets, but not between them?
It should be clear that the issue is much, much more complicated than
any global a priori judgment that the time depth in the Americas is
uniformly greater
(that is not exactly what McLaughlin says, but I think it underlies
the tone of his suggestion that the method is worthless in the Americas).

Stahlke wrote:

> McLaughlin writes:

> Hmmmm.
> That's the difference between the Americas and Africa.  Africa's had a stable
> indigenous population.  The Americas haven't.  Indeed, it's quite possible
> that northwestern North America has been the site of many groups of people
> from Asia, speaking different languages, landing on the shores of or walking
> across the "bridge" to a New World.

> >>>>>>>>>>

Stahlke responds:

> This apparent difference is deceiving.  The Khoi-San languages, with or
> without the Tanzanian pair, represent a clearly distinct group probably
> originating in southern Africa.  Although all but substratal information on
> pre-Bantu pygmy languages has disappeared, and the substratal information
> isn't any better than in most other parts of the world (worse, in fact), they
> must have represented at least one ancient language family that has
> disappeared.  Beyond those, the major migrations appear to have east to west
> (most of Niger-Congo) and north to south (Cushitic, Nilotic, and Bantu, in
> that order).  Nilo-Saharan, if Songhay belongs in it, may represent a central
> Sahara to Great Lakes migration.  Cushitic, as a branch of Afro-Asiatic,
> represents either a group that originated somewhere along the Red Sea or a
> migration from the Arabian Peninsula.  A-A probably is NE African in origin.
> All of these represent time depths of rather less than 40k:  N-C and A-A in
> 10k-15k range, and Nilo-Saharan and older.  At these time depths, it's hard
> to make a case that extra-continent vs. intra-continental orign makes much of
> a difference.

McLaughlin then responded as follows.
My comments follow about why McLaughlin's are not to the point.

[JM]
>You're missing the point.  You're describing a mixing and matching WITHIN
>the confines of native Africa.  But still within Africa.  You haven't
>described a single event here of an EXTERNAL group coming into Africa and
>affecting the mix of languages.  In the Americas, we're talking about just
>the opposite.  We're discussing groups from northeast Asia coming INTO
>America from outside a number of times overland during the life of the
>Bering bridge and by sea afterwards.  These immigrants would be bringing
>languages from OUTSIDE the Americas, not just moving around within the same
>group of languages as you're describing for Africa (and as also happened
>within the American continents).  This could have happened many, many times,
>although G's "Amerind" implies ONE migration by land at least 12k (but more
>likely much earlier) ago, one migration (possibly by sea) for Na-Dene, and
>one migration by sea for Eskimo-Aleut.

>Africa and the Americas are apples and oranges as far as linguistic history
>and population history is concerned.

***

Therefore it seems to be implied that we should not study the application
of Multilateral Comparison to the American context?

Why not?

McLaughlin's comments only imply that the Multilateral Comparison technique
may very possibly be unable to handle the relations of all of the languages
of the Americas, presumably on the grounds (I am attempting to fill out
what I think is McLaughlin's intent here, common sense with which I agree)
that there may be many migrations and the time depth between back to a common
origin in Asia, if there were such, would be so great as to be beyond the
reach of the technique, in general.

But that in no way implies that Multilateral Comparison technique
is not useful.  It may turn out (from future hindsight) to have been useful
only within certain subgroups of Amerind languages.
These might reflect the groups about which Greenberg felt more secure,
but not his highest-level classifications within Amerind.
After all, the results of Multilateral Comparison may equally be taken
to indicate the greatest probability of non-relation among those groups
linked only at the highest level of classification.  This statement,
while true, is often surprising to both supporters and detractors of
the technique.  They simply had not thought of it from that perspective.
Or there might be surprises, of other kinds.

[For a general explanation of Multilateral Comparison,
please see my earlier message, slightly revised, which
courtesy of Pat Ryan is now posted at his web site,
accessible from the bottom of his main page
<http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/index.html>
or more specifically from
<http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/comment-MultilateralComparison.htm
>
Please suggest any further revisions or improvements to
that explanation, I want it to be objective and balanced.
In agreeing with Pat Ryan to place it there, I insisted that it not
be taken as comment pro or con any other positions, and that
its scope not be exaggerated.  It is not about Greenberg,
it is about the technique of Multilateral Comparison.]

McLaughlin I think also misses the point of Stahlke's commentary.
That is that the time depths may be just as great in Africa,
when we consider the groupings which cannot be linked,
and the substrates, etc.  Why should it matter that for the Americas
we think in terms of migrations, whether across the Bering land
bridge or along older seacoasts, whereas for Africa the physical
distances and barriers are less.  Should that make ANY technique
applicable or not applicable?  Or should each technique merely give
slightly different results in different types of context?

The point of studying the application of the technique of Multilateral
Comparison to both Africa and the Americas is precisely to get a
better idea of what the differences might be.  The results should be
empirical findings, not a priori judgements in advance.
Saying the two are "apples and oranges" is to say
we should not and cannot consider them at the same time.
That is to block an entire domain of science, and to deny the use of
one of the most potent tools of science, the use of a variable or variables
(here Africa vs. the Americas, refined into more detailed variables)
to discover the effect of those variables on some outcomes
(here the results of using the technique of Multilateral Comparison).

I believe an underlying psychological reason for not treating the
African and the American applications of Multilateral Comparison
together is simply the great discomfort most comparative-historical
linguists have with techniques which are used to discover plausible
hypotheses for future work.  They are simply not comfortable at
the edges of new knowledge, because it cannot have the certainty
of the most exacting techniques applied in long-established fields.
There is obviously no criticism here of those more detailed techniques,
it is simply inappropriate to insist on them at the edges of new knowledge.
It manifests an inflexibility to be unable to adapt one's choice of
techniques
to the differences between long-established fields and the edges of
significantly new knowledge not limited to filling in details.
No one person may be comfortable working in both kinds of domains,
but that does not entitle either personality for criticising those
who prefer the other type of domain.
And, fortunately, there is a continuum of intermediate types of work,
at neither of the two extremes.

Each of us should work where we are most comfortable,
because we will do better work there.
Each of us should be supportive of those who work in
a domain requiring different sets of techniques
from those in our own preferred domain,
and should keep the channels open for
flow of significant information between domains of different kinds.

That means those who prefer to work in domains where the
more detailed comparative-historical method is applicable should make the
results of our studies available in forms which those working
in other domains can use without having to be specialists in our own
particular domain.  (And of course should not make claims to greater
certainty than we have a good basis for doing.)
[This is currently sometimes the case, often not.]

It also means those who prefer to work in domains where
Multilateral Comparison is applicable should make the
results of our studies available in forms which those working
in other domains can use without having to be specialists in our own
particular domain.    (And of course should not make claims to greater
certainty than we have a good basis for doing.)
[This is currently sometimes the case, often not.]

No one set of techniques has an exclusive right to all fields
of linguistics.

For a more succesful future for historical linguistics in general,
as for any other field,
it is essential that we use issues which generate public excitement
and channel that interest in productive ways.
Historical linguists shouldbe at the forefront of actively
exploring correlations between language, ethnicity, blood groups,
dentition types, DNA studies, and all other sources of information
which can give clues to the history of humanity.
That can give a better financial foundation to linguistics,
than can a narrow focus exclusively on filling in details within
accepted frameworks.

Paradoxically, public interest is also a very good way,
perhaps the best way, to get more respect and support precisely for
the most advanced and highly precise techniques of
Comparative-Historical techniques.
An attitude of generously providing the results of
the best Comparative-Historical techniques to all comers,
even to those exploring hypotheses which are not favored by
those more narrowly focused, is the best way of spreading
education in the value of those precise techniques.

The reaction to Greenberg's book on languages of the Americas
SHOULD HAVE BEEN from the very beginning
"I am a specialist in X, and can correct some of his data.
Let's see what differnence that would make in his conclusions."
Instead it was mostly "there are errors, so the work is worthless".

To those who have said Greenberg's judgements are purely personal and
not replicable, I can only reply, I had no difficulty selecting from
his data that which I considered more closely vs. less closely similar,
even if I might not have done it exactly the way he would have,
and exploring whether using only the more highly similar data had
any significant impact on his results.
I had no difficulty taking some of the lists of corrections (after they
were published much later by various specialists), and examining
some of Greenberg's results to estimate whether particular corrections
would make any significant difference.
(In neither case did I think the changed data would dictate
significantly different results, though now many years later,
with many more corrections available, I would like to have the time
to examine this again.)

I think the objection that Greenberg's work is not objectively replicable
is really less what the objectors think it is, and mostly simply their
discomfort with exploring a field where they cannot use their most
favored techniques, and where results have a much lower
level of security of being right than they are accustomed to.
But I have also learned from later exchanges that trained linguists
do have different judgments of what constitutes closer similarity,
and therefore now strongly advocate explicit studies of the technique
of judging similarity.

Personally, I am comfortable working both in filling in details
in given and accepted frameworks, and in exploring data sets which
may suggest changing frameworks, or in which we cannot have
an exact and detailed answer.  Not everyone is comfortable
across such divides.  That's OK.  But those of different preferences
should not be critizing each other, they should be cooperating
productively.

Sincerely,
Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics


From ECOLING at aol.com  Wed Oct  6 17:51:32 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 13:51:32 EDT
Subject: Azkue's dictionary
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.135132.EDT.>

Thanks to Larry Trask for the very informative review
of two Basque dictionaries.  I am printing a copy to keep on
permanent file.

I would only have one caveat, which is that the paragraph
quoted below is listed as a "major drawback" of Azkue's dictionary.
Many dictionary users who are interested in the vocabulary of
the language might consider it an advantage,
that one can find a word under whatever dialect variant
the dictionary maker had evidence for.

(The lack of cross-references to eymologically related items
is a drawback for anyone interested in etymologies, it is true.
Perhaps a list of cross-references and
dates of attestation could be prepared by someone
as a supplement to Azkue's dictionary,
since it is in Spanish and French and otherwise provides
the best information on dialectal provenience?)

Rather this quoted paragraph should be part of indications
on how one uses Azkue's dictionary,
not under a list of supposed drawbacks of Azkue's dictionary.

Lloyd Anderson

>Third, when -- as so often -- a word exists in several regional
>variants, Azkue enters each variant separately in its own alphabetical
>place, and he hardly ever provides cross-references.  Consequently, any
>attempt at using his dictionary without heavy editing will lead to
>multiple entries for single words.  This is potentially a serious
>problem: for example, the Basque word for `strawberry' exhibits at least
>twenty regional variants.  This is admittedly an exceptional case, but
>very many words exhibit two to six regional variant forms, and accepting
>Azkue's headwords without suitable editing will produce badly skewed
>results.

Of course one would edit these, and any linguist would recognize
many or most etymologically related words with the same meanings.
On the whole, it seems from Larry Trask's review of it that Jon Patrick is
on very solid ground in using Azkue's dictionary as a basis for
analytical studies.


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Wed Oct  6 18:24:01 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 13:24:01 -0500
Subject: re pre-greek language
In-Reply-To: <37F787C4.533E0C55@Compuserve.com>
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.132401.0500.>

There were attempts to link Linear scripts to earlier Anatolian scripts
especially what's sometimes called "Hittite Hieroglyphic" [actually Palaic,
I think]

[ Moderator's note:
  Luwian, rather than Palaic.
  --rma ]

There have also attempts to read Linear A as one or another Anatolian language

>There is many problems about the pre-greek languages of the Aegean, and
>Linear A is only one of them.
>Linear A is autochtonous and cannot be derived from cuneifor or
>hieroglyph, so it must have evolved from local pictograms and thus
>reflects the language it was first designed for (even if it was not
>perfect). But that is not the main reason for thinking that the
>indigenous language of Crete was not Greek.
[snip]

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Wed Oct  6 18:20:22 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 14:20:22 EDT
Subject: Contributions by Steve Long
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.142022.EDT.>

>colkitto at sprint.ca writes:

>Actually, there is a linguistic consideration.  Scots used to have a large
>number of distinctive lexical items, differentiating it from "English". Many
>of these are now rare in everyday speech, thus reducing the amount of
>differentation.>>

-- upper-class Scots began conforming to southern English useage long before
the Act of Union of 1707.


From s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca  Wed Oct  6 19:37:24 1999
From: s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca (Stephane Goyette)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 15:37:24 -0400
Subject: Basque 'sei'
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9910040843370.6056-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.153724.0400.>

On Mon, 4 Oct 1999, Larry Trask wrote:

> Perhaps, but how old is the Gascon phonology?  As I've pointed out
> elsewhere, place names appear to show Gascon /s/ corresponding to Basque
> laminal <z>, not to apical <s>.

I'm not sure I follow. In the case of these place names, one is dealing
with Basque (or 'Aquitanian') names borrowed into Late Latin/Early
Romance, which only had one sibilant: laminal and apical /s/ would both be
borrowed as Latin/Romance /s/, whatever its exact point of articulation
was.

> Recall that Latin /s/ was almost
> invariably borrowed as Basque <z>, and so it appears that the apical /s/
> of Ibero-Romance and Gascon is at least a post-Roman development.

Agreed. However, it is almost certainly not recent: Gascon is basically a
highly Ibero-Romance-like language which, since the earliest Middle Ages,
has been increasingly influenced by Provencal, meaning that
Gascon/Ibero-Romance isoglosses are as a rule ancient (as opposed to
Gascon/Provencal isoglosses). Considering that apical /s/ is universal in
the more isolated mountain dialects of Gascon, and becomes increasingly
rare as one moves North and East, my impression is of an older feature
which has been receding in the face of Provencal influence.

> But just how late could a Gascon word for `six' be borrowed into Basque?
> After all, the Basque names for `7, 8, 9, 10' and so on are decidedly
> non-Romance.

If there is no known case of a word for "six" alone being borrowed,
leaving the rest of the numeral system intact, then of course /sei/ must
be assumed to be a native Basque word.

> With respect, I don't think the facts of modern Gascon are necessarily
> relevant, since the Basque word is certainly not borrowed from modern
> Gascon.  Is there any possibility of dating any of the relevant Gascon
> phonological developments?

Regarding apical /s/, see above. Regarding final /s/ to /j/:
Unfortunately, Gascons used Provencal (and Latin, of course) as their
written language for most of the Middle Ages; Old Provencal was itself a
highly standardized language, which was later replaced by another highly
standardized written language, French, meaning that dating this change
with any precision is well-nigh impossible.

HOWEVER...the fact that this change, far from being confined to Gascony,
is widespread in Southern France (where, by the way, it often applies
across the board, i.e. final /s/ shifts to /j/ whatever the position of
the word) does suggest it could go back to Medieval times: this is plainly
not a recent, strictly local change in Gascon.

Stephane Goyette
University of Ottawa
stephane at Goyette.com


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Wed Oct  6 19:48:03 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 15:48:03 EDT
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.154803.EDT.>

Dear IEists:
I'm not always quite sure how interested members of the list are in the
historical and archaeological evidence.  And I'm not always sure about how it
even impacts linguistic conclusions.

IF it is in any way important to any of the members, perhaps this quick note
is worthwhile.

At this point in time, THERE IS NO MATERIAL EVIDENCE AT ALL AS TO WHEN
GREEK-SPEAKERS APPEARED IN GREECE.  THE ONLY EVIDENCE OF A SIGNIFICANT
MIGRATION DURING THIS PERIOD (3000BC-1650BC) IS FROM ANATOLIA.

ALTHOUGH THIS MIGRATION MAY HAVE INTRODUCED GREEK INTO GREECE, THERE IS NO
REAL EVIDENCE TO JUSTIFY EVEN THIS CONCLUSION.  I give a fairly current
summary of the evidence below.

List members may want to be aware that the following statement by Mr. Crist
may not be particularly accurate with regard to the current knowledge
regarding Greek prehistory.

On10/6/99 12:48:29 AM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu wrote: << perhaps you
mean that the Greek-speaking presence in what is now Greece goes back further
than e.g. 2100-1900 BCE.  The most widely accepted view is that the
destruction of sites which we find in that period represent the invasion of
speakers of an early form of Greek.  The preceding cultural tradition in
Greece is substantially different.>>

I'm not sure what sites or culture are being spoken of above.  But there is
no special break in "cultural tradition" - except one - that occurs during
this time.  More importantly, there is a continuity in many aspects of the
early Greek material culture that remain consistent right from the end of the
Neolithic (about 3500BC) through to the end of the Middle Helladic (about
1500BC).

Currently (1990's), the generally accepted stratigraphics of cultures in
Greece from this period runs sometime like:

Late Neolithic (ending about 3500BC)
   - Early Helladic -
Eutresis (ending about 2650BC)
Korakau (about 2650 - 2150BC)
Lefkandi (2400 - 2150BC ) (co-existing)
Tyrins (2150BC-2000BC)
   - Middle Helladic (2000-1650BC)
(all of these might be dated somewhat later based on new evidence gathered
from the Santonini/Thera eruption sites.)

There is clear CONTINUITY between all of these cultures EXCEPT for Lefkandi
I.  (Tyrins is described as "the result of a process of "cultural fusion"
between the Korakou and "Lefkandi I" cultures,... Significantly, this process
of fusion did NOT extend all over Mainland Greece. In Messenia, Laconia, and
the interior of west-central Greece (Aetolia, Acarnania), the Korakou culture
may have continued while the Tiryns culture flourished elsewhere." )  (Caps
theirs.)

The main attributes of Middle Helladic (starting about 2000BC) e.g. Gray
Minyan pottery and longhouses/megarons, are now viewed as CONTINUATIONS of
Korakou or Tyrins  (which itself was a "fusion" culture.)  In the bad old
days, Gray Minyon was associated with "the arrival of the Greeks" from the
north, but it is now quite clear that the pottery style is a continuance that
never appears father north than the Pelopenese.

By far, the single striking example of an abject change in material culture
on the Greek mainland before the Mycenaean period is associated with the
appearance of "Lefkandi" culture.

What is very apparent about Lefkandi however is that it DOES NOT represent
any invasion or migration from the north, but rather the sudden appearance of
a well-established culture from Anatolia.

"The Lafkandi culture of the late EH II central Greek Mainland is probably
best viewed as the result of a trans-Aegean population movement from Western
Anatolia through the northern Cyclades (attested there by the EC IIB or EC
IIIA "Kastri Group" of Naxos, Delos, Syros, and Keos) and Sporades (at the
site of Palamari on Skyros) to the eastern seaboard of central Greece
(Euboea, Raphina, Pefkakia).

"Although the "Lefkandi I" culture penetrates westward into the interior of
Boeotia..., it does not appear to have extended southwards into the
Peloponnese,... This westward movement across the Aegean in NOT marked by
violence at any known site. Indeed, there is considerable continuity from the
EH/EC IIA to IIB periods at sites such as Chalandriani (Syros), Ayia Irini
(Keos), Raphina (Attica), and Thebes and Eutresis (Boeotia). [Caps theirs.]

"Although it is at first difficult to imagine such a dramatic change in
ceramics, and in some cases seemingly in architecture [megara] as well,
having taken place without the introduction of new people(s), some
authorities (e.g. Davis) have suggested trade rather than migration as a
preferable interpretative scenario."

(I'm traveling but I did have this info on my hard drive.
Most of the info above can be found on the Dartmouth webite
-http://tenaya.cs.dartmouth.edu/history/bronze_age - or in works cited in the
exhaustive bibliography that can found there.)

To sum up:  THE ONLY EVIDENCE OF A SIGNIFICANT MIGRATION INTO GREECE BETWEEN
NEOLITHIC AND MYCENAEAN TIMES IS FROM ANATOLIA.  THERE IS NOTHING TO CLEARLY
IDENTIFY THE FIRST APPEARANCE OF GREEK WITH THIS MIGRATION.

Sean Crist also wrote:
<<Given that the latest date of PIE unity is around 4000 BCE (again, pace
Renfrew), there's only so much of a time range to play with; you might manage
to make a case that the Greeks were in Greece a little earlier, but not
massively earlier.>>

Based on the evidence above, there is nothing to preclude the conjecture that
"Greeks were in Greece" during or even before the Neolithic.  If one connects
PIE with the first appearance of agriculture (a la Renfrew), then that could
move the date of "proto-Greek" or its ancestors being in mainland Greece back
towards 7000BC.

Regards,
Steve Long


From edsel at glo.be  Wed Oct  6 21:17:48 1999
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 23:17:48 +0200
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.231748.0200.>

-----Original Message-----
From: Roslyn M. Frank <roz-frank at uiowa.edu>
Date: Wednesday, October 06, 1999 8:02 PM

[snip]
>>Basque <maite>, in its definite form <maitea>, is of course a common way
>>of addressing a sweetheart of either sex.  It is literally `(my)
>>beloved', even though it is functionally roughly equivalent to English
>>`love' here.

>Let us agree to disagree about which form is the common used as a form of
>address, one with a "definite article" or one without. Clearly we have have
>different views about this situation as was demonstrated in the case of our
>earlier discussion on whether <beltz> was a proper nickname for a bear,
>rather than <beltza>. From your previous comments, you do not wish to
>concede that in such circumstance the <mugagabe> unsuffixed form is often
>used.

[ moderator snip ]

>If, on the other hand, one writes a letter, there is clearly the option of
>using the "definite article" along with their "nickname" when "addressing"
>the person.

>Then there are many examples of the numens who populate Basque folklore and
>mythology. The (nick)names of many of these beings, e.g., Praka Gorri "Red
>Pants", appear without the definite article. However, I might refer to this
>same character, when writing in Euskera, in a given sentence as Praka
>Gorria. But when I do, I've changed the status of his (nick)name to
>something like "The One with Red Pants." It can be done, the "definite
>article" can be added, but when it is the name takes on a different nuance
>of meaning.

[ moderator snip ]

[Ed Selleslagh]

Note that similar, but not always identical, usages exist in various European
languages like regional colloquial Peninsular Spanish ('la Maruja'), regional
colloquial Dutch ('de Jan'), German ('der Otto') etc. The definite article is
only used when speaking ABOUT the person, not TO him/her.

Ed.


From s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca  Wed Oct  6 23:07:04 1999
From: s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca (Stephane Goyette)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 19:07:04 -0400
Subject: "six" and "seven" Mediterranean
In-Reply-To: <703a9400.252babe1@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.190704.0400.>

On Tue, 5 Oct 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote:

>> but surely there's more
>> than just chance resemblance between the numeral names for "6"
>> and "7" as found all over the Mediterranean:

>> Egyptian:       sjsw (*sds-)            sfxw (*sp'3-)
>> Berber:         sd.is                   sa (*sab-)
>> Akkadian:       s^is^s^et (*s^id_s^-)   sebet (*sab3-)
>> Indo-European:  swek^s ~ s^wek^s        sep(h3)tm
>> Georgian:       ekwsi                   s^vidi
>> Etruscan:       s^a                     semph
>> Basque:         sei (*s^ei)             zazpi (*sasbi)

> These are language families which for the most part are
> thought to be unrelated or unrelatable, except for the first
> three which are parts of Afro-Asiatic.

It is perhaps pertinent to note, in connection to the Indo-European forms,
that Andre Martinet (DES STEPPES AUX OCEANS, p.20) pointed out that the
total absence, in the Indo-European numerals, of any aspirate consonant
was extremely odd, considering how frequent such consonants otherwise
were, and suggested this might indicate that the Indo-European numerals
had been borrowed from some language without aspirate consonants.

Stephane Goyette,
University of Ottawa.
stephane at Goyette.com


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Oct  7 00:36:49 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 20:36:49 EDT
Subject: Linear A to Linear B
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.203649.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/6/99 1:03:09 PM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu wrote:

<<OK, then, why can't we read it if it's Greek?  Linear A and Linear B have
many of the same characters.  If both are Greek, the only way this could
have happened would be if the scribes at some point decided to keep the
same characters,...>>

I'd like to address the statement here: <<the ONLY way this could have
happened...>> (caps mine)

AND this from the same post: <<I don't know where you keep
getting this 'certainty' business; you're attributing a certainty to me
which I don't hold...>>

But in the case quoted above you apparently do.  To say this is the ONLY way
this could have happened is to assume a fair measure of certainty.

Let's look at some alternatives.

1. LINEAR A and LINEAR B DEVELOPED INDEPENDENTLY FROM THE SAME PICTOGRAPHIC
SYSTEM.   When sounds were eventually assigned to the same pictograms, that
occurred in entirely different contexts, traditions or languages.  (The word
for house, for example, might have corresponded to two different sets of
sounds in two different languages.  The common pictogram for house would
become associated with a different sets of sounds in each language.  When the
pictogram was later permanently assigned to a sound or sounds derived from
"house", the resulting character would have represented two distinct sets of
sounds in those two different languages.)  Such symbols would appear to be
common, but the sounds they represent would not the same.  Greek might have
followed one character-to-sound system in A.  And a different one in B.

2. LINEAR A IS ONLY PARTIALLY PHONETIC.  Like early hieroglyhics, the script
may be partly pictogram and partly sound-referenced.  E.g., the letter /a/ in
early script might refer to a sound or it might refer to what it is, a
picture of an ox.  The transition to Linear B may have involved the re-use of
former pictographic symbols to stand for sounds instead.  This might have
mandated a revamping of the former partial character-to-sound correspondence
that existed in Linear A.  So these characters would reappear, but would in
Lin B refer to sounds instead of the objects represented, taking the place of
other characters that dropped out of use.

3. A LANGUAGE INTERVENED DESTROYING THE SOUND EQUIVALENCE BETWEEN LIN A AND
B.  Already noted in an earlier post, apparently a transitional script
between A and B has been found at "Canaanite" sites in Isreal.   If a
language with many non-equivalent sounds - or one used to representing only
consonants or syllables - intervened, the Greek scribes using Linear B would
have been working with a different sound/character system than scribes who
would had written Greek using Linear A.  The transition from Linear A to an
intervening syllabic script, for example, might have resulted in
sound/character sets that would be unusable by scribes attempting to write
Greek in Linear B, mandating a realignment of character-sound correspondence.

4.  LINEAR A IS GREEK WRITTEN BY MINOAN SPEAKERS.  LINEAR B IS GREEK WRITTEN
BY GREEK SPEAKERS.  Or some other such circumstance that would cause a severe
difference in the way words were heard, understood and translated into script.

There are of course other scenarios.  Two of the above were borrowed from
others who've commented on the situation.  Another one worth mentioning is
the circumstances that created the similarities in characters (but not
necessarily sound equivalencies) in the current modern Russian and English
alphabets.  And finally it may be important to note that we have no evidence
that scribes writing Linear B ever saw Linear A or vice versa.

Given all the above, is it proper to say <<Linear A and Linear B have
many of the same characters.  If both are Greek, the ONLY way this could have
happened would be if the scribes at some point decided to keep the
same characters,...>>?

Note that I'm not advocating any of these, but merely pointing out that
saying ONLY one explanation will work is overstating the case.

I wrote:
<<As you note this is evidence but not conclusive.  A shift in vowel sounds
(e.g., from -u to -i or -oi) that might have prompted the change from A to B
would actually work the other way.>>

Mr. Crist replied:
<<But we know that no such change happened in pre-Greek.  Attested Greek
[oi] generally represents PIE *oy, etc.; _not_ earlier *-u.>>

Again, in terms of certainty - <<...we KNOW that no such change happened in
pre-Greek>>.

Actually all we "know" is that if such a sound change did occur in some
dialect of pre-Greek, it was not preserved in Greek - unless Lin A/B
preserved it.

But what I actually had in mind was a sound shift in the unknown language
that may have occurred between the time the Greeks borrowed Linear A and when
they borrowed Linear B.  That characters would have stood for one thing in
Linear A, but later stood for another when Linear B was borrowed.

Sean Crist also wrote:
<<you're attributing a certainty to me which I don't hold and which I never
voiced. I'm simply correctly reporting that based on our current state of
knowledge, Linear A does not appear to be Greek.>>

But this is not what was first "reported:"
<<Actually, we can say with pretty fair CERTAINTY that Linear A is not Greek

nor any other Indo-European language.>> (Caps are mine)
(Message dated 9/30/99 8:49:01AM)

There is a different level of confidence expressed in "...does not appear to
be Greek" and "pretty fair certainty... is not Greek."

I was addressing the latter.  I'm fine with the former.

Sean Crist wrote:
<<there's no shame in the fact that the field was once wrong on this
question.>>

And you're 100% right. (Or perhaps 99.99%)  No shame should be found in the
Ventris/Lin B situation at all.  I would never suggest such a thing.  The
history of the physical sciences is actually pretty much one "wrong" theory
after another.  And that's what taught physicists and astronomers and
geologists to recognize their uncertainties and wherever possible to quantify
them.  And even to make it a principle in physics and math, without which
further analysis would have been impossible.

Many of our arguments have been about what we can be sure of and how much we
are sure of.   You look well on your way to a brilliant career.  In the
course of that career, you "know" that some things that seem pretty certain
now will turn out to be not quite the case.  Might as well anticipate them by
qualifying how you describe them now.

Stephen Jay Gould is absolutely brilliant at (among other things) showing how
"bad" theories advanced our knowledge.  And showing how, e.g., Lamarck and
the creationist who named first named dinosaurs (forgot his name) already
could foresee the problems with their theories but didn't have the tools to
solve them.  The thing that often got them in trouble was simply that they
overstated the strenght of their case and therefore didn't allow a window for
what came afterwards.

Most theories are not 100% right.  There's always allowance for a little
uncertainty.

Regards,
Steve Long


From Odegard at means.net  Wed Oct  6 22:33:15 1999
From: Odegard at means.net (Mark Odegard <Odegard@means.net>)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 22:27:15 -6
Subject: PIE and the Black Sea Flood.
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.222715.6.>

This link has some junk I wrote after re-reading Ryan and Pitman. I
also started comparisons to Mallory.This are rough, personal use
notes and personal speculations. Take them just for that. These pages
are unicode compliant, tho they work fine with extended latin (they
just load funny).

http://homepages.msn.com/LibraryLawn/mark_odegard/Indo-European.html

Besides links to 'religious' sites that make use of Ryan and Pitman,
the only web pages that refer to their findings seem to be the
original press reports of their book as well as a reference
someplace to the _Science_ article that reported their work
originally. Ryan and Pitman are impeccably-credentialed Earth
Scientists. They are not archaeologists, linguists or ethnographers.
This book was meant to be popular, but the hard science is obscured
by the speculative stuff. And they are the only person I've ever
read that's referred to Kathleen Kenyon as Kay Kenyon (which
suggests they are way out of their field).

Anyway. The Med indeed burst thru the Bosporus ca 5500 BCE, in a huge
event that raised the Black Sea 350 feet in two years.

The implications for the coalescence of PIE are unavoidable. It's in
the right part of the world at something like the right time. It
also lets you put agriculture in the Pontine region well before
archaeology proves it. And domestic animals too, I think. It lets
you think of the larger grouping PIE belonged to, and of it's
breakup (not Nostratic, but something under that).
--
Mark Odegard   mailto:odegard at means.net


From mclasutt at brigham.net  Thu Oct  7 06:06:37 1999
From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 00:06:37 -0600
Subject: Change and What Remains
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9910040952000.6056-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.000637.0600.>

Larry Trask wrote:

> The English that I speak is, in a reasonable sense, a daughter of the
> English my parents spoke.  And the English the young people are speaking
> back home, which is already noticeably different from my own, can be
> regarded as a daughter of the English I speak.  In that sense, I
> suppose, a language can co-exist with its own daughter.  Is that what
> you mean?

> My 22-year-old niece has acquired some of the vowel changes collectively
> known as the Northern Cities Shift.  As a result, her vowel system is
> conspicuously different from mine, and I occasionally have trouble
> understanding her.  Her parents (my generation) have no trouble
> understanding her, because they're exposed to the youngsters' speech all
> the time, but they don't talk like her.  But I don't get home very
> often, and, when I do get home, I'm startled by the young people's
> English.

> All of the several generations can talk to one another, just as I could
> talk to my grandparents when they were alive.  But my grandparents
> didn't sound exactly like my parents, either.  And my Aunt Catherine,
> who's now pushing 100, sounds remarkably different from the youngsters,
> and even from me.

> As I said, ceaseless change.  The incomprehensible English of King Alfred
> is separated from us by scarcely more than forty generations.
> Chaucer's speech, separated from us by no more than 25 generations,
> would also be utterly incomprehensible to us.  Even Shakespeare, only
> about 16 generations ago, would probably be largely incomprehensible to
> us if we could hear him speak -- and some specialists believe we would
> not be able to understand him at all.  What will our descendants, 20 or
> 25 generations from now, make of the sound recordings we'll be leaving
> them?

> So, apart from the trivial case of me and my niece, how can a language
> co-exist with its own descendant?

Normally, I agree completely with you, Larry, but this time I've got to
disagree, if only in pointing out that your definition of "language" in this
discussion is not standard usage.  In the sense that you've described,
namely, that any change makes a different language, then you and your niece
are speaking different languages, you and your Aunt Catherine are speaking
different languages, indeed, you and I are speaking different languages, as
I imagine you and your wife are both bilingual in each other's non-English
and different tongues.  According to this definition, language is strictly a
one-generation, one-location event, to be changed to the language of the
next generation in the same location or to be changed whenever one crosses
the county line.

In one sense, you are indeed correct--when using the definition that a
language comprises a particular set of generative, transformational, and
phonological rules on a nearly identical lexicon with an identical phonemic
and phonetic inventory.  One generation slightly fronts a vowel over the
previous generation.  The next generation might raise that vowel a touch.
The following generation might switch the alveolar fricative in one word to
a postalveolar affricate to make it rhyme with another word.  In this sense,
using the constant change definition of language, you would have to admit
(as you did) that several parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents can
coexist with multiple daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters.

But if you use the standard definition of "language", that is, two speech
varieties which do not exceed X% of mutual comprehensibility, then your
familial examples don't work anymore.  You must look at rates of change in
different communities and particular linguistic features that develop in one
community that drastically affect mutual intelligibility versus other
changes that do not have as radical an effect.  In this definition of
language, a community that has experienced a slower rate of change, where
the changes are such that mutual comprehensibility is not radically
affected, can be compared to a sister community where the rate of change has
been faster and has included changes that tend to always affect mutual
comprehensibility.  In this case, community A can be said to still speak the
mother language and community B is speaking a daughter language.  Actually,
this scenario with a standard definition of language is simply the same
situation as described using your tighter definition of language--only at a
longer time scale.

Let me reiterate and give more details about Shoshoni and Comanche.  The
phonological, morphological, and syntactic rules of Eastern Shoshoni are
very similar to the rules that must be reconstructed for Common Shoshoni.
The differences between modern Eastern Shoshoni and modern Western Shoshoni
(now completely separated by the states of Utah and Idaho where other
dialects are spoken) are minimal and mostly optional variants.  There is
only a small percentage of different vocabulary (at least 90%
lexicostatistical similarity between the most extreme examples from western
Nevada and central Wyoming).  Speakers from Fallon, Nevada have reported
virtually no problems in communicating with speakers from Wind River,
Wyoming.  About 1720 or so, some groups of Eastern Shoshoni speakers
separated from the main group and headed south into the Texas Panhandle.  A
treaty with the Spanish in 1786 lists the names of the treaty signatories
with Spanish translations.  The list is easily analyzed into Common Shoshoni
(predating certain vocabulary that has changed in both modern Eastern
Shoshoni and Modern Comanche).  Some examples from 1786, 1828, and 1865 will
illustrate some features of the languages (Cm = Comanche; Sh = Shoshoni; in
Modern forms: y = barred i, j = y; NR = not recorded):

                    1786               1828               1865
                    (Spanish source)   (French source)    (Spanish source)
'crane, heron' (Cm) ...condata         NR                 different word
Modern Cm--different word
Modern Sh--koonty
'shoe, foot' (Cm)   ...nampat          naap               napé
Modern Cm--napy
Modern Sh--nampe
'sit on mtn' (Cm)   toyamancare        NR                 NR
Modern Cm--tojamakary
Modern Sh--tojamankary
'red' (Cm)          enca...            eica..., eca...    eca...
Modern Cm--eka
Modern Sh--enka

Notice how the loss of preconsonantal /n/ was completed in Old Comanche
between 1786 and 1828.  Yet this one change was the major breaking point
between mutual intelligibility with Shoshoni and mutual unintelligibility.
Before that, the tribes of west Texas spoke a dialect of Shoshoni (as the
near identity of 1786 forms and Modern Shoshoni forms attests).  After 1828,
the bands spoke Comanche.  Their self-identification didn't change (Shoshoni
nymy, Comanche nymy), but their speech did.  All other changes between
Shoshoni and Comanche are found elsewhere as dialectal variants in Shoshoni,
but losing the preconsonantal /n/ on top of several minor changes that had
already occurred was too much phonetic (and according to my preferred
analysis, phonemic) difference to make up for.

This seems to me to be a clear case of a parent co-existing with a child,
using a standard definition of "language".  Even when using a more
restrictive definition of "language", this shows how quickly a single
radical change can affect an entire community, breaking off communicative
ability with the parent community in about 40 years.

John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
mclasutt at brigham.net

Program Director
Utah State University On-Line Linguistics
http://english.usu.edu/lingnet

English Department
3200 Old Main Hill
Utah State University
Logan, UT  84322-3200

(435) 797-2738 (voice)
(435) 797-3797 (fax)


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Oct  7 07:50:48 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 08:50:48 +0100
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19991004180310.00988640@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.085048.0100.>

On Mon, 4 Oct 1999, Roslyn M. Frank wrote:

[on Basque <maite(a)>] `(my) beloved']

> Let us agree to disagree about which form is the common used as a
> form of address, one with a "definite article" or one without.
> Clearly we have have different views about this situation as was
> demonstrated in the case of our earlier discussion on whether
> <beltz> was a proper nickname for a bear, rather than <beltza>. From
> your previous comments, you do not wish to concede that in such
> circumstance the <mugagabe> unsuffixed form is often used.

Aw, c'mon, Roz.  Not only have I never said any such thing, I said
precisely the opposite in a posting a couple of weeks ago.

As I've pointed out before, the use or non-use of the Basque article
with names and in vocatives is subject to complex rules which I don't
pretend to understand.  However, in the case of <maite> as a vocative,
the use of the suffixed form <maitea> is, in my experience, *far*
commoner than the use of <maite> alone.  As it happens, <maitea> is the
form I hear constantly in the Basque Country, among Basques in England,
and even in recorded songs.

> Contrarily, there is no question, as I believe I've said before,
> that when translating from French of Spanish Basque speakers will
> add the "definite article" to what is the unsuffixed form of the
> word in the Romance languages. But that is a different case. In the
> case of nicknames there are circumstances in which the suffixed form
> is common and there are also many cases where both forms can be
> encountered.

Yes; I agree with this entirely, though I don't pretend to know what the
rules are.

> I think part of our disagreement might be caused by the existence of
> two slightly different definitions of what is meant by the words
> "the common way of addressing someone." If one calls out to another
> and addresses the person with a nickname, that word will not
> necessarily take what is called the "definite article." I think you
> may have cited a couple examples of this yourself. The problem is
> complicated further by the fact that the "distal demonstrative" in
> Euskera has been appropriated as a "definite article" but that role
> is still not identical to that of a "definite article" in a language
> such as Spanish or English where, conceptually, there *are* definite
> and indefinite articles.

Largely agreed.  The Basque article derives historically from the distal
demonstrative, but is no longer identical with it, especially since, in
most varieties, the old distal demonstrative *<(h)ar> has been displaced
by the innovating absolutive <(h)ura>, leaving <-a> somewhat isolated as
the article.  (Bizkaian is an exception here, of course.)

And I agree that the label `definite article' is not really appropriate
for the Basque article, since its functions are wider than this name
suggests.  I've occasionally tried to promote another name, `ordinary
article', but my colleagues seem to have little enthusiasm for this.

> If, on the other hand, one writes a letter, there is clearly the
> option of using the "definite article" along with their "nickname"
> when "addressing" the person.

> Then there are many examples of the numens who populate Basque
> folklore and mythology. The (nick)names of many of these beings,
> e.g., Praka Gorri "Red Pants", appear without the definite article.
> However, I might refer to this same character, when writing in
> Euskera, in a given sentence as Praka Gorria. But when I do, I've
> changed the status of his (nick)name to something like "The One with
> Red Pants." It can be done, the "definite article" can be added, but
> when it is the name takes on a different nuance of meaning.

Agreed.

> In summary, I don't think one can come up with a hard and fast rule that
> covers all the individual cases.

I certainly agree.

> And when one turns to the so-called proper names the waters become
> even muddier. So, let's just agree to disagree on this particular
> point.

Sure, Roz -- but what exactly are we disagreeing about?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Oct  7 08:41:24 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 09:41:24 +0100
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19991004185840.009a51f0@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.094124.0100.>

On Mon, 4 Oct 1999, Roslyn M. Frank wrote:

> Phonologically speaking in other circumstances I don't think that
> Euskera regularly looses the intervocalic /r/. That's my impression.

That's correct.  The intervocalic tapped /r/ is not normally lost in
lexical items, except in the Zuberoan dialect, where it is lost.
But it is often lost in inflections and in grammatical words.  For
example, the dative singular ending <-ari> is frequently heard in speech
as <-ai>, and the progressive marker <ari> is frequently pronounced as
<ai>.

> I also don't know what the relationship would be between the set of
> (unconscious) phonological rules used to produce such nicknames and
> the set used for the rest of the language.

I don't think anybody knows.  Some eager philology student at Gasteiz
might usefully look into this.

> Nor do I know if this is a topic that has been subjected to serious
> study.

I'm pretty sure it hasn't.

> Without having looked into the literature, I would suggest that what
> we may be looking at is the question of whether there are different
> sets of rules that are brought into play by speakers of a given
> language to produce items belonging to different parts of the
> lexicon, e.g., phonoestetic expressions (is that the right term?)
> versus "regular" words. Or stated differently, do speakers have
> access to two different (although perhaps largely overlapping)
> phonological repertoires that are then drawn into play by them
> depending on the circumstances?

Bingo, Roz!  This is *certainly* true of Basque.  Putting aside names,
Basque has a set of templates for creating expressive formations, and
the phonological rules governing these formations are quite different
from the rules governing ordinary lexical items.  This is a topic close
to my heart, and one day I hope to produce a serious piece of work on
it.

But names are clearly subject to different rules again.

> Has anyone done a cross-linguistic study of such forms? How similar
> are these patterns cross-linguistically and/or what conclusions can
> be drawn concerning the relationship holding between them and the
> standard phonotactic rules of the same language?

There have been a few studies, yes, though I can't immediately cite any
references.

> For example in Euskera, as Larry has pointed out, emphasis is often
> expressed not by just repeating the same word. For example, we find
> <gorrigorri> "very red" (lit. "red, red"), but also there are many
> instances in which the first letter of the second word/expression is
> turned into an <m>, to produce compounds, e.g., <hikamika> "a
> falling out, tiff, verbal fight," an expression that I've always
> assumed came from <hi-ka>, from repeatedly accusing the other person
> by saying "You (did this...).. You (did that)."

Yes.  I call this `m-reduplication', and it's a common pattern for
creating expressive formations: <aiko-maiko> `pretext, excuse',
<ikusi-mikusi> (or <ikusi-makusi>) `a children's game resembling "I
spy"', <zirimiri> `drizzle', <zurrumurru> `whisper, murmur, gossip', and
so on.

Something similar occurs in a number of other languages with expressive
functions.

> In this interpretation <hi> would be the second person pronoun.
> Actually <hika> is often used to refer to the notion of "addressing
> the other in <hi>, in the allocutive forms of the verb that that
> form of address requires.

> A form like <esa-mesa-ka> based on the verbal stem of <esan> "to
> speak, to say" refers to "gossip". Here the iterative suffix <-ka>
> with its often gerundive force, is added to the compound <esamesa>
> to form a word in its own right, a (de)verbal noun (?).

Yes.  The suffix <-ka> is strictly adverb-forming, as in <zaldi>
`horse', <zaldika> `on horseback', and <harri> `stone', <harrika> `while
throwing stones'.  But derivatives in <-ka> not infrequently get
reinterpreted as nouns.  For example, the use of the intimate pronoun
<hi> is <hiketa>, with the suffix <-keta> forming nouns of activity, but
the adverbial derivative <hika> `while/by speaking with <hi>' is now
commonly used as a noun.

> This last example,I believe, shows the way that a rule governing an
> expressive formation (I refer merely to the addition of the <m> to
> the second <esa>) in a given language can end up producing a "real"
> compound. Obviously this creation is based on a real verbal stem in
> Euskera, i.e., <esa->, not on a purely phonoestetic or onomatopeic
> form. But the rule that governs the insertion of the <m> comes from
> the "other" set of rules.

Absolutely.  An m-reduplication in Basque can be based either upon an
existing lexical item or on an expressive stem of no other existence.

> In this case the question would be, does this formation bring into
> play the regular rules or are there subrules to these rules that can
> be accessed which allow for expressive formations?

If and when I get my planned research done, I'll be better able to
answer this question.  Meanwhile, all I can say with confidence is that
there exist clear templates.

Here's a sample of one template, using items taken from a variety of
regional dialects:

	<mozkor> `short and fat', `five by five'
	<moxkor> `drunk'
	<margul> `faded, washed out, colorless'
	<muker> `arrogant, pompous'
	<malkor> `sterile'
	<maltzur> `cunning, malevolent'
	<malkar> `rugged, barren' (of terrain)
	<makur> `twisted, bent, curved'
	<makal> `feeble'
	<mukur> `coarse, clumsy'
	<motel> `insipid, dull'
	<mutur> `put out, pissed off'
	<mutxer> `withered, faded'
	<muskil> `insignificant'
	<muskur> `fat, gross, bulky'
	<mukul> `spineless, pusillanimous'
	<matxar> `vile'
	<matzer> `deformed, defective'
	<maker> `counterfeit, fake'
	<moker> `hard' (of land, bread or people)
	<mokol> `flabby, slack'
	<motzor> `crude, rough'

And so on.  I will leave it to the interested reader to figure out
what's going on here.

> In short, are the two systems really as separate as they are
> sometimes portrayed to be? A topic that has been brought up before
> on this list.

They are not absolutely separate, but they are clearly partly distinct.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Oct  7 10:59:53 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 11:59:53 +0100
Subject: Excluding Basque data
In-Reply-To: <31073401.252babf2@aol.com>
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.115953.0100.>

On Tue, 5 Oct 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote:

> Sound-symbolic words are
> BOTH different in canonical forms
> AND underrepresented in vocabularies etc.
> and the coincidence of these two properties
> means it is dangerous to exclude them.

An interesting point, but I'll be taking issue with it below.

> As to sound-symbolic words,
> Larry says he does NOT insist on their having the same canonical
> forms as other vocabulary, does not exclude them on that basis.

That's right.

> (I surely thought he was using canonical forms as one of his
> criteria for setting up his initial lists?  Was that not true?

Certainly not.  As I have made clear repeatedly, my primary criteria are
early attestation, widespread distribution, and absence from neighboring
languages.  Nothing remotely phonological there.

I have also explained that, in addition, I would prefer to exclude
obvious nursery words and obvious imitative words at the outset, for
excellent reasons.  But I don't mind if others prefer not to do this.
It isn't going to make much difference anyway, since very few of these
words will satisfy my primary criteria.

> In any case, another criterion is explicit or implicit in the
> following:

[LT]

>> But, in fact, the vast majority of sound-symbolic items in Basque do
>> *not* satisfy my other criteria.  Hence my approach will immediately set
>> them apart from the words which are the best candidates for native and
>> ancient status.  Once that's established, *then* these distinctive words
>> can be investigated to determine their own phonological characteristics.

> Notice in the way the middle sentence follows the first sentence
> that Larry treats his approach (his criteria) as if his criteria
> were pretty much the same thing as selection for "the best
> candidates for native and ancient status".  Others of us believe
> that must always be kept on the surface of awareness as an empirical
> question, not taken for granted;  it is precisely a core question!

Something crucial has been omitted here.

However, for about the fifth time: if you think my criteria are
imperfect, then *what other criteria* do you propose for the task of
identifying the best candidates for native and ancient status in Basque?
How about an answer to this question, at last?

> If what Larry says above about Basque is true of other languages
> to a simlar degree, then should we conclude that sound-symbolic
> items are NOT good candidates for native and ancient status,
> in general?  That would seem to be implied by the paragraph
> just quoted.  Yet to me that shows there must be something wrong
> with the argument.

My criteria are devised with Basque in mind.  Other cases may call for a
different approach, notably in respect of my third criterion.

Whether sound-symbolic words are generally not ancient, I don't know,
but I have no particular interest in this question anyway.  I'm only
interested in the Basque case.

> That is not to say we treat sound-symbolic
> words exactly the same way as other words.
> Just as the English "pavilion" from French "pavillon"
> is the normal French development by the sound laws, and "papillon"
> is a sound-symbolic form which has resisted a sound change,
> so we might suspect Basque <pinpirin> may have not undergone all of the
> sound changes which most of the vocabulary did in the history of
> Basque, independent of the question whether it is a recent loan
> or some primaeval vocabulary item inherited from 10,000 years ago.
> So even the supposedly air-tight logic of sound laws cannot be
> used unequivocally to include or exclude vocabulary from native
> vs. borrowed categories.

In Basque, borrowed words develop phonologically just like native words,
modulo date of entry into the language.

But the point is not whether <pinpirin> is borrowed or not (I'm pretty
sure it's not), but whether it's *ancient* or not.

Now, I consider it most unlikely that the severely localized word
<pinpirin> has been in the language for millennia, all that time
violating the ordinary phonological structure of the language and
refusing to participate in otherwise categorical phonological changes.
But that's not the point.

The point, yet again, is that it is a waste of time to try to focus, at
the outset, on sweeping up everything that *might* be native and ancient
in Basque -- even highly implausible cases like <pinpirin>.  The point
is to identify those words which have the *strongest* claim to being
native and ancient -- hence my criteria.

> A shocker, and not a wild card we want to use without severe limits
> or controls, or else the entire enterprise falls.

OK.  And just what "severe limits and controls" would those be?
*How about an answer to this?*

I've already proposed my severe limits and controls.
What are yours?

> But a shocker we cannot escape by waving magic wands
> or waving words.

And just what "magic wand" do you think I'm waving?

> It's a fact of reality.
> (English "tiny", which went through the great vowel shift,
> and "teeny", which did not go through the great vowel shift,
> was retained or regenerated or reborrowed from a dialect,
> would be a similar case,
> unless the dialect-borrowing solution is adopted.)

No.  The earlier `tine' went through the GVS normally and produced
`tiny', as expected.  The form `teeny', in all likelihodd, is a later
re-formation, derived from sound-symbolic factors.  The OED tells me
that `teeny' is nowhere recorded before 1825 -- long after the GVS --
and suggests that it probably originated in nursery language.

> Among Larry Trask's other criteria were the distribution across all
> of the dialects, not the occurrence in only a few. As I took pains
> to point out in previous messages, that criterion is biasing.
> However reasonable, even obvious, it may appear to a historical
> linguist (including seeming obvious to me too, I may add) it may
> still disproportionately bias against sound-symbolic words, because
> of the spotty record of those who record vocabularies in not
> collecting such words, thereby reducing the number of dialects in
> which they are attested, quite independently of whether they
> actually were used in those dialects. The entire class of such words
> may not be recorded, or very few of them, it is not simply that
> their recording is randomly slightly less full.

> And this enormous underrepresentation can then indirectly lead to
> initial conclusions on canonical forms which are too simple and
> neat, too consistent, including canonical forms which are
> underrepresentative of sound-symbolic forms.

At last a point of substance!  I thought I was never going to see one.
OK.  Let's assume this point is valid.  What are the consequences?

Well, either sound-symbolic forms conform to the canonical forms of
ordinary lexical items, or they do not.  If they do, there is no
problem.  If they don't, then, assuming that many of them get into my
list in the first place, I'm going to have two sharply distinct groups
of words obeying different rules.  Also no problem.

Perhaps I haven't made it clear that I am also very interested in
characterizing the expressive formations.  But I first want to
characterize the forms of ordinary lexical items, before I turn my
attention to the expressive formations -- for one thing, because it's
easier to see what's special about expressive formations if I already
know what ordinary words look like.

So: apply my primary criteria; get a list of candidate ancient words;
determine their phonological properties; then look at expressive
formations (mostly excluded from my list by my primary criteria) and
identify the differences.  Now: what exactly is wrong with this?
And what *different* procedure could give better results?

> Such initial conclusions on canonical forms can then have
> cascading secondary effects on inclusion or exclusion of additional
> vocabulary in the lists.  Even if /bat/ (from the recent discussion of
> /bade/ /bedere/ etc.) were the only form included with a final
> stop consonant, being exceptional would not prove it is not part of
> pre-Basque.

I agree with this.  But, remember: I am not excluding this word, because
it satisfies my primary criteria.

> All (?) languages have more common and rarer forms,
> and have peripheral forms,

Sure.  But how can I tell that a particular form is rare unless I first
determine what the common forms are?

> especially when the ambiguities of
> fast speech and slow speech borderlines are considered,

Not of central importance here, I'd say.

> and when a few short high-frequency items are considered.

Yep, but note particularly that wording: "a few".

> Yet we must also pay attention to differences of canonical forms,
> as they sometimes DO clue us in to different strata of vocabulary
> which may be relevant in historical-comparative studies.

No doubt.  But what I'm trying to do is precisely to identify the damn
strata in the first place.

That's enough for now.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Oct  7 11:19:24 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 12:19:24 +0100
Subject: Excluding Basque data (2)
In-Reply-To: <31073401.252babf2@aol.com>
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.121924.0100.>

On Tue, 5 Oct 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote:

[LT]

>> I have proposed that obvious and recognizable sound-symbolic items, like
>> <tu> `spit', might reasonably be excluded at the outset.  But I'm not
>> wedded to this, and I don't mind if others want to include them when
>> they satisfy the other criteria.

> How about if they do not satisfy the other criteria, or some of
> them,

Then they don't go into the list.  That's what the criteria are for.

> and if the inclusion of such exceptional forms then enters
> into the determination of what are true canonical forms, and even
> what those other criteria should be, and cycles back to affect
> judgements of what forms are exceptional or not, or to what degree
> (frequency or structural), and EVEN to affect which forms are
> included in the analysis? It is indeed circular not in a bad sense,
> but should be recognized as circular.

Sorry, but I see no circularity at all.
What criteria do you propose instead of mine?

> Larry says his criteria do not have any biases (I think he believes
> they cannot, as he thinks he has formulated them), yet here he himself
> says he is excluding a form, mentioning in this paragraph only that it
> is sound-symbolic (as if that were a sufficient reason?
> I do not want to assume that, but at least here no more was given).
> I do not remember whether he gave any other reasons for
> excluding <tu>?

First, if you listen to a Basque pronouncing <tu>, you will surely
understand at once that it constitutes an imitation of the sound of
spitting, just as Basque <mu> `moo' is an imitation of a cow mooing,
<miau> is an imitation of a cat meowing, and so on.

Second, imitative words for `spit' of the general form /tu-/ are
commonplace in languages.  Note, for example, Burushaski <thu:> `spit',
and North Caucasian words of the general form /tuk'/ `spit'.

Otherwise, well, Basque <tu> is abundantly attested before 1600, so it
satisfies my date criterion.  I'm not aware that such a word exists in
Romance, but maybe somebody can tell me different.  As for distribution,
that's tricky.  The word is attested widely, but not universally.  It
will take a search -- which I haven't yet performed -- to determine just
how widely the word is recorded, and its inclusion or exclusion may
depend crucially on exactly what criteria I adopt for distribution.
It's going to be close.

> Trask refers to this:
>> ...criticizing me for selecting criteria appropriate only
>> to the task I have in mind, and not to other conceivable tasks that
>> someone else might like to pursue.

> Trask clearly believes his criteria are obviously
> appropriate to the task he has in mind.
> Others are not quite so certain that that is all his criteria do,
> believe they may do some other things as well.

Lloyd, I'm afraid I'm getting a little tired of this constant innuendo.
*What alternative criteria do you propose?*  *And how will they give
better results?*

Are you ever going to answer these questions?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Oct  7 11:35:36 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 12:35:36 +0100
Subject: Respect goes both ways!
In-Reply-To: <23066e8a.252be098@aol.com>
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.123536.0100.>

On Tue, 5 Oct 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote:

> Steve Long this morning sent me a reference to p.177 of Larry
> Trask's "Historical Linguistics" where he claims to be quoting Trask
> to the effect that 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."

> Here it appears that Trask is indeed using just the criterion he says
> he does not use, at least as a part of his definition which in this
> case is a determining part.

> Even if the quotation Long sent me is within a context of a
> criticism of the technical "mutually intelligible" definition, it
> still demonstrates that Trask CAN think logically using this
> definition, and come to the exact same conclusion as I believe
> anyone else.  Simply common sense. If so, why does he refuse to do
> so in the present discussion on our email list?

> Is the reference Steve Long sent me correct, anyone?

Yes; it's correct.  I wrote this, and I see nothing wrong with it.

But let's consider the context.  I wrote this in an elementary textbook
of historical linguistics for beginning students.  Now, beginning
students often do not understand what we mean by the term `genetic
relationship', and they often do not understand that a language can give
rise to a family of diverse daughters.  Since this point is fundamental,
I try hard in my textbook to get it scross.  In the process, I silently
overlook any number of complicating factors.  This is necessary.
If I simply present all known complications from page one, my readers
will be lost: they won't be able to see the wood for the trees.
Students have to learn the basic concepts before they can get to grips
with the complications.

Does a clarinet teacher try to teach all known techniques on day one?
No?

But what I say to beginning students is one thing.  And what I say to
professional colleagues is another.

> Even before receiving this reference, I wrote the following
> paragraph: If the correspondent really believes there is NO
> acceptable technical definition of "same language" vs, "different
> language", then perhaps the correspondent should simply have said
> that and declined to participate in this discussion.

I think I *have* said this.

To repeat: there is no principled and watertight definition of what
constitutes a single language.  That is a fact known to all linguists,
I think -- though sometimes I wonder about the Chomskyans. ;-)

Nevertheless, it is often convenient, and even necessary, to proceed as
though individual languages exist and can be identified -- so long as we
never forget that we are making simplifying assumptions.  However, as I
have pointed out, if we forget that we are making these simplifying
assumptions, and start reifying languages into discrete and individual
entities, comparable to the individual seagulls that wander about
outside my window, then we're in deep trouble.  And it's this last point
that I was emphasizing.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Thu Oct  7 15:24:16 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 08:24:16 -0700
Subject: PIE vs. Proto-Language
In-Reply-To: <004a01bf0d95$f8231480$879f113f@oemcomputer>
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.082416.0700.>

At 11:53 AM 10/3/99 +0000, Patrick C. Ryan wrote:
>[PR]
>I am convinced by the genetic evidence that modern humans are, at least,
>principally descended from a single ancient (pre-)human stock, whether out
>of Africa, which I think likeliest, or from another place.

> ...
>If you believe that a scenario of 'language' developing in separated human
>groups (hence unrelated except indirectly by the biological potential to
>develop it) is preferable,  then tell me, if the original stock (presuming
>you buy the genetic argument) was capable potentially of language, what
>prevented that potential from being realized?

The basic answer would be: they had not yet invented it.
Consider: the original modern humans were also potentially capable of doing
calculus, so one could ask why they didn't.  In this case the answer is
obvious.  But is language really any less complex than calculus?

Now, I, *personally* find this situation unlikely, but it is at least
coherent, and thus cannot be ruled out a priori.

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


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Thu Oct  7 15:31:39 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 08:31:39 -0700
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.991003224432.20156B-100000@unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.083139.0700.>

At 11:13 PM 10/3/99 -0400, Sean Crist wrote:
>On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
>I know; that's why I said 'mostly', and also why I picked the example of
>Japanese, which does have a limited set of syllable codas.

Which, interestingly, are often written using a kana containing the vowel
'u', at least in the Tokyo dialect.  Could this be where the high frequency
of final 'u's comes from in Linear A?

[The most common syllabic coda in Japanese, 'n', has its own kana].

>That's assuming that any of these systems had an effect on the development
>of Linear A.  I don't think we know this; as far as we know, it developed
>in isolation

I would say "isolation" is a bit too strong, given the extent of sea trade
at the time.  Independently is certainly indicated, but some influence, at
least to the extent of planting the *idea* of writing in their heads, is
very probable.

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


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Thu Oct  7 15:37:33 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 08:37:33 -0700
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.991003231722.20156C-100000@unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.083733.0700.>

At 11:44 PM 10/3/99 -0400, Sean Crist wrote:
>It depends on what you mean by that.  In a sense, all of the currently
>living Indo-European languages are of the same 'age', in that they all
>develop from the same prehistoric language which had its final unity at
>some prehistoric date (i.e., before the split of Anatolian from what
>became the other IE languages).

I question the assumption that the Anatolian languages necessarily split
off earlier than the others.  Given the linguistic and archaeological
facts, I suspect that the northern European languages, and probably
Proto-Tocharian, split off at least as early as Anatolian.  Thus I see an
original three or four-way split, not a simple bidding off of Anatolian

[The northern group would be ancestral to Germanic, Celtic, and Italic, at
least, and perhaps Balto-Slavis as well],

>Or perhaps you mean that the Greek-speaking presence in what is now Greece
>goes back further than e.g. 2100-1900 BCE.  The most widely accepted view
>is that the destruction of sites which we find in that period represent
>the invasion of speakers of an early form of Greek.  The preceding
>cultural tradition in Greece is substantially different.  Given that the
>latest date of PIE unity is around 4000 BCE (again, pace Renfrew), there's
>only so much of a time range to play with; you might manage to make a case
>that the Greeks were in Greece a little earlier, but not massively
>earlier.

And given that, again pace Renfrew, Anatolian almost certainly had to move
through the Balkans prior to Greek arrival *there*, let alone their arrival
in Greece proper, and that there is some evidence for a non-Greek IE
language in Greece in place names, the time scale is further constrained.

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


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Thu Oct  7 15:50:18 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 08:50:18 -0700
Subject: Change and What Remains
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9910040952000.6056-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.085018.0700.>

At 10:16 AM 10/4/99 +0100, Larry Trask wrote:
>I don't see how.  A living language never remains identical from one
>generation to the next.  See below.

On the other hand, the minor changes that occur often are evanescent, and
short-lived.  Fashion has a great deal to do with this.

>The English that I speak is, in a reasonable sense, a daughter of the
>English my parents spoke.  And the English the young people are speaking
>back home, which is already noticeably different from my own, can be
>regarded as a daughter of the English I speak.

I am not sure this is a reasonable interpretation: see below.

>My 22-year-old niece has acquired some of the vowel changes collectively
>known as the Northern Cities Shift.  As a result, her vowel system is
>conspicuously different from mine, and I occasionally have trouble
>understanding her.

I suspect that this is because her *peers* at school speak that way.
Certainly I doubt that this is really such a new development that it could
reasonably be called a "daughter" dialect of your dialect.  Northern cities
have had a distinct dialect of English for as long as I can remember, even
if it is now becoming somewhat more distinct.  In short, her change in
speech pattern is not due to simple inter-generational change, but rather
to local dialect differences.

Take the case of *my* niece.  When she was about two or three her parent
moved with her to Melbourne, Australia.  She quickly picked up a Melbourne
"accent", while her parents did not.  A few years ago they moved back to
the States, to Chicago.  Within about six months after school started my
niece had *lost* her Melbourne accent.  I suspect the case of your niece is
similar.

>All of the several generations can talk to one another, just as I could
>talk to my grandparents when they were alive.  But my grandparents
>didn't sound exactly like my parents, either.  And my Aunt Catherine,
>who's now pushing 100, sounds remarkably different from the youngsters,
>and even from me.

And how much of that is due to regional dialect differences?  My parents
and myself speak in very similar manners, as do most of my nieces and
nephews.  Almost no differences are discernable among us.

[My grandparent spoke somewhat differently, but then they learned English
as a second language, and still had a slight Low German accent all their
lives].

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


From edsel at glo.be  Thu Oct  7 16:01:38 1999
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 18:01:38 +0200
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.180138.0200.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

-----Original Message-----
From: Sean Crist <kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
Date: Wednesday, October 06, 1999 9:44 PM

>On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

>> I like the comparison (BTW, is Kirisuto such a transcription of Crist?).

>My login is kurisuto, which is the katakana-ized version of my family
>name Crist.  "Kirisuto" is the katakana-ization of "Christ".

[Ed Selleslagh]

Sorry for the typo.  One side remark: the katakana-ization of Christ seems to
indicate that the name was not taken from English speaking peoples/wouldbe
colonizers.  From the Portuguese or the Dutch maybe?

>If I understand your post correctly, you're speculating (and I appreciate
>the cautious terms in which you do so!) that there could be a connection
>between Iberian and Linear A.  I can't rule this out, but of course such a
>connection hasn't been shown, as you acknowledge.

[Ed]

Exactly.  When dealing with such difficult cases, I think no possibility should
be ruled out unless there is a compelling reason to do so. Especially on the
coasts of the Mediterranean Basin (as you noted further on), where a lot of
exchanges took place at very early dates, cf. the export of obsidian from
around Sicily. We know about a few East to West migrations (not necessarily
conquests!), and may safely presume there have been many more: the spread of
various technologies and genes point into that direction.

>I think this is probably a good place to make the following observation.
>It is probably the case that during most of the long period of human
>existence, the norm has been extreme linguistic diversity.  The phenomenon
>of a language being spoken over a wide area is probably a fairly recent
>one; I don't know that it ever happens except as the product of
>empire-building.  When we go into places where there hasn't been a long
>history of empires (e.g. New Guinea), what we find is that every little
>village has its own language.  It wouldn't be surprising if every local
>clan in prehistoric Europe similarly had its own language.

[Ed]

That may be carrying it a bit too far: it depends on things like geography,
which enhance or inhibit frequent contacts. In e.g. flat open agricultural
regions, you will find differing dialects from village to village (in Flanders
(less than 15 000 km2) this was still the case until 30 or 40 years ago, but
after that it began to break down pretty fast), but still belonging to the same
'language' (interpreted as a fuzzy set of pretty related dialects). Another
case is the Amerindian languages in vast N. American regions.

In rough mountainous regions like the Caucasus, with a - at least previously -
very sedentary population, much greater differences can develop and become
stabilized for long periods.

So, I would rather guess that more or less separated subregions had their own
languages, each divided into a large number of very local dialects, until major
migratory movements/infiltrations changed the picture.  This would then settle
down and diversify internally till the next movement.

>When the Indo-Europeans, Semites, etc. spread over a wide area, they
>probably erased an enormous number of local languages in the process.  At
>the beginning of the historical period, we can still catch glimpses of the
>earlier diversity: Hattic, Hurrian, Etruscan, etc. don't appear to be
>related to each other or to any other language we know.  Basque probably
>represents the sole outcropping remaining from the earlier old European
>diversity.

[Ed]

We can reasonably accept that Etruscan has the same grandmother as PIE, and is
a first cousin of Anatolian and PIE, but closer to Anatolian.  I don't think
anybody doubts the close link between Etruscan and Lemnian nowadays.

The case of Hatti, Hurri and Sumerian is indeed still problematic, but we
shouldn't lose hope: after all, Elamite - which was in the same situation - was
finally recognized as Dravidian [rather strangely late, if you ask me, because
the word Elaam still exists in Tamil, I was told].  And Basque and Iberian seem
to share a number of roots and affixes, even though a genetic relationship
doesn't look probable for now. Some substrate traces (BTW, also found in
Castilian) in Sardinian seem to indicate that a similar language - or one
representative of the same substrate - has been spoken there at an early date.

>When we find these tantalizing bits of older languages just barely peeking
>into the historical record, it's tempting to try to connect them with each
>other. If we can actually establish a connection, that's great (and in the
>Mediterranean basin, such connections might be somewhat more likely, since
>transportation has always been relatively easier).  It's certainly not
>wrong to make the attempt.  We should bear in mind, tho, that we should
>expect to find cases of languages which can't be connected with anything.

[Ed]

I wholeheartedly agree with you, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't continue
the search.  If monogenesis is vaguely true (at least by major regions of the
world), there must be links, but it is equally possible that the
signal-to-noise ratio is so low that we don't see them any longer. Entropy
knows no pity. Information does get lost over time.

Ed.

Dr. Ir. Eduard Selleslagh edsel at glo.be
B-9120 Haasdonk
Belgium


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Oct  7 18:09:29 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 18:09:29 +0000
Subject: Respect goes both ways!
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.180929.0000.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

ECOLING at aol.com writes:

>  [LA]

>>> I use here the definition of distinctness of "languages" preferred by
>>> most linguists, including the experts on this list, that is, fuzzily,
>>> "forms of speech which are mutually unintelligible".

[LT]

>> Sorry, but I don't think this is the definition of `languages' used by
>> most linguists.  If anything, it's closer to the man-in-the-street's
>> perception.  Linguists are aware that mutual intelligibility or the lack
>> of it is only one of many factors which may help to determine whether
>> varieties are best regarded as two languages or as a single language.
>> I could cite examples for hours -- Chinese, Italian, Dyirbal -- but I'll
>> leave that now.

> The above seems to be EXACTLY THE REVERSE of the bulk of the
> recent discussion which said that political and cultural reasons may lead
> people to call very different languages by the same name,
> as if they were the same language.  (Note the counterfactual.)
> Folks-in-the-street are perhaps even MORE aware than linguists
> of many of the other factors other than mutual intelligibility,
> which they normally do not think of at all.

This is astonishing.  Folks in the street, in my experience, tend to believe
that there must be language called 'Belgian', because there's a country called
Belgium.

Anyway, the point just made is not "exactly the reverse" of my point, but
merely another facet of it.  For their own historical, cultural and political
reasons, the Chinese refer to the seven or so Chinese languages as "dialects"
of Chinese.  Most linguists dissent, on the ground that the purely linguistic
differences are too great, and the boundaries between the varieties sometimes
too sharp, to allow us to regard the varieties as a single language.

And the assertion that linguists do not normally think at all of any factors
beyond mutual intelligibility is beyond belief.  This is not remotely true.
I'm a linguist, and I've just given our first-years a lecture on the numerous
factors involved in deciding where language boundaries should be placed.
Nor am I in any way unusual here.

> Unless of course the writer literally means as he writes
> that mutual intelligibility is "one of many factors which may help to
> determine whether varieties are best regarded as two languages
> or as a single language".  Note the "one of", in which case the
> response should have been not "NO, WRONG", but
> "YES, WITH ADDITIONAL SPECIFICATIONS".

Eh?  I say it's one of many factors, and you complain that I am overlooking
other factors?  What does this mean?

> I was not discussing other possible definitions,
> I was discussing a common highly technical definition,
> mutual intelligibility, about which I was completely explicit.

With respect, I do not regard mutual intelligibility as a "highly technical
definition".  It's a single very rough criterion, no more.

Whether two related varieties are, or are not, mutually comprehensible is not
an absolute yes/no question.  Mutual intelligibility can take any value from
zero to 100%.  It is perfectly possible for two varieties to be, say, 70%
mutually comprehensible, and such estimates are often reported in the
literature.

It is also possible for comprehensibility to be strongly one-way.  In my
experience, the Portuguese understand the Spaniards a lot more readily than the
Spaniards understand the Portuguese.  The Danes understand the Swedes a lot
better than the Swedes understand the Danes.  And I've met plenty of
English-speakers who understood me a hell of a lot better than I understood
them.

Mutual comprehensibility is also not independent of time.  The first time I met
an English-speaker from Newcastle, I could not understand *a single word* he
was saying -- even though he could understand me perfectly well.  However,
after a few days of exposure, my ear got attuned, and I could understand almost
everything he said.  This sort of thing happens all the time.

Almost anything you can think of can happen.  At the street level, Hindi and
Urdu are the same language, and speakers of the two can chatter happily about
everyday matters.  But, as soon as the conversation turns to elevated or
technical topics, they can't understand each other any more, because their
abstract and technical words are different.

So, let me ask this: are Hindi and Urdu "the same language" or not?
And on what basis should the question be answered?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From ECOLING at aol.com  Thu Oct  7 17:13:53 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 13:13:53 EDT
Subject: Campbell's def. of "language"
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.131353.EDT.>

Yesterday I received the latest issue of the Journal "Language",
in which there is a review by Doris Bartholomew of
Lyle Campbell's book
*American Indian Languages: The historical linguistics of Native America*
Oxford University Press 1997

Campbell defines these terms (and reviewer Bartholomew
     does not comment, so presumably regards these definitions
     as quite normal, unremarkable):

'dialect' is a variety (regional or social) of a language,
     mutually intelligible with other dialects

'language' is a distinct linguistic entity that is
     mutually unintelligible with other languages

I simply do not believe that Larry Trask is unaware that this is
     standard linguistic usage.  He is not forced to use it himself,
     but he is obligated to treat this usage with respect,
     not to evade discussions based upon it by ridiculing it.

*****

Both the book and the review are of interest to those interested
in the classification of languages and their genetic groupings
and in the logic of using data and evidence in these domains.

Bartholomew is a specialist in the Otomanguean family of
Mesoamerica, and she finds quite a number of details to criticize
in that area.  She is very polite in her criticisms, expressing her
appreciation for Terrence Kaufman's work, in areas where there
are not yet enough scholars and where basic descriptions are
still being assembled, even as she gives reasons to
not accept Kaufmann's overall results in her area of special knowledge.

Of most interest for the logic of demonstration,
Bartholomew points out that Kaufman commits some of the errors
that Campbell warns about in his discussion of logic and
method, using lookalikes which are not supportable as reconstructions
in component families.

My comment on the immediately preceding:
Should this legitimize use of lookalikes?  No.
Should this delegitimize use of lookalikes?  No.
Arguments on such issues are much more complex.

No single criterion by itself is overriding,
languages of different structures permit different
kinds of evidence to be available for use in reconstruction
of common ancestry.

It is also of course appropriate and expected that a specialist
in one language family will have more to comment on with
regards to that language family, and may detect more errors
in a non-specialist's treatment of that family, than they will
for other language families.

Bartholomew is responsible and gracious in making the
criticisms she has, while recognizing that her finding what
she considers errors of logic, or at least inadequate evidence,
DOES NOT undermine the entire work under review,
does not even necessarily disprove the conclusions that
Kaufman drew from the material
(Campbell to a great extent followed Kaufman
for Mesoamerica and for South America).

***

My own familiarity with Campbell's earlier work makes me
very wary, because in his eagerness to defeat Greenberg's
final conclusions, he has previously made what I consider
serious logical errors, and in parts of his "Language" review of
Greenberg's *Language in the Americas*, he even wrote
in a very seriously misleading fashion, as if Greenberg's
chapter on methodological analysis did not exist.

That does not meet my standards of civic obligation, at least.

Nevertheless, Campbell is an extremely competent scholar.
For several proposed distant genetic groupings,
he provides probability estimates that the groupings
will ultimately prove valid, and separately from that,
a confidence level (based on how adequate he feels the data is
on which he bases his estimate of ultimate relationship).
For example, for Maya - Huave - Mixe/Zoquean,
he estimates the probability of ultimate relationship at 30%,
and gives a 25% confidence level for that estimate.

This book should be of great usefulness both to anyone
interested in what is generally established knowledge
of genetic relationships, and to anyone interested
in methods of establishing new genetic relationships for
languages of the world.

Doris Bartholomew's review covers quite a bit of the content
and conclusions, beyond her specialty in Otomanguean.
She notes Campbell's position that he does not believe
studies of dentition or other non-linguistic matters
will correlate strongly with genetic groupings which linguists
can establish.  (Personally I think that is too negative a
position.)

I have looked at some portions of it in the past,
but am not familiar enough with it at this point
to review it independently.

The price of the book is $75 at
<http://www.amazon.com>

***

Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics


From ECOLING at aol.com  Thu Oct  7 17:45:29 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 13:45:29 EDT
Subject: No such assertion
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.134529.EDT.>

Larry Trask writes:

>And the assertion that linguists do not normally think at all of any factors
>beyond mutual intelligibility is beyond belief.

No such assertion was made by me.

That does not change the fact that definitions of "distinct language"
often refer only to mutual intelligibility as the core distinguisher.

Nor does it change the argument that even adding additional factors
to a definition may leave the original paradox intact.

Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Thu Oct  7 21:54:03 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 17:54:03 -0400
Subject: Answers regarding IE tree
In-Reply-To: <199910042008.NAA01234@netcom2.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.175403.0400.>

On Mon, 4 Oct 1999, Richard M. Alderson III wrote:

> I've now read the technical report in which the early results were published.
> As it appears from Mr. Crist's comments on the UPenn tree, further work has
> continued to refine the original results.

> Is the list of characters published anywhere electronically accessible?
> I'd be curious to see what the definitions for the Hittite vs. the world
> codings were --it may very well be that a different view of laryngeals,
> for example, would change the outcome greatly.

Just for you, I asked Don Ringe these questions when I met with him today.
The set of characters is not yet available online.  It's one of the things
they plan to do, tho.  The first order of business for the team is to get
their monograph on this subject out the door, and they're trying to get it
done before Don leaves for sabbatical this coming spring.

As a side point (and this is me talking now, not Don), I don't think that
any of the characters relates directly to the presence of laryngeals.  The
standard view, which almost everybody accepts, is that there were three
laryngeals in PIE.  It wouldn't really help us to set up a character which
codes for the retention of laryngeals, since the _loss_ of laryngeals
could have been an independent innovation in every branch, and has to be
coded as such; hence, such a character would be of no probative value.

> I have a larger problem with the tree as a whole, now that I know more
> of the details:  Only one language from each sub-family was used to
> provide input, and I believe that *this* choice may very well have
> biased some results.  I would be much happier if the Italic and Celtic
> languages were not from the respective "Q" branches thereof.  Does any
> of the papers provide information on how long a run of the program to
> interpret the characters actually runs (rather than the theoretical
> O(<mumble>) specification)?  How much time would be added by data from
> other languages?

Using a very fast, expensive, state-of-the-art machine donated by Intel, a
single run of the algorithm over the current character set takes about
eight days. How long the run takes depends on how messy the data are
(i.e., how badly they deviate from a perfect phylogeny). If you take
Germanic out, the remaining tree is close enough to a perfect phylogeny
that the algorithm only takes about three days to run.

As I mentioned before, the algorithm is guaranteed to give you a perfect
phylogeny if there is one; but if there is no perfect phylogeny, the
algorithm will not provably give you the phylogeny with the best fit.
However, if the number of characters not conforming to the resulting tree
is small, you can do an exhaustive search on the relatively small
remaining space of possible optimal trees, and then you can be certain you
have the optimal tree. If the number of non-conforming characters is
large, however (as is the case if you include Germanic), searching this
space becomes intractable, because the search runs in exponential time.

Regarding your concern that the results might have been biased by
selecting only one language per major branch: this necessity is partly
forced upon us by the slowness of the algorithm (and mind you, the
algorithm in question is at the very cutting edge of the field in computer
science, so the required processor time not something which can be readily
improved upon at our current state of knowledge).

A further consideration is that you have to have a pretty substantial
corpus to be able to code for a language in any useful way. I remember Don
Ringe saying in a talk that the team chose Old English over Gothic to
represent Germanic, for example, for this very reason.  He added that the
character encoding for Germanic would have been no different (other than
less complete) if they had used Gothic instead.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From anna-karin.strobel at swipnet.se  Thu Oct  7 23:57:10 1999
From: anna-karin.strobel at swipnet.se (anna-karin.strobel)
Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1999 01:57:10 +0200
Subject: Help to find article
Message-ID: <FRI.8.OCT.1999.015710.0200.>

Hello,

I wonder if anyone could be so kind to inform me where I could
locate this article

Gabrovec, S. "Das problem des nordwestillyrischen Gebietes", in
'Simpozijum Sarajevo', 1964 pp. 230-252.

Do anyone now any libraries that got this?

Thanks in advance,
Anna-Karin Strobel,

You might direct Your kindly answer to
anna-karin.strobel at swipnet.se


From roz-frank at uiowa.edu  Thu Oct  7 23:57:55 1999
From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 18:57:55 -0500
Subject: Basque 'sei'
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9910031701210.6056-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.185755.0500.>

>On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:

>[LT]

>>> Second, there's the problem of the sibilant.  Basque has two contrasting
>>> voiceless alveolar sibilants: a laminal, notated <z>, and an apical,
>>> notated <s>.  Now, in early loans from Latin, Latin /s/ is almost always
>>> rendered as the laminal <z>.  The same is true at all periods of loans
>>> from Gallo-Romance: the laminal /s/ of Occitan and French is rather
>>> consistently rendered by the Basque laminal <z>, not by the apical <s>.
>>> In contrast, the apical /s/ of Ibero-Romance is equally consistently
>>> rendered by the Basque apical <s>.

>> But Gascon-Be'arnais is Ibero-Romance in many ways, including
>> it's apical <s>.

Miguel, does that mean that Gascon-Beárnais also had a laminal /s/ or just
the apical one?

And if so, were the two respesented as <z> (laminal) and <s> (apical) as is
the convention in Euskera?

Ondo izan,
Roz


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Oct  8 13:30:37 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1999 14:30:37 +0100
Subject: Respect goes both ways!
Message-ID: <FRI.8.OCT.1999.143037.0100.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

> From: ECOLING at aol.com
> Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 19:15:36 EDT

[LT]

>> So: is the English of 1998 "the same language" as the English of 1997?
>> If you answered "yes" the first time, you must answer "yes" now.

> No, that does not follow.  The relation is not transitive.

> I am sure the correspondent knows perfectly well it is not transitive.
> So why bring up this kind of an example and act as if the persons
> being criticized believed the relation is transitive?

I am completely mystified.  The relation "is the same as" is unquestionably
transitive.  That is, if it is true that X is the same as Y, and also true that
Y is the same as Z, then it must be true that X is the same as Z.  There is no
way round this, and I cannot understand why anyone should dispute it.

However, the point under discussion has nothing to do with transitivity.
Obviously, if it is true that X is the same as Y, then it does not follow, by
transitivity or by anything else, that Y is the same as Z.  This is not a valid
conclusion.

But my point is otherwise.  I'm talking about the following two propositions:

(a) English 1999 = English 1998
(b) English 1998 = English 1997

Now, if you agree that (a) is true, it does not *logically* follow that (b)
must be true.  However, given the nature of these statements, I can see no
rational basis for accepting the truth of (a) while rejecting the truth of (b).
Anyone who accepts (a) but rejects (b) must apparently agree that there was
some kind of dramatic discontinuity in English at the end of 1997, but not at
the end of 1998.  And this position I can't fathom at all.

[LT]

>> But you can see where this leading.  If the answer is "yes", then, by
>> transitivity, the English of 1999 is "the same language" as the English
>> of King Alfred the Great 1000 years ago.  Are you happy with this?  The
>> two varieties are not at all mutually comprehensible, since the changes
>> in 1000 years have been dramatic.

> And therefore,
> since the correspondent knows I would not want to answer yes
> (it is the most elementarily obvious conclusion from what I have written
> previously) it is obvious that the relation I used the definition of
> is not transitive, the correspondent has proven that.
> Isn't that interesting!

Well, I don't know if it's interesting or not, but I certainly can't regard it
as coherent.  As far as I am concerned, "is the same language as" is beyond
question a transitive relation, and there is nothing to discuss.

> The definition I made explicit was not a transitive definition
> (which goes unremarked by the correspondent).
> What an odd coincidence!
> Surely I could not have been careful
> enough to think this through in advance?
> Nor knowledgeable enough to know this in advance?
> Must be a coincidence.

Perhaps you could just explain how, in your view, "is the same language as" can
be other than transitive?

> The correspondent here is using a different definition,

A different definition of what?

> and just incidentally, it seems to be a definition of "language"
> more used by the man-on-the-street (i.e. a political-cultural definition).
> I believe earlier discussions were explicit that this was more
> the man-on-the-street's definition.

And I disagree absolutely.  I can only suggest that you stop a few people in
the street, ask them what they understand by 'language', and then report back
to us.

In my experience, the man in the street believes that there's a language called
'Indian' spoken by native Americans, that there's a language called 'Belgian'
in Belgium, that there's a language called 'Chinese' spoken by everybody in
China, that everybody speaks English with an accent except him and his friends,
and very often that they speak Latin in Latin America.

> I have not previously accused the correpondent of being an ignorant
> layman, though that is apparently what the correspondent is accusing
> me and Steve Long of being (in more than one way).

Hardly.  I merely fail to agree with the statements made above, and with other
statements made in other postings.

By the way, I do have a name, and I don't mind when people use it. ;-)

> The correspondent seems simply unwilling to face the fact that
> one particular technical definition of
> what makes two dialects distinct languages,
> a definition used by some professional linguists
> (and part of the definition used by almost all),
> carries with it a paradoxical answer that yes,
> what Steve Long said is in principle possible,
> a language and a descendant distinct language can co-exist.

Lloyd has already mailed me privately about this, and I have replied privately.
If anyone is interested, I can post the relevant part to this list.

> Inconvenient, perhaps, but a consequence of that technical definition.
> Not my technical definition,
> rather one used by many professional linguists
> when using "same language" in an ideal sense,
> not colored by political or cultural preferences of users.

Sorry, but I don't think this is a reasonable description of the approach of
linguists.  Among other things, I don't think linguists recognize an "ideal
sense" of the terms 'language' or 'same language', and I don't think we
commonly ignore the political and cultural preferences of users.

> And, just perhaps, co-operativeness would dictate that one should
> propose another more easily operationalized definition.

But my point was that there *is* and *can be* no "easily operationalized
definition".  Languages are simply not discrete entities, and that is that.

[LT]

>> I think that Steve
>> and Lloyd are both gravely wrong on certain fundamental points.

> Notice the magisterial tone, "fundamental points",
> unspecified even in what follows, like the Joe McCarthy hit list,
> very much like the words "fundamentally flawed"
> which have become a code among academics in reviewing books
> for "worthless, unprofessional, do not read that author".

Lloyd, this is absolutely unreasonable.  I have spelled out at some length the
fundamental points on which I was taking issue.

> I think the correspondent knows perfectly well
> I have not made that error.
> In which case I believe what he said is slanderous or libelous
> (take your pick, email is a strange being).

Well, under the draconian British libel laws, it would surely be libel.
See Geoff Pullum's essay on the subject in NLLT in 1985 and reprinted in his
book The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.

However, I don't plead guilty to either libel or slander, but only to
disagreeing with you on a number of fundamental issues.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Oct  8 16:07:06 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1999 17:07:06 +0100
Subject: Excluding data
Message-ID: <FRI.8.OCT.1999.170706.0100.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Jon Patrick writes:

>>> I've never asserted that you did. However I do think that your
>>> criteria are designed to create an analysis that is more strongly
>>> consistent with the generalisations you "think you have a pretty
>>> good idea" about.

[LT]

>> I flatly deny this, and I challenge you to back up your assertion.

> Ok tell us what all your "pretty good ideas are" and we will see how much of
> it you revise in your future presentations.

Sigh.  OK.  Here's a summary of what I expect to find, at least in the main
lines, based on what I've found so far.  Bear in mind that the following
account is necessarily slightly simplified: I've ignored a couple of small
complications.  And, of course, this is the current state of play, not the
final word.

I am talking about native and ancient Basque lexical items which are
monomorphemic.  I exclude verbs, which are constructed according to different
rules.  All other parts of speech are included.

The Pre-Basque phoneme inventory is this, as per Michelena (symbols as usual in
Basque historical linguistics; don't take them seriously as phonetic values):

	*/p  t  k  tz  ts  R  L  N/
	*/b  d  g   z   s  r  l  n/

	*/i  e  a  o  u/

The following vowel-sequences (probably) can form diphthongs:

	*/ai  ei  oi  ui  au  eu/

Now, a lexical item is normally two syllables long.  Its canonical form is as
follows:

	(C1)-V1-(C2)-(C3)-V2-(C4)

All the consonants are optional, and C2 is present only if C3 is.  If C3 is
empty, then its place is occupied by a phonetic [h].  If C3 is filled, but C1
is empty, then C1 can be optionally filled by a phonetic [h], according to
rules which are not clear.

V1 and V2 may each be any vowel or diphthong, except that no more than one of
them can be a diphthong.

C1 can only be one of the following:

	*/b g z s l n/

C3 can be any consonant at all.

C4 can only be one of the following:

	*/tz ts N R L/

If C3 is a plosive, then C2 can be any of these:

	*/n r l z s/

(Only */p t k/ can follow */z/ or */s/: neutralization.)

If C3 is an affricate, then C2 can be any of */r l n/.

If C3 is anything else, then C2 cannot be present.

So, legal bisyllables include the following:

	*/a[h]o/ 'mouth'
	*/ate/ 'door'
	*/uRe/ 'gold'
	*/atzo/ 'yesterday'
	*/na[h]i/ 'desire'
	*/a[h]uL/ 'weak'
	*/zati/ 'piece'
	*/zozo/ 'blackbird'
	*/be[h]aR/ 'need'
	*/initz/ 'dew'
	*/gizoN/ 'man'
	*/banats/ 'grapes'
	*/arte/ 'interval'
	*/alte/ 'side'
	*/zaldi/ 'horse'
	*/gazte/ 'young'
	*/[h]andi/ 'big'
	*/antza/ 'likeness'
	*/[h]aitzuR/ 'mattock'
	*/bazteR/ 'edge, corner'

A complication.  In a word of the form C1-V-C3-V(-), it is unusual for both Cs
to be plosives.  If they are, then both are taken from */b d g/.  (Recall that
*/d/ cannot be initial.)  Legal examples:

	*/bide/ 'road'
	*/begi/ 'eye'
	*/gabe/ 'without'
	*/bade/ 'one'
	*/biga/ 'two'
	*/gogo/ 'mind, memory'

Trisyllables are possible, though not numerous.  A trisyllable looks just like
a bisyllable with a third V attached at the end, except that C4 can now be any
consonant except a plosive.  It also appears that C1 and C3 cannot both be
plosives.  Legal trisyllables:

	*/ardano/ 'wine'
	*/itsaso/ 'sea'
	*/buztaRi/ 'yoke'
	*/aRaNo/ 'eagle'
	*/andere/ 'lady'

Monosyllables are possible, though not numerous.  The canonical form is this:

	(C1)-V-(C4)

Both consonants are optional.  If C1 is empty, then its place may be optionally
occupied by a phonetic [h].  C1 and C4 have the same values as above. V can be
any vowel or diphthong.  Legal examples:

	*/[h]i/ 'you' (singular)
	*/[h]itz/ 'word'
	*/su/ 'fire'
	*/gatz/ 'salt'
	*/gaitz/ 'bad'
	*/uR/ 'water'
	*/sats/ 'ordure'
	*/laN/ 'work'
	*/gai/ 'material'
	*/beL/ 'dark'

That's about it.  Longer monomorphemic words are not possible, probably.
I don't expect this picture to change much, though I'm hoping to find some
further constraints on possible sequences.

I also have to decide what to conclude about a handful of modern words with
exceptional clusters, such as /arlo/ 'field', /erle/ 'bee' and /ernai/ 'awake,
alert'.  There aren't many of these.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From roz-frank at uiowa.edu  Sat Oct  9 01:08:20 1999
From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank)
Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1999 20:08:20 -0500
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
Message-ID: <FRI.8.OCT.1999.200820.0500.>

To: Indo-European at xkl.com
From: "Roslyn M. Frank" <roz-frank at uiowa.edu>
Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To:
    <Pine.GSO.4.03.9910031404180.6056-100000 at rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
References: <4.1.19990929211028.009a0970 at blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>

At 02:21 PM 10/3/99 +0100, Larry Trask wrote:
>On Wed, 29 Sep 1999, Roslyn M. Frank wrote:

>>> [LT]
>>>>> And <bat> `one' is pretty clearly derived from earlier *<bade>.

[RF]
>> Larry, is this theory on *<bade> yours or did you glean it from some
>> other souce? And if it isn't yours, could you share with us who
>> first came up with it and when? Did that person use the same
>> explanation?

[LT]
>The comparison of <bat> with <bederatzi> `nine', and the consequent
>suggestion that <bat> must derive from something of the form *<bad->,
>was first made by Henri Gavel early in this century.  The further
>comparisons with <bedera> `one apiece'

[RF]
In other words, for you the meaning of <bedera> is "one apiece"? I think
you defined it this way in an earlier mailing, also.

[LT]
> and other items, and the proposed
>reconstruction *<bade>, were put forward by Michelena, in his book
>Fonetica Historica Vasca, p. 134 and p. 235.

[RF]
 Hence, the data set under analysis consists solely of <bedera> and
<bederatzi> since these are the only two examples mentioned by Michelena,
right?

[LT]
>I can claim no credit here, but I do endorse Gavel's and Michelena's
>suggestions.  But note that, for lack of compelling evidence, Michelena
>did not regard the reconstruction *<bade> as secure, but only as a
>plausible suggestion.

[RF]
You have shared with us two statements concerning the etymology of <bat>:
First your own which you phrased as follows:

1). that <bat> "is pretty clearly derived from earlier *<bade>."

Then you provided us with a paraphrase or synopsis of Michelena's
statements on the topic:

2). that in Michelena's opinion the etymology from *<bade> "lacked
compelling evidence" and hence
"was not secure." It should be considered, therefore, "only a plausible
suggestion."

Having read over Michelena's comments, I believe your summary of them,
provided above, is quite accurate and appropriate. It expands on
Michelena's representation of *<bade> as "*<bade>?". He clearly didn't feel
fully confident about it. Also, above you state that you "endorse Gavel's
and Michelena's suggestions," once again emphasizing the tentative nature
of the reconstruction and once again a very measured statement on your part.

However, there is a third instance in which you have spoken about this same
problem although in rather different terms. Specifically on that occasion
you stated the following:

"It is most unusual for a native Basque word to end in a plosive, and <bat>
is clearly from earlier *<bade> or *<bada>  suggested by  the morph <bede->
in derivatives as (northern) <bedera> 'one apiece' and <bederatzi> 'nine'."

To my knowledge Michelena did not list the second etymon *<bada>, although
perhaps he did so on some other occasion, i.e., not in his work _Fonetica
Historica Vasca_.

As you will recall, the above quote is found on page 273 of your book _The
History of Basque_. Your statement, therefore, seems to contradict what you
have shared with us on the IE list or at least to be far less cautious.
Furthermore, I note that in your book you list <bede-> as a morph, not as
*<bede->. Earlier on this list you also affirmed that <bedere(n> contains
the same morph, if my memory serves me right.

Before you wrote your book, did you discover additional evidence -beyond
that presented by Gavel and Michelena- which strengthened your conviction
concerning this version of events? And if you did find additional proof for
this position, could you share it with us?

Furthermore, based on your statements in the email on this topic cited
above ("I can claim no credit."), you seem to be saying that all you have
done is repeat the positions of Gavel and Michelena, nothing more. Yet in
this section of your book you do not cite or otherwise overtly refer to the
specific works of Gavel nor Michelena where they discuss this problem.
Indeed, your statement "<bat> is clearly from earlier *<bade> or *<bada>"
leaves the impression that there is no other possibility: that yours is a
summary of the consensus opinion.

In that respect I would mention that Ribary in his _Ensayo sobre la lengua
vasca_, translated by Julian Vinson (Paris, 1877) argued that the first
element in <bederatzi> was <bat>, i.e., that the word should be broken down
into <bed-era-tzi>) and where <bat> had taken on the shape of *<bed>.  In
other words, he doesn't question the original shape of the root-stem. (As
an aside I should mention that I don't agree with Ribary's etymology of the
ending on <bederatzi>).

For anyone working in comparative linguistics it is important to be able to
build on the works of those who have gone before. However, there is always
the possibility that somewhere in the chain of transmissions -like in the
proverbial game of telephone- the message gets garbled. The danger is that
others can start using that version of linguistic realities as a basis for
further descriptions of the phenomena under study, i.e., utilizing
paraphrases of others' works rather than testing the data themselves.

At least in the case of Euskera, it has been my experience that sometimes
it can be a risky business unless each aspect of the data sets used in
reconstructing the phonology of the language is well researched, checked
and double-checked for accuracy. This is obviously a monumental task in the
case of (P)IE comparative linguistics (given the massive volume of earlier
research), but perhaps it is still possible in the case of Euskera given
the much more restricted number of detailed investigations on these aspects
of the language and the circumscribed nature of the data themselves.

Comments anyone?

Ondo ibili,
Roz

************************************************************************
Roslyn M. Frank
Professor
************************************************************************
Department of Spanish & Portuguese
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242
email: <roz-frank at uiowa.edu>
fax: (319)-335-2990


From colkitto at sprint.ca  Tue Oct 12 05:25:15 1999
From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 01:25:15 -0400
Subject: Change and What Remains
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.012515.0400.>

I had a cousin by marriage who moved to  Canada as a young girl.

My father met her for the first time when she was a very old lady and said:
"I heard this lovely 1920's voice".

My mother had an aunt, from the "Inverness area" who spent her life in
Paris.

My father spent several years of his boyhood in Inverness.  Around 1950 my
father met htis aunt for the first time, and he said that she had the same
voice as much older people he remmembered in the Inverness area.

Does this constitute  "parent and daughter co-existing" at all?

[ moderator snip ]

>So, apart from the trivial case of me and my niece, how can a language
>co-exist with its own descendant?

I actually do know a couple of cases

>Larry Trask


From MF1107 at mclink.it  Mon Oct 11 21:23:23 1999
From: MF1107 at mclink.it (Massimo Forconi)
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 23:23:23 +0200
Subject: Nors Josephson's Theory about a linguistic and cultural influence
 of Ancient Greek on East-Polynesia
Message-ID: <MON.11.OCT.1999.232323.0200.>

I should like to know some scholarly opinion about N. Josephson's theories
concerning a presumptive linguistic Greek influence on Pacific area (ex. gr.
cf. N. Josephson, Greek Linguistic Elements in the Polynesian Languages,
Universitaetsverlag C. Winter, Heidelberg, 1987; or Idem, Eine
archaisch-griechische Kultur auf der Osterinsel, Universitaetsverlag C. Winter,
Heidelberg, 1999 ).


From Georg at home.ivm.de  Tue Oct 12 07:38:22 1999
From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 09:38:22 +0200
Subject: accusative and ergative languages
In-Reply-To: <003601bf0d7d$863d4a60$879f113f@oemcomputer>
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.093822.0200.>

>[PR interjects]
>Ralf-Stefan, ease up. Do I have to put in a 'funny-face' whenever I attempt
>to say something funny?

OK, eased up. I certainly overreacted. The Hun knows no fun ...

>[PR]
>All good points. I am wondering how you would react to the proposition that
>'passive' in ACC languages fulfills a roughly analogous role to 'splits' in
>predominantly ERG languages? 'Splitting', AFAICS, seems to be a method of
>fine-tuning the indication of directness (and intentionality) of the
>agentivity, and I am wondering if other mechanisms in ACC languages are not
>really functionally if not formally equivalent.

This is worth some thought. Nevertheless, passive is a techique I can
deliberately (within certain boundaries of course) employ to do something
with it, where this is possible (namely to downplay the agent), whereas the
splits in predominantly ERG languages are grammaticaly hard-wired and
compulsory. E.g. it is "wrong" in Georgian to use the ERG construction in
the present tense. Antipassives, in languages that do have them, are more
"equivalent" to passives there (they also "downplay", in this case the
patient), hence the name.

St.G.

Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
+49-228-69-13-32


From Georg at home.ivm.de  Tue Oct 12 08:07:45 1999
From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 10:07:45 +0200
Subject: PIE vs. Proto-Language
In-Reply-To: <004a01bf0d95$f8231480$879f113f@oemcomputer>
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.100745.0200.>

SG:
>> Again: homo sapiens is a biological species endowed with certain
>> intellectual abilities, among which the ability to develop, learn and
>> handle such a complicated thing as language is possibly the most remarkable
>> one. The next step, from homo sapiens to, say, homo loquens is not I
>> biological one, but a cultural one. Nothing prevents us from assuming that
>> it could have happened more than once, maybe even often, or, in short:
>> language is a tool.

>[PR]
>I am afraid that we will not be able to settle this question to the
>satisfaction of either of us.

We should not give up so early ...

>So much hinges on at what point we begin to regard the noises that early man
>was making as 'language'. As another thread on this list attests, that does
>not seem to be a question that all can answer with consensus.

The point is: we have not heard these noises. If we could, we could decide
whether those people were making use of anything worthy of the name "lg" or
not. The thread you mention is, if I'm not mistaken, about the notion of a
*given* language as opposed to others, i.e. about discreteness in
"language-space". For distinguishing between human language and other
systems of communication, say, of animals, there are rather good and
straightforeward criteria (openness, double articulation aso.).

>I am convinced by the genetic evidence that modern humans are, at least,
>principally descended from a single ancient (pre-)human stock, whether out
>of Africa, which I think likeliest, or from another place.

I don't take issue with the generally held position that biologically
modern humans descend from a single ancestior.

>Was this ancient group capable of 'language'? I think so but I would not
>unequivocally assert it. It justs seems to be the simplest scenario, hence,
>possibly, the most probable.

Capable, yes.

>If you believe that a scenario of 'language' developing in separated human
>groups (hence unrelated except indirectly by the biological potential to
>develop it) is preferable,  then tell me, if the original stock (presuming
>you buy the genetic argument) was capable potentially of language, what
>prevented that potential from being realized?

The fact that they had to find out about this ability first. They were also
capable of inventing the wheel and eventually the moderated e-mail list ...

>Would you go so far as to
>assert that 100(-150) ya there was *NO* language?

I simply don't have any opinion about this, as long as precise dates are
involved. Biologically modern humans may have begun to exploit their unique
mental capacities fairly quickly; it may also have taken them some time
(millennia ??). I dunno. The only thing I find fairly easy to imagine and
accept is *biologically* modern man existing without language for some
time, thus *culturally* not being significantly more advanced than the
brightest primates. Why not ?
Once those mental capacities started to be used, we may well reckon with a
kind of cultural explosion, leaving all early human groups not able to
catch up with it quickly behind and dooming their fate.
For this, it is not necessary to assume that the actual material make-up
of the "first language", or its form-meaning-clusters,  were imitated by
others. Finding out the usefulness of such a thing as language, together
with finding out that one is actually capably to manage it is enough to
develop one.

The question when language arose is one I simply cannot claim to be able to
judge competently about, but it is clear to me that the two notion of
*biologically* and *culturally* modern man are not necessarily the same
thing. Palaeontologists a/o archaeologists should be looking for signs of
early culture, i.e. social organisation, sophisticated artefact use,
tradition, art, emergent religion etc. to approach the time where it would
simply be necessary to assume that people who did this and that or used
this and that, or cooperated in this and that way could not well have none
so without considerably elaborate communication skills. Having the brains
is only a prerequesite for this.

St.G.

Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
+49-228-69-13-32


From lmfosse at online.no  Tue Oct 12 09:46:11 1999
From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 10:46:11 +0100
Subject: SV: Pre-Basque Phonology
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.104611.0100.>

Stanley Friesen [SMTP:sarima at ix.netcom.com] skrev 06. oktober 1999 03:51:
> This may certainly have been part of it.  However, a large part of the
> modern Marian treatment in Catholic Christianity goes back to the
> assimilation of the Romano-Egyptian worship of Isis.  (Of course, if it
> happened once it could happen more often, and we could have a major
> composite here).

And not only Isis. The Roman world knew a number of mother goddesses (e.g.
Cybele), as well as some chaste virgin goddesses (e.g. Athena, Artemis). In the
religious conscience of Mediterranean antiquity, there must have been a "niche"
for a mother goddess as well as a chaste goddess. The church combined these two
concepts in the Virgin Mary. I am not certain that Christianity would have been
as successful without this elegant sleight-of-hand.

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 larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Oct 12 10:20:47 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 11:20:47 +0100
Subject: Africa vs. Americas, Multilateral Comparison
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.112047.0100.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Lloyd Anderson writes:

>  I believe an underlying psychological reason for not treating the
>  African and the American applications of Multilateral Comparison
>  together is simply the great discomfort most comparative-historical
>  linguists have with techniques which are used to discover plausible
>  hypotheses for future work.  They are simply not comfortable at
>  the edges of new knowledge, because it cannot have the certainty
>  of the most exacting techniques applied in long-established fields.
>  There is obviously no criticism here of those more detailed techniques,
>  it is simply inappropriate to insist on them at the edges of new knowledge.
>  It manifests an inflexibility to be unable to adapt one's choice of
>  techniques to the differences between long-established fields and the edges
>  of significantly new knowledge not limited to filling in details.

Well, I query this view of my field.

To begin with, as Lloyd himself emphasizes, MC is not a new technique but a
very old one.  It is also a technique which has been largely supplanted by
newer and better techniques.

More generally, though, I take issue with the suggestion that today's
historical and comparative linguists are generally inflexible old
stick-in-the-muds who can't cope with new ideas.  In fact, I would say that we
are living in one of the liveliest and most interesting periods that the
subject has ever seen.

These days the literature is full of masses of fascinating new data and of
constant new ideas.  The importance of contact and convergence phenomena is
being ever more steadily recognized.  We are learning more and more about the
complex and messy ways in which languages change and about the social factors
which are important in promoting change.  New models of linguistic descent are
being put forward almost in a breathless rush, and these new models are being
applied both to long-standing problems and to new ones.  A number of groups are
trying very hard to develop useful mathematical and computational approaches to
such problems as long-range comparison and tree-drawing.  We have Johanna
Nichols's population typology, Malcolm Ross on social networks, Thurston and
others on esoterogeny and exoterogeny, Roger Lass on parallels with
evolutionary biology, Daniel Nettles on computational models of rate of change
and population size, Jim Matisoff and others unraveling the huge and complex
mess that is Sino-Tibetan, Peter Bakker and others showing us undeniable mixed
languages, the Pennsylvania and Cambridge groups with their best-tree
approaches...I could go on in this vein for some time.

Indeed, the field is in such ferment that I almost get dizzy trying to keep up
with the flow of news ideas.  Just to cite one example, Bob Dixon's recent book
promoting the punk-eek model has already spawned a sizeable number of papers
debating its applicability to many areas of the world.

Inflexible stick-in-the-muds?  I don't think so.  We may not be all that keen
on MC, but nobody can say we're not interested in new ideas.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From adahyl at cphling.dk  Tue Oct 12 10:36:59 1999
From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 12:36:59 +0200
Subject: Moldavian (was: Contributions by Steve Long)
In-Reply-To: <l03102801b41cdb6a92b2@[195.247.226.87]>
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.123659.0200.>

On Sun, 3 Oct 1999, Ralf-Stefan Georg wrote:

> witness the overnight extinction
> of language with 2 1/2 Mio. speakers recently. Cannot happen ? Has
> happened: Moldavian;

In the case of Moldavian, we're dealing with a language that was also
CONSTRUCTED overnight, and those languages are probably more likely to
face extinction. In fact, the Soviet language planners could have done
their job much better; they never took advantage of the actual
phonological differences between standard Romanian and the dialects of
Moldavian Socialist Soviet Republic. The cyrillic alphabet introduced
for Moldavian in 1940 was actually a grapheme-to-grapheme correspondence
to the roman alphabet used for standard Romanian, very much like the
relationship Croatian vs. Serbian during the Yugoslav era. And only a few
loanwords from Russian and Ukrainian, most of them already used in the
area, replaced standard Romanian words in the official Moldavian
vocabulary. Examples are Mold. <hulub> 'pigeon' (from Ukr.) vs. Rom.
<porumbel>, Mold. <drujba`> 'friendship' (from Russ.) vs. Rom.
<prietenie>.

After Moldova's independence in 1991, the question of whether the official
language should be called ROMANIAN or MOLDOVIAN rocked its political
cradle. In Moldova's present constitution, the official language is called
MOLDOVIAN, but it is acknowledged as a variety of Romanian, and Moldovian
has even followed the recent Romanian spelling reform.

Best regards,
Adam Hyllested


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Oct 12 10:47:03 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 11:47:03 +0100
Subject: Azkue's dictionary
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.114703.0100.>

Lloyd Anderson writes:

>  Thanks to Larry Trask for the very informative review
>  of two Basque dictionaries.  I am printing a copy to keep on
>  permanent file.

>  I would only have one caveat, which is that the paragraph
>  quoted below is listed as a "major drawback" of Azkue's dictionary.
>  Many dictionary users who are interested in the vocabulary of
>  the language might consider it an advantage,
>  that one can find a word under whatever dialect variant
>  the dictionary maker had evidence for.

This is convenient for practical everyday use, certainly, but it's far less
convenient for scholarly work, since Azkue does not, in general, provide
cross-references.

>  (The lack of cross-references to eymologically related items
>  is a drawback for anyone interested in etymologies, it is true.
>  Perhaps a list of cross-references and
>  dates of attestation could be prepared by someone
>  as a supplement to Azkue's dictionary,
>  since it is in Spanish and French and otherwise provides
>  the best information on dialectal provenience?)

This work is being done, though not all in one place.

Agud and Tovar's etymological dictionary (still incomplete) gathers all
regional variants under a single headword, but provides no dates.  Sarasola's
(monoglot Basque) dictionary provides dates of first attestation, but is not
comprehensive.  The Academy's new dictionary, which is meant to be
comprehensive, also provides dates, but is far from complete.

Some day -- probably after I retire -- I plan to compile an etymological
dictionary which will incorporate all of the useful information in one place.

>  Rather this quoted paragraph should be part of indications
>  on how one uses Azkue's dictionary,
>  not under a list of supposed drawbacks of Azkue's dictionary.

The difficulty here is that knowing Azkue's policy does not help the reader
in locating the attested variant forms.  Given any one variant form of the
Basque word for, say, 'wine' or 'strawberry', there is no way of locating the
others except by guessing possible forms and then trawling through the
dictionary.  Even putting the dictionary on line, as Jon Patrick has done,
will not help if you cannot guess the possible forms to be examined --
unless, of course, you simply search for all the entries with a given gloss,
which will work in the simplest cases but not in the cases in which the
variant forms also have somewhat different meanings.

[on the problem of duplicating entries]

>  Of course one would edit these, and any linguist would recognize
>  many or most etymologically related words with the same meanings.

Well, I wish I could share this optimism, but I can't.

I get to read a whole lot of hopeful long-range comparative work involving
Basque.  And I'm afraid it is commonplace for comparativists to cite variant
forms of a Basque word as though they were unrelated and to compare them
separately with words in the other language(s) which they happen to resemble.
Only a couple of weeks ago, I chided one such comparativist for citing
eastern <hertsi> 'narrow' and its western variant <estu> 'narrow' as two
unrelated items and comparing each with a different item in the language
being compared.

A related issue is identifying transparent derivatives.  For example, Basque
<egun> 'day' has a transparent derivative <eguzki> 'sun', which in turn has a
localized eastern variant <ekhi>.  I have been astonished to see one
comparativist cite *all three* of these on the same page as though they were
unrelated and to compare each of them with a *different* word in the other
language under discussion.

>  On the whole, it seems from Larry Trask's review of it that Jon Patrick is
>  on very solid ground in using Azkue's dictionary as a basis for
>  analytical studies.

But only, I think, if a detailed knowledge of Basque linguistics is first
superimposed on the raw data.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Oct 12 14:33:45 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 15:33:45 +0100
Subject: Contributions by Steve Long
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.153345.0100.>

Stanley Friesen writes:

[on my Yugoslav example]

> This actually accords with what one book on linguistic change suggested is
> the *main* cause of language change: a social desire to differentiate one's
> group from some other group.  (Unfortunately I cannot locate the book right
> now).

I don't know of any book or article which makes such a strong claim as this,
and I must confess I find it implausible.  But there *has* been some recent
work showing that this desire for linguistic distance has been a major factor
in certain cases.

[on the contunuity-plus-change in English]

> There is another way out of this dilemma.  At least in many cases
> substantial language change occurs in a *single* generation.  In the
> history of English, one such case occurred during the Wars of Roses, and
> separates Middle English from Modern English.

Perhaps, but I find it very hard to believe that *most* linguistic change
occurs over a single generation.  The evidence seems to be clearly against
this.

By the way, what was there that was so dramatic during the Wars of the Roses?

> And it is occurring right now for the Blackfoot language, with older tribe
> members speaking Old Blackfoot, and the younger ones speaking New
> Blackfoot.  The changes are quite substantial, and include replacement of
> vowel+glottal stop with a long/creaky vowel.

I have encountered comparable cases elsewhere.  But, again, it seems doubtful
that language change mostly occurs in sudden and dramatic jumps, or
saltations, to borrow a term from evolutionary biology.

[LT]

>> Take a real case in this vein.  Is modern Greek "the same language" as
>> ancient Greek?  If not, where's the cutoff point?

> One of two places:
> 1. at some historical point where there was a major break between
> successive generations.

At what point?

Standard histories of Greek, in my experience, present a history of constant
change, with few if any dramatic discontinuities.  The conventional division
into historical periods (Mycenaean, Homeric, classical, Hellenistic, New
Testament, Byzantine, and what not) is presented as a convenience, not as an
objective fact.  The only observable discontinuities lie in those periods
during which Greek is not attested.

> 2. at the point where any older dialects are not easily comprehensible to
> someone knowing the modern literary standard language.  (Choosing the
> literary standard here  deals with the issue of the subtle changes over
> time in modern Greek).

Well, to be honest, I think it's out of order to appeal to a written literary
language, which need bear little or no relation to speech -- and it's speech
we're interested in.

Anyway, I think it's improper to pick a contemporary speaker as the judge.
Everybody at every stage can normally understand the speech of the two or
three immediately preceding or following generations.  My grandparents would
probably have understood their own grandparents better than I could have, had
I ever been able to meet them.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Tue Oct 12 14:39:10 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 10:39:10 -0400
Subject: Possessives
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9910061722430.9615-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.103910.0400.>

On Wed, 6 Oct 1999, Larry Trask wrote:

> On Sun, 3 Oct 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote:

>> 'Black dog' can be represented logically as a small circle ('black')
>> within a larger circle ('dog').  [...] [Snip, and reordering -SC]

[...]
> For example, consider `Susie is a mere child.'  Here the adjective
> `mere' does not define a subclass of the class of children: children are
> not divided into mere and non-mere varieties.  Or consider this one:
> `Lisa is a heavy smoker'.  This time the adjective `heavy' does not
> perform any subclassification of the set of smokers.  In fact, it
> doesn't even apply semantically to smokers, or to Lisa: instead, it
> applies to Lisa's habit.

Just to amplify on this point, consider "a counterfeit dollar".  The whole
point here is that the item in question is _not_ a dollar; it doesn't
belong to some subset of dollars in the way that a black dog belongs to a
subset of the dogs.  Likewise with "a fake moustache", "an imposter
policeman", etc.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From mclasutt at brigham.net  Tue Oct 12 14:58:37 1999
From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 08:58:37 -0600
Subject: Africa vs. Americas, Multilateral Comparison
In-Reply-To: <3c28b702.252ce240@aol.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.085837.0600.>

Lloyd's recent response to my thoughts on using Greenberg's multilateral
comparison in Africa and America was quite thoughtful and implies that I'm
not willing to accept ANY use of multilateral comparison in the proper
context.  This isn't the case, but Greenberg's misuse of the results of his
multilateral comparison often clouds the issue and I am guilty of not being
absolutely precise.

Let me summarize, if I may, the similarities and differences between Lloyd's
and my positions vis a vis Multilateral Comparison and Greenberg.

Multilateral Comparison:

Multilateral Comparison is a useful tool in the initial stages of linguistic
investigation of a large area.  It has been used since the beginning of the
historical/comparative method as one tool among many.  It is not a
conclusive proof of anything in and of itself because it ignores factors of
chance, fails to properly identify borrowing, fails to take into account
historical and other nonlinguistic factors, and is dependent on the quality
and quantity of available materials for the languages involved.  It can be
suggestive of potential areas for further research.  Misused, it can give
the appearance of a final proof of genetic relationship that may or may not
actually be there.  Any results must be validated or invalidated with
further research using comparative methodology.  Lloyd and I agree on this.
(I'm going to infer some of this from your posts, Lloyd, so if I'm not
correct about your opinions, I apologize in advance.)

Greenberg's use of multilateral comparison:

1.  Greenberg makes the error of using multilateral comparison to prove
genetic relationship in the Americas instead of merely suggesting further
avenues of research.  His arguments in "Language in the Americas" are clear
that he does not consider his results to be merely suggestive, but
conclusive.  Greenberg, and his principal disciple, Merritt Ruhlen, have
spread this "proof" throughout the nonlinguistic world as accomplished
demonstration.  I think that Lloyd may not completely agree with this, but I
do.

2.  Native American language specialists have generally rejected Greenberg's
claims due to lack of evidence, following well-established practice that
multilateral comparison merely suggests, it does not prove.  However, in our
zeal to undo the false perception of final proof that Greenberg has placed
in the public's mind, we often overdo our criticism of Greenberg's misuse of
multilateral comparison and appear to be condemning the act of multilateral
comparison itself.  Of this I am guilty.  Multilateral comparison is a
preliminary tool, but Greenberg has used it as proof--that's the main issue
among Americanists.  It is this overzealousness on my part to which Lloyd
takes issue.  I'll be more accurate in my wording in the future.

John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
mclasutt at brigham.net

Program Director
Utah State University On-Line Linguistics
http://english.usu.edu/lingnet

English Department
3200 Old Main Hill
Utah State University
Logan, UT  84322-3200

(435) 797-2738 (voice)
(435) 797-3797 (fax)


From ECOLING at aol.com  Tue Oct 12 17:18:35 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 13:18:35 EDT
Subject: Refining early Basque criteria
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.131835.EDT.>

Concerning Larry Trask's list of criteria for potential candidates
for early Basque vocabulary lists:

>1. Early attestation

>The word should be recorded early.  I have proposed a cut-off date of
>1600, since the first substantial literature appears in the 16th
>century.  Someone else (Jon Patrick?) suggested 1700 instead.  This is
>reasonable: the 16th-century texts are not numerous; they are all
>written by clerics; and they are overwhelmingly religious, with many of
>them being translations.  The 17th-century literature, in contrast, is
>much more voluminous, and it includes the first lay writers, notably the
>important Oihenart.  I'm happy with 1700, though I suspect it won't make
>a great deal of difference.  But nothing later.

The details in the paragraph above suggest to me OBVIOUSLY
if you want early Basque, you use 1700 in preference to 1600,
because the 16th-century materials are so limited in content.
It is always possible to study any differences between 16th and 17th-century
equivalent grammatical morphemes, forms of the same words, etc.,
where those are attested in both centuries, but obviously much
non-religious vocabulary will be systematically disfavored by the earlier
cutoff date.

>2. Widespread distribution.
<snip>
>Now, I suggest counting a word as widespread if it is securely attested
>in at least four of these five groupings.
<snip>

As explained in a long and detailed message sent many days ago,
focused on sound-symbolic vocabulary ...
given the limited recording of sound-symbolic vocabulary,
an insistence on very wide distribution will have the effect of biasing
against this type of vocabulary,
and in this case will certainly bias against a variety of canonical forms,
in favor of canonical forms more uniform and more limited than they
actually were in very early Basque.
A systematic distortion, in other words,
in this case not merely a lack of particular lexical items, but even
a systemic distortion by changing the hypotheses of canonical forms.

Thinking of subject matters attested or not, we have the following,
which ties this issue back to the specifics of subject matter noted
by Larry Trask for 16th vs. 17th centuries:
If only two dialect areas have documents in certain subject matters,
then vocabulary specific to those subject matters will be systematically
excluded by requiring their attestation from more than two dialect areas.
This is obviously undesirable.  It suggests that a moderate position might
be to categorize documentary attestations by subject matter,
and vary the number of dialect areas required according to the number
of areas attesting documents in each subject matter.
Of course in practice, this can be done in another way.
Record ALL vocabulary items for a particular concept,
and study the UNIFORMITY of etyma for that concept,
without much regard AT FIRST for whether it comes from two or from five areas.
If variants for a particular concept cannot be established as loans from
neighboring languages, then remaining variety of non-cognate terms
argues against immediately positing any of the conflicting forms
as candidates for very early Basque (even though one or more
of them MIGHT be a direct descendant of very early Basque).
Additional argumentation would then be necessary, either way.
Of course things are not this simple,
but Larry Trask is an expert at using all of these varied sorts of
information.
More dialect areas of course gives additional security,
and perhaps additional phonological information.

>3. Absence from neighboring languages
<snip>
> I suggest that, if
>Agud and Tovar's etymological dictionary shows a widespread belief or
>suspicion among specialists that a word is borrowed, then it should be
>excluded -- even if the loan origin is not certain.  Caution is vital
>here, in my view.

Some would use "caution" in not throwing out things for which loanword
origin is merely suspected, for which the argument is not a strong one.
"Strong" is not the same as "certain".
Moderation in all criteria, as in all things.

>A decision must be made about the very few shared words which are
>thought to be of Basque origin.  For example, everybody believes that
>the Castilian and Portuguese words for `left (hand)' are borrowed from
>Basque <ezker>.  A policy must be adopted here, but such words are
>vanishingly few anyway, and the decision is most unlikely to have any
>significant consequences.

Would such examples be those in which the Castilian and Portuguese words
have no cognates in other Romance languages?  In such a case,
would not the identical sort of criteria dictate that they be excluded from
studies of early Castilian and Portuguese?  Of course, there is no necessary
contradiction here, because items of this sort could in principle be
excluded from BOTH sides of any puzzling sharing, in the approach
Larry Trask is taking.  Or they can be included on BOTH sides.
My own position would be simply to include them on both sides,
but with a note that they might be from either side, and if they are
from the Romance side, but limited to Iberian Romance, then we
must have an additional hypothesis that there was some innovation within
Iberian Romance, or else a borrowing from some third language family
related neither to Romance nor to early Basque.  Is there some gap in
that reasoning?  Because it seems to me to suggest that words limited
to Basque and to Iberian Romance (not found in other Romance languages),
are better assigned to early Basque than to early Romance,
since by definition of the situation they are not reconstructible to early
Romance.  But this is not certain, Occam's razor can suggest a route
to follow, but it cannot absolutely exclude the more complex case that
there was an extinct third language family from which a word was
borrowed both into Basque and into Iberian Romance.

***

>...it is well known that words like <ama>
>`mother' and <tu> `spit' occur in languages all over the planet.

That does not argue either for or against such words actually being
inherited from Proto-Basque.

It DOES make it difficult to use such words in trying to prove
a deep genetic relation between languages, because one must then
have sufficient knowledge of sound-symbolic forces to argue
something more specific is shared between particular languages,
not merely a vague resemblance.
That is quite a separate issue.

***

<snip>

>When -- as so often -- a word exists in
>several regional variant forms, what form should go into the list?
>My answer is that we should simply appeal to the known phonological
>prehistory of Basque, and use the form which can be reconstructed as the
>common ancestor.

I have great confidence that Larry Trask will almost always draw the
correct conclusions in such cases, given his knowledge of the
phonological history of Basque.  But it nevertheless should be clear
that there is a potential circularity, of exactly the kind pointed out by
Steve Long, that a theory of the historical development of a language
is used to select which forms are considered to have been in a proto-
language.  That virtually guarantees that a different theory of
historical development of the language cannot easily be developed
from data thus selected.  Elementary common sense.

That does not make this procedure wrong.
Because it is the totality of the COMBINATION of the attested data
and the hypothesized sound changes (etc.) which we evaluate,
in the long run.  But it does make this procedure less than absolutely
certain to give the correct results.  (Using terminology from other
fields, it is often possible to find a "local minimum" or solution
which is better than any nearby points (closely similar solutions),
yet which is not an absolute minimum, not the absolute best solution.
In our field,
changing BOTH some of the hypotheses about sound changes and
other historical developments AND some of the hypothesized proto-forms,
changing both together, in a co-ordinated fashion, may
yield a better solution.  Such shifts of paradigm do occur.

>Finally ... if anybody out there still believes that my primary criteria are
>somehow likely to skew the results in some phonological way, or if
>anybody thinks that there exist better criteria for the purpose of
>identifying the best candidates for native and ancient status in the
>language, let's hear about it.

I don't understand the word "still" here,
it should be evident that I do and have previously explained the
concrete reasons why.  There is no need to repeat the details here.
As far as I know, Larry Trask has not
argued against the reasons I gave.

I have repeatedly pointed to the problem of selection against
sound-symbolic vocabulary through accidents of limited recording,
having the effect of biasing our notions of canonical forms.
Using Larry's mention of the difference of subject matters
between 16th-century and 17th-century documentations,
it is easy to explain why using too early a cutoff in time,
or requiring too many or the wrong dialect attestations,
can systematically bias against vocabulary in certain semantic
fields, because these, like sound-symbolic items more generally,
were not within the subject matter favored by the documents.

***

Additionally, criteria for what are likely to be descendants of early
Basque forms are NOT THE SAME THING as criteria for
what are good items to use in any consideration of potential
external relationships of Basque.  I say this latter NOT because I hold
out any hopes for finding distant relatives of Basque in my lifetime,
but simply because mixing these two goals can distort the picture
of proto-Basque by excluding many items which were in fact
part of proto-Basque.

***

In addition to all of the criteria Larry Trask mentions, I think there
should be another criterion:  For each item on the basic 100-word
or 200-word Swadesh list, be sure to INCLUDE SOME vocabulary item
whose meaning matches that item.
Simply on the grounds that every language will have vocabulary
for such meanings, so reconstructing an early Basque without any
term for such a meaning is contra-indicated.
This is not a criterion for evaluating any particular proposed vocabulary
item in Proto-Basque, it is rather a global criterion which can be
used to evaluate the sum total of the judgments on individual candidates
for inclusion.  It can tell us that we have excluded too much,
and in what semantic ranges we should probably seek additional
candidates for inclusion.

I would bet there are many other criteria which might be added,
and balancing them all together to make decisions will yield
better results than using a simpler set of criteria and allowing
any one otherwise reasonable criterion to dictate inclusion or exclusion.
Larry Trask has shown his ability to use many criteria beyond the
simple set in discussing particular vocabulary items
(such as /sei/ or any other).

***

Best wishes,
Lloyd Anderson


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Tue Oct 12 17:50:58 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 12:50:58 -0500
Subject: Updates regarding UPenn tree
In-Reply-To: <LPBBJHPIGJGDEKDCLOBFOELCCEAA.mclasutt@brigham.net>
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.125058.0500.>

	I've only read about in general books but it seems regular. I
remember the example [something like] "Fair is the fite fulpie?" for "Where
is the white whelpie?"
	I don't know if it has anything to do with influence from Gaelic or
not, in that some dialects of Gaelic have a type of alternation of f/wh;
e.g. fuisce vs. uisge, last name Phelan vs. Whelan [< ? Ui Faolain sp?]
--where /hw/ may possibly be a local pronciation of <fh> and where /hw/ may
possibly have been perceived as a form of /f/
	But, on the other hand, I seem to remember that the dialect in
question was from NE Scotland, and more likely not in contact with Gaelic

>John McLaughlin wrote:

[ moderator snip ]

>What are the details of this /hw/ > /f/ change?  Is it due to mishearing as
>Crist suggests for PIE *penkwe > *PGmc *finf?  Is it a regular change or
>conditioned?

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Tue Oct 12 17:54:44 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 12:54:44 -0500
Subject: Updates regarding UPenn tree
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.4.10a.9910061049230.18272-100000@orange.csi.cam.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.125444.0500.>

Can you elaborate on the origin of this and how far back it goes?

>Yes; just to expand, hw > f is common in Aberdeenshire (North-Eastern)
>Scots, in words like 'what', 'which' - and I think it can show up as a
>bilabial fricative as well as the more common labiodental.

>		April McMahon

[ moderator snip ]

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Wed Oct 13 01:51:38 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 21:51:38 EDT
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.215138.EDT.>

In the absense of written records, you can never "prove" an
invasion/migration.

There are plenty of historically attested migrations, which resulted in
linguistic replacement, which have left little or no archaeological evidence
-- the invasion of the Scotii which brought Gaelic to Scotland, for instance.

So it's a matter of the archaeologists fitting their data into the linguistic
evidence, not vice versa.  The stones and bones are silent; they have no
language.


From mrr at astor.urv.es  Wed Oct 13 11:59:19 1999
From: mrr at astor.urv.es (Macia Riutort Riutort)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 13:59:19 +0200
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.135919.0200.>

Liebe Freunde,
ich kann Euch sagen, dass niemand, sowohl hier (Katalonien) wie auf den
Balearen, auf die Idee kommen würde, Maite als baskischen Frauennamen zu
betrachten. Für uns ist Maite einfach die normale Koseform zu Maria Teresa
(Mari-Tere klingt übrigens ziemlich "schicki-micki", weswegen diese Form
hier kaum verwendet wird). In unserer Abteilung haben wir sogar zwei Maria
Teresas, die aber von uns Maite genannt wurden...
Mit freundlichen Grüßen

Macia

[ moderator's transcription for 8-bit-unfriendly mail systems:

Liebe Freunde,
ich kann Euch sagen, dass niemand, sowohl hier (Katalonien) wie auf den
Balearen, auf die Idee kommen w{\"u}rde, Maite als baskischen Frauennamen zu
betrachten. F{\"u}r uns ist Maite einfach die normale Koseform zu Maria Teresa
(Mari-Tere klingt {\"u}brigens ziemlich "schicki-micki", weswegen diese Form
hier kaum verwendet wird). In unserer Abteilung haben wir sogar zwei Maria
Teresas, die aber von uns Maite genannt wurden...
Mit freundlichen Gr{\"uss}en

  -rma ]


From ECOLING at aol.com  Wed Oct 13 14:16:46 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 10:16:46 EDT
Subject: Excluding Basque data
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.101646.EDT.>

We may be getting closer to some agreement on issues of fact
(as distinct from preferences).

Trask writes:

>On Tue, 5 Oct 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote:

>> Sound-symbolic words are
>> BOTH different in canonical forms
>> AND underrepresented in vocabularies etc.
>> and the coincidence of these two properties
>> means it is dangerous to exclude them.

>An interesting point, but I'll be taking issue with it below.

As far as I understand the rest of his message,
Trask does NOT take issue with it in what follows.
He does say it doesn't matter whether the sound-symbolic
words have different canonical forms from other vocabulary
or not.  I here quote from a later part of his message.

>> In any case, another criterion is explicit or implicit in the
>> following:

>[LT]
>>> But, in fact, the vast majority of sound-symbolic items in Basque do
>>> *not* satisfy my other criteria.  Hence my approach will immediately
>>> set
>>> them apart from the words which are the best candidates for native and
>>> ancient status.  Once that's established, *then* these distinctive words
>>> can be investigated to determine their own phonological characteristics.

>> Notice in the way the middle sentence follows the first sentence
>> that Larry treats his approach (his criteria) as if his criteria
>> were pretty much the same thing as selection for "the best
>> candidates for native and ancient status".  Others of us believe
>> that must always be kept on the surface of awareness as an empirical
>> question, not taken for granted;  it is precisely a core question!

>Something crucial has been omitted here.

I am not sure I can figure out what has been omitted.
My point remains.  Trask appears to be equating his criteria
with "best candidates for native and ancient status".

>> If what Larry says above about Basque is true of other languages
>> to a simlar degree, then should we conclude that sound-symbolic
>> items are NOT good candidates for native and ancient status,
>> in general?  That would seem to be implied by the paragraph
>> just quoted.  Yet to me that shows there must be something wrong
>> with the argument.

>My criteria are devised with Basque in mind.  Other cases may call for
>a different approach, notably in respect of my third criterion.
>Whether sound-symbolic words are generally not ancient, I don't know,
>but I have no particular interest in this question anyway.  I'm only
>interested in the Basque case.

This does not respond to my point.  My point was that this appears to
be a reductio ad absurdum of the approach, because it seems to be
implied that sound-symbolic items are not good candidates for native
and ancient status.  That conclusion must I think be false,
UNLESS one means by it circularly that words which undergo
reformations not in accordance with the sound laws applicable to
the bulk of the vocabulary, reformations entirely internal to the
language in question, or even words which persist unchanged despite
sound changes which apply to other vocabulary, are not native or ancient.
To me, it is simply that these words are subject to a different set of
sound changes (or lack thereof), they are no less native for sure,
and arguably no less ancient since their antecedents in direct line of
descent existed in an earlier form of the language.

To doubt that last part seems to be to doubt that earlier forms of
various languages had sound-symbolic words, or if they did,
to doubt that those words are in any reasonable sense cognate
(parent) to any of the current sound-symbolic words, that is,
that sound-symbolic words are so unstable as to prevent any
reasonable sense of inherited vocabulary from being applicable.
I think most linguists would reject that conclusion.  Perhaps
there is some way of avoiding it, but it seems to me to follow
logically.

>But the point is not whether <pinpirin> is borrowed or not (I'm pretty
>sure it's not), but whether it's *ancient* or not.

>Now, I consider it most unlikely that the severely localized word
><pinpirin> has been in the language for millennia, all that time
>violating the ordinary phonological structure of the language and
>refusing to participate in otherwise categorical phonological changes.

I don't so quickly come to that judgment.
It appears to be rather common for sound-symbolic words.

The example of French "papillon" giving rise by regular sound
change to "pavillon" when in the meaning of English pavillion,
not sound-symbolic, but being retained unchanged as "papillon"
in its sound-symbolic (extended sense, movement-symbolic?)
sense of "butterfly"

[Trask asked for the limits on when words are resistant to
sound changes which apply to other vocabulary, because
I had explicitly noted that we don't want that to be applied
loosely so as to reduce our rigor.  My reply is partly
that using the term "sound-symbolic" in its most general sense
does give the limits.  The other part is that we have to empirically
determine what those limits are, by discovering examples.
Therefore, the difference between "pavillion" and "butterfly"
seems to be a difference between two meanings, one not
in the sound-symbolic domain, the other in that domain.
As an aside, I will add that I have been interested in this
problem for a very long time, and have discovered it also in
the historical changes of deaf communities' "signed languages",
where sometimes in a pair of etymologically related signs,
the sign with the more concrete meaning retains its form, while the
sign with the more abstract meaning undergoes changes
of execution, what we would refer to as reductions and simplifications.]

>> It's a fact of reality.

The fact that this makes our task harder does not argue for or against
the validity of the statement that inherited "sound-symbolic" words
sometimes do not undergo sound changes.  They are nevertheless
inherited.

Trask suggests that the following example is wrong.
I should have said that I took it on the authority of
Dwight Bolinger, a linguist specializing in English linguistics
who was a president of the Linguistic Society of America,
who believed that "teeny" was regenerated (I think that was
his word).
(He was also labeled a "premature anti-fascist" for his volunteer
participation in the war against Franco in Spain -- that doesn't
prove he was right about "teeny" and "tiny", of course,
but I thought people might like to know that.)

[LA]
>> (English "tiny", which went through the great vowel shift,
>> and "teeny", which did not go through the great vowel shift,
>> was retained or regenerated or reborrowed from a dialect,
>> would be a similar case,
>> unless the dialect-borrowing solution is adopted.)

[LT]
>No.  The earlier `tine' went through the GVS normally and produced
>`tiny', as expected.  The form `teeny', in all likelihodd, is a later
>re-formation, derived from sound-symbolic factors.  The OED tells me
>that `teeny' is nowhere recorded before 1825 -- long after the GVS --
>and suggests that it probably originated in nursery language.

We are not too far apart here, except that Trask should have said
"Yes" to the first sentence, which he was actually agreeing with.
In this next sentence he could have said "No" or "But not" or whatever.
His "in all likelihood" should be emphasized,
that is, we really don't know for sure.
I gave three possible scenarios.
But the outcome of each of them is the same.
What is now SPELLED "teeny"
is pronounced rather similarly to what was earlier SPELLED "tine",
when the final "e" was still pronounced and the "i" was pronounced
as in "machine".
So was it retained or re-formed much later?
We know that spelling changes lag behind speech.
And we know that first attestations which we happen to have evidence
for may be later than first usages, often by a large time span.
So the conclusion is not obviously the one Trask prefers.

Trask does not mention the case of French "pavillon / papillon".
Does he believe that "papillon" was lost and then regenerated,
and thus "not ancient" or even "not native"?
I assume he would not want to claim either of the latter two.
If not, then use that example instead of "tiny / teeny".

[LA]
>> Among Larry Trask's other criteria were the distribution across all
>> of the dialects, not the occurrence in only a few. As I took pains
>> to point out in previous messages, that criterion is biasing.
>> However reasonable, even obvious, it may appear to a historical
>> linguist (including seeming obvious to me too, I may add) it may
>> still disproportionately bias against sound-symbolic words, because
>> of the spotty record of those who record vocabularies in not
>> collecting such words, thereby reducing the number of dialects in
>> which they are attested, quite independently of whether they
>> actually were used in those dialects. The entire class of such words
>> may not be recorded, or very few of them, it is not simply that
>> their recording is randomly slightly less full.

>> And this enormous underrepresentation can then indirectly lead to
>> initial conclusions on canonical forms which are too simple and
>> neat, too consistent, including canonical forms which are
>> underrepresentative of sound-symbolic forms.

[LT]
>At last a point of substance!  I thought I was never going to see one.
>OK.

I thought I had made exactly this consequence clear many times,
even if not in so many words.
I had at least stated the conclusions of it.
But I'm glad if we are now understanding each other.

[LT]
>Let's assume this point is valid.  What are the consequences?

>Well, either sound-symbolic forms conform to the canonical forms of
>ordinary lexical items, or they do not.  If they do, there is no
>problem.

But  Trask has said previously that the
expressive vocabulary in Basque DOES differ in canonical forms
from other vocabulary, so he believes the first alternative does not
apply.  Here is his second alternative:

>If they don't, then, assuming that many of them get into my
>list in the first place, I'm going to have two sharply distinct groups
>of words obeying different rules.  Also no problem.

But Trask himself argues AGAINST the latter case occurring.
He actively wants to prevent it "in the first place",
and only to include them later. He says that his preference is
to exclude nursery words etc.
He really does want  to prevent the inclusion of nursery and expressive
forms.  He believes these forms do not follow what he regards as the
normal sound laws and that they violate
the normal canonical forms (his comments on "pinpirin").
Since lack of attestation may correlate with this, use of the criterion
of lack of sufficiently wide attestation DOES tend to exclude forms
of certain formal types.
He says that he wanted to exclude by an explicit criterion,
but that he is not too unhappy if others don't want that particular
exclusionary criterion, (? because he believes that ?)
his other criteria will exclude most nursery words anyhow.

The assumption that "many" of them will get into Trask's list in
the first place is exactly what much of this discussion has been about,
namely,
his criteria will tend to prevent many of them from getting into his list.
Notice again his strong antipathy towards the word "pinpirin":

>Now, I consider it most unlikely that the severely localized word
><pinpirin> has been in the language for millennia, all that time
>violating the ordinary phonological structure of the language and
>refusing to participate in otherwise categorical phonological changes.

(even aside from the fact that "millennia" is not required to reach
the level of the early Basque of the 16th century which Trask
otherwise prefers as his starting point for data, to project
further backwards)

>Perhaps I haven't made it clear that I am also very interested in
>characterizing the expressive formations.  But I first want to
>characterize the forms of ordinary lexical items, before I turn my
>attention to the expressive formations -- for one thing, because it's
>easier to see what's special about expressive formations if I already
>know what ordinary words look like.

In that case, the best possible way is to include expressive formations
in the data set from the very beginning, mark the ones we are
reasonably sure are "expressives" because of their semantics,
and notice what may be different about them,
eventually perhaps slightly revising our notions of which
items should be considered "expressives" (hopefully not in
a circular way, simply because they resist sound changes,
but even simply listing those which do resist sound changes
would be useful, if we can do that).

>So: apply my primary criteria; get a list of candidate ancient words;
>determine their phonological properties; then look at expressive
>formations (mostly excluded from my list by my primary criteria) and
>identify the differences.  Now: what exactly is wrong with this?
>And what *different* procedure could give better results?

This explicitly states that the expressives would be mostly
excluded from his list by his primary criteria.  That comes very
close to contradicting the possibility that "many" of them could
be included "in the first place".  We can't have it both ways.

What is wrong with that, he asks?
Answered in my preceding paragraphs.
The human mind is known to be better at marginally distinguishing
similar items put before it in comparison,
than it is in properly categorizing
similar items put before it without overt contrast.

[LA]
>> All (?) languages have more common and rarer forms,
>> and have peripheral forms,

[LT]
>Sure.  But how can I tell that a particular form is rare unless I first
>determine what the common forms are?

By contrasting them explicitly, as just pointed out.

[LT]
>But what I'm trying to do is precisely to identify the damn
>strata in the first place.

Again, best done by including them in the data set,
and learning how to mark them as belonging to different strata,
gradually with increasing accuracy.

Larry Trask should use whatever sequence of investigations
he is most comfortable with.  But he should also be careful
that he does not allow the order of his investigating various
strata, an order of his own choosing, not a property inherent
to the language itself, to bias his conclusions.
That is, in part, what we have been discussing.

Trask wants to draw firm conclusions from his initial steps
with his initially selected strata of the vocabulary,
and it appears he would not be eager to change those conclusions
from the later results of investigating other strata.

>I have also explained that, in addition, I would prefer to exclude
>obvious nursery words and obvious imitative words at the outset, for
>excellent reasons.  But I don't mind if others prefer not to do this.
>It isn't going to make much difference anyway, since very few of these
>words will satisfy my primary criteria.

Why should the "primary" criteria be systematically selective of
one stratum of NATIVE vocabulary against another stratum of NATIVE
vocabulary.  Should that not be considered a defect in criteria
which are claimed to be ideal for identifying the best candidates
for native and ancient vocabulary?

Rather, the criteria should be advertised for what they then are,
criteria for identifying ONE stratum WITHIN the native and ancient
vocabulary, a stratum excluding nursery and expressive words
(and excluding vocabulary in those semantic domains and
in those subject matters not dealt with in earliest documents,
as discussed in another message).

If the criteria are stated fully explicitly for what they are,
then the conclusions drawn from them will have their
inherent limitations made more explicit.
That will be a courteous service to those who might want
to use the results.  It of course means the results are less
sweeping or definitive.  Such are the good consequences
of being clear and open about what one is doing.

I will be very glad if it turns out that we are getting somewhat closer.

Sincerely,
Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Wed Oct 13 14:21:51 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 15:21:51 +0100
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.152151.0100.>

Given the amount of recent discussion of the Aegean problem on this list
recently, perhaps I might draw attention to a fairly recent article which has
been mentioned by no one and which may not be widely known.

The article is this:

	Colin Renfrew. 'Word of Minos: the Minoan contribution to Mycenaean
	Greek and the linguistic geography of the Bronze Age Aegean'.
	Cambridge Archaeological Journal 8(2): 239-264. 1998.

Renfrew begins in a familiar place:

Ancient Greek contains a sizeable number of words which cannot be native Greek
and which must have been taken from some other language.

The conventional position is that these words are pre-Greek, and that they
were taken into Greek from an earlier substrate language, already in Greece,
after the Greek-speakers entered Greece.

Renfrew queries this.  He notes that a number of these words appear to pertain
to a sophisticated urban civilization of a kind that is not known to have
existed anywhere in the Aegean before the second millennium BC.  He therefore
proposes the following scenario.

1. Crete had been inhabited since 7000 BC by the speakers of what eventually
became the Minoan language.  (No human settlement is attested in Crete before
7000 BC, and there is no evidence for a change in population before the second
millennium BC, when the Greek-speakers arrived.)

2. Minoan was neither Greek nor closely related to Greek.  It may or may not
have been an IE language, but Renfrew endorses the idea that Pre-Minoan was
introduced to Crete from Anatolia, and that it may well have been not only an
early IE language but even a member of the Anatolian branch.  (Recall that
Renfrew embraces a time-depth for PIE much earlier than most linguists do, and
that he places the IE homeland in Anatolia.)

3. Many of the problematic words in Greek (though not all of them) must have
been borrowed into Greek, *not* during the first Greek settlement of Greece,
but much later, during the Bronze Age, when the Greeks came into contact wih
the advanced Minoan civilization.  These words are thus not ancient substrate
words in Greek, but late adstrate (or even superstrate) borrowings.

4. There is consequently no early limit on the introduction of Greek into
Greece.  Renfrew leans toward the idea that there never was a "coming of the
Greeks".  Instead, he suggests, Greek itself evolved within Greece at a very
early period, out of a more-or-less vanilla variety of PIE which had already
occupied the territory.

Renfrew acknowledges some difficulties with this scenario, pointed out by John
Chadwick and others.  In particular, the problematic words which are names for
flora and fauna indigenous to Greece cannot readily be explained as late
borrowings from Minoan, and are more likely to be substrate words of some
kind.  But Renfrew does not see this as a serious obstacle to his scenario.

This position may provide some food for thought.  But let me stress that I
neither endorse nor oppose any of these suggestions: I am merely reporting
them.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From ECOLING at aol.com  Wed Oct 13 14:47:45 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 10:47:45 EDT
Subject: Misrepresenting others' views
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.104745.EDT.>

Larry Trask continues to avoid the basic statement of the paradox,
to muddy the waters with red herrings.

And he continues to knowingly misrepresent others' views.

>And the assertion that linguists do not normally think at all of any factors
>beyond mutual intelligibility is beyond belief.  This is not remotely true.
>I'm a linguist, and I've just given our first-years a lecture on the numerous
>factors involved in deciding where language boundaries should be placed.
>Nor am I in any way unusual here.

No one has said that linguists do not normally think at all of any factors
beyond mutual intelligibility.  So attributing it to one's opponents in a
discussion is a serious misrepresentation.  (Nor has anyone said they
do not normally think of other factors when creating a serious definition.
They may choose a definition which does not incorporate every detail
of which they are fully aware.)
This misrepresentation is however consistent with
what Larry Trask repeatedly does.  (See further below.)

Saying that many linguists commonly use a definition of distinct
languages referring in some way to "mutual intelligibility"
in no way implies that they are in any sense unaware of other factors
which would enter into a refined definition.

Nor do they or we need to be lectured about mutual intelligibility
being a gradient phenomenon (70% or etc.) as Larry Trask does.
We are all quite aware of that, thank you very much.

NOR does it imply that such a simple definition is used only for children
nor that it is "not a serious definition", as Trask has attempted to argue.
Lyle Campbell (whom Larry Trask professes to admire) uses exactly
that definition in his book *American Indian Languages*
which many consider a definitive reference work on the current
status of knowledge of genetic relations in this field.

These are all red herrings.  Trask simply refuses to deal with
the paradox raised.  He clearly does not like the obvious conclusion.
As pointed out previously, the conclusion almost certainly stands
EVEN IF one changes the definition to suit him, AS LONG AS
the definition of "same" vs. "different" language does not preclude
that some dialects of a language can change substantially so that
(under one's favorite definition) they count as a distinct language,
while other dialects can in the same time span change so little that
one is more comfortable treating them as still the same language.
The only way to avoid this appears (so far) to be a definition which
circularly prevents the paradox by  defining ANY CHANGE HOWEVER
SMALL as meaning we no longer have the "same language".
This certainly does violence to any normal definition of
same vs. different language (see also the next paragraph).

(Of course, saying there is no such thing as same vs. different
language also evades it.  But that is a perversion of the English
language, and a denial of normal usage among both linguists
and lay people.  In a most recent message, Trask affirms this is his
position, but then fails to admit that he should not have pretended
to be answering the paradox with his many other red herrings,
which appear relevant to the statement of the paradox only if one DOES
admit that the notions of same vs. different language mean something.
Because without that, the statement of the paradox means nothing
and so should not be under discussion at all.)

On Trask's continued attmempts to discredit others:

>> Unless of course the writer literally means as he writes
>> that mutual intelligibility is "one of many factors which may help to
>> determine whether varieties are best regarded as two languages
>> or as a single language".  Note the "one of", in which case the
>> response should have been not "NO, WRONG", but
>> "YES, WITH ADDITIONAL SPECIFICATIONS".

>Eh?  I say it's one of many factors, and you complain that I am overlooking
>other factors?  What does this mean?

Mr. Trask should have asked first, if he did not know what it means.
As I have pointed out to him elsewhere, it means that he should not always
try to find fault with the expressions of others' views, by saying they are
wrong, then giving his own version which includes their views as part.
That is both rude and not entirely honest (at least I would consider myself
dishonest if I did that).  Rather he should agree with his interlocutors as
far as he can, and say he accepts their views as a PART of his own when
he in fact does (as in this case he clearly did), and say that he needs to add
some refinements or modifications before he can agree fully.
It's an attitude and politeness problem, and also one of misrepresentation.

As to other misrepresentations, Trask in the list paraphrased here
implies he disagrees with others of us on a long list of items.

Trask says he does *not* believe that mutual intelligibility is *the*
criterion
     for setting up language boundaries.
He says he does *not* believe that it is the primary or sole criterion
     used by linguists in general.
He says he does *not* believe that it constitutes a "serious technical
definition".

He says he does *not* believe that it can be applied in a principled way.

He says he does *not* believe that the man in the street has a better
     conception of language boundaries than professional linguists do.
He says he does  *not* believe that individual languages just exist
     as discrete entities "out there".
He says he does *not* believe that the question "Are A and B the
     same language or different languages?" is generally meaningful
     or capable of being answered in a principled way.
He says he does *not* believe that a language can remain unchanged over time.

And Trask says he is afraid that this cumulation of disagreements
     doesn't seem to leave him many points of contact with me.

As has been apparent from his many communications, Mr. Trask
     repeatedly tries to paint others as having the views listed above,
     and similar ones.

Every one of these is a misrepresentation, and Mr. Trask has been
repeatedly informed of this fact.  So it is a deliberate misrepresentation.

Other than one item dealt with in more detail shortly below,
I agree with Mr. Trask on every single item in the list above.
Trask has been told that, on most of them repeatedly,
in one way or another.
Yet he insists on repeating various of these claims,
or versions of them, in a context in which he is attempting
to denigrate his conversation partners,
and adds to that the appearance (only) of great erudition.
Those are features which make these assertions libelous or slanderous.

(On one item, Mr. Trask regards
Lyle Campbell as a serious linguist, and his book as a serious book,
therefore it necessarily follows, though I suspect Trask will try to
evade this, that Campbell's use of "mutual intelligibility" as his
working definition for that book is a serious definition.
Doris Bartholomew, reviewing it in the prestigious journal Language,
quoted that definition without critical remarks.  Politeness to one's
fellow professional linguists should then require that it be treated
seriously, and that one should be able to explore the consequences
of using that definition.  Mr. Trask is clearly very intelligent,
and quite capable of doing so.  However he refuses to do so.)

>*What alternative criteria do you propose?*  *And how will they give
>better results?*

>Are you ever going to answer these questions?

Larry has repeatedly made the statement above.
It is a red herring, avoiding dealing with the poins which WERE raised.

I have repeatedly answered these questions.
I have done so here yet again.
Partly the answer is fewer exclusions, this will give better results
because of earlier awareness of the full range of native and
ancient vocabulary.
Anything more specific has to refer to specifics which
have been given elsewhere, some of them here yet again.

Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Wed Oct 13 15:28:29 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 11:28:29 -0400
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE)
In-Reply-To: <b2c475ab.252d0173@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.112829.0400.>

In an earlier post, I suggested that the speakers of Greek entered Greece
around 2100-1900 BCE.  Steven Long suggested that the speakers of Greek
could have been in Greece as early as 7000 BCE, and cites Renfrew as a
source.

This issue is going to take some discussion.  Let me say up front that I'm
not an archaeologist.  I minored in archaeology as an undergrad and went
on several fairly boring digs as summer jobs, so I know something about
it; but I'm not a specialist in the field.

Anyway, let me start by giving some background.  When archaeology was
first getting off the ground a little over a century ago, it was
fashionable to explain everything in terms grand, prehistoric mass
migrations.  Lecturers describing the history of the field of archaeology
usually spread their arms wide and make the appropriate facial expression
at this point to indicate the grandiosity of this sort of explanation.

Today, most archaeologists would reject this general approach.  The major
contribution by Renfrew (and others) has been the approach known as
"process archaeology", wherein observed changes within a culture are
attributed to pressures within that culture.  For example, suppose we find
that in a particular area, there is a change in the archaeological record
from a fairly egalitarian society to one with marked differences in
wealth. Earlier archaeologists might take this as a sign of an invasion by
some prestige-oriented culture.  A process-type explanation, on the other
hand, might involve the rise in a culture's internal population density,
changes in the climate, etc., without positing any migration or other
influence from another culture.

This is a major advance in our understanding of prehistoric cultural
change.  Unfortunately, the pendulum swung too far in the opposite
direction; it came to be the case that positing _any_ prehistoric
migration _whatever_ was viewed with disdain.  Some archaeologists have
begun to argue that the rejection of prehistoric migrations has gone too
far. Around ten years ago, David Anthony wrote an article called "The Baby
and the Bathwater" in which he criticized this wholesale rejection of
prehistoric migrations.  He gave a reasonable and formal model for
predicting and explaining migrations in terms of push-pull pressures.
Mallory also argued against categorically rejecting prehistoric migrations
in "In Search of the Indo-Europeans".

With all of this background in mind, we can see the general ideological
framework which is leading Renfrew to seek the kind of solution which he
has done.  Renfrew wants to keep to an absolute minimum the number of
prehistoric migrations which we have to posit.  He'd probably prefer that
we not need to posit _any_ prehistoric migrations, but even Renfrew would
surely concede that the spread of a language over a large area implies a
population movement.  Technology in agriculture, pottery, metallurgy, etc.
can plausibly spread by diffusion without a large-scale movement of
populations; but language (other than loan words) does not diffuse this
way.  Verb conjugations, etc. only spread when speakers move.

So what Renfrew is trying to do is kill two birds with one stone.  Suppose
we assume that the introduction of the agricultural cultural complex thru
Europe is the result of a population movement from Anatolia to the Balkans
during the 7th millenium BCE (which Renfrew accepts).  We're also forced
to say that the spread of the Indo-European languages implies a population
movement.  Renfrew's response is to try to collapse these two migrations
into one, thus keeping the number of migrations to a minimum.  If you're
assuming that it's a bad thing to posit prehistoric migrations, this is
the sort of solution you'd like to try for.

Unfortunately, this solution cannot be made to work without ignoring a
huge amount of evidence.  An archaeologist here at Penn told me that he
was very "annoyed" at Renfrew for having put forward this view, and said
that if anyone with less than Renfrew's prestige had put it forward, it
simply would have been ignored as not worthy of consideration.  But
Renfrew's earlier contributions (i.e. to the notion of process
archaeology, to C-14 recalibrations, etc.) are so well respected that he
has to be answered.  He has been answered indeed.

Mallory (p. 164 ff.) discusses the whole issue at some length, and makes
the following arguments:

-Renfrew proposes that Anatolia is the homeland of the Indo-Europeans.  If
so, it is very odd the Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic existed in the midst of
languages (Hattic and Hurrian) which are not only not Indo-European but
which bear no typological resemblance to Indo-European. If there were any
language family which we might guess to be a sister of Indo-European, it
would be Finno-Ugric, which would argue for a Ukrainian homeland, not an
Anatolian one.

-There is clearly a substantial non-Indo-European substrate in Greek, both
in place names and in loan words.  This would be a bit surprising if
Indo-European speakers had been in the area since the beginning of the
Neolithic.

-Most importantly, placing the initial dispersion of the Indo-Europeans at
the beginning of the Neolithic around 6500 BCE in entirely incompatible
with the reconstructed Indo-European vocabulary.  Words such as yoke,
wheel, etc. are reconstructed for PIE, but this technology is not attested
until much, much later- namely, not much after 4000-3500 BCE, which is the
date which Mallory and others put forward as the final date of IE
linguistic unity.

So let's return now to Steve Long's post, which I will take the liberty of
reordering:

On Wed, 6 Oct 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> Based on the evidence above, there is nothing to preclude the conjecture
> that "Greeks were in Greece" during or even before the Neolithic.  If
> one connects PIE with the first appearance of agriculture (a la
> Renfrew), then that could move the date of "proto-Greek" or its
> ancestors being in mainland Greece back towards 7000BC.

I hope you see now why I find this entirely untenable.

> At this point in time, THERE IS NO MATERIAL EVIDENCE AT ALL AS TO WHEN
> GREEK-SPEAKERS APPEARED IN GREECE.  THE ONLY EVIDENCE OF A SIGNIFICANT
> MIGRATION DURING THIS PERIOD (3000BC-1650BC) IS FROM ANATOLIA.

[...]
> On10/6/99 12:48:29 AM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu wrote: << perhaps you
> mean that the Greek-speaking presence in what is now Greece goes back further
> than e.g. 2100-1900 BCE.  The most widely accepted view is that the
> destruction of sites which we find in that period represent the invasion of
> speakers of an early form of Greek.  The preceding cultural tradition in
> Greece is substantially different.>>
>
> I'm not sure what sites or culture are being spoken of above.  But there is
> no special break in "cultural tradition" - except one - that occurs during
> this time.  More importantly, there is a continuity in many aspects of the
> early Greek material culture that remain consistent right from the end of the
> Neolithic (about 3500BC) through to the end of the Middle Helladic (about
> 1500BC).

This is appears to be incorrect.  Between the Early Helladic II and Early
Helladic III phases (c. 2200 BCE), we find the following:

-Destruction and abandonment of Early Helladic II sites
-Changes in architecture, including appearance of houses with apsidal ends
-Changes in burial practice
-Appearance of stone "battle-axes" and clay "anchors"
-Appearance of a new pottery style, i.e. the Minyan ware
-Major change in economy to a much simpler agricultural society
(Mallory, p. 70)

You're correct that the culture in this area otherwise appears to have
been uninterrupted over a long period.  Giving the dates 2200-1900 BCE as
the date for "the coming of the Greeks" is certainly not without
ongoing controversy, but it seems to be the best candidate given what we
know now, and given the larger view of when and how the Indo-Europeans
dispersed.

[Much deleted]

> The main attributes of Middle Helladic (starting about 2000BC) e.g. Gray
> Minyan pottery and longhouses/megarons, are now viewed as CONTINUATIONS of
> Korakou or Tyrins  (which itself was a "fusion" culture.)  In the bad old
> days, Gray Minyon was associated with "the arrival of the Greeks" from the
> north, but it is now quite clear that the pottery style is a continuance that
> never appears father north than the Pelopenese.

This is a matter of controversy; Mallory described the Minyan ware as
being "incessantly discussed".  I don't know all the details regarding
that pottery style, but I'm pretty confident in stating that you're
misrepresenting the field if you say that it was "quite clear" that the
Minyan pottery represents a continuation of an earlier style.

I accept the view of Mallory and many others that the latest unity of PIE
was in the area of the Ukraine around 4000-3500 BCE.  If this is true,
then the "coming of the Greeks" must have occurred at some time between
3500 and 1500, at which point Linear B kicks in.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Wed Oct 13 16:31:06 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 17:31:06 +0100
Subject: Linear A to Linear B
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.173106.0100.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

We've been seeing quite a bit of speculation on this list about possible
stories for Linear A and Linear B.  Well, look.  The conventional position, as
I understand it, is this.

Linear A was used to write the unknown language we call Minoan.  In all
likelihood, it was invented for the purpose of writing that language.  Minoan
was not Greek, was not closely related to Greek, was very likely (though not
certainly) not even IE, and was very possibly a language of which we have no
other knowledge.

Linear B was used to write an archaic form of Greek.  It seems highly likely,
perhaps even close to certain, that Linear B is derived in some way from Linear
A, most likely that it simply represents a modification or adaptation of Linear
A for the purpose of writing an entirely different language.

Now, as far as I can see, this scenario is not only the simplest possible one
but the most obvious interpretation of the evidence at our disposal, such as
that evidence is.  The scenario seems to be entirely consistent with the
evidence.  I know of no single piece of substantial evidence that conflicts
with the standard interpretation.  Does anybody?  If not, then what reason can
there be for constructing ever more complex, ever more implausible and ever
more outlandish alternatives?  What can we possibly gain from this? How does
any given alternative story account for the known facts better than the
standard story?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Wed Oct 13 16:37:19 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 11:37:19 -0500
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
In-Reply-To: <b2c475ab.252d0173@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.113719.0500.>

[snip]
>At this point in time, THERE IS NO MATERIAL EVIDENCE AT ALL AS TO WHEN
>GREEK-SPEAKERS APPEARED IN GREECE.  THE ONLY EVIDENCE OF A SIGNIFICANT
>MIGRATION DURING THIS PERIOD (3000BC-1650BC) IS FROM ANATOLIA.
[snip]

	But I imagine there is a postulated date for the breakup of
Indo-Iranian-Hellenic-Armenian.
	And I'd wonder about postulated dates for loanwords from languages
in the Balkans and the Aegean
	The arrival of the Greeks may not have disrupted the local culture
in any great way
	e.g. it could well have been an example of elite dominance
	or on the contrary a continuous arrival of technologically less
advanced people whose language was adopted by the elite

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Wed Oct 13 16:45:20 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 17:45:20 +0100
Subject: language origins
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.174520.0100.>

Stanley Friesen writes:

[PCR]

>> If you believe that a scenario of 'language' developing in separated human
>> groups (hence unrelated except indirectly by the biological potential to
>> develop it) is preferable,  then tell me, if the original stock (presuming
>> you buy the genetic argument) was capable potentially of language, what
>> prevented that potential from being realized?

> The basic answer would be: they had not yet invented it.
> Consider: the original modern humans were also potentially capable of doing
> calculus, so one could ask why they didn't.  In this case the answer is
> obvious.  But is language really any less complex than calculus?

> Now, I, *personally* find this situation unlikely, but it is at least
> coherent, and thus cannot be ruled out a priori.

Well, maybe it can.

Language, I'd say, is a lot *more* complex than calculus.  But I don't think
degree of complexity is the issue.

The point is that our language faculty appears to be part of our biological
inheritance in a way that the ability to construct or use calculus is not.

All physically normal human infants in passably normal surroundings learn a
language.  Even in highly abnormal surroundings, they will do their best to
learn a language, and they will succeed if there's any significant
reinforcement at all.  They do this at an age when they can hardly do anything
else, and they go about it in a highly orderly and consistent way.

Inventing (or using) calculus is an achievement, comparable to inventing (or
using) ice skates, or boomerangs, or cars, or oboes.  Zillions of perfectly
healthy people go through their lives without ever achieving any of these
things.  I myself can drive a car, but I can't ice skate, throw a boomerang,
or play the oboe.  I learned to do calculus at university, but have since
forgotten how to do it.  And I doubt that I would have been capable of
inventing any of these things.  But I learned English normally in my infancy.

I think we learn a first language because our ancestors, at some point,
evolved a very specific biological proclivity to learn and use language.
I don't believe we have a specific and dedicated calculus faculty, or
ice-skating faculty, but I do believe we possess a dedicated language faculty.
And I believe language is a biological part of us in a way that calculus and
ice skating are not.  We didn't "invent"language in the way that we invented
my other examples: we evolved it.  It's just something that happened to us.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Wed Oct 13 16:50:54 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 17:50:54 +0100
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.175054.0100.>

Stanley Friesen writes:

> And given that, again pace Renfrew, Anatolian almost certainly had to move
> through the Balkans prior to Greek arrival *there*, let alone their arrival
> in Greece proper, and that there is some evidence for a non-Greek IE
> language in Greece in place names, the time scale is further constrained.

Why?

Why did Anatolian have to move through the Balkans?

Even if you don't buy Anatolia as the PIE homeland, why couldn't Anatolian
have entered Anatolia across the Caucasus or from east of the Caspian Sea,
through Iran?

And why did Greek have to move through the Balkans?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Wed Oct 13 16:57:24 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 11:57:24 -0500
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <004201bf1043$1be048c0$a103703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.115724.0500.>

[snip ]

>[Ed Selleslagh]

>Note that similar, but not always identical, usages exist in various European
>languages like regional colloquial Peninsular Spanish ('la Maruja'), regional
>colloquial Dutch ('de Jan'), German ('der Otto') etc. The definite article is
>only used when speaking ABOUT the person, not TO him/her.

>Ed.

	It's also used in colloquial Latin American Spanish but, in
general, to imply familarity --whether affection or contempt, or perhaps to
emphasize the sugject.It's sort of like "our Ed" or "that Ed". In some
forms of rural or popular Latin American Spanish, it seems pretty universal
and a lot of college educated Latin Americans, particularly women, avoid it
as a vulgarism. And "inappropriate" usage of the article before proper
names can mark people as hillbillies or uneducated. I've come across it
among Mexicans, Central Americans, Colombians, Peruvians and Chileans.
	The article before titles in the 3rd person is standard in Spanish.
	In Portuguese, of course, the article before proper names used in
the 3rd person is standard.
	It seems to work like a "non-vocative" case marker.

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Wed Oct 13 17:09:32 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 12:09:32 -0500
Subject: Linear A to Linear B
In-Reply-To: <0.4f531c68.252d4521@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.120932.0500.>

	I seem to remember that Linear B may be [at least] partially based
on ideograms in that there are symbols represent the first syllable of
certain words.
	If I remember correctly [and correct me if I haven't], the symbols
for LI and SA seem to be based on LINO [sp?] "flax/linen" and SASAMA [sp?]
"sesame" and that they may represent those plants.
	If this is so, one could expect the possibility of some symbols
being calqued as distinct syllables if Linear A & B represent different
languages.

[snip]
>2. LINEAR A IS ONLY PARTIALLY PHONETIC.  Like early hieroglyhics, the script
>may be partly pictogram and partly sound-referenced.  E.g., the letter /a/ in
>early script might refer to a sound or it might refer to what it is, a
>picture of an ox.  The transition to Linear B may have involved the re-use of
>former pictographic symbols to stand for sounds instead.  This might have
>mandated a revamping of the former partial character-to-sound correspondence
>that existed in Linear A.  So these characters would reappear, but would in
>Lin B refer to sounds instead of the objects represented, taking the place of
>other characters that dropped out of use.
[snip]

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu  Wed Oct 13 18:58:26 1999
From: HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu (Herb Stahlke)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 13:58:26 -0500
Subject: Campbell's def. of "language"
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.135826.0500.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

I too found Bartholomew's review engaging and fair.  One can, however, be a bit
more critical about some of Campbell's statements on the probability of distant
genetic groupings proving valid.  Such estimates are guesses that depend on
one's confidence in the guesser.  While I regard Campbell's scholarship in
Meso-American and related languages highly, I find he has a way of putting
forth his opinion on untestable matters with more authority than is
appropriate.  In his Historical Linguistics (MIT 1999), p. 163, for example, he
says in a table that Africa has "c. 20+ families.  I've been in African
linguistics since the mid-60s, and I've never confronted this number, but he
provides no justification for it.  On pp. 164-5, his table 6.2 lists "Some of
the better-known language families" of the world and rates the present state of
comparative studies in each.  Of the 29 families listed, he rates present
knowledge as good or better for 13, of which 8 are Western Hemisphere groups.
No African group, including Bantu, is rated better than "moderate," and he
leaves out groups like Jukunoid, Akan, Chari, Gbe, Central Khoisan, etc., where
the state of work is quite high.  He also rates Sino-Tibetan as "much needed"
without noting the extensive work going on both on the larger family and on
some of its subgroups.  A significant number of those he rates as good or
better are groups he himself has worked on.  I suspect the table reflects his
own knowledge and experience as much as it reflects scholarly reality.

By the way, unlike Larry, I think it was, I've found Campbell's intro very well
done, in spite of, perhaps also because of, matters where I differ strongly
with him.  I'm planning on using it next semester in an intro course for
graduate students who have had a phonetics course and a first phonology course
as prerequisites.  I expect them to be able to handle Campbell's challenges
well.

Herb Stahlke

Lloyd Anderson writes:
>>> <ECOLING at aol.com> 10/07 12:13 PM >>>

Nevertheless, Campbell is an extremely competent scholar.
For several proposed distant genetic groupings,
he provides probability estimates that the groupings
will ultimately prove valid, and separately from that,
a confidence level (based on how adequate he feels the data is
on which he bases his estimate of ultimate relationship).
For example, for Maya - Huave - Mixe/Zoquean,
he estimates the probability of ultimate relationship at 30%,
and gives a 25% confidence level for that estimate.


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Wed Oct 13 18:58:19 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 14:58:19 EDT
Subject: The Parent/Daughter Question (was Contributions)
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.145819.EDT.>

I'm sending this with a little reluctance, but mainly to clarify the question
being addressed, which was a bit narrower than where it has ended up.

In a message dated 10/3/99 02:00:55 AM, Larry Trask wrote:

<<I guess I might respond to a few of his points -- especially since I think
that Steve and Lloyd are both gravely wrong on certain fundamental points.  I
think both have fallen badly into the reification fallacy.  The
reification fallacy lies in inventing a name, and then concluding that,
since we have a name, there must exist something "out there" for the
name to refer to.>>

Just for the record: neither Lloyd nor myself "invented" the word 'language.'
 I cannot speak for Lloyd, but I do not recall "inventing" "English" or
"Basque" or the name of any other language that I know of.

Apparently someone else "out there" either was making up names for imaginary
entities or actually thought they heard or saw something that they called a
"language."  We didn't reificate.  Someone else did.

LT also wrote:
<<But this is wrong, all wrong. Names like `English', `German' and `Italian'
designate real-world entities only to the extent that enough people want this
to be so -- for whatever reasons.  Those reasons are just as likely to be
historical, cultural and political as they are linguistic.... And all
discussions predicated upon the belief that this is a linguistically
meaningful question with a LINGUISTICALLY MEANINGFUL ANSWER are badly
MISGUIDED.>> [Caps mine.]

ACTUALLY, Larry Trask STARTED these discussions.  It was Larry who first
acted as if this was a "linguistically meaningful question."  And if I was
misguided it was partly by his guidance.  This thread and all recent related
threads had their start right here, in the following post:

I wrote:
<<                         PIE
                                      /   \
                                    /   Anatolian
Does this mean that PIE co-exists with Anatolian?  It would have to, wouldn't
it?>>

Specifically to which Larry Trask replied (8/24/99 03:04:58 AM):
<<No.  An ancestral LANGUAGE cannot co-exist with its own descendant.>>
[Caps mine]

At this particular point, Larry Trask seemed to have NO PROBLEM using the
term "language" in a linguistic sense as if it were the real thing.  Was
Larry reificating?  And is it disingenuous to raise a question by declaring a
"language" cannot exist with its own descendant AND THEN announce that the
question is meaningless - after good counterarguments have been raised?  Can
one actually first pronounce without qualification that a parent language
CANNOT CO-EXIST with its daughter and then argue afterwards that that
language DOES NOT ACTUALLY EXIST after all?

LT went on to explain in the same post what is happening at the top of the
UPenn tree that I illustrated above:
<<It is concluded by the Penn group... that Anatolian was the first branch of
IE to split off from the rest. So, that top node, with its two daughters,
represents an initial split of the single LANGUAGE PIE, with one daughter
being the ancestor of Anatolian, and the other daughter being the single
common ancestor of everything else.  We now often speak of `broad PIE' -- the
ancestor of the whole family -- and `narrow PIE' -- the ancestor of
everything except Anatolian.  Narrow PIE is a sister LANGUAGE of
Proto-Anatolian...>> [Caps are mine]

[Larry Trask writes: "I firmly believe that the question `Are related
varieties A and B the same language or different languages?' is one devoid of
linguistic content."  So that Larry should find his own description of "the
single language PIE" and "narrow PIE" as "sister language" to Proto-Anatolian
equally "devoid of linguistic content."  Note also that either the two PIEs
are two different "languages" OR PIE co-existed with its daughter, by the
terms of Larry Trask's own statement about co-existence.]

Given Larry Trask's current stand, I would say that his argument is now with
the "Penn group" for "concluding that, since we have a name" (e.g., PIE)
"there must exist something 'out there' for the name to refer to."  Either wit
h the Penn group or - of course -  with his former self.

You see, I was just using THEIR terminology.  Look at the papers posted on
the UPenn tree website and you will see they are dripping with the term
'language' and "linguistic distinctions" between "related languages" and all
almost exclusively in a "linguistic" sense.  If anyone is guilty of
"reification", it is not myself (nor Lloyd, for that matter) who was merely
trying to get at the premise behind the tree and used the terms being used by
the authors.

Even going back to the first appearance of the UPenn tree as the source of
this whole question, it was asked: <<Is Phrygian still considered as a
possible ancestor or close relative of Armenian?  Is Macedonian considered
closer to Greek or Thracian?>>

To which Sean Crist replied:
<<Here is a partial answer; ...  In the last few years, Don Ringe, Tandy
Warnow, and Ann Taylor collaborated to produce a phylogeny of the
Indo-European LANGUAGES.... What was new in their approach was to use this
methodology to produce a phylogeny of a family of LANGUAGES...>> [Caps mine.]
 Crist showed a tree with Anatolian branching off from PIE to one side, and
nothing but a dotted line going off from PIE to the other.

I could only assume that Anatolian was one of those "languages" he referred
to.  And PIE was another.  And address my question in those terms.

If Larry Trask is saying that (to quote Larry) "an ancestor language cannot
co-exist with its own descendent" BECAUSE the issue is NOT "a linguistically
meaningful question" - then he should start his argument where the
terminology was first used - in the description of the UPenn tree and the
procedure it follows.  (I.e., first, "array the languages", then assign
characteristics, then build some trees.)  The Penn group has none of Larry's
problems with defining a language - to say the least.

Finally, Larry Trask wrote:
<<Is modern English "the same language" as Proto-Germanic?  As PIE?  If not,
then at what stage do we have a cutoff point between one language and the
next, and why?>>

I'm sure that Larry Trask's apparent position here - that Proto-Germanic and
modern English can't be linguistically distinguishable as separate
"languages" - deserves a much more formidable counterpoint than this
non-specialist correspondent can offer.  And perhaps the authors of the UPenn
tree (or perhaps Mr. Crist) would be just the ticket - especially since they
are the original reason that the term "language" was used in these
discussions.  And because they use the term "language" in just the way Larry
seems to object to.  And because their uses and definition of the term
"language" is why Larry announced with authority that "an ancestor LANGUAGE
cannot co-exist with its own descendent" in the first place.

Regards,
Steve Long


From Georg at home.ivm.de  Wed Oct 13 19:40:10 1999
From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 21:40:10 +0200
Subject: Campbell's def. of "language"
In-Reply-To: <0.1e85ef15.252e2ed1@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.214010.0200.>

>Campbell defines these terms (and reviewer Bartholomew
>     does not comment, so presumably regards these definitions
>     as quite normal, unremarkable):

>'dialect' is a variety (regional or social) of a language,
>     mutually intelligible with other dialects

>'language' is a distinct linguistic entity that is
>     mutually unintelligible with other languages

>I simply do not believe that Larry Trask is unaware that this is
>     standard linguistic usage.  He is not forced to use it himself,
>     but he is obligated to treat this usage with respect,
>     not to evade discussions based upon it by ridiculing it.

That something is "standard linguistic usage" does of course not mean that
there is nothing to comment or think about. We all have to use undefined
terms sometimes, but for some purposes definitions are important and a
matter which should be looked into every now and then. What Campbell does
is to *define* the terms "l." and "d." *for the purposes of his book*. This
is a recommendable practise. The very fact that C. *introduced explicitly*
these terms, accompanied by an explit purpose-focussed definition is
responsible for the reviewer not commenting about it. If he hadn't done
this, this or that reviewer might find reasons to ask what he means by
these terms. In a work of this kind, overflowing with names for linguistic
varieties, this is inevitable. On the other hand, if there were such a
thing as a "standard linguistic usage" of these terms, C. would hardly have
bothered to present a definition. Since there isn't, he had to and did.

Further, if this definition - well-suited for C.'s purposes and entirely
unobjectionable as long as the definition is maintained - were "standard"
in "linguistics", a lot of "languages" would, much to the surprise of their
speakers, fall under the rubrum "dialect". There simply *cannot* be such a
thing as "standard" use of these terms (only a *casual* use) in
linguistics, since it makes a great difference to classify lects according
to "purely" linguistic criteria (as, inter alia, mutual intelligibility),
or according to political, sociological and a host of other reasons, which
go normally into people's linguistic self-awareness.

There are other terms in linguistics and elsewhere which evade a
once-and-for-all definition (like /word/, /sentence/ and others). The
reason for this is that they, like /language/ have been around *before* any
meaningful science appeared which found itself in the position to say
something about the "things" people refer to by these terms. Any science
needs its own well-defined terminology, and terms from every-day language
are all too often laden with connotations of all sorts, which make them
unsuitable for precise definitions. Two ways out: introduce new, most often
latinate, terms, or use the old ones but *say what you mean with them*.
Campbell did this, others fail to. Thus, there is no reason not to respect
C.'s usage, whereas the practice of others, who don't care, is less worthy
of respect.

St.G.

Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
+49-228-69-13-32


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Wed Oct 13 22:26:49 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 18:26:49 -0400
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19991007083203.00983d30@popd.netcruiser>
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.182649.0400.>

On Thu, 7 Oct 1999, Stanley Friesen wrote:

> I question the assumption that the Anatolian languages necessarily split
> off earlier than the others.  Given the linguistic and archaeological
> facts, I suspect that the northern European languages, and probably
> Proto-Tocharian, split off at least as early as Anatolian.  Thus I see an
> original three or four-way split, not a simple bidding off of Anatolian

> [The northern group would be ancestral to Germanic, Celtic, and Italic, at
> least, and perhaps Balto-Slavis as well],

You must be new on this list; during August and September, the question of
the phylogeny of the IE languages was hashed over in great detail.  I'm
curious as to what linguistic and archaeological evidence you have in
mind; your claim is at odds with the work of Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor
which I have been discussing.  If you like, I can forward you some of the
emails which I sent out as a part of this dialog.

> And given that, again pace Renfrew, Anatolian almost certainly had to move
> through the Balkans prior to Greek arrival *there*, let alone their arrival
> in Greece proper, and that there is some evidence for a non-Greek IE
> language in Greece in place names, the time scale is further constrained.

If the speakers of prehistoric Anatolian travelled south along the west
coast of the Black Sea to the Bosporus, they need not have entered any
part of what is now Greece on their way into Anatolia.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From Georg at home.ivm.de  Wed Oct 13 23:27:02 1999
From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 01:27:02 +0200
Subject: Nors Josephson's Theory about a linguistic and cultural
 influence of Ancient Greek on East-Polynesia
In-Reply-To: <001b01bf142e$da46fe00$0100007f@i1g7v2>
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.012702.0200.>

>I should like to know some scholarly opinion about N. Josephson's theories
>concerning a presumptive linguistic Greek influence on Pacific area (ex. gr.
>cf. N. Josephson, Greek Linguistic Elements in the Polynesian Languages,
>Universitaetsverlag C. Winter, Heidelberg, 1987; or Idem, Eine
>archaisch-griechische Kultur auf der Osterinsel, Universitaetsverlag C.
>Winter,
>Heidelberg, 1999 ).

The Universitaetsverlag C. Winter, once well-reputed, got bankrupt a few
years after the publication of the first of the abovementioned titles (only
the name is continued by the new possessors).
I see a connection.

(Another nail in that publishing house's coffin was Mufti: Die
Sprachwissenschaft des Tscherkessischen, also from the 80s, championing the
theory of Adyghe *as* Indo-European)

St.G.

PS: This is of course only my personal opinion, and very likely to be not
more than my usual reluctance against scholarly breakthroughs paired with
bad manners, but there are reviews of this work, such as B. Nothofer: Die
historisch-vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft und die Hypothese einer
Verwandtschaft des Griechischen mit den polynesischen Sprachen, in: Die
deutsche Malaiologie: Festschrift I. Hilgers-Hesse (edd.: K.-H. Pampus et
al.) Heidelberg: Groos 1988, 77-89.
I vaguely remember a review in Die Sprache/Indogermanische Chronik,
uncertain date or number (1992 at the latest, I'd say) by M. Peeters, I
think, maybe someone knows better. It was very laconic and, as one might
expect, devastating.

Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
+49-228-69-13-32


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Oct 14 02:29:07 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 22:29:07 EDT
Subject: PIE vs. Proto-Language
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.222907.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/13/99 6:16:18 PM, Georg at home.ivm.de wrote:

<<Palaeontologists a/o archaeologists should be looking for signs of
early culture,...to approach the time where it would simply be necessary to
assume that people who did this and that or used this and that, or cooperated
in this and that way could not well have none so without considerably
elaborate communication skills. Having the brains is only a prerequesite for
this.>>

Let me just posit a slightly different scenario.  That the first change that
happened that moved early primates towards homo was the ability to make
complex sounds.  One of the core understandings of evolutionary theory is
that all adaptation is local and limited in time.
So this adaption would have had a very local and limited advantage - say, in
the ability to hunt communally or to signal with precision where food or
danger was on an ad hoc basis.

But with the ability to make more complex sounds would have come a number of
additional features that became more long term.  The most critical of these
would have been the ability to pass on acquired traits and knowledge from
generation to generation in an efficient form - verbally.  Human communalism
would have immediately become a more powerful tool for survival with the
addition of language.  Dogs and Japanese monkeys pass on non-genetic
knowledge from generation to generation - but they must do it by
demonstration.  Language permits the passing on of information without
demonstration - symbolically.  I can describe to you a hand-axe and how it
works without ever showing you one.  And you might be able to make one from
description alone.

Language therefore creates a cultural knowledge storage system that is
cumulative.  It keeps expanding.  Which would make a culture favor
individuals (among others) who could retain more of that accumulated
knowledge - it would favor larger harddrives, so to speak.  (There is an
analogy between the old 10meg harddrives and the 8gig drives becoming
standard today.)  And this would favor the development of bigger, if not more
specialized brains to store that accumulated information.

The pattern would be:
- communal action favors more complex signaling capability (speech)
- speech favors multi-generational communal information accrual
- continuing communal information accrual favors larger brains
- larger brains favor larger pools of communal knowledge (cultural
complexity) and so forth

In this view, early language becomes the enhanced vehicle for preserving
knowledge from one generation to another - human culture -(so that it does
not have to be relearned each new generation) and even accumulated.  And
EVENTUALLY accounts for increased brain size.  Language > human culture >
bigger brain.

Where would this date human language (in the big broad sense, not as a
language system)?  I received a post awhile back that pointed out that
handaxes date as far back possibly as 700,000 years ago.  And that the
quality and refinement of those handaxes steadily increase over time.  And
that there is no case in the animal kingdom where that kind of
generation-to-generation improvement has ever been evidenced.  Could those
handaxes have been improved by generation-to-generation demonstration?
Possibly.  But there are just no examples of demonstration alone being able
to keep information passing on for very long, much less while improvements
are also being made.  And so there is at least an argument that such steady,
cumulative technical improvement could not have been accomplished without
language.  A similar case can be made for the communal use of fire.

That would date the earliest forms of human language as early as 700,000
years ago.  Really not that long ago, when you consider how much knowledge
one would personally have to accumulate to say travel to the moon, make an
atom bomb or write new National Enquirer cover headlines every week.

Not arguing for this point of view.  Just offering it as a different POV.
One that connects our evolution intricately with language.  Not suddenly big
or specialized brains.  Not some extraordinary cerebral event.

But just the ability to make sounds complex enough so that information  could
be stored in those sounds (or written words) and passed on in that form from
generation to generation in the cumulative way that is so singularly
characteristic of human culture.

PS - Just saw who A&E's Biography picked as the number one (out of 100) most
influential person of the last Millennium, over Copernicus, Newton, Adam
Smith, Shakespeare, Pasteur, DaVinci, etc.

Gutenberg.

Regards,
Steve Long


From ECOLING at aol.com  Thu Oct 14 04:02:26 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 00:02:26 EDT
Subject: Agree on Multilateral Comparison (w John McLaughlin)
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.000226.EDT.>

I thank John McLaughlin for his very balanced statement.

I agree probably with even a bit more of it than he thinks.

I would only change SLIGHTLY the wording of a couple
of statements following:

> [Multilateral Comparison] is not a
>conclusive proof of anything in and of itself because it ignores factors
>of chance, fails to properly identify borrowing, fails to take into account
>historical and other nonlinguistic factors, and is dependent on the quality
>and quantity of available materials for the languages involved.  It can
>be suggestive of potential areas for further research.

I agree that MC does not provide proof, but it does not "ignore" chance,
rather, it aims to gain useful results despite the vagaries of chance
and noise in the data.  This difference in phrasing is important,
because it removes the imputation of incompetence among those
who know perfectly well what its uses are, and that it cannot do
what the Comparative Method can do when sufficient information
is available and when the languages are close enough (approximate
conditions, I'm not concerned about excessive exactness just at
this point).

WHEN USED properly as a heuristic,
I am most concerned about a weakness of Multilateral Comparison
in being influenced too much by massive borrowing.
Given the limited goals for which Multilateral Comparison is appropriate,
perhaps we should then think in terms of the wisdom
that when borrowing is massive enough,
it is hard to say which is the "true" ancestor language.
The biases of most of us linguists in favor of grammar as carrying
the "true" genetic line can be considered as just that, biases,
in some points of view, even though there is also truth in that
point of view.

>Misused, it can give
>the appearance of a final proof of genetic relationship that may or may
>not actually be there.

It is not Multilateral Comparison which can give the appearance
of final proof.  It is improper claims made by some practitioners.
That is little different from any other method,
which can equally be abused by claiming more for it than it can do.
I do not consider Multilateral Comparison to be more subject to this
than any other method.  (And I do not consider this a variant of
the view that we should not blame the guns for the murder rate,
it is human beings that fire them.)  The availability of Multilateral
Comparison in the tool kit does NOT itself contribute
to misuse of Multilateral Comparison.  Rather, clear teaching
in our introductory and graduate linguistics departments of what
the technique of Multilateral Comparison really is, independent
of whatever claims may have been made for it at one time or another,
is the best antidote.  Celebrate its successes, point out that it can
be used to suggest
ultimate non-relationship (the less close resemblances)
just as much as ultimate relationship (the closer resemblances).
Provide inoculation against misuse that does not go overboard
by globally condemning its use and disregarding how useful
it has in fact been in the history of work on both preliminary
classifications globally and preliminary classifications within
many language families.  Teaching of historical linguistics
should not ignore heuristics, they are just as important,
even if less "final" (in mature fields), as are the methods used
to refine details when languages are known to be related.
It is the LACK of teaching of the proper use of Multilateral
Comparison which is most likely to give rise to abuses of it.

I even agree that Greenberg has most often overstated his case.
I think this is because he is attempting to use
Multilateral Comparison at a presumed depth of separation
much greater than that in most of its demonstrated
successful uses.
Some of the deepest of the successful cases
probably include the internal classifications within the
major highest-level families of African languages.

However, I was a direct witness to early conversations by
Greenberg in which he admitted that all the method could do
was show which languages or families were relatively
closer or more distant.  I wish he had maintained that
approach more generally.  I also wish his critics had used
their knowledge to correct his errors AND THEN to evaluate
whether their corrected data caused his way of applying
Multilateral Comparison to yield different results,
rather than (illogically) arguing that the existence of error
made all aspects of what he did worthless.  There is error
in virtually everything human beings do.  Even massive
error needs to be evaluated for its effect on the outcome,
simply calling it massive does not remove the need to deal
with the actual facts.

I still believe that the subtle study of both
similarities and differences between the African and
American contexts may effectively teach us what can and
cannot be accomplished by Multilateral Comparison,
and may permit us to refine various versions of that method.

Sincrerely,
Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics


From mclasutt at brigham.net  Thu Oct 14 05:24:46 1999
From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 23:24:46 -0600
Subject: Campbell's def. of "language"
In-Reply-To: <0.1e85ef15.252e2ed1@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.232446.0600.>

Lloyd Anderson wrote

> Yesterday I received the latest issue of the Journal "Language",
> in which there is a review by Doris Bartholomew of
> Lyle Campbell's book
> *American Indian Languages: The historical linguistics of Native America*
> Oxford University Press 1997

...

> My own familiarity with Campbell's earlier work makes me
> very wary, because in his eagerness to defeat Greenberg's
> final conclusions, he has previously made what I consider
> serious logical errors, and in parts of his "Language" review of
> Greenberg's *Language in the Americas*, he even wrote
> in a very seriously misleading fashion, as if Greenberg's
> chapter on methodological analysis did not exist.

> That does not meet my standards of civic obligation, at least.

I think that Greenberg is mistaken in his conclusions, but I also agree that
many Americanists seemed to jump on the anti-Greenberg bandwagon.  However,
Greenberg's views on the languages of Native America were not a surprise
when they were published in 1987 and Americanists had been lining up for and
against for about a decade prior to their publication.  Greenberg had first
published in 1960 on the classification of the languages of Central and
South America, but at that time so little was known about those areas that
anyone could have said just about anything and not caused a ripple.  But I
was in the audience at Norman, Oklahoma in 1978 at the Mid-America
Linguistics Conference when he first presented his views on North America.
(He actually sat in on the paper that I read and asked me a couple of
questions at this my first professional meeting as a grad student, so I'll
always have a "warm fuzzy" memory of him despite my disagreements with his
conclusions.)  Mary Haas and several other legends of the Native American
linguistic pantheon were sitting in the front row as he spoke (he was the
keynote speaker).  You could have heard a pin drop and most of us were
stunned at his presentation and the conclusions he reached without using
careful comparative methodology.  That was the beginning of the division
among Americanists and the source of Lyle Campbell's vitriol.

> This book should be of great usefulness both to anyone
> interested in what is generally established knowledge
> of genetic relationships, and to anyone interested
> in methods of establishing new genetic relationships for
> languages of the world.

I completely agree.  The methodology chapters actually occupy a very large
portion of the book.

> I have looked at some portions of it in the past,
> but am not familiar enough with it at this point
> to review it independently.

I've owned my copy for about a year now and have read it a couple of times
already.  The methodology sections are very sound and represent the
classical comparative methodology.  There are also carefully argued sections
devoted to a variety of iconoclasms including Greenberg's.  He is thoughtful
and very careful in his discussions and he approaches the apostates with
much more care and respect than his Language review would indicate.  I saw a
draft of this book in Wick Miller's library when I helped clean out his
office after his untimely passing in 1994.  I'm not sure how long Wick had
it before his death, but Wick's copy was dog-eared, so Campbell had worked
on this for a long time.  It shows.

John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
mclasutt at brigham.net

Program Director
Utah State University On-Line Linguistics
http://english.usu.edu/lingnet

English Department
3200 Old Main Hill
Utah State University
Logan, UT  84322-3200

(435) 797-2738 (voice)
(435) 797-3797 (fax)


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Thu Oct 14 05:30:07 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 22:30:07 -0700
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
In-Reply-To: <b2c475ab.252d0173@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.223007.0700.>

At 03:48 PM 10/6/99 -0400, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:
>I'm not sure what sites or culture are being spoken of above.  But there is
>no special break in "cultural tradition" - except one - that occurs during
>this time.  More importantly, there is a continuity in many aspects of the
>early Greek material culture that remain consistent right from the end of the
>Neolithic (about 3500BC) through to the end of the Middle Helladic (about
>1500BC).

I sometimes think the critics of linguistic archaeology make too much of
this sort of continuity.  In a mixing of cultures in which one language
eventually displaces another, *naturally* many aspects of the culture of
the "losing" language will persist afterwards.

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 ...".

>Based on the evidence above, there is nothing to preclude the conjecture that
>"Greeks were in Greece" during or even before the Neolithic.  If one connects
>PIE with the first appearance of agriculture (a la Renfrew), then that could
>move the date of "proto-Greek" or its ancestors being in mainland Greece back
>towards 7000BC.

Except that Renfrew can only reach this "conclusion" by ignoring many facts
about PIE that are quite secure (e.g. the universality of *ekwos, and the
original distinction between wlkwos and kuoon) and which are inconsistent
with what is known about early Neolithic culture (no domesticated equids
and no domesticated dog).

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


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Oct 14 05:35:05 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 01:35:05 EDT
Subject: Change and What Remains
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.013505.EDT.>

I wrote:
<< And with regard to that, let me write again that bringing up "ceaseless
change" tells us nothing about whether enough "remained" of the ancestor so
that it could co-exist with the daughter.>>

In a message dated 10/6/99 9:35:22 AM, Larry Trask wrote:

<<Sorry, but, with the best will in the world, I can't understand this.
What is the force here of `enough'?>>

With "enough" of "the best will in the world" I'm sure you can figure out
exactly what I mean.

You know full well what you yourself wrote in your textbook.  You can't with
"the best will in the world" forget that you yourself drew a line at which
point a language is no longer the same language: 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.)

You can say that that quote was not meant for specialists, only for students.
 But you really CAN'T say you don't understand what it meant.  It meant that
MUTUAL COMPREHENSIBILITY was the measure of when a language is no longer the
same language.  If you find that an inadequate definition for
"professionals", that's fine.  But please don't pretend that a language
"changing enough" to be become a different language - ancestor or otherwise -
is something you don't understand.  It is precisely how you described Latin
changing into other languages: "Within another couple of centuries, speakers
of Latin in Spain, France, Italy... could no longer understand each
other,...it no longer made much sense to apply a single name to this babel of
regional varieties...."

I wrote:
<<The coexistence of ancestor with daughter language is obviously a separate
question.>>

Larry Trask replied:
<<I don't see how.  A living language never remains identical from one
generation to the next.>>

With the help of "the best will in the world" I'm sure you can "see how":

There is no need for the ancestor to remain IDENTICAL in order for it to be
the same language, by mutual comprehensibility standards.  You drew the line
between former dialects and new languages in your textbook at the point where
the dialects "cease to be mutually comprehensible at all."  That is far, far
from the point where a language is no longer IDENTICAL to its former self.

And please don't bring up my non-innovative language hypothetical.  It had
nothing to do with your statement "an ancestor language cannot co-exist with
its own descendent."  That hypothetical was posted long after you made that
statement.  And never had anything to do with the truth of your statement.

As far as requiring that an ancestor must be IDENTICAL to its former self
when a descendent shows up, why would you set such a standard?  When is such
a standard ever applied in any science that observes identity over time?

You are not identical in shape or size to the person you were when you were
two years old.  Morphologically, even down to the cells you once were made up
of, you are not IDENTICAL to "Larry Trask" at that age.  However, any
biologist would be willing to say you were the same organism.  Members of
biological species are hardly identical among themselves or over time.  But a
specialist can easily identify the bones of a domestic cat or a human from
200 years ago and confidently distinguish the two species.

It is totally inconsistent to require that the ancestor stay IDENTICAL to
itself in order to be called the same language.  If you want to find a way to
make it a different language,  the obvious thing any scientific methodology
would do is point to an ESSENTIAL change, one that alters the DEFINING
CHARACTERISTICS of the language.  E.g., the point where the biologist or
biochemist or doctor would say that the organism being viewed is no longer
"Larry Trask."

<<The English that I speak is, in a reasonable sense, a daughter of the
English my parents spoke.  And the English the young people are speaking
back home, which is already noticeably different from my own, can be
regarded as a daughter of the English I speak.  In that sense, I
suppose, a language can co-exist with its own daughter.  Is that what
you mean?>>

With "the best will in the world", I cannot believe you are asking this.
This all started with my asking if the peak on the UPenn tree meant that PIE
co-existed with Anatolian.  And you think I meant that your parents are
speaking an ancestor language of modern English?

No, you don't think that.  You were quite confident in describing the
relationship between an ancestor language and a daughter and even a sister.
You wrote: <<So, that top node, with its two DAUGHTERS, represents an initial
split of the single language PIE, with one DAUGHTHER being the ANCESTOR of
Anatolian, and the other DAUGHTER being the single common ANCESTOR of
everything else.  We now often speak of `broad PIE' -- the ANCESTOR of the
whole family -- and `narrow PIE' -- the ANCESTOR of everything except
Anatolian.  Narrow PIE is a SISTER language of Proto-Anatolian...>> [Caps are
mine]

Did you mean that there were some parents who were speaking "wide PIE" at the
same time that the young people were speaking "narrow PIE?"  Is that what you
meant by an ancestor?  I don't think so.  So why would you think that's what
I meant?

And BTW did you mean that "wide PIE" was not "identical" to "narrow PIE"?  Or
did you mean that "wide PIE" was totally incomprehensible to speakers of
"narrow PIE"?  Which was it?  Apparently the only distinction you make
between "wide PIE" and "narrow PIE" is by their descendents - you don't even
seem to consider whether they were identical or mutually comprehensible or
not.

I will tell you what I meant and I think that if you use anything close to
"the best will in the world," you will have no problem understanding it.  I
will not assume that you are cynically pretending to misunderstand me.

In your textbook, you wrote about dialects fragmenting and forming different
languages:  "And it is clear that such fragmentation of single languages into
several different languages has happened countless times..."

Up to that point, a dialect is still just a variety of the original language.
(See your Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology where you define "dialect" as
"a regionally or socially distinctive variety of a language, differing from
other varieties in its grammar and/or lexicon.")

This is all that is required for "an ancestor language to coexist with its
descendent" - by your own terms above :
Given ten co-existing, changing dialects "of a language" - say, Latin as an
example - one dialect is the first to become "mutually incomprehensible."
The other nine are all still mutually comprehensible.  The nine are still
"varieties" of Latin.  The nine are dialects of the "ancestor language."  The
new language is a descendent.  They co-exist.

I think with enough of the best will in the world, you can understand why
this is a serious, good faith counterargument to your statement - in terms
drawn from statements that you yourself have published.  If you have
rethought those terms, that's fine and understandable.  But I do hope that
you will not take the position that what I wrote above is something
particularly difficult for you to understand.

Regards,
Steve Long


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Thu Oct 14 06:13:38 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 23:13:38 -0700
Subject: Contributions by Steve Long
In-Reply-To: <E11b2wk-0005YF-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.231338.0700.>

At 03:33 PM 10/12/99 +0100, Larry Trask wrote:
>Stanley Friesen writes:

>[on my Yugoslav example]

>> This actually accords with what one book on linguistic change suggested is
>> the *main* cause of language change: a social desire to differentiate one's
>> group from some other group.  ...

>I don't know of any book or article which makes such a strong claim as this,
>and I must confess I find it implausible.  But there *has* been some recent
>work showing that this desire for linguistic distance has been a major factor
>in certain cases.

I may have slightly overstated (without the actual book, I cannot get a
quote: all I know is the source of this is certainly NOT Hock's book).

But I am fairly certain that the book at least cast doubt on the importance
of "mis-hearing" by children in language change.  So, I think saying the
author asserts that it is the most important cause of change is reasonable.

>> There is another way out of this dilemma.  At least in many cases
>> substantial language change occurs in a *single* generation.  In the
>> history of English, one such case occurred during the Wars of Roses, and
>> separates Middle English from Modern English.

>Perhaps, but I find it very hard to believe that *most* linguistic change
>occurs over a single generation.  The evidence seems to be clearly against
>this.

It is hard to be certain.  In so many cases we just lack evidence.  The
Latin to separate Romance languages transition is hidden behind the
persistent tradition of writing in classical Latin.  I suspect that the Old
English to Middle English transition is actually equally hidden by a
persistence of an older literary tradition (with OE spellings and case
forms continuing in use well after they have changed or disappeared in speech).

>By the way, what was there that was so dramatic during the Wars of the Roses?

The wars themselves.  They were bloody, and disruptive of the stability of
government.  Most noble families were killed off during those wars, leaving
few indeed of the old Norman families alive afterwards (and Henry VII
eliminated many of those).

But that in itself is not sufficient to explain language change.  I suspect
there was also an matter of some sort of profound "generation gap" as well.

>> And it is occurring right now for the Blackfoot language, with older tribe
>> members speaking Old Blackfoot, and the younger ones speaking New
>> Blackfoot.  The changes are quite substantial, and include replacement of
>> vowel+glottal stop with a long/creaky vowel.

>I have encountered comparable cases elsewhere.  But, again, it seems doubtful
>that language change mostly occurs in sudden and dramatic jumps, or
>saltations, to borrow a term from evolutionary biology.

>> One of two places:
>> 1. at some historical point where there was a major break between
>> successive generations.

>At what point?

I don't know, as I haven't studied the issue.

>Anyway, I think it's improper to pick a contemporary speaker as the judge.
>Everybody at every stage can normally understand the speech of the two or
>three immediately preceding or following generations.  My grandparents would
>probably have understood their own grandparents better than I could have, had
>I ever been able to meet them.

Actually, I am not so sure about that.  Language fashions, like clothing
fashions, often go in circles.  I suspect you might have been able to
understand your great great grandparents better than you think.   Certainly
I have no trouble understanding Mark Twain, even though he was about the
same age as my great great grandparents!  Indeed, I find him more
accessible and readable than the more recent F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was
my grandfather's contemporary.

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


From lmfosse at online.no  Thu Oct 14 08:41:33 1999
From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 09:41:33 +0100
Subject: SV: Change and What Remains
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.094133.0100.>

Robert Orr [SMTP:colkitto at sprint.ca] skrev 12. oktober 1999 06:25:

> I had a cousin by marriage who moved to  Canada as a young girl.

> My father met her for the first time when she was a very old lady and said:
> "I heard this lovely 1920's voice".

> My mother had an aunt, from the "Inverness area" who spent her life in
> Paris.

> My father spent several years of his boyhood in Inverness.  Around 1950 my
> father met htis aunt for the first time, and he said that she had the same
> voice as much older people he remmembered in the Inverness area.

> Does this constitute  "parent and daughter co-existing" at all?

For what it is worth, I can back up this experience with emigrant Norwegians. I
have met old emigrants to the US who still spoke their childhood dialect in a
manner that is not  used today. And there are still Norwegians using the dative
in their dialects who coexist with younger dialect speakers who have dropped
the dative. So two sligthly different versions of the same language or dialect
may apparently exist side by side.

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 Georg at home.ivm.de  Thu Oct 14 09:05:40 1999
From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 11:05:40 +0200
Subject: Moldavian (was: Contributions by Steve Long)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.10.9910121131550.24676-100000@rask>
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.110540.0200.>

>After Moldova's independence in 1991, the question of whether the official
>language should be called ROMANIAN or MOLDOVIAN rocked its political
>cradle. In Moldova's present constitution, the official language is called
>MOLDOVIAN, but it is acknowledged as a variety of Romanian, and Moldovian
>has even followed the recent Romanian spelling reform.

Thanks for these useful additions, of course the fact that this language
was created overnight is instrumental in its overnight "extinction"; what
always struck me most about Soviet attutudes towards this language was the
fact that even the most authoritative accounts of M. (e.g. Jazyki Narodov
SSSR) always (correctly ;-) included M. in the Romance family of lgs., but
that any statement to the effect that it might, within this family, be
particularly close to Romanian, was carefully avoided. This bordered on
hysteria. A useful account of all this is to be found in Donald L. Dryer:
Moldavian Linguistic Realities on pp. 234-253 in the proc. of the 4th conf.
on Non-Slavic Languages of the USSR, Columbus/O: Slavica 1994. The status
of Moldavian has been the subject of other interesting papers in earlier
conference volumes, one of which was entitled: "How non-Romanian is
Moldavian ?", closing with the dictum: "Barely." No, sorry, I forgot the
author and publishing-date of this one.

St.G.

Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
+49-228-69-13-32


From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Oct 14 10:00:57 1999
From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max Wheeler)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 11:00:57 +0100
Subject: Basque 'sei'
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.110057.0100.>

-- Begin original message --

> From: "Roslyn M. Frank" <roz-frank at uiowa.edu>

>>> But Gascon-Be'arnais is Ibero-Romance in many ways, including
>>> it's apical <s>.

> Miguel, does that mean that Gascon-Beárnais also had a laminal /s/ or just
> the apical one?

> And if so, were the two respesented as <z> (laminal) and <s> (apical) as is
> the convention in Euskera?

-- End original message --

Gascon-Bearnais, like all Romance languages as far as I know, has only one
/s/, i.e. only one sibilant place of articulation. Whether this was always so
is another matter. In French, Occitan, Catalan, Portuguese, and Andalusian
Spanish modern /s/ is a merger of inherited /s/ and the reflex of, among other
things, /k/ before non-low front vowels, which almost certainly went through a
stage /ts/ (affricate), which may have been laminal, given that in
non-Andalusian European Spanish it resulted in /<theta>/ (dental fricative).
It is conceivable that /ts/ went through a stage [laminal dental/alveolar
fricative] before merger with /s/, but I don't know of evidence on the matter.

We shouldn't assume, without looking at the evidence, that the current
distribution of laminal versus apical /s/ phonemes in Europe can be projected
way back into the past.

Max
______________________________________________________________
Max W. Wheeler
School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer
BRIGHTON BN1 9QH, G.B.

Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975 Fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 Email: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk
______________________________________________________________


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Oct 14 11:34:40 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 12:34:40 +0100
Subject: Campbell's def. of "language"
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.123440.0100.>

Lloyd Anderson writes:

>  Yesterday I received the latest issue of the Journal "Language",
>  in which there is a review by Doris Bartholomew of
>  Lyle Campbell's book
>  *American Indian Languages: The historical linguistics of Native America*
>  Oxford University Press 1997

>  Campbell defines these terms (and reviewer Bartholomew
>       does not comment, so presumably regards these definitions
>       as quite normal, unremarkable):

>  'dialect' is a variety (regional or social) of a language,
>       mutually intelligible with other dialects

>  'language' is a distinct linguistic entity that is
>       mutually unintelligible with other languages

>  I simply do not believe that Larry Trask is unaware that this is
>       standard linguistic usage.  He is not forced to use it himself,
>       but he is obligated to treat this usage with respect,
>       not to evade discussions based upon it by ridiculing it.

OK; let's talk about this.

First, Lyle Campbell is a friend of mine.  I have the greatest respect for
his work.  I have read his book on American languages from cover to cover,
and I enjoyed it greatly.  It's the perfect work for a non-specialist who
wants an overview of the state of play in American historical and
comparative linguistics.

Now, in his first chapter, Campbell points out a number of the difficulties
he faced in compiling his book.  Like other parts of the world, the Americas
contain many instances of related but distinct language varieties, some of
them closely related, others more distantly related.  Mutual
comprehensibility between related varieties may range, as usual, from 100%
to zero.  Also as usual, specialists have often arrived at very different
classifications of the resulting position.  Just to cite one example, the
large and messy Zapotecan complex has variously been counted at anything
between six and 55 distinct languages (p. 158).  Campbell reports (pp. 3-4)
that specialists have counted the American languages at anything from a
minimum of 400 to a maximum of over 2500.

Now, for his purposes in writing this book, he needs to adopt a policy, and
his policy is spelled out on pp. 7-8.  These are the definitions quoted
above.

Now, it is *perfectly clear* from the context that Campbell is spelling out
a particular policy devised for a particular purpose.  Nowhere does he give
the slightest hint that his definitions are intended to be universal ones.
Nowhere does he suggest that other definitions, other criteria or other
classifications are inappropriate, misguided or wrong.  And *nowhere* does
he assert or imply that his choices are "standard linguistic usage".
Quite the contrary, in fact.  On p. 7, he tells us this: "It is important to
clarify this terminology and to specify how such terms are used in this book
at the outset."

Note the wording: "in this book".

It is simply that Campbell has to do *something* in order to get on with his
book.  And, quite properly, he is explaining his choices.

Also on p. 7, Campbell confesses that mutual intelligibility may be
"difficult...to define or apply in practice".  He says no more about this,
and we are left to conclude that Campbell is relying on his own or his
colleagues' judgements of mutual comprehensibility.

All of this is, or should be, perfectly obvious to any reader of the book.
But Lloyd Anderson -- who apparently has not read the book -- is extracting
bits and pieces badly out of context, declaring Campbell's policies here to
be "standard linguistic usage", and accusing me of "ridiculing" it.

Not guilty.  I've read the book.  Lloyd apparently hasn't, and he should not
be quoting bits of it out of context in such a way.  Nor have I ever
ridiculed the kind of policy adopted here by Campbell.

There's more.  Linguists commonly invoke a number of criteria in deciding
how many languages to recognize and where to put the boundaries.  Only when
no other criteria are available -- written traditions, standard forms,
political boundaries, or whatever -- do we fall back on mutual
intelligibility as the last gasp.  And mutual intelligibility is not such a
great criterion, because it varies along a continuum, and there is no
principled way of drawing language boundaries when we find -- as we often do
-- that mutual intelligibility among a group of related varieties varies
between, say, 20% and 80%.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From mcv at wxs.nl  Thu Oct 14 19:42:00 1999
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 19:42:00 GMT
Subject: Perfective-Imperfective (2) - Habitual
In-Reply-To: <003d01bf0d80$325e9ea0$879f113f@oemcomputer>
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.194200.GMT.>

"Patrick C. Ryan" <proto-language at email.msn.com> wrote:

>Is it therefore appropriate to say that:

>'Lisa suele fumar'

>can be interpreted as: 'Lisa is accustomed to smoking'?

>And if 'Lisa is used to smoking' is equivalent to 'Lisa is accustomed to
>smoke', is it possible, in some contexts, for 'Lisa suele fumar' to be
>interpreted as virtually equivalent to 'Lisa esta' acostumbrada a fumar'?

If you consider English "Lisa used to smoke" to be in some
contexts virtually equivalent to "Lisa was used to smoking".

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Thu Oct 14 00:03:48 1999
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 00:03:48 -0000
Subject: Possessives
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.000348.0000.>

Dear Larry and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 1999 5:12 PM

[PR previously]

<snip>

>> One of the principal benefits of terming this class of words
>> "possessive pronouns" is that it enables us to identify comparable
>> classes of words in IE, English, and Basque --- even though the
>> details of their employment may differ.

[LT]
> Well, this reminds me of Abe Lincoln's little joke.  "How many legs does
> a sheep have if you call the tail a leg?"  "Five?"  "No, four: calling
> the tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."

> Possessive items, in general, are "comparable" among languages only
> insofar as they are translation equivalents.  Syntactically, they can
> and do exhibit many different kinds of behavior, requiring them to be
> assigned to various parts of speech, or sometimes to no part of speech.

> The English possessives like `my' are determiners because they behave
> like determiners.  They do not behave like pronouns, and so they are not
> pronouns.  And they certainly don't behave like adjectives.

[PR]
It seems to be the rationale of the approach Larry espouses to assign words
to classes based on their ability to occur in certain positions within
grammatically well-formed sentences --- what I would call the slot-theory.

That is certainly one method of analysis; and, in certain cases, I would
admit it may be useful.

But, it is not the only useful rationale that may be used, a broad-minded
position that I have not seen Larry espouse in any context.

His preference is a direct outgrowth of the school to which he subscribes,
and the definitions that school generates.

His definition of 'pronoun' (as contained in his dictionary) is: "The
lexical category, or a member of this category, whose members typically
function as noun phrases in isolation, not normally requiring or permitting
the presence of determiners or other adnominals, and whose members typically
have little or no intrinsic meaning or reference."

[ moderator snip ]

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 meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er
mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)


From swheeler at richmond.edu  Thu Oct 14 23:51:46 1999
From: swheeler at richmond.edu (Stuart Wheeler)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 19:51:46 -0400
Subject: Greater Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite Language Family
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.195146.0400.>

On March 17-19 of 2000 a colloquium entitled "Greater Anatolia and the
Indo-Hittite Language Family" will be held at the University of Richmond in
Richmond, Virginia.  The conference will be hosted by Robert Drews,
Professor of Classics and History at Vanderbilt University and visiting
Professor of Classics at the University of Richmond.

Assuming the Indo-Hittite theory as a point of departure, the organizers
hope that the colloquium will explore but also narrow the possibilities for
the relationship of Greater Anatolia (everything from the Aegean to the
Caspian, and from the Caucasus to the Jazirah) to both the Anatolian and
the "traditional" Indo-European branches of Indo-Hittite.  The colloquium
will begin on Friday evening with a public lecture by Professor Lord Colin
Renfrew, followed by a reception for participants and registrants.  The
title of Professor Renfrew's address is, "The Hittites and Indo-European:
Some Historical Questions."  On Saturday and on Sunday morning invited
speakers will present eight papers, approaching the topic from a wide
variety of disciplines and perspectives, and the papers will be followed by
two critical responses.  It is hoped that all papers and responses will be
intelligible to scholars outside the presenter's own specialty.

Papers will be presented by Elizabeth Wayland Barber, William Darden,
Margalit Finkelberg, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Peter Kuniholm, Alexander Lehrman,
Colin Renfrew, and Paul Zimansky.   Craig Melchert and Jeremy Rutter have
agreed to present critical responses.  Funding for the colloquium will be
provided by a matching grant made to the University of Richmond by the
National Endowment for the Humanities.

All conference details can be accessed at
<http://hermes.richmond.edu/anatolia>.


From roz-frank at uiowa.edu  Fri Oct 15 00:22:16 1999
From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 19:22:16 -0500
Subject: Basque 'sei'
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.192216.0500.>

Four items.

1) Larry Trask has brought into play  what appears to be compelling toponymic
evidence in order to refute the claim that <sei> might have been copied into
Euskera from Gascon. Yet Seguy (1951) whose research is discussed in Ruffie and
Bernard (1976)  indicates that the final element of such the place names was
rendered variously as <-os>, <-osse>, <-ons> <-ost> and <-oz>. If one assumes
that the original suffixing element was in all cases <-otz> "cold" (which is
not entirely clear),  there seems to be a certain ambivalence concerning which
sibilant was chosen to represent the original Basque suffix in Gascon. The
relevant map with the isoglosses is reproduced in Trask 1996: 41). It also
indicates attestations of corresponding Aragonese endings in <ues> and <ueste>.


2) Larry Trask hasn't mentioned (with respect to this item) that in Euskera,
/z/ regularly undergoes palatalization, e.g., in the case of the pronoun <zu>
"you" which commonly becomes <xu> (palatalized) in northern dialects, and that
Azkue and others write or represent that sound as <s> with a "tilde."
Furthermore, palatalization of sibilants in Basque creates a situation in which
both the letter <z> and the letter <s> can become conflated and represented by
the same letter, e.g., as <s> although at times with a "tilde" (cf. the dozens
of examples of this in Azkue's dictionary).

Among the commonplace palatalizations in northern dialects we have the case of
<sei> (Azkue II: 247).  This permutation is so common in other dialects of
Euskera that when I learned Basque, primarily through contacts with native
speakers of the language from Goierri in Gipuzkoa (a southern dialect), I
thought that it always had a palatalized sibilant. Interestingly, this
palatalization was commented upon recently by Max Wheeler with respect to
Gascon:

[snip]
<Luchaire (1879) on Pyrenean Gascon has abundant cases of
<final /-s/ maintained, in dialect transcriptions. The only item I can <see
with s-vocalization in any of his transcribed dialect texts is <mais> 'more' in
proclitic contexts before /j/ or /dZ/. Nothing similar in the documents he
cites. And <seis>, he notes, is often pronounced with an initial pal.-alv
fricative.

3) Furthermore, in reference to whether <sei> was copied at some time in the
past from some non-Basque language, one could construct the following argument.
In the case of the numbers 5, 7, 8 and 9, if one were to assume that they were
all indigenous to Euskera (that none of them are "loans" not even ancient ones,
(cf. Miguel C.'s contribution suggesting the contrary) we would find that we
could argue that earlier all of them ended in a consonant cluster that had /z/
as an element: <bortz> (*<bortzi> 5, <zazpi> (*<zatzi> or *<zaptzi>) 7,
<zortzi> 8, and <bederatzi> 9. Such a reconstruction would make <sei> an
anomaly in the series and, hence, suggest that it was copied from some
non-Basque language, e.g., perhaps an IE language, which was in contact with it
at some time in the past. The past 2500 years would have brought it into close
contact with Celtic, Latin/Romance, Germanic (Visogoths) speaking peoples. As a
result, there would have been a number of  opportunities for this IE item to
have entered the language.

4) I believe that Larry Trast argued that in the case of words copied (early?)
from Latin and ending in <x> (sorry I can't find the exact email), the Basque
word never drops the final sibilant complex, i.e., it is copied into Euskera as
/tz/ (again forgive me if I"m misquoting). However, there would seem to be a
few words that don't follow this rule, e.g., Basque <trebe> which I was once
told comes from Latin <trebax>. Are there others?

Conclusion: things are somewhat more complicated than they might appear to be
at first glance. Although I don't believe we are any closer to a definitive
solution to the problem, there does seem to be evidence that could be mustered
for several different scenarios. The four points above are meant only to
provide a bit of additional data for the analysis, not necessarily to suppport
one position or another.  I leave it to the experts to figure out whether any
of the above information helps one cause over the other.

Izan untsa,
Roz


From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu  Thu Oct 14 13:37:15 1999
From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 09:37:15 -0400
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.093715.0400.>

Eduard Selleslagh <edsel at glo.be> wrote:
> after all, Elamite - which was in the same situation - was
> finally recognized as Dravidian

Actually, Dravidianologists profess agnosticism or reservations: The most
sympathetic view seems to be that a connection is believable but not
proven. Kamil Zvelebil, in his original review of McAlpin, pointed out
several problems; his more recent books seem to indicate guarded
acceptance, but still he leaves himself some escape hatches.

>[rather strangely late, if you ask me, because
> the word Elaam still exists in Tamil, I was told]

I don't know what Elamites called themselves and how they pronounced it.
In Modern Tamil it is i:zham, where the `zh' stands for the same sound as
in `tamilzh'. In some dialects, it comes out a retroflex l, but the older
pronunciation (and still the standard pronunciation) is not quite an l.
People have claimed success in teaching it to Americans starting from some
American varieties of r. Some attempt to connect retroflex s of Sanskrit
to it (and the transliteration as zh or z-underdot seems to come from
Cyrilic which makes sound like a shibilant). It seems to me that the
difficulty is describing it due to ignoring the most important bit: the
tongue moves along the roof of the mouth >while< the sound is being made.

Anyway, i:zham nowadays refers to Sri Lanka or rather the northern parts
of it. I am not sure why anyone should have rushed to connect this to
Elam.


From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu  Thu Oct 14 13:50:46 1999
From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 09:50:46 -0400
Subject: Respect goes both ways!
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.095046.0400.>

Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk> wrote:

> I am completely mystified.  The relation "is the same as" is
> unquestionably transitive. [Rest of the argument deleted]

As philosophers have been aware for two or more thounsands of years, this
argument leads to conclusions which make all science questionable [for one
extreme example, read Nagarjuna].

Am I the same person I was when I wrote the previous sentence? After all,
merely by breathing, the set of atoms that make up me (whatever that
means) has changed. But if you say yes, by a long chain of equivalences,
it must follow that I am the same person that I was when I was conceived.
But was I even a person at that point?


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Fri Oct 15 01:39:50 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 21:39:50 EDT
Subject: Nors Josephson's Theory about a linguistic and cultural
 influence of Ancient Greek on East-Polynesia
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.213950.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/13/99 5:33:08 PM, MF1107 at mclink.it wrote:

<<I should like to know some scholarly opinion about N. Josephson's theories
concerning a presumptive linguistic Greek influence on Pacific area (ex. gr.
cf. N. Josephson, Greek Linguistic Elements in the Polynesian Languages,
Universitaetsverlag C. Winter, Heidelberg, 1987; or Idem, Eine
archaisch-griechische Kultur auf der Osterinsel, Universitaetsverlag C. Winter,
Heidelberg, 1999 ).>>

For those interested, there's a brief page on Josephson's '87 piece with word
comparisons at:
http://www.ancientgr.com/Unknown_Hellenic_History/Eng/Words_in_Hawai.htm
(the url may wrap around in e-mail and have to be deleted back to one line)

S. Long


From colkitto at sprint.ca  Sat Oct 16 04:24:37 1999
From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr)
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 00:24:37 -0400
Subject: Updates regarding UPenn tree
Message-ID: <SAT.16.OCT.1999.002437.0400.>

Gaelic has an f/zero alternation (f/fh orthographically), and also what
looks like an  s/f alternation (Lenited IE *sw develops to Goidelic f
(non-lenited sw becomes s) and Welsh chw (there are not many examples, and
these are often obscured by subsequent sound chnages and levellings).

Gaelic f is actually a development of Indo-European *w in non-lenited
position (lenited *w develops to zero).  cf. fear/fhear (< IE wir-);
Brythonic  develops IE *w to g(w) in non-lenited position, cf. Welsh gwr (<
IE *wir-).

These would completely independent of the hw > f sound change in Buchan,
Banff, etc., discussed earlier.  (by the way, "where" in North-East Scots
would be "far" or "faur"; Scottish Gaelic "far" - "where" is not related, it
is a development of "de bharr (barr)"

Robert Orr


From Odegard at means.net  Fri Oct 15 01:51:26 1999
From: Odegard at means.net (Mark Odegard <Odegard@means.net>)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 01:45:26 -6
Subject: Mutual Intelligibility. [was Re: Misrepresenting others' views]
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.014526.6.>

On 13 Oct 99 at 10:47, ECOLING at aol.com wrote:

> Saying that many linguists commonly use a definition of
> distinct languages referring in some way to "mutual
> intelligibility" in no way implies that they are in any sense
> unaware of other factors which would enter into a refined
> definition.

I going to use this snippet to turn the subject onto the more general
question of 'mutual intelligibility' and the uselessness of the term.
Let's face it: Geordie (the dialect found in Newcastle on Tyne) is
unintelligible to most other native-speakers of English --
particularly if the particular Geordie being listened to is suffused
with ethnic pride and wants to exclude some flapping ears.
Nonetheless, if you taped a pub conversation, then had it
transcribed word-for-word, and accounting for Tyneside slang, it
comes out as informal low-register Standard English. Beyond 'slang'
and the peculiariaties of the 'accent', it's my understanding
there are no grammatical or lexical differences that make it in any
way extraordinary, when compared to other English 'dialects'.

The issue is rather modern. In times past, in times when the mass
of humanity was illiterate, if one group shifted its 'accent' too
far away from the 'standard', it was de facto a separate language.
But if you, the modern linguist, did a word-for-word
phonemo-grammatico-lexical analysis, you'd see it was the *same*
language.

One wonders if the ancient reporters were hearing an extravagantly
sound-shifted 'dialect' of Greek when they mention the Pelasgian
language. The question becomes pointed when you also ask if the
language of the Makedones was really 'Greek'. Was Philip of
Macedon's mother tongue an Illyrian 'dialect'? I vaguely remember
reading once that Alexander had to learn proper Greek at Aristotles' knee.

I've posited a grammatico-lexical definition of 'language', but this
has its problems too. What happens when there are major grammatical
innovations, but of a such transparent nature that the next-door
cognate has no problems understanding it (e.g., collapsing locative
ablative and instrumental into dative+preposition)? My answer is they
are separate languages, inasmuch as both speakers will regard the
other's speech as 'ungrammatical'.

The third possibility is complete lexical replacement, possibly with
some phonological changes, but nothing in terms of grammar. I don't think
such a thing is possible but would like to be proved wrong. English
comes closest to this, but no one is going to say English is anything
other than Germanic, notwithstanding all the French we've devoured.

My point is that 'mutual intelligibility' is not a proper test for
'separate-languageness' or of 'same-languageness'. Not for known
written languages where we can all consult the big OED-style
historical dictionaries.

Someone needs to come up with a few new words that everyone can agree
on. The word 'lect' is useful, but limited.
--
Mark Odegard   mailto:odegard at means.net


From Odegard at means.net  Fri Oct 15 04:52:54 1999
From: Odegard at means.net (Mark Odegard <Odegard@means.net>)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 04:46:54 -6
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.044654.6.>

On 13 Oct 99 at 17:50, Larry Trask wrote:

> Why did Anatolian have to move through the Balkans?

> Even if you don't buy Anatolia as the PIE homeland, why
> couldn't Anatolian have entered Anatolia across the Caucasus or
> from east of the Caspian Sea, through Iran?

> And why did Greek have to move through the Balkans?

I think most of us here are ignorant of geography, i.e, the easy way
to get where they got.

My own current view is that Anatolian moved from what is now SE
Bulgaria into Anatolia via the Black Sea (yeah, boats). I can't
provide a citation, but there are scholarly mutterings about a
sea-level rise ca. 3100 BCE or somewhat before that pushed Sumer and
Egypt upwards from the then-seashore into history with the clear
conclusion that their beginnings as well as the archaeological
evidence that goes with it is now inundated.

What you have are 'civilized' IEs, Tripolye culture acculturated IEs,
down by the sea. Presumably, it's a gradual sea-level rise, but a
definite one. Every year, a few inches, maybe a few feet -- a whole
meter -- of seashore disappears. The did not go over the mountains
into Thessaly and thence into nothern or central Greece. They went to
Troy! An easier route when you have boats.

So. As a seat-of-the pants theory that cannot be proved, the
Anatolians were, oh, 3100, 3200 BCE while the other group of
IE-speakers, the group that was ancestral to all the other IE
languages, were still hopelessly land-lubbers up where the steppe
merged into forest. Anatolian can be seen as a happenstance offshoot
that got lucky and left us written records 2500 years later. The rest
of us, of course, were still chasing aurochesen somewhere rather
north of the Black Sea.
--
Mark Odegard   mailto:odegard at means.net


From edsel at glo.be  Fri Oct 15 10:59:55 1999
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 12:59:55 +0200
Subject: Campbell's def. of "language"
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.125955.0200.>

-----Original Message-----
From: ECOLING at aol.com <ECOLING at aol.com>
Date: Wednesday, October 13, 1999 7:28 PM

>Yesterday I received the latest issue of the Journal "Language",
>in which there is a review by Doris Bartholomew of
>Lyle Campbell's book
>*American Indian Languages: The historical linguistics of Native America*
>Oxford University Press 1997

>Campbell defines these terms (and reviewer Bartholomew
>     does not comment, so presumably regards these definitions
>     as quite normal, unremarkable):

>'dialect' is a variety (regional or social) of a language,
>     mutually intelligible with other dialects

>'language' is a distinct linguistic entity that is
>     mutually unintelligible with other languages

>I simply do not believe that Larry Trask is unaware that this is
>     standard linguistic usage.  He is not forced to use it himself,
>     but he is obligated to treat this usage with respect,
>     not to evade discussions based upon it by ridiculing it.

[snip]
>Lloyd Anderson

[Ed Selleslagh]

Sorry for responding late, but I have spent two days in hospital and I am still
recovering.

My impression is that Campbell is envisaging languages with low-variance
dialects (like Spanish or even English).  Here in Flanders, the most extreme
(both geographically and linguistically) dialects of Dutch, in their lowest
registers, are mutually unintelligible.  Even 'softer' registers are, at times,
very hard to understand (Flemish TV provides Dutch subtitles (only) in these
cases, like interviewing a peasant, Dutch TV always does).

On the other hand, my Spanish speaking (Peruvian) wife understands most of an
Italian newscast, and she has no Italian friends, never learned Italian or
whatever. But she has a lot of trouble with Catalan, especially the Barcelona
(not Valencia) variety. Another example: The Portuguese understand most of what
Spaniards say (if correctly articulated), but Spaniards hardly understand
anything of what the Portuguese SAY (but do understand most of what they
WRITE). Most Flemings that never learned German can easily understand 70-80% of
German speech and writing.

So, according to Campbell: Spanish = Italian, and West-Flemish or Limburgish do
not belong to the same language as Holland Dutch.

And 'mutual intelligibility' is a multi-faceted concept.

I guess C. intended something else, or was limiting the study to some aspects
where the definitions used make sense.  I wonder if a general definition is
possible at all. At least, we should first have a look at the existing
'variance' within the language as commonly accepted.

Ed.

Dr. Ir. Eduard Selleslagh edsel at glo.be
B-9120 Haasdonk
Belgium


From edsel at glo.be  Fri Oct 15 11:20:56 1999
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 13:20:56 +0200
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.132056.0200.>

-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Mc Callister <rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu>
Date: Friday, October 15, 1999 9:37 AM

>>[Ed Selleslagh]

>>Note that similar, but not always identical, usages exist in various European
>>languages like regional colloquial Peninsular Spanish ('la Maruja'), regional
>>colloquial Dutch ('de Jan'), German ('der Otto') etc. The definite article is
>>only used when speaking ABOUT the person, not TO him/her.

>>Ed.

> It's also used in colloquial Latin American Spanish but, in
>general, to imply familiarity  --whether affection or contempt, or perhaps to
>emphasize the subject.It's sort of like "our Ed" or "that Ed". In some
>forms of rural or popular Latin American Spanish, it seems pretty universal
>and a lot of college educated Latin Americans, particularly women, avoid it
>as a vulgarism. And "inappropriate" usage of the article before proper
>names can mark people as hillbillies or uneducated. I've come across it
>among Mexicans, Central Americans, Colombians, Peruvians and Chileans.
> The article before titles in the 3rd person is standard in Spanish.
> In Portuguese, of course, the article before proper names used in
>the 3rd person is standard.
> It seems to work like a "non-vocative" case marker.

>Rick Mc Callister

[Ed Selleslagh]

I forgot to mention that in Modern Greek (NeoEllinikó) the use of the
definite article before proper names is standard practice, e.g. O Yorghos ("the
George", written Ho Gio:rgos). And of course also with titles, like in Spanish:
o kírios ("el señor", written Ho Kyrios) XYZ, i kiría ("la señora",
written He: Kyría) XYZ. I know of no special connotation.

[Ed]

Dr. Ir. Eduard Selleslagh edsel at glo.be
B-9120 Haasdonk
Belgium

[ Moderator's transcription for 8-bit-unfriendly mail systems:

I forgot to mention that in Modern Greek (NeoEllinik{\'o}) the use of the
definite article before proper names is standard practice, e.g. O Yorghos ("the
George", written Ho Gio:rgos). And of course also with titles, like in Spanish:
o k{\'i}rios ("el se{\~n}or", written Ho Kyrios) XYZ, i kir{\'i}a ("la
se{\~n}ora", written He: Kyr{\'i}a) XYZ. I know of no special connotation.

  --rma ]


From jrader at m-w.com  Fri Oct 15 09:20:55 1999
From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 09:20:55 +0000
Subject: Nors Josephson's Theory about a linguistic and cultural
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.092055.0000.>

Sad news about Winter.  The number of core references in I-E and
older I-E language studies published by C. Winter is very high.  Just
glancing at the shelf across from me I note Streitberg's _Gotisches
Elementarbuch_, published in 1910 by Carl Winter's
Universitaetsbuchhandlung, as well as Jespersen's _A Modern English
Grammar_, v. 1, published in 1909--both in the "Germanische
Bibliothek" series.

Jim Rader

[ moderator snip ]

> The Universitaetsverlag C. Winter, once well-reputed, got bankrupt a few
> years after the publication of the first of the abovementioned titles (only
> the name is continued by the new possessors).
> I see a connection.

> (Another nail in that publishing house's coffin was Mufti: Die
> Sprachwissenschaft des Tscherkessischen, also from the 80s, championing the
> theory of Adyghe *as* Indo-European)


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Fri Oct 15 14:06:38 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 10:06:38 -0400
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <E11bPEk-0005He-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.100638.0400.>

On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, Larry Trask wrote:

> 3. Many of the problematic words in Greek (though not all of them) must have
> been borrowed into Greek, *not* during the first Greek settlement of Greece,
> but much later, during the Bronze Age, when the Greeks came into contact wih
> the advanced Minoan civilization.  These words are thus not ancient substrate
> words in Greek, but late adstrate (or even superstrate) borrowings.

How does Renfrew claim to know this?  If we assume that the speakers of
Greek were somewhere in what is now Greece from a date as early as Renfrew
would like to claim, it would be very surprising if they didn't borrow
words for trade items, etc. from their neighbors to the south.  Cf. the
Latin loan words in Germanic (wine, cheese, street, etc.)

> Renfrew acknowledges some difficulties with this scenario, pointed out by
> John Chadwick and others.  In particular, the problematic words which are
> names for flora and fauna indigenous to Greece cannot readily be explained as
> late borrowings from Minoan, and are more likely to be substrate words of
> some kind.  But Renfrew does not see this as a serious obstacle to his
> scenario.

Not only that, but many of the place names in Greece (Corinth, Salamis,
Larisa, Samos, Olympus, Mycenae) are not of Greek origin, which is not
what we would expect if the speakers of Greek had been in the area for a
long time.

I ought to pull that article and take a look at it.  I had heard that
Renfrew had backed off from some of his claims, but if he published this
as late as 1998, it sounds like it is not so.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Fri Oct 15 14:13:29 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 10:13:29 -0400
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
In-Reply-To: <l0313030fb42a62d8dde5@[209.147.211.53]>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.101329.0400.>

On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote:

>> At this point in time, THERE IS NO MATERIAL EVIDENCE AT ALL AS TO WHEN
>> GREEK-SPEAKERS APPEARED IN GREECE.  THE ONLY EVIDENCE OF A SIGNIFICANT
>> MIGRATION DURING THIS PERIOD (3000BC-1650BC) IS FROM ANATOLIA.
> [snip]

> 	But I imagine there is a postulated date for the breakup of
> Indo-Iranian-Hellenic-Armenian.

Well, no; we believe we know the _relative chronology_ of this breakup
(i.e., we know what _order_ the things happened in), but we don't know
exactly when the particular splits happened.  If, as I've said, the latest
date of PIE unity is in the Ukraine around 4000-3500 BCE, and given that
both Greek and Sanskrit are attested in the second millenium BCE, we can
say that the breakup happened somewhere in that range.  At our current
state of knowledge, we can't fix it much better than that.

> 	And I'd wonder about postulated dates for loanwords from languages
> in the Balkans and the Aegean

Same problem.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Fri Oct 15 14:23:07 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 10:23:07 -0400
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19991013221251.0098c100@popd.netcruiser>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.102307.0400.>

On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, Stanley Friesen wrote:

> Except that Renfrew can only reach this "conclusion" by ignoring many facts
> about PIE that are quite secure (e.g. the universality of *ekwos, and the
> original distinction between wlkwos and kuoon) and which are inconsistent
> with what is known about early Neolithic culture (no domesticated equids
> and no domesticated dog).

In fairness to Renfrew, *ekwos is not probative.  It's true that the horse
had not been domesticated at the early date for PIE unity which Renfrew
postulates; but you need not have domesticated the horse to have a word
for it.  The PIE speakers could have been hunting wild horses for their
meat, for example.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Oct 15 15:04:48 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 16:04:48 +0100
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.160448.0100.>

Roz Frank writes:

[on Basque <bat> 'one' from *<bade>]

>  In other words, for you the meaning of <bedera> is "one apiece"? I think
>  you defined it this way in an earlier mailing, also.

Yes.  The word has other meanings, but 'one apiece' is the most widespread,
and, more importantly, it's the earliest sense recorded -- in Leizarraga, in
1571.

>   Hence, the data set under analysis consists solely of <bedera> and
>  <bederatzi> since these are the only two examples mentioned by Michelena,
>  right?

Primarily, yes.  There are one or two other words which may also be connected,
but these are less clear.

>  You have shared with us two statements concerning the etymology of <bat>:
>  First your own which you phrased as follows:

>  1). that <bat> "is pretty clearly derived from earlier *<bade>."

>  Then you provided us with a paraphrase or synopsis of Michelena's
>  statements on the topic:

>  2). that in Michelena's opinion the etymology from *<bade> "lacked
>  compelling evidence" and hence
>  "was not secure." It should be considered, therefore, "only a plausible
>  suggestion."

>  Having read over Michelena's comments, I believe your summary of them,
>  provided above, is quite accurate and appropriate. It expands on
>  Michelena's representation of *<bade> as "*<bade>?". He clearly didn't feel
>  fully confident about it. Also, above you state that you "endorse Gavel's
>  and Michelena's suggestions," once again emphasizing the tentative nature
>  of the reconstruction and once again a very measured statement on your part.

Correct.

>  However, there is a third instance in which you have spoken about this same
>  problem although in rather different terms. Specifically on that occasion
>  you stated the following:

>  "It is most unusual for a native Basque word to end in a plosive, and <bat>
>  is clearly from earlier *<bade> or *<bada>  suggested by  the morph <bede->
>  in derivatives as (northern) <bedera> 'one apiece' and <bederatzi> 'nine'."

>  To my knowledge Michelena did not list the second etymon *<bada>, although
>  perhaps he did so on some other occasion, i.e., not in his work _Fonetica
>  Historica Vasca_.

The variant proposal *<bada>, which I do not endorse, was not made by
Michelena, but by somebody else more recently.  Sorry; I've forgotten who it
was.

>  As you will recall, the above quote is found on page 273 of your book _The
>  History of Basque_. Your statement, therefore, seems to contradict what you
>  have shared with us on the IE list or at least to be far less cautious.
>  Furthermore, I note that in your book you list <bede-> as a morph, not as
>  *<bede->. Earlier on this list you also affirmed that <bedere(n> contains
>  the same morph, if my memory serves me right.

No; I didn't affirm any such thing.  I merely noted that it was possible.

As for <bede->, this is an attested morph, and so it gets no asterisk.

>  Before you wrote your book, did you discover additional evidence -beyond
>  that presented by Gavel and Michelena- which strengthened your conviction
>  concerning this version of events? And if you did find additional proof for
>  this position, could you share it with us?

>  Furthermore, based on your statements in the email on this topic cited
>  above ("I can claim no credit."), you seem to be saying that all you have
>  done is repeat the positions of Gavel and Michelena, nothing more. Yet in
>  this section of your book you do not cite or otherwise overtly refer to the
>  specific works of Gavel nor Michelena where they discuss this problem.
>  Indeed, your statement "<bat> is clearly from earlier *<bade> or *<bada>"
>  leaves the impression that there is no other possibility: that yours is a
>  summary of the consensus opinion.

I am more enthusiastic about *<bade> than Michelena was, that's all.

I don't know if there exists a consensus.  But I know of nobody who has
criticized Michelena's proposal of *<bade>.

>  In that respect I would mention that Ribary in his _Ensayo sobre la lengua
>  vasca_, translated by Julian Vinson (Paris, 1877) argued that the first
>  element in <bederatzi> was <bat>, i.e., that the word should be broken down
>  into <bed-era-tzi>) and where <bat> had taken on the shape of *<bed>.  In
>  other words, he doesn't question the original shape of the root-stem. (As
>  an aside I should mention that I don't agree with Ribary's etymology of the
>  ending on <bederatzi>).

Ah, tremendous!  Thanks, Roz -- I didn't know about this early suggestion, and
apparently neither did Agud and Tovar.  But I agree that the rest of Ribary's
analysis looks indefensible.

>  For anyone working in comparative linguistics it is important to be able to
>  build on the works of those who have gone before. However, there is always
>  the possibility that somewhere in the chain of transmissions -like in the
>  proverbial game of telephone- the message gets garbled. The danger is that
>  others can start using that version of linguistic realities as a basis for
>  further descriptions of the phenomena under study, i.e., utilizing
>  paraphrases of others' works rather than testing the data themselves.

Sure, but I am trying to be careful here, and to consult the raw data as far as
I can.

>  At least in the case of Euskera, it has been my experience that sometimes
>  it can be a risky business unless each aspect of the data sets used in
>  reconstructing the phonology of the language is well researched, checked
>  and double-checked for accuracy. This is obviously a monumental task in the
>  case of (P)IE comparative linguistics (given the massive volume of earlier
>  research), but perhaps it is still possible in the case of Euskera given
>  the much more restricted number of detailed investigations on these aspects
>  of the language and the circumscribed nature of the data themselves.

Yes, but this is precisely what I'm trying to do.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Oct 15 15:07:58 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 16:07:58 +0100
Subject: Change and What Remains
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.160758.0100.>

Robert Orr writes:

[on generational differences in speech]

>  Does this constitute  "parent and daughter co-existing" at all?

This is what I asked in an earlier posting.  I haven't seen a reply yet, but
I'm vastly behind with my e-mail.

It clearly does, I think, in a sense, but I'm not sure that this is the sense
that Lloyd Anderson had in mind.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Oct 15 16:09:17 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 17:09:17 +0100
Subject: Refining early Basque criteria
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.170917.0100.>

ECOLING at aol.com writes:

> Concerning Larry Trask's list of criteria for potential candidates
> for early Basque vocabulary lists:

[on the choice of cut-off date]

> The details in the paragraph above suggest to me OBVIOUSLY
> if you want early Basque, you use 1700 in preference to 1600,
> because the 16th-century materials are so limited in content.
> It is always possible to study any differences between 16th and 17th-century
> equivalent grammatical morphemes, forms of the same words, etc.,
> where those are attested in both centuries, but obviously much
> non-religious vocabulary will be systematically disfavored by the earlier
> cutoff date.

Well, I've already explained that I am prepared to consider 1700 rather than
1600.  But I don't think the choice is obvious.  My impression at this stage --
which might prove to be wrong, of course -- is that most of the words that meet
my other criteria are already attested by 1600, and so, if possible, I'd prefer
to use the more restrictive early date.

For example, <uko> 'forearm', is nowhere attested before the 17th-century
writer Oihenart, but then it appears to be attested *only* in Oihenart, so it
will fail to be included anyway.

But this example raises another interesting point.  Though <uko> itself is not
found outside of Oihenart, its transparent compound <ukondo> (and variants>
'elbow' (from <uko> plus <ondo> 'bottom') is close to universal in the
language, and recorded from 1596.  Now <ukondo> must be excluded as obviously
polymorphemic, but I will have to decide whether its existence should or should
not license the listing of <uko>, which itself does not meet my criteria.  At
the moment, I have not yet decided, though I lean toward the negative.

[on my criterion of very widespread distribution]

> As explained in a long and detailed message sent many days ago,
> focused on sound-symbolic vocabulary ...
> given the limited recording of sound-symbolic vocabulary,
> an insistence on very wide distribution will have the effect of biasing
> against this type of vocabulary,
> and in this case will certainly bias against a variety of canonical forms,
> in favor of canonical forms more uniform and more limited than they
> actually were in very early Basque.
> A systematic distortion, in other words,
> in this case not merely a lack of particular lexical items, but even
> a systemic distortion by changing the hypotheses of canonical forms.

But consider the alternative.

If I admit words found, say, only in one of the recognized dialects, then I'm
inevitably going to be admitting a vast number of words whose native and
ancient status is at best deeply questionable and at worst certainly zero.  And
this would be catastrophic for my purposes.

I can't afford to sweep up huge numbers of non-ancient words in order to avoid
overlooking a much smaller number of genuinely ancient words.

> Thinking of subject matters attested or not, we have the following,
> which ties this issue back to the specifics of subject matter noted
> by Larry Trask for 16th vs. 17th centuries:
> If only two dialect areas have documents in certain subject matters,
> then vocabulary specific to those subject matters will be systematically
> excluded by requiring their attestation from more than two dialect areas.
> This is obviously undesirable.  It suggests that a moderate position might
> be to categorize documentary attestations by subject matter,
> and vary the number of dialect areas required according to the number
> of areas attesting documents in each subject matter.
> Of course in practice, this can be done in another way.
> Record ALL vocabulary items for a particular concept,
> and study the UNIFORMITY of etyma for that concept,
> without much regard AT FIRST for whether it comes from two or from five
> areas.
> If variants for a particular concept cannot be established as loans from
> neighboring languages, then remaining variety of non-cognate terms
> argues against immediately positing any of the conflicting forms
> as candidates for very early Basque (even though one or more
> of them MIGHT be a direct descendant of very early Basque).
> Additional argumentation would then be necessary, either way.
> Of course things are not this simple,
> but Larry Trask is an expert at using all of these varied sorts of
> information.

Well, much of this is very reasonable, but only for a different task from the
one I have in mind.

In written texts, the great bulk of the Basque vocabulary pertaining to
specific areas is clearly neither native nor ancient -- as we might expect.
Religion, law, government, seafaring, even agriculture -- most of the words are
either obvious compounds or derivatives, or obvious borrowings.  Hence I can
see little point at this stage in worrying about them.  First things first.

> More dialect areas of course gives additional security,
> and perhaps additional phonological information.

Not sure what this means.

Requiring a given word to be attested in a large number of dialects certainly
does give additional security, and that's why I require this.

[on my suspicion of possible borrowings]

> Some would use "caution" in not throwing out things for which loanword
> origin is merely suspected, for which the argument is not a strong one.
> "Strong" is not the same as "certain".
> Moderation in all criteria, as in all things.

Sure, but I have to make a decision here.

Given the vast impact of Latin and Romance on the Basque vocabulary, and the
near-total absence of traffic in the other direction, I think it's wise to
exclude words for which a loan origin looks even moderately plausible.

After all, it is hardly conceivable that genuinely native and ancient Basque
words for which a loan origin has been seriously (but wrongly) suggested are
likely to be systematically different in form from other native and ancient
words -- now is it?

[on the rare Basque loans into Romance]

> Would such examples be those in which the Castilian and Portuguese words
> have no cognates in other Romance languages?

Not necessarily, but such cases are so few anyway that no generalizations can
be made.

> In such a case,
> would not the identical sort of criteria dictate that they be excluded from
> studies of early Castilian and Portuguese?

Students of early Romance must draw up their own criteria, which need not be
the same as mine -- especially since the Romanists have not only a whole bunch
of languages to look at, but also Latin.  My criteria are designed only for the
particular task I have in mind.  I claim no universal validity.

> Of course, there is no necessary
> contradiction here, because items of this sort could in principle be
> excluded from BOTH sides of any puzzling sharing, in the approach
> Larry Trask is taking.  Or they can be included on BOTH sides.
> My own position would be simply to include them on both sides,
> but with a note that they might be from either side,

Why?  There are thousands of Latino-Romance loans into Basque, while there
exists just one apparently clear case of a Basque loan into Romance with any
great currency.

> and if they are
> from the Romance side, but limited to Iberian Romance, then we
> must have an additional hypothesis that there was some innovation within
> Iberian Romance, or else a borrowing from some third language family
> related neither to Romance nor to early Basque.  Is there some gap in
> that reasoning?

Yes; I think so.  See below.

> Because it seems to me to suggest that words limited
> to Basque and to Iberian Romance (not found in other Romance languages),
> are better assigned to early Basque than to early Romance,
> since by definition of the situation they are not reconstructible to early
> Romance.

No; I can't agree.  Given the established paucity of Basque loans into Romance,
it is out of order to impute a Basque origin to any Romance word not derivable
from Latin, even if it does occur in Basque.

> But this is not certain, Occam's razor can suggest a route
> to follow, but it cannot absolutely exclude the more complex case that
> there was an extinct third language family from which a word was
> borrowed both into Basque and into Iberian Romance.

It is widely suspected by specialists that such words exist.  But clearly I do
not want to sweep up such words if I can help it.

[on words like Basque <ama> 'mother' and <tu> 'spit']

> That does not argue either for or against such words actually being
> inherited from Proto-Basque.

Of course, but not the point.

The point is this: is there any good reason to suppose that a given word was
not present in Pre-Basque, and native there?  If the answer to this question is
"yes", for any reason at all, then I prefer to exclude the word.

Remember: I'm looking for the *best* candidates, not for *all possible*
candidates.

> It DOES make it difficult to use such words in trying to prove
> a deep genetic relation between languages, because one must then
> have sufficient knowledge of sound-symbolic forces to argue
> something more specific is shared between particular languages,
> not merely a vague resemblance.
> That is quite a separate issue.

Yes, but I don't think that <ama> 'mother' is "only vaguely" a nursery word, or
that <tu> 'spit' is "only vaguely" an imitative word.

[LT]

>> When -- as so often -- a word exists in
>> several regional variant forms, what form should go into the list?
>> My answer is that we should simply appeal to the known phonological
>> prehistory of Basque, and use the form which can be reconstructed as the
>> common ancestor.

> I have great confidence that Larry Trask will almost always draw the
> correct conclusions in such cases, given his knowledge of the
> phonological history of Basque.  But it nevertheless should be clear
> that there is a potential circularity, of exactly the kind pointed out by
> Steve Long, that a theory of the historical development of a language
> is used to select which forms are considered to have been in a proto-
> language.  That virtually guarantees that a different theory of
> historical development of the language cannot easily be developed
> from data thus selected.  Elementary common sense.

But there exists *only one* theory of the phonological prehistory of Basque,
and that theory is massively and meticulously documented.  It has never been
seriously challenged by anyone, and no alternative of substance has ever been
put forward.  Hence vague invocations of "alternative theories" are without
foundation.

> That does not make this procedure wrong.
> Because it is the totality of the COMBINATION of the attested data
> and the hypothesized sound changes (etc.) which we evaluate,
> in the long run.  But it does make this procedure less than absolutely
> certain to give the correct results.  (Using terminology from other
> fields, it is often possible to find a "local minimum" or solution
> which is better than any nearby points (closely similar solutions),
> yet which is not an absolute minimum, not the absolute best solution.
> In our field,
> changing BOTH some of the hypotheses about sound changes and
> other historical developments AND some of the hypothesized proto-forms,
> changing both together, in a co-ordinated fashion, may
> yield a better solution.  Such shifts of paradigm do occur.

This is becoming extremely abstract.

If Lloyd, or anybody else, wants to propose an alternative theory of the
prehistory of Basque, let's hear about it.  Meanwhile, I am entirely
comfortable working with the conclusions we have already reached.

[LT]

>> Finally ... if anybody out there still believes that my primary criteria are
>> somehow likely to skew the results in some phonological way, or if
>> anybody thinks that there exist better criteria for the purpose of
>> identifying the best candidates for native and ancient status in the
>> language, let's hear about it.

> I don't understand the word "still" here,
> it should be evident that I do and have previously explained the
> concrete reasons why.  There is no need to repeat the details here.
> As far as I know, Larry Trask has not
> argued against the reasons I gave.

Yes, I have.  I have addressed every single comment of substance I have seen on
this list -- and there haven't been many.

> I have repeatedly pointed to the problem of selection against
> sound-symbolic vocabulary through accidents of limited recording,
> having the effect of biasing our notions of canonical forms.
> Using Larry's mention of the difference of subject matters
> between 16th-century and 17th-century documentations,
> it is easy to explain why using too early a cutoff in time,
> or requiring too many or the wrong dialect attestations,
> can systematically bias against vocabulary in certain semantic
> fields, because these, like sound-symbolic items more generally,
> were not within the subject matter favored by the documents.

Possibly, but not a problem for me.

If there is no persuasive evidence for particular sound-symbolic forms in
Pre-Basque, then there is no such evidence.  That's all there is to it.

> Additionally, criteria for what are likely to be descendants of early
> Basque forms are NOT THE SAME THING as criteria for
> what are good items to use in any consideration of potential
> external relationships of Basque.

Sorry; I don't follow.

I myself have only one immediate goal: identifying the best candidates for
Pre-Basque words.  My other goals can only follow on later.

> I say this latter NOT because I hold
> out any hopes for finding distant relatives of Basque in my lifetime,
> but simply because mixing these two goals can distort the picture
> of proto-Basque by excluding many items which were in fact
> part of proto-Basque.

It is inevitable that I will not succeed in listing every single attested word
which was in fact present in Pre-Basque.  But there is no way around this fact,
and it doesn't worry me in the slightest.

Remember what I'm doing.  I'm trying to find the best candidates for Pre-Basque
status, so that I can then determine their phonological characteristics.
*After* that, I can hope to examine further words, and try to judge whether
they too might be plausible candidates for Pre-Basque status, even if they fail
my initial criteria.

> In addition to all of the criteria Larry Trask mentions, I think there
> should be another criterion:  For each item on the basic 100-word
> or 200-word Swadesh list, be sure to INCLUDE SOME vocabulary item
> whose meaning matches that item.
> Simply on the grounds that every language will have vocabulary
> for such meanings, so reconstructing an early Basque without any
> term for such a meaning is contra-indicated.

Absolutely not.

One of Swadesh's words is 'mountain'.  If we applied this criterion to English,
then we'd have to include 'mountain' as the only English representative -- but
it's a shrieking loan word.

Likewise, there are three Basque words which might be glossed as 'animal':
<animalia>, <piztia>, and <abere>.  All three are transparent borrowings from
Romance.  So what on earth could be the point of including them?
This is perverse.  We cannot decide *in advance* which Basque words must be
native.

> This is not a criterion for evaluating any particular proposed vocabulary
> item in Proto-Basque, it is rather a global criterion which can be
> used to evaluate the sum total of the judgments on individual candidates
> for inclusion.  It can tell us that we have excluded too much,
> and in what semantic ranges we should probably seek additional
> candidates for inclusion.

I am not concerned at this stage about excluding too much.  I am far more
concerned about including things that shouldn't be there.

> I would bet there are many other criteria which might be added,

Let's see these, then.

> and balancing them all together to make decisions will yield
> better results than using a simpler set of criteria and allowing
> any one otherwise reasonable criterion to dictate inclusion or exclusion.
> Larry Trask has shown his ability to use many criteria beyond the
> simple set in discussing particular vocabulary items
> (such as /sei/ or any other).

Thank you.  But the criteria I invoke depend upon the problem in hand.
Not all problems require the same criteria.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Oct 15 16:55:20 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 17:55:20 +0100
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.175520.0100.>

Macia Riutort Riutort writes:

>  Liebe Freunde,
>  ich kann Euch sagen, dass niemand, sowohl hier (Katalonien) wie auf den
>  Balearen, auf die Idee kommen würde, Maite als baskischen Frauennamen zu
>  betrachten. Für uns ist Maite einfach die normale Koseform zu Maria Teresa
>  (Mari-Tere klingt übrigens ziemlich "schicki-micki", weswegen diese Form
>  hier kaum verwendet wird). In unserer Abteilung haben wir sogar zwei Maria
>  Teresas, die aber von uns Maite genannt wurden...

Well, the only way I can think of to decide whether <Maite> originated in the
Basque Country is to check the historical records, if there are any.

But <maite> happens to be an ordinary Basque word, and moreover a most
appropriate one for naming a woman: it means 'beloved' in Basque, and is hence
a translation equivalent of Romance female names like French <Aimee> and
Castilian <Amada> -- and perhaps of something in Catalan?

I'd be interested to hear what the Spaniards or the Catalans think of the
female name <Arantxa>.  This is unquestionably of Basque origin -- it's a
Marian name, from the Basque word for 'thorn' -- yet it is now far from rare in
Spain: there's famous tennis player with this name, and she claims no Basque
ancestry that I know of.  Is the name perceived as Basque in the Peninsula
generally?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From edsel at glo.be  Fri Oct 15 17:14:24 1999
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 19:14:24 +0200
Subject: Perfective-Imperfective (2) - Habitual
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.191424.0200.>

-----Original Message-----
From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv at wxs.nl>
Date: Friday, October 15, 1999 6:05 PM

>"Patrick C. Ryan" <proto-language at email.msn.com> wrote:

>>Is it therefore appropriate to say that:

>>'Lisa suele fumar'

>>can be interpreted as: 'Lisa is accustomed to smoking'?

>>And if 'Lisa is used to smoking' is equivalent to 'Lisa is accustomed to
>>smoke', is it possible, in some contexts, for 'Lisa suele fumar' to be
>>interpreted as virtually equivalent to 'Lisa esta' acostumbrada a fumar'?

>If you consider English "Lisa used to smoke" to be in some
>contexts virtually equivalent to "Lisa was used to smoking".

>Miguel Carrasquer Vidal

[Ed Selleslagh]

I think the problem here is one of lacking proper equivalents ('traduttore
traditore'), at least in some tenses.

Couldn't we just say that the Spanish verb 'soler' indicates having a habit, in
casu Lisa being a habitual smoker? IMHO (as a plurilingual but native Dutch
speaker que suele hablar Castellano en casa) 'being accustomed to' is not
exactly the same thing: doesn't it imply an adaptation to some external
(habitually occurring) circumstances?

I guess that's roughly what you meant with your 'if-sentence', Miguel?

P.S. I have often wondered whether 'soler' is a late re-introduction of a Latin
verb (i.e. bypassing the Latin-Romance-Castilian evolution), namely the
semi-deponent 'solere' ('soleo, solitus sum', which seems to indicate a remnant
of an earlier medio-passive status, vel sim.), or a true Spanish verb that went
through the natural evolution. The trend to diphtongation of the accentuated o
is so strong in Spanish that diphtongation is no guarantee of antiquity. (In S.
America some people even diphtongate where it shouldn't be done, like 'toser,
tueso' [= to cough]).

Ed

Dr. Ir. Eduard Selleslagh edsel at glo.be
B-9120 Haasdonk
Belgium


From petegray at btinternet.com  Thu Oct 14 19:40:35 1999
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 20:40:35 +0100
Subject: Contributions by Steve Long
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.204035.0100.>

> Standard histories of Greek, ... present a history of constant change, ...
> The ... historical periods (Mycenaean, Homeric, classical, Hellenistic, New
> Testament, Byzantine, and what not) [are] ... a convenience,

True.  The convenience is also inconvenient in that it hides shifts in
register or social context, which may give a distorted view if we think the
language actually developed linearly through these periods.   We know, for
example, that New Testament Greek is very different from literary Greek of
the same period (e.g. Philo), which is different again from the language of
contemporary papyri.   NT Greek had substantial influence from both Hebrew
(Old Testament - LXX) and Aramaic, which other forms of Greek at that time
did not.

The fact that one type of language is most readily available and attested
for a particular time should not blind us to the idea that other forms of
the language existed alongside it - even if these forms are unattested!

Despite its enormous subsequent influence, classical Greek has many forms
which are a dead end, a linguistic blind alley.   Some Attic forms or
constructions were so out of step with most other dialects, that they did
not survive into Koine, but were replaced either with a form from another
dialect, or with a hybrid.   Thus, although it is convenient, and at some
levels necessary, to talk of Greek developing linearly through the stages
mentioned, we should recognise that this is an over-simplification of the
actual complexity.

Peter


From mcv at wxs.nl  Fri Oct 15 18:46:27 1999
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 18:46:27 GMT
Subject: Basque 'sei'
In-Reply-To: <E11bhdp-0004po-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.184627.GMT.>

maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max Wheeler) wrote:

>Gascon-Bearnais, like all Romance languages as far as I know, has only one
>/s/, i.e. only one sibilant place of articulation. Whether this was always so
>is another matter. In French, Occitan, Catalan, Portuguese, and Andalusian
>Spanish modern /s/ is a merger of inherited /s/ and the reflex of, among other
>things, /k/ before non-low front vowels, which almost certainly went through a
>stage /ts/ (affricate), which may have been laminal, given that in
>non-Andalusian European Spanish it resulted in /<theta>/ (dental fricative).
>It is conceivable that /ts/ went through a stage [laminal dental/alveolar
>fricative] before merger with /s/, but I don't know of evidence on the matter.

>We shouldn't assume, without looking at the evidence, that the current
>distribution of laminal versus apical /s/ phonemes in Europe can be projected
>way back into the past.

One problem with apical vs. laminal /s/ is the lack of data.
Because of the fact that the two *are* distinguished
phonologically in Basque [I'm not aware of any other language
where this is the case], and this fact linked with the
observation that the default /s/ in Castillian is apical, has led
to a decent amount of data being available for the areas
surrounding Basque and Castilian.  We know that apical /s/ is
also the norm in Galician and northern Portugal, in Catalan, in
Gascon and in Languedocien Occitan.  On the other hand, laminal
/s/ dominates in southern Portugal and Spain, and in the rest of
the langue d'oc and langue d'oeil areas.  I would expect a
transition to laminal /s/ also in Valencian Catalan, but I don't
know.  As to the rest of Europe, or the world, data are almost
entirely lacking.  I believe Old/Middle High German <z,z,> is
believed to have been an apical sibilant, opposed to laminal
<ss>, and I've read somewhere that apical pronunciations of /s/
are not unknown in individual varieties of English.  But I don't
think I've ever seen a mention of the apical/laminal opposition
for /s/ in the description of the phonological systems of most
languages.  I mean, Abkhaz and Zulu have the phoneme /s/, but is
it apical or laminal?  Or doesn't it matter?
As to myself, were it not for the fact that I've studied a bit
phonetics, I would have spoken Dutch with apical /s/ my whole
life without even knowing it (now I do so knowing it: too late to
change now).  Nobody ever told me, or probably even noticed...
In that sense, it's not unlikely that the current distribution of
apical and laminal /s/ *can* be projected "way back into the
past".  Unlike other phoneme substitutions, this is one that
might have gone completely unnoticed, in say the Roman era,
without any purist pressure whatsoever to replace it with "real",
laminal, Latin /s/.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri Oct 15 19:16:55 1999
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 20:16:55 +0100
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.201655.0100.>

Thank you, Larry, for the summary of Renfrew's article.  I am continually
amazed how poorly stocked the great libraries of England are on PIE!

I'm responding to the idea that
> ... Greek itself evolved within Greece ... out of a more-or-less vanilla
> variety of PIE which had already
> occupied the territory.

You mention that Renfrew "acknowledges some difficulties" and it may be that
he answers my question in the article.    I would like to know how he
maintains this position in the light of a fairly probable Greek -
Indo-Iranian - Armenian Sprachbund, which on some views is innovative, not
merely retentive or conserving.   Does he suggest that somehow the I-I-ans
also originated within Greece?  Or that the vanilla ur-pre-Greek had already
acquired the characteristics it shares with II and Armenian before its
speakers occupied the terrritory - which would make it much more raspberry
ripple than vanilla?   Or does he believe that the shared characteristics
are mere retentions?   Any of these positions is open to serious question.

By the way, no one ever did tell me if the plural of Sprachbund
was -unds, -|nde, or -unde.   I guess I go for the middle one, making it a
language-association, rather than a language-collection.

Peter


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri Oct 15 19:32:31 1999
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 20:32:31 +0100
Subject: Linear A to Linear B
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.203231.0100.>

Larry asks for responses in a posting where he says:
> Linear A was used to write the unknown language we call Minoan.  In all
> likelihood, it was invented for the purpose of writing that language.

Much of Larry's posting appears to me reasonable and common sense, except
that here I wish to add a quibble.   It seems to me more likely that the
idea that a language could be written down did not develop in isolation in
Crete, but was imported from somewhere.    We know that when this happened
elsewhere, it was very common for the inspiring script to be adapted to the
new language, rather than for a totally new script to be developed ex nihilo
(although I grant there are one or two exceptions).    This adaptation often
meant inadequacies or infelicities in the resultant script.   I would
therefore be very cautious in using the argument that the script of Linear A
must reflect the language well, since it was "invented" for linear A.

Peter


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri Oct 15 19:43:41 1999
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 20:43:41 +0100
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.204341.0100.>

A mild rebuke to Sean Crist (along with an apology for misspelling his name
earlier!)

He says to Stanley Friesen:
> You must be new on this list; during August and September, the question of
> the phylogeny of the IE languages was hashed over in great detail.

Is this perhaps a little patronising, and a little premature?
I didn't post very much in that discussion myself, because I didn't think it
was worthwhile, but myy guess is that I am not alone in being both (a)
relatively silent about it and (b) totally convinced that the discussion has
not yet proved anything.

Stanley Friesen may be in good company in maintaining that the NW IE
languages separate early - this is the position taken by Lehmann among
others.

Peter


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri Oct 15 19:52:12 1999
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 20:52:12 +0100
Subject: Change and What Remains
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.205212.0100.>

Lars said:
>two sligthly different versions of the same language or dialect
> may apparently exist side by side.

This is not a surprise to English speakers in the West Midlands.   Some of
us use subjunctives ("If I were king...) and others do not, some of us
distinguish witch and which and others do not, and on a bus you can hear
"you am", "you are", "you be" and even "you bist".   I am sure there are
other variations as well.   Some of this variety is due to importations of
speakers of foreign dialects (e.g. Jamaicans or New Zealanders), but
certainly not all.   It used to be claimed that the dialect changed every
two or three miles in this area.

Peter


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Fri Oct 15 22:31:54 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 18:31:54 EDT
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY (THE EVIDENCE)
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.183154.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/12/99 7:47:34 PM, I wrote:

<<At this point in time, THERE IS NO MATERIAL EVIDENCE AT ALL AS TO WHEN
GREEK-SPEAKERS APPEARED IN GREECE.  THE ONLY EVIDENCE OF A SIGNIFICANT
MIGRATION DURING THIS PERIOD (3000BC-1650BC) IS FROM ANATOLIA.>>

There's been a little confusion here.  I wrote the above for a limited
reason.  I'm not saying there was no northern migration.  I'm just saying
that THERE IS NO ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE of any such thing during that
period.  I am also saying there is however STRONG EVIDENCE of a significant
migration from Anatolia that is the ONLY clear connection to any serious
material discontinuity in Greece during that period.

With regard to the "coming of the Greeks" from the north during that period,
as John Collis has said generally, "such theories... may be supported by
other means, but the archaeological evidence can lend in good conscience
absolutely no support.... and should not be used by others as an endorsement
of those theories... "

My statement IS the current state of the EVIDENCE based on the best
information I have.  I have excellent access to the literature in this field,
I've worked in it and I have regular correspondence with archaeologists who
are or have been active in this very area.  One of them highly recommended
the website I quoted from as an accurate and up-to-date summary of the latest
findings.

If anyone on the list is interested, I STRONGLY urge them to consult that web
site.  It's by Jeremy Rutter and it's on the Darmouth site but has been
reproduced any number of times on the web as support material for courses
given at least six other schools, including UCLA.  It is CURRENT and is a
thorough summary and bibliography of where I understand things now stand.

PLEASE NOTE that I was only reporting the evidence as I been able to gather
it.  I could be wrong.  If there are more recent archaeological reports
coming from the area that say something different, I'D LOVE TO SEE THEM.  If
Mr Crist or anyone else has access to such reports, PLEASE POST THEM.  I
stand ready to be corrected.

AND once again I must caution members of the list to consult the website or
any other legitimate current material on this subject before accepting what
Mr. Crist's might have said about there being ANY serious archaeological
evidence for when "Greeks entered Greece."  This really isn't the case.

[Mr Crist wrote of "process archaeology" (message dated 10/15/99 12:23:37
AM).   This is only part of a greater movement by archaeologists and related
historical scientists towards keeping their evidence objective  and free of
the conclusions that pet theories want to attach to them.  Following Mr.
Crist in the name-dropping mode, I had the opportunity to attend and report
on a good number of lectures by John Collis, probably the preeminent scholar
in bronze and iron age European archaeology.  What he has made clear over and
over again is that archaeological evidence WILL NOT SUPPORT the conclusions
that many like Mr Crist would like it to.  This is a big issue in Celtic prehi
story, but as Prof. Collis has said on a number of occasions, it applies
equally to Greek prehistory.]

So I wrote:
<<At this point in time, THERE IS NO MATERIAL EVIDENCE AT ALL AS TO WHEN
GREEK-SPEAKERS APPEARED IN GREECE.  THE ONLY EVIDENCE OF A SIGNIFICANT
MIGRATION DURING THIS PERIOD (3000BC-1650BC) IS FROM ANATOLIA.>>

To which Mr. Crist replied:
<<This is appears to be incorrect.  Between the Early Helladic II and Early
Helladic III phases (c. 2200 BCE), we find the following:
-Destruction and abandonment of Early Helladic II sites
-Changes in architecture, including appearance of houses with apsidal
-Changes in burial practice
-Appearance of stone "battle-axes" and clay "anchors"
-Appearance of a new pottery style, i.e. the Minyan ware
-Major change in economy to a much simpler agricultural society
(Mallory, p. 70)>>

There's a number of things seriously wrong with all this.

First of all, there is NOTHING in the list Mr. Crist gave that contradicts
the evidence of a singular migration from Anatolia.  In fact most of these
points are directly connected BY EARLIER FINDS in and on the way from
Anatolia.  Practically everything he cites can be and is explained by THE
STRONG EVIDENCE OF A MIGRATION FROM ANATOLIA OR WHAT HAPPENED WITHIN GREECE
AFTERWARDS BECAUSE OF THAT MIGRATION.

The destruction of sites in Greece is NOT now attributed to outsiders but to
the Tiryns culture (2150BC-2000BC).  As I reported, Tyrins is described as
"the result of a process of 'cultural fusion'" between two PRE-EXISTING
cultures already in Greece.  One culture is contiguous from the Neolithic
(Korakau.)   The other culture represents the aftermath of the Anatolian
"migration." (Lefkandi I).  By the time of the destructions, both of these
two elements had been the Greek mainland together for as long as 400 years.
There is no serious material evidence of "outsiders from the north" being
involved.

It's important to mention that there is NO evidence of violence in connection
with the original Anatolian migration.  And also important that evidence of
Lefkandi or Tiryns does not extend throughout mainland Greece, being
restricted to the east.  Neither are evidenced in e.g. Laconia or the western
Peloppenese, where the continuity appears to have persisted into the middle
Hellenic.

And there is not much evidence of anything "northern" in any of this.   The
long houses, both rectangular and with apses, as well as the pottery can be
traced very confidently in their manufacture, forms and even often the source
of the material through the Cylades right back to Anatolia. (All of this I
either quoted already or can be found on the web site mentioned.)

As to Gray Minyan Ware, I'll cover that in the next post.  Suffice it to say
that whatever evidence we have of the origins of Gray Minyan also comes from
the direction of Anatolia.

So how is that Sean Crist can say something different?  Well, one reason is
that his single source is out-of-date.  I checked and THERE IS NOT ONE PAPER
CITED IN MALLORY'S BIBLIOGRAPHY DATED AFTER 1986.  This is a problem in a
field where an awful lot has been learned in the past15 years.  A
preponderance of papers cited in the Dartmouth web bibliography are, for
example, dated after 1994.   There are volumes of new scientific findings
that support the current status of the evidence which I described above.

Once again I may be misinformed. I kind of doubt it, but I am ready to be
contradicted by any recent archaeological evidence that has escaped my
attention.  And again I am not saying there was no northern migration into
Greek between 3500 and 1650BC or even when Greek came into Greece.  What I am
saying is that list members should be very wary of any assertion that
archaeological evidence supports any such conclusions.

And once again check out the web site
-http://tenaya.cs.dartmouth.edu/history/bronze_age -
- if you don't have access I'll try to download a text copy for you and maybe
even copies of the more recent papers if I can.

PS - I just saw the announcement on the list for the "Greater Anatolia and the
Indo-Hittite Language Family" colloquium at the URichmond and along with
Renfrew, Ivanov, etc., Jeremy Rutter - the author of the web site I've
referred to - will be there to give critical response.  Sounds fascinating.

Regards,
Steve Long


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Fri Oct 15 19:46:20 1999
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 19:46:20 -0000
Subject: language origins
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.194620.0000.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Dear Larry and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Sent: Wednesday, October 13, 1999 4:45 PM

<snip>

[LT]

> I think we learn a first language because our ancestors, at some point,
> evolved a very specific biological proclivity to learn and use language.  I
> don't believe we have a specific and dedicated calculus faculty, or
> ice-skating faculty, but I do believe we possess a dedicated language
> faculty.  And I believe language is a biological part of us in a way that
> calculus and ice skating are not.  We didn't "invent"language in the way that
> we invented my other examples: we evolved it.  It's just something that
> happened to us.

[PR]
I say sincerely that it gives me great pleasure to agree with Larry when our
agreement is normally such a rare occurrence.

I think the idea of 'inventing language' is dubious for another reason. It
implies that, at some point, language was consciously conceptualized and
implemented. Though we may never learn his name (if he had one), should we
postulate an Edison of language who explained to his speechless fellows (how
would he explain it?) that, from then on, /iiiii/ would not be merely a
squeal (of delight?) but would mean 'mastodon marrow'?

And /uggggg/ would mean 'mastodon . . .', well, you know.

I think it greatly more likely that a constant association of something like
/iiiii/, a purely instinctual sound associated with delight, acquired for a
substantial portion of the group, an association with something in which the
group generally delighted, and that a pars pro toto type of development
occurred, in which some slight phonological modification of /iiiii/ made it
specific to 'mastodon marrow', or 'hive honey', or 'accidentally fermented
grapes'.

This, I believe, could well have occurred before ancestral human beings
parted ways, so that the question then becomes really how far had this
process proceeded before our wandering ancestors wandered into Neandertalia?

I think that I am familiar with Larry's ideas that, though a proto-language
*might* have existed at this early date, through temporal processes, it has
become unrecoverable. I apologize in advance if I have unwittingly
misrepresented Larry's previously expressed sentiments on this subject.
That, of course, has no bearing on the general proposition of whether
monogenesis or polygenesis is likelier on general principles (lacking
agreeable data).

But, I still believe strongly that this is the likeliest scenario.

Opposing it, we have a group squealing but with no 'words', which splits up;
and mirabile dictu, all at the same time (approximately) in different
places, under different environmental challenges, presuming also
substantially similar genetic modifications, former members of the group
'invent' languages that all have so many common traits that we have no
problem comparing them structurally and functionally. We might call this the
'multiple Edison' theory; or just assume that God set up Gardens of Eden in
many now lost locations.

I think this scenario, which is possible, is so unlikely compared to the
first scenario that unless strong evidence compels it, it should be shelved.

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 meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er
mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Sat Oct 16 01:24:36 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 18:24:36 -0700
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.991013094133.15064A-100000@unagi.cis.upenn.e du>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.182436.0700.>

At 11:28 AM 10/13/99 -0400, Sean Crist wrote:
>-Renfrew proposes that Anatolia is the homeland of the Indo-Europeans.  If
>so, it is very odd the Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic existed in the midst of
>languages (Hattic and Hurrian) which are not only not Indo-European but
>which bear no typological resemblance to Indo-European.

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

>This is a matter of controversy; Mallory described the Minyan ware as
>being "incessantly discussed".  I don't know all the details regarding
>that pottery style, but I'm pretty confident in stating that you're
>misrepresenting the field if you say that it was "quite clear" that the
>Minyan pottery represents a continuation of an earlier style.

Actually, even if it is in large part a continuation of earlier styles,
this does not rule out external influences in generating the change in
fashion.  It is not as if pottery styles are wholistic things that must
either be taken entire or not at all.  Mixed influences are both possible
and reasonable.

>I accept the view of Mallory and many others that the latest unity of PIE
>was in the area of the Ukraine around 4000-3500 BCE.  ...

The appearance of horse-bits (for riding) in the Sredny-Stog culture is
quit telling here.  (Mallory does not actually mention this, as it was not
yet known when he wrote his book).

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


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Sat Oct 16 01:30:23 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 18:30:23 -0700
Subject: language origins
In-Reply-To: <E11bRTe-0000pY-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.183023.0700.>

At 05:45 PM 10/13/99 +0100, Larry Trask wrote:
>Stanley Friesen writes:
>> Now, I, *personally* find this situation unlikely, but it is at least
>> coherent, and thus cannot be ruled out a priori.

>Well, maybe it can.

>Language, I'd say, is a lot *more* complex than calculus.  But I don't think
>degree of complexity is the issue.

>The point is that our language faculty appears to be part of our biological
>inheritance in a way that the ability to construct or use calculus is not.

This is a large part of why I find an origin of spoken language after the
origin of the *capability* to be unlikely.  Unfortunately, preadaptation
(or as it is more commonly called nowadays, exaption) can produce just this
appearance of special adaptation.  Thus it is *possible* (though unlikely)
that the human "language capability" actually evolved for to perform some
*other* function, and turned out to accidentally allow what we call human
language.

I do not believe this is what happened, but it is hard to entirely
eliminate this possibility.

>I think we learn a first language because our ancestors, at some point,
>evolved a very specific biological proclivity to learn and use language.
>I don't believe we have a specific and dedicated calculus faculty, or
>ice-skating faculty, but I do believe we possess a dedicated language faculty.

I agree, I just do not think the whole of this model is yet completely
established.

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


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Sat Oct 16 01:40:53 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 18:40:53 -0700
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <E11bRZ2-0000uT-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.184053.0700.>

At 05:50 PM 10/13/99 +0100, Larry Trask wrote:
>Stanley Friesen writes:

>> And given that, again pace Renfrew, Anatolian almost certainly had to move
>> through the Balkans prior to Greek arrival *there*, let alone their arrival
>> in Greece proper, and that there is some evidence for a non-Greek IE
>> language in Greece in place names, the time scale is further constrained.

>Why?

>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.
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.  (They do indicate an early appearance of proto-Iranian
peoples to the east of Mesopotamia)

>Even if you don't buy Anatolia as the PIE homeland, why couldn't Anatolian
>have entered Anatolia across the Caucasus or from east of the Caspian Sea,
>through Iran?

The first is made unlikely by the lack of IE-related cultural artifacts in
the Caucusus and the *total* lack of any pre-Armenian IE substratal
influences in any of the non-IE languages of the Caucasus.

For the second you have to explain why the Sumerians, Old Bablyonians and
Assyians make NO mention of any possible pre-Anatolian peoples, while they
*do* give indications of the existence of proto-Iranian peoples in Iran
(look at the Mitanni words for charioteering).

>And why did Greek have to move through the Balkans?

Ditto.

Plus:

C) the closest relative of Greek seems to be Old Macedonian
D) there were peripheral populations of Greeks to the northeast of Greece
proper, whence came the Dorians after the collapse of the Mykenean
civilization.
[Note, I do *not* say the Dorians *caused* said collapse, but they *did*
come from the area of modern day Albania and/or the former Yugoslavia].

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


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Sat Oct 16 03:39:58 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 20:39:58 -0700
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.991013180929.19455C-100000@unagi.cis.upenn.e du>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.203958.0700.>

At 06:26 PM 10/13/99 -0400, Sean Crist wrote:
>On Thu, 7 Oct 1999, Stanley Friesen wrote:

>> [The northern group would be ancestral to Germanic, Celtic, and Italic, at
>> least, and perhaps Balto-Slavis as well],

>You must be new on this list; during August and September, the question of
>the phylogeny of the IE languages was hashed over in great detail.  I'm
>curious as to what linguistic and archaeological evidence you have in
>mind; your claim is at odds with the work of Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor
>which I have been discussing.  If you like, I can forward you some of the
>emails which I sent out as a part of this dialog.

That would help.

However, I have some issues with accepting such a result.  The biggest
blocker to my mind is the very early date for the beginning of the Corded
Ware cultures in northern Europe.  This complex seems, to me, to be very
strongly IE in character.  And it is too far from the Ukraine for the
possibility of it remaining the same language.  So, unless it represents a
now extinct branch of the IE family, this puts the split between at least
some of the northern European IE languages subfamilies back to about 3500
BC or so.  Given that PIE unity is dated at not much earlier than that,
this leaves precious little time for Anatolian to have already split off.
Indeed the beginning of the Cernavoda-Ezero complex of the Balkans actually
seems to date a couple of centuries later, and this seems, to me, to be the
most likely pre-Anatolian culture, given its association with the lower
layers of Troy.

On the linguistic side, Hittite itself seems to be somewhat abberrant even
*within* Anatolian, so any phylogenetic analysis probably needs to
cross-check any features encoded for Anatolian with the other languages in
the group.  (I ran across an indication the other day that the other
Anatolian languages had a more typical IE verbal system, for instance).
Overall, I think this makes Anatolian somewhat less deviant within the
family than it seems at first glance.

>> And given that, again pace Renfrew, Anatolian almost certainly had to move
>> through the Balkans prior to Greek arrival *there*, let alone their arrival
>> in Greece proper, and that there is some evidence for a non-Greek IE
>> language in Greece in place names, the time scale is further constrained.

>If the speakers of prehistoric Anatolian travelled south along the west
>coast of the Black Sea to the Bosporus, they need not have entered any
>part of what is now Greece on their way into Anatolia.

True, but the Greeks would have had to pass through somewhere close there
as well.  (Though they seem to have gone rather further west, at least
based on the NW dialects).  On the other hand, the Cernavoda-Ezero complex
does extend west into the area the Greeks probably had to pass through.

The key point is that there appear to be some IE place names in Greecce
that cannot be interpreted as Greek.  This means that *some* IE group had
to precede the Greeks there, even if it wasn't the Anatolians.

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


From Odegard at means.net  Fri Oct 15 23:16:02 1999
From: Odegard at means.net (Mark Odegard <Odegard@means.net>)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 23:10:02 -6
Subject: Wheeled Vehicles.
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.231002.6.>

This post considers the position that the date of (non-Anatolian) PIE
unity is rather late, ca. 2500 BCE. My discussion will center on
wheeled vehicles, and the question how, when and where.

The following quotes are from J.P. Mallory's chapter in _The
Indo-Europeanization of Northern Europe_, edited by Karlene Jones-Bley
and Martin E. Huld (Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph No. 17,
Institute for the Study of Man, 1996).

--start quotes--
[...] Stefan Zimmer has argued what we may call the "strict
constructualist" case. He argues that since a reconstructed
proto-language is essentially an abstraction and thereare no
independent ways of dating it, the only date we can meaningfully
employ is immediately before our earliest textual evidence about 2000
BC....

Now I think that both linguists and archaeologists should realize the
consequences of this "strict constructualist" date. By 2500 BC there
is hardly an archaeological solution to Indo-European origins that
does not propose that the Indo-Europeans spanned most of the breadth
of Eurasia and other than Robert Drews's recent attempt ... I am
unaware of any serious archaeological solution that envisages
expansions beginning ca. 2500 BC or later. If one follows Marija
Gimburtas' Kurgan theory, for example, then we would have
Proto-Indo-Europeans occupying the entire area from the Corded Ware
culture in Holland ... to the Afanasievo culture on the Yenisei [...]
and the Sherratt's scenario would have them at least from Denmark to
the Aral Sea [....] [p. 6]

[...] David Anthony defends the notion that the Proto-Indo-European
community must have been relatively unified up to ca. 3300 BC because
it shared a vocabular for wheeled vehicles which only began to appear
in Eurasia about this time. Against the suggestion that the words
forvehicles may have spread among the various Indo-Europeanlanguages
later, Anthony argues that the "five Indo-European roots forming the
wheeled-vehicle semantic field exhibit no internal evidence of having
been derived from any one Indo-European daughter language" and had
they come from an already differentiated language "then the linguistic
signature of that parent group should be evidence in the disseminated
vocabulary". [p.11]

The striking thing here is that the northwest languages are generally
seen to emerge as daughter branches sometime between 1500 and 500 BC
(and Tocharian would perhaps offer a similar date), Greek and
Indo-Aryan sometime between 2100-1500 BC. In a sense then the purely
linguistic picture of Indo-European might be said to fit disturbingly
well with Stefan Zimmer's proposal that Proto-Indo-European should not
date prior to 2500 BC. [p. 14]

The Neolithic argument proposes that ca. 4500-4000 BC, populations in
west and northern Europe spoke Indo-European and that it later evolved
into Celtic and Germanic. These languages contains words for wheeled
vehicles which are widely shared by other Indo-European groups.
Archaeological evidence suggests that these words could not have
entered their vocabulary at any time, no matter where they were
situated, before the fourth millennium BC. According to many of the
traditional arguments adduced for the date of linguistic divergence in
this region, the terms for wheeled vehicles could have been adopted by
either or both of these populations at anytime between ca. 3500 and
1000 BC and not be detected as a loan word. From this we can see that
while the shared wheeled vehicle terminology cannot be explained as
loan words between individual Indo-European languages, they also need
not be explained as the fourth millennium BC terms either -- they
could have diffused later. [pp. 15-16]
--end quotes--

So. When did wheeled vehicle technology become a part of the
Indo-Europeans' industrial repetoire? And where? And how?

There are some practical requirements if you are to have sturdy,
steppe-worthy wagons and carts. The first of them, of course, is a
source of wood. While there were trees the river valleys of the
steppe, the real source for lumber would have been the southern edge
of the North European forest -- the forest which is essentially
co-extensive in area as is the 'incessantly discussed' Corded Ware
horizon.

The second is tools, at least copper tools, and for a really good cart
that makes judicious use of hardwood, probably bronze tools. How early
can one reasonably impute the regular use of bronze at the
forest-steppe boundary? In his 1989 book, Mallory mentions the Ezero
culture of modern central Bulgaria (= Karanovo VII), starting 3200 BCE
as one bright point of early Bronze Age culture. We might have the
proto-Anatolians down here at this time, and who knows, they might
have even been the go-betweens for moving the knowledge of making
bronze northwards.

Mallory reminds us of the need to keep the PIE homeland within
reasonable bounds: Poland- or Germany-sized. Having an essentially
mutually intelligible continuum ranging from the Yenisey to the North
Sea is improbable, as is Denmark to the Aral Sea, or even Hungary to
the Caspian. The north Pontic area is reasonable.

Is it necessary that the steppe be monolithically IE-speaking? This
goes against the historic pattern for the area. Is it necessary that
every person who was part of the Yamnaya culture be IE-speaking? Is
it necessary for the French and Germans to speak a single language if
they are to share a single material culture? Mallory, in the closing
pages of his 89 book seems suspicious of the reputed IE-ness of the
Corded Ware horizon.

The PIEs were highly mobile. At least no one really denies that. But
what was the basis of their mobility *as a people* (and not a bunch
of bravos riding off to wreck havoc someplace). Pregnant women and
small children cannot ride bareback on horses. They had carts and
wagons. When was it possible for them to have the tools to make these
sturdy steppe-worthy vehicles, as well as the associated skills in
handling and yoking animals to pull them?

A 'disturbingly' late date seems attractive.
--
Mark Odegard   mailto:odegard at means.net


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Oct 16 05:58:44 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 01:58:44 EDT
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY (GRAY MINYAN)
Message-ID: <SAT.16.OCT.1999.015844.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/15/99 12:23:37 AM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu wrote:
<<I don't know all the details regarding that pottery style, but I'm pretty
confident in stating that you're MISREPRESENTING the field if you say that it
was "quite clear" that the Minyan pottery REPRESENTS A CONTINUATION of an
earlier style.>> (caps are mine)

We'll be getting to misrepresentations later.  But at this point it's
probably important that those on the list who are interested rely on more
than your confidence, which may be a bit misleading.  Below I quote sources
that say that Gray Minyan is both a continuation and has no established
connection with a northern migration, but rather probably has its roots in
Anatolia.

Once again, I am NOT saying that the appearance of Gray Minyan proves
anything specifically.  But its seems that these days Gray Minyan lends NO
SERIOUS SUPPORT for a northern invasion or migration by Greek speakers during
this period.

I wrote:
<<In the bad old days, Gray Minyon was associated with "the arrival of the
Greeks" from the north, but it is now quite clear that the pottery style is a
continuance....>>

Here are some descriptions of a current understanding of Grey Minyan pottery.
 If there are any recent documented findings that contradict what's written
below, it would be great to see them.

<<Until about 1960, Gray Minyan was often identified as the pottery of
northern invaders who destroyed EH civilization ca. 1900 B.C. and introduced
MH material culture into the Greek peninsula.   However, Caskey's excavations
at Lerna as well as more recently excavated sequences at several other sites
have MADE IT ABUNDANTLY CLEAR that Gray Minyan, rather than being new in the
MH period, is the DIRECT DESCENDANT of the fine gray burnished pottery of the
EH III Tiryns culture. Moreover, it seems likely that the Black/Argive
variety of Minyan is nothing other than an evolved version of the EH III
"Dark slipped and burnished" class....>> (caps are mine)

<<...Furthermore, there is nothing particularly "northern" about the ancestry
 of the EH III progenitors of MH Minyan except that they almost certainly
came to the northeastern Peloponnese from central Greece (i.e. from the north
with respect to the Peloponnese).>> (This corrects my statement about Minyan
not being found north of the Peloponnese.)

<<The term "Minyan" was originally coined by Schliemann very early in the
history of Aegean prehistoric archaeology ... The monochrome burnished
pottery manufactured from moderately to extremely fine clays which is
presently described as "Minyan ware" can occur in Gray, Black (or Argive),
Red, and Yellow varieties. The most common shapes in all varieties of Minyan
are open forms, for the most part goblets and kantharoi which are clearly
recognizable as EVOLVED FORMS of the Bass bowl and kantharos of the EH III
Tiryns culture.>> (caps are mine)

[With regard to the Bass bowl]: <<Virtually all these new shapes [Lefkandi I]
are derived from Western Anatolian prototypes of late Troy II or Troy III
date, as is presumably also the use of the fast wheel....the Bass bowl
[however] has a long local history going back to the EH I period, while the
other two appear to be local developments in this phase which may have been
at least partially inspired by the Anatolian influence evident in much of the
"Lefkandi I" ceramic assemblage.>>

<<One other distinctive ceramic class of [Tiryns] culture consists of fine
gray burnished vases, almost invariably kantharoi, Bass bowls, and tankards.
This gray ware is the EH III ANCESTOR of the characteristic Middle Helladic
ware known as "Gray Minyan". At Lerna, Lefkandi, and Tsoungiza/Nemea, a good
deal of this EH III fine gray burnished pottery is wheelmade, whereas almost
all of the rest of the pottery of this period is handmade.>> (caps are mine)

<<The angular profiles of Gray Minyan vases are in fact probably due simply
to the common utilization of the fast wheel in their production.... the
development of Minyan ware is probably best associated with the arrival of
the fast wheel from Anatolia...>>

The above are excerpted from J Rutter's Prehistoric Archaeology of the Aegean
on the web at
(http://tenaya.cs.dartmouth.edu/history/bronze_age/lessons/3.html) and
(http://tenaya.cs.dartmouth.edu/history/bronze_age/lessons/9.html) and
Nordquist, "The Pottery of the Early Helladic III and Middle Helladic
Periods," in Runnels, Pullen, & Langdon, Artifact and Assemblage: The Finds
from a Regional Survey of the Southern Argolid (Stanford1995) 43ff.

I hope this gives interested list members a sense of how unsatisfactory the
Gray Minyan evidence is as a support for a northern migration.  Of course, I
may be wrong.  There may be newer documented archaeological evidence that
contradicts this.  I'd love to hear about it.

Regards,
Steve Long


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Sat Oct 16 01:04:15 1999
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan)
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 01:04:15 -0000
Subject: Possessives
Message-ID: <SAT.16.OCT.1999.010415.0000.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Dear Larry and IEists:

My apoligies to the moderator and the list for the accidental posting of a
partial draft of this response to Larry.

----- Original Message -----
From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 1999 5:12 PM

[PR previously]

<snip>

>> One of the principal benefits of terming this class of words
>> "possessive pronouns" is that it enables us to identify comparable
>> classes of words in IE, English, and Basque --- even though the
>> details of their employment may differ.

[LT]

> Well, this reminds me of Abe Lincoln's little joke.  "How many legs does
> a sheep have if you call the tail a leg?"  "Five?"  "No, four: calling
> the tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."

> Possessive items, in general, are "comparable" among languages only
> insofar as they are translation equivalents.  Syntactically, they can
> and do exhibit many different kinds of behavior, requiring them to be
> assigned to various parts of speech, or sometimes to no part of speech.

> The English possessives like `my' are determiners because they behave
> like determiners.  They do not behave like pronouns, and so they are not
> pronouns.  And they certainly don't behave like adjectives.

[PR]
It seems to be the rationale of the approach Larry espouses to assign words
to classes based on their ability to occur in certain positions within
grammatically well-formed sentences --- what I would call the slot-theory.

That is certainly one method of analysis; and, in certain cases, I would even
be glad to admit that it may be useful although Larry has, so far, steadfastly
refused to respond to my criticisms of it except with two logically fallacious
arguments:

1) argumentum ad populum: (paraphrased) "all linguists are using it".

I have specifically documented that there are eminent linguists like Beekes
who, apparently, are not using Larry's system of word classification;
strangely, we heard no further comment from Larry when I demonstrated a prima
facie case for Beekes classifying words as 'possessive pronouns'.

But even if Beekes did prefer Larry's method of classification, in fact if God
himself preferred it, it is still, depending on one's beliefs, a fallacy: ad
populum, based on the democratic popular prejudice that the majority's will has
some intrinsic value; ad verecundiam, if one should be awed that "all"
linguists agree with Larry (oops! all but one, of course).

I would have much preferred to know "why" slots are the only game in town
rather than the identity of the slot-fillers.

But, "slots" is not the only useful rationale that may be used, a broad-minded
position that I would hope Larry might espouse in any context.

His preference is a direct outgrowth of the school to which he subscribes, and
the definitions that school generates. Larry, there are other schools, no
matter who underrepresented they may be in your Weltanschauung.

Larry's definition of 'pronoun' (as contained in his dictionary) is: "The
lexical category, or a member of this category, whose members typically
function as noun phrases in isolation, not normally requiring or permitting
the presence of determiners or other adnominals, and whose members typically
have little or no intrinsic meaning or reference."

I guess I may be one of the *few* aspiring-to-be linguists who was surprised to
learn that this definition made *no* reference whatsoever to what I always
thought was *one* characteristic of pronouns: that they "function as
substitutes for nouns or noun phrases", quoting the now worthless (:-))) AHD.

Now, I can entertain the possibility that Larry's definition may be superior,
so let us see if it is.

Now Larry says 'pronouns' "typically have little or no intrinsic meaning or
reference". I consider this totally inaccurate and misguided. The 1st p. sing.
pronoun, "I", means 'the speaker'; the 2nd p. sing. pronoun, "you", means 'the
listener'. Now I know Larry is familiar with enough languages to know that
there are a number of languages where this can be etymologically shown. Now,
maybe Larry will want to regard those terms in those languages as 'nouns'
rather than 'pronouns'. I will fear for the state of his soul if he argues that
((:--:). And let us please not worry about things like German 'Sie' or 'His
Majesty'. There have been enough red herrings on the list already; and most of
us prefer ours, referring to red herrings, white with vinegar and onions.

Now Larry says 'pronouns' are words "not normally requiring or permitting the
the presence of determiners or other adnominals".

I, who would dispute this, think that adnominals ("An adnominal constituent may
be variously . . . a relative clause") are fairly uncommon in the 1st and 2nd
persons but not at all rare in the 3rd person, it being typically less
well-defined than the 1st or 2nd person. Are there they who doubt this?

Am I, who am maintaining this, alone in the non-linguist night?

[LT continued]
> The Basque possessives like <nere> `my' exhibit none of the properties
> of the Basque determiners and they cannot be classified as determiners.
> They are also certainly not adjectives, since they behave nothing like
> adjectives.  They are probably best regarded as case-inflected forms of
> pronouns.

> The Latin possessives like <meus> `my', on the whole, are probably best
> regarded as adjectives, since they behave like adjectives in that
> language.  They are certainly not determiners, and they don't look much
> like pronouns, either.

[PR]
This method of analysis makes no sense to me at all. If I say 'horse hockey',
then 'horse' "behave(s)" like an adjective but, unless I missed something, even
Larrry's dictionary would call it a noun, wouldn't it?

So what if Latin <meus> behaves like an adjective? It is a pronoun, because it
stands for 'the speaker's'. Is there anyone on this list besides Larry who
thinks it means anything different? <meus> is a pronoun in a form designed for
its adjectival employment.

[LT continued]
> Other languages use other strategies.  Some have no distinct possessive
> forms at all, but simply adpose the free forms of pronouns to head
> nouns.  Some use a particle to link a free pronoun to its head.  Some
> use bound markers attached to head nouns, often markers bearing no
> resemblance to free pronouns.  And some languages employ mixed
> strategies with two or more of these in various combinations; examples
> are Turkish and Jacaltec.

> Classing all of these are "possessive pronouns" *tout court* is, at the
> very least, unhelpful.

[PR]
Why, specifically, is it "unhelpful"?  In the first case, we *could* say that
"pronouns form their adjectival forms by direct adposition"; in the second,
"pronouns form their adjectival forms by linking through a particle with the
noun'; or, thrirdly, "pronouns, with a different form from free pronouns, are
employed adjectivally by attachment to head nouns".

Whatever the mechanism, the equivalent to "my" means "the speaker's".

[PR previously]
>> The essential quality of any adjective is that it designates a
>> subcategory of a catgeory of objects.

[LT responded]
> No, not at all.

> This is a prototypical semantic property of adjectives in languages that
> have them, but `adjective' is a syntactic category, not a semantic
> category, and not all adjectives, even in English, have this property.

[PR]
Can Larry name me a "syntactic category" that has *NO* meaning?

[LT continued]
> For example, consider `Susie is a mere child.'  Here the adjective
> `mere' does not define a subclass of the class of children: children are
> not divided into mere and non-mere varieties.

[PR]
Since AHD and OD both are so notoriously "unlinguist"ic, I really have no
certain way to know what Larry understands by <mere>.

I shall stick my neck in the noose and try to explain what I, as a native
speaker of English, understand by it.

I believe the sentence can be re-phrased as 'Susie is nothing more than a
child'. One interpretation might be that, contrary to someone's assertion that
Susie is old (or mature, or trusted, etc) enough to stay out all night long,
the speaker considers her so young that heavy dates are not advised. We might
also say: 'Susie is no non-child', with all the restrictions or privileges that
we put on or accord our offspring of tender years. Perhaps it is a little more
difficult to see 'mere' as an adjective because of its semantics but, as I am
sure the debater Larry knows, we can use the logical circles on this one very
easily.

Therefore, j'accuse! It seems to me that almost everyone will be able to accept
'mere' as an adjective modifying 'child'. Am I wrong, or merely misguided?

[LT continued]
> Or consider this one:
> `Lisa is a heavy smoker'.  This time the adjective `heavy' does not
> perform any subclassification of the set of smokers.  In fact, it
> doesn't even apply semantically to smokers, or to Lisa: instead, it
> applies to Lisa's habit.

[PR]
Well, if there are "heavy smokers" and "non-heavy smokers" ("light smokers"),
it is difficult for me to see that no process of classification has been at
work. Perhaps you could explain that in greater detail, Larry. To me, the set
has been subclassified. I think it is you, who, this time, is confusing the
semantics with the syntax. Is it so strange really that with an agentive
deverbal noun the adjective should have a connection adverbially with the
underlying verb, or does that not occur in Basque (:--/).

[PR previously]
>> 'Black dog' can be represented logically as a small circle ('black')
>> within a larger circle ('dog'). Possessive pronouns can be
>> represented logically in exactly the same way.

[LT]
> For certain purposes, perhaps.  But this is not an argument that `my' is
> a pronoun: rather, it appears to be a (feeble) argument that `my' is an
> adjective -- which it is not.

[PR]
The "certain purposes" are communication. And yes, when 'my' is shorthand for
'the speaker's', it is a pro-noun. In that circle called X, there are smaller
circles containing 'my', 'your', 'Larry's', 'Pat's', 'etc.'s'.

[PR previously]
>> Of course, this is exactly the same situation as when nouns are used
>> attributively: "newspaper account".

[LT]
> Indeed.  It begins to become clear that semantic tests are not very
> useful for identifying syntactic categories.  But we linguists knew
> that.

[PR]
It has become very clear to me that "semantic tests" are not your forte ({:-o).
And, generally, what synatctic category is it that you think has not "semantic
content"; and, if it has none, whatever would it mean?

[PR previously]
>> I think your basic problem is that you need to take a serious look
>> at your definition of 'adjective'.

[LT]
> Well, *one* of us certainly does. ;-)

<snip>

[PR previously]
>> Perhaps not when you're playing the 'slots' but that is not the only
>> game in town by a long shot!

>> I sincerely feel sorry for you if you cannot see that.

[LT]
> You mean there's an Arkansas analysis in which `arrival' is a verb?
> Most interesting.

> [on the slot-and-filler approach]

[PR]
>> I remember the first manifestations of the 'slot system' as opposed
>> to teaching grammar in the training I received as an aspirant
>> foreign language instructor.

>> This 'grammarless' method of teaching language was then extended to
>> English instruction in the US,

[LT]
> I would hardly describe the slot-and-filler approach as "grammarless".
> It is in fact a thoroughly grammatical approach.  Not so traditional, of
> course, but certainly grammatical in nature.  Far more so than the
> semantic approach which I dismissed above.

[PR]

Yes, you were dismissive but your dismissal does not dismiss it. And how does
your characterization of the slot-and-filler approach (the original inspiration
for Macs, no doubt), square with your definition of "grammar": "The system by
which the words and morphemes of a language are organized into larger units,
particularly into sentences . . ."?

When we were first presented with the "slots", we were informed that the whole
purpose of the technique was to circumvent "difficult grammar" for less
talented students.

[PR previously]
>> and the terrible language skills of today's youth are
>> directly attributable to this method of instruction, IMHO.

[LT]
> Dear me.  The linguistic shortcomings of our young people are to be laid
> at the door of slot-and-filler grammar?

> That's a new one on me.

[PR]
The relativistic non-prescriptive ideology hepped Mommy too.

[LT]
>I'm
> afraid my baleful influence is getting out of hand.

[PR]
To judge by the threads in progress on this list, you may put your fears to
rest.

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 proto-language at email.msn.com  Sat Oct 16 01:12:35 1999
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan)
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 01:12:35 -0000
Subject: Possessives
Message-ID: <SAT.16.OCT.1999.011235.0000.>

Dear Sean and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: Sean Crist <kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 1999 2:39 PM

> On Wed, 6 Oct 1999, Larry Trask wrote:

>> On Sun, 3 Oct 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote:

>>> 'Black dog' can be represented logically as a small circle ('black')
>>> within a larger circle ('dog').  [...] [Snip, and reordering -SC]

> [...]
>> For example, consider `Susie is a mere child.'  Here the adjective
>> `mere' does not define a subclass of the class of children: children are
>> not divided into mere and non-mere varieties.  Or consider this one:
>> `Lisa is a heavy smoker'.  This time the adjective `heavy' does not
>> perform any subclassification of the set of smokers.  In fact, it
>> doesn't even apply semantically to smokers, or to Lisa: instead, it
>> applies to Lisa's habit.

[SC]
> Just to amplify on this point, consider "a counterfeit dollar".  The whole
> point here is that the item in question is _not_ a dollar; it doesn't
> belong to some subset of dollars in the way that a black dog belongs to a
> subset of the dogs.  Likewise with "a fake moustache", "an imposter
> policeman", etc.

[PR]
One of the most challenging things about interpretation of any language is
that words, spelled and pronounced the same, do not always mean the same
things.

In the phrase, "a counterfeit dollar", the "dollar" cannot mean a 'real
dollar', obviously that would be self-contradictory. It means, in this
phrase, rather 'something that looks, feels, etc.  like a dollar'. In that
category, there are the 'real' ones and, another circle for the
'counterfeit' ones.

But, for the sake of discussion, let us pretend to assume that it means
'real, genuine dollar'. Then what part of speech is 'counterfeit', and how
would you say it is used syntactically?

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 meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er
mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri Oct 15 20:07:22 1999
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 21:07:22 +0100
Subject: Phylogeny
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.210722.0100.>

By the way, in all the discussion of the UPenn tree, no one has referred to
the book:
"An Indo-european classification, a lexicostatistical experiment" by Joseph
B Kruskal et al (Transactions of the American Philological Society, vol. 82,
part 5).

This may also show some strengths and limitations of a purely
computer-generated model.

Peter


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sat Oct 16 15:46:21 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 16:46:21 +0100
Subject: Excluding Basque data
Message-ID: <SAT.16.OCT.1999.164621.0100.>

ECOLING at aol.com writes:

> We may be getting closer to some agreement on issues of fact
> (as distinct from preferences).

[on my comments]

> As far as I understand the rest of his message,
> Trask does NOT take issue with it in what follows.
> He does say it doesn't matter whether the sound-symbolic
> words have different canonical forms from other vocabulary
> or not.

For my purposes now, it doesn't matter.  Correct.

> Trask appears to be equating his criteria
> with "best candidates for native and ancient status".

Not "equating".  I am *proposing* my criteria as the most appropriate ones for
my purposes.  And so far nobody has proposed any other criteria for the
purpose.

[LT]

>> My criteria are devised with Basque in mind.  Other cases may call for
>> a different approach, notably in respect of my third criterion.
>> Whether sound-symbolic words are generally not ancient, I don't know,
>> but I have no particular interest in this question anyway.  I'm only
>> interested in the Basque case.

> This does not respond to my point.  My point was that this appears to
> be a reductio ad absurdum of the approach, because it seems to be
> implied that sound-symbolic items are not good candidates for native
> and ancient status.

In Basque, this appears to be true.  But I make no universal claims.

> That conclusion must I think be false,
> UNLESS one means by it circularly that words which undergo
> reformations not in accordance with the sound laws applicable to
> the bulk of the vocabulary, reformations entirely internal to the
> language in question,

An interesting point.  Amusingly, my most recent paper, to be published early
next year, draws attention to the difficulties posed by certain types of
re-formations for reconstruction -- though not reformations of expressive
words.

By the way, re-formations are not exceptions to sound laws: they are merely
events which obscure the histories of the affected items.

> or even words which persist unchanged despite
> sound changes which apply to other vocabulary, are not native or ancient.

There is no reason to suppose that any significant numbers of such words exist
in Basque.

> To me, it is simply that these words are subject to a different set of
> sound changes (or lack thereof), they are no less native for sure,
> and arguably no less ancient since their antecedents in direct line of
> descent existed in an earlier form of the language.

But still missing the point.  I exclude words from my initial list if they are
not attested early, if they are not widespread in Basque, or if they are shared
with neighboring languages.  I do this regardless of whether I do or do not
suspect the words to be expressive formations.  If most expressive formations
get excluded as a result -- as indeed they do -- that's just tough bananas.

> To doubt that last part seems to be to doubt that earlier forms of
> various languages had sound-symbolic words,

Certainly not.  I do not for a moment suppose that Pre-Basque must have lacked
expressive formations.  But it is a bad mistake to assume that any *particular*
expressive formations in the modern language must be ancient, in the absence of
any evidence for such a conclusion.

> or if they did,
> to doubt that those words are in any reasonable sense cognate
> (parent) to any of the current sound-symbolic words, that is,
> that sound-symbolic words are so unstable as to prevent any
> reasonable sense of inherited vocabulary from being applicable.

I make no such assumption, and I can't imagine why anybody thinks I do.
But we have to have criteria for judging which words are most likely ancient.
We can't ignore those criteria just because of dark suspicions.

> I think most linguists would reject that conclusion.  Perhaps
> there is some way of avoiding it, but it seems to me to follow
> logically.

What "follows logically" is neither here nor there in this case.
The only point being made is that some native and ancient Basque words still
exist today or existed long enough to be recorded, even though they fail to
satisfy my criteria.  I have no doubt this is true.  But it is utterly
irrelevant.

For the seventeenth time, I am *not* trying to sweep up every Basque word that
*might* be ancient.  I am only trying to identify the best candidates for
native and ancient status.  Why is that so hard to understand?

[on the severely localized Basque <pinpirin> (and variants) 'butterfly']

[LT]

>> Now, I consider it most unlikely that the severely localized word
>> <pinpirin> has been in the language for millennia, all that time
>> violating the ordinary phonological structure of the language and
>> refusing to participate in otherwise categorical phonological changes.

> I don't so quickly come to that judgment.
> It appears to be rather common for sound-symbolic words.

I do not come to that judgement "quickly".  I come to it after more than 25
years of studying the history and prehistory of Basque.  If anyone were
interested, I could write a modest essay on the numerous Basque words for
'butterfly', all of which appear to be expressive formations of no great
antiquity.  These words further appear to have been exceptionally unstable.

> As an aside, I will add that I have been interested in this
> problem for a very long time, and have discovered it also in
> the historical changes of deaf communities' "signed languages",
> where sometimes in a pair of etymologically related signs,
> the sign with the more concrete meaning retains its form, while the
> sign with the more abstract meaning undergoes changes
> of execution, what we would refer to as reductions and simplifications.]

Excellent!  I am delighted to see data cited from sign languages, which are
still badly under-represented in our linguistic database.

> The fact that this makes our task harder does not argue for or against
> the validity of the statement that inherited "sound-symbolic" words
> sometimes do not undergo sound changes.  They are nevertheless
> inherited.

Yes: inherited words are inherited.  No quarrel there.

But it does not follow that any particular expressive formations are ancient --
now does it?

Basque <pinpirin> is not ancient because some other sound-symbolic words in
some other languages are ancient -- and I'm pretty sure it's not very ancient
at all.

> Trask suggests that the following example is wrong.
> I should have said that I took it on the authority of
> Dwight Bolinger, a linguist specializing in English linguistics
> who was a president of the Linguistic Society of America,
> who believed that "teeny" was regenerated (I think that was
> his word).

>>> (English "tiny", which went through the great vowel shift,
>>> and "teeny", which did not go through the great vowel shift,
>>> was retained or regenerated or reborrowed from a dialect,
>>> would be a similar case,
>>> unless the dialect-borrowing solution is adopted.)

> [LT]

>> No.  The earlier `tine' went through the GVS normally and produced
>> `tiny', as expected.  The form `teeny', in all likelihodd, is a later
>> re-formation, derived from sound-symbolic factors.  The OED tells me
>> that `teeny' is nowhere recorded before 1825 -- long after the GVS --
>> and suggests that it probably originated in nursery language.

> We are not too far apart here, except that Trask should have said
> "Yes" to the first sentence, which he was actually agreeing with.
> In this next sentence he could have said "No" or "But not" or whatever.
> His "in all likelihood" should be emphasized,
> that is, we really don't know for sure.
> I gave three possible scenarios.
> But the outcome of each of them is the same.
> What is now SPELLED "teeny"
> is pronounced rather similarly to what was earlier SPELLED "tine",
> when the final "e" was still pronounced and the "i" was pronounced
> as in "machine".
> So was it retained or re-formed much later?
> We know that spelling changes lag behind speech.
> And we know that first attestations which we happen to have evidence
> for may be later than first usages, often by a large time span.
> So the conclusion is not obviously the one Trask prefers.

The conclusion of a re-formation is indeed not intrinsically obvious.
But it *is* the conclusion supported by most of the sources I have ever
consulted.  It is also the conclusion best supported by the evidence.

> Trask does not mention the case of French "pavillon / papillon".
> Does he believe that "papillon" was lost and then regenerated,
> and thus "not ancient" or even "not native"?
> I assume he would not want to claim either of the latter two.
> If not, then use that example instead of "tiny / teeny".

I did not comment on this example because I am not familiar with the facts,
that's all.

> [LT]

>> Let's assume this point is valid.  What are the consequences?

>> Well, either sound-symbolic forms conform to the canonical forms of
>> ordinary lexical items, or they do not.  If they do, there is no
>> problem.

> But  Trask has said previously that the
> expressive vocabulary in Basque DOES differ in canonical forms
> from other vocabulary, so he believes the first alternative does not
> apply.

Indeed, but it would cause me no difficulty if it were otherwise.

> Here is his second alternative:

>> If they don't, then, assuming that many of them get into my
>> list in the first place, I'm going to have two sharply distinct groups
>> of words obeying different rules.  Also no problem.

> But Trask himself argues AGAINST the latter case occurring.
> He actively wants to prevent it "in the first place",
> and only to include them later. He says that his preference is
> to exclude nursery words etc.
> He really does want  to prevent the inclusion of nursery and expressive
> forms.  He believes these forms do not follow what he regards as the
> normal sound laws and that they violate
> the normal canonical forms (his comments on "pinpirin").
> Since lack of attestation may correlate with this, use of the criterion
> of lack of sufficiently wide attestation DOES tend to exclude forms
> of certain formal types.
> He says that he wanted to exclude by an explicit criterion,
> but that he is not too unhappy if others don't want that particular
> exclusionary criterion, (? because he believes that ?)
> his other criteria will exclude most nursery words anyhow.

Yes.  I do not exclude <pinpirin>, because its expressive origin is not
blindingly obvious to non-specialists.  But <tu> 'spit' is different: probably
any comparative linguist would at once spot that one as an imitative formation.

> The assumption that "many" of them will get into Trask's list in
> the first place is exactly what much of this discussion has been about,

By my criteria, few words will make it into my list that I personally consider
expressive, true.  That's just the way it is.

If this bothers you -- and it certainly doesn't bother me -- then *what other
criteria* do you endorse for my task?

I've lost track of how many times I've asked this fundamental question.
But I still hear nothing but silence.

May I now safely conclude that Lloyd Anderson has no other explicit criteria to
offer?

If so, why is he continuing to post at such length?

> namely,
> his criteria will tend to prevent many of them from getting into his list.
> Notice again his strong antipathy towards the word "pinpirin":

>> Now, I consider it most unlikely that the severely localized word
>> <pinpirin> has been in the language for millennia, all that time
>> violating the ordinary phonological structure of the language and
>> refusing to participate in otherwise categorical phonological changes.

> (even aside from the fact that "millennia" is not required to reach
> the level of the early Basque of the 16th century which Trask
> otherwise prefers as his starting point for data, to project
> further backwards)

Eh?  I'm interested in finding out something about the Pre-Basque of about 2000
years ago.  Now, by my reckoning, 2000 years is two millennia.

Any hypothetical case of the sort invoked by Lloyd must therefore have remained
in the language for *at least* two millennia, all the while serenely violating
the ordinary phonological constraints of the language and refusing to undergo
the ordinary phonological changes.

The 16th century has nothing to do with it.  This is merely the period of the
first substantial Basque texts.

[LT]

>> Perhaps I haven't made it clear that I am also very interested in
>> characterizing the expressive formations.  But I first want to
>> characterize the forms of ordinary lexical items, before I turn my
>> attention to the expressive formations -- for one thing, because it's
>> easier to see what's special about expressive formations if I already
>> know what ordinary words look like.

> In that case, the best possible way is to include expressive formations
> in the data set from the very beginning, mark the ones we are
> reasonably sure are "expressives" because of their semantics,
> and notice what may be different about them,

Finally a proposal!

Let's see if I understand this.  You are proposing that I should decide *in
advance* which Basque words are of expressive origin, and include these in my
initial list even though they grossly fail my otherwise categorical criteria.

Questions, Lloyd:

1. How do I know in advance which words are of ultimate expressive origin
unless I *first* make up my mind what expressive words look like?

2. I first pick the expressive words and put them into my list, whereupon I
find that the expressive words I have deliberately put into the list because of
their distinctive forms and/or meanings do indeed have distinctive forms and/or
meanings.  Is this not totally circular?  What can I possibly hope to find
other than what I put in to start with?

3. If the deliberately selected words are put into my list even though there
exists no evidence that they are ancient, how can I possibly have any
confidence that my list consists largely of ancient words?

How about some answers?

[on my criteria]

> This explicitly states that the expressives would be mostly
> excluded from his list by his primary criteria.

Yes; I believe this to be correct.

> That comes very
> close to contradicting the possibility that "many" of them could
> be included "in the first place".  We can't have it both ways.

And who has suggested otherwise?

I don't give a damn whether many, few or none of them get in.  I personally
believe that few of them will, that's all.  But the words that go in are the
words that satisfy my criteria.

> [LT]

>> Sure.  But how can I tell that a particular form is rare unless I first
>> determine what the common forms are?

> By contrasting them explicitly, as just pointed out.

Contrasting them *with what*?

> [LT]

>> But what I'm trying to do is precisely to identify the damn
>> strata in the first place.

> Again, best done by including them in the data set,
> and learning how to mark them as belonging to different strata,
> gradually with increasing accuracy.

Poppycock, I'm afraid.  Lloyd, I am afraid you have suggested no procedure at
all for distinguishing strata.  Go ahead: put in all the words you like.
Put in every word in a large Basque dictionary, if you like.

Then what?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

> Larry Trask should use whatever sequence of investigations
> he is most comfortable with.  But he should also be careful
> that he does not allow the order of his investigating various
> strata, an order of his own choosing, not a property inherent
> to the language itself, to bias his conclusions.
> That is, in part, what we have been discussing.

> Trask wants to draw firm conclusions from his initial steps
> with his initially selected strata of the vocabulary,
> and it appears he would not be eager to change those conclusions
> from the later results of investigating other strata.

>> I have also explained that, in addition, I would prefer to exclude
>> obvious nursery words and obvious imitative words at the outset, for
>> excellent reasons.  But I don't mind if others prefer not to do this.
>> It isn't going to make much difference anyway, since very few of these
>> words will satisfy my primary criteria.

> Why should the "primary" criteria be systematically selective of
> one stratum of NATIVE vocabulary against another stratum of NATIVE
> vocabulary.  Should that not be considered a defect in criteria
> which are claimed to be ideal for identifying the best candidates
> for native and ancient vocabulary?

> Rather, the criteria should be advertised for what they then are,
> criteria for identifying ONE stratum WITHIN the native and ancient
> vocabulary, a stratum excluding nursery and expressive words
> (and excluding vocabulary in those semantic domains and
> in those subject matters not dealt with in earliest documents,
> as discussed in another message).

> If the criteria are stated fully explicitly for what they are,
> then the conclusions drawn from them will have their
> inherent limitations made more explicit.
> That will be a courteous service to those who might want
> to use the results.  It of course means the results are less
> sweeping or definitive.  Such are the good consequences
> of being clear and open about what one is doing.

> I will be very glad if it turns out that we are getting somewhat closer.

> Sincerely,
> Lloyd Anderson
> Ecological Linguistics

-- End original message --


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sat Oct 16 16:32:26 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 17:32:26 +0100
Subject: Misrepresenting others' views
Message-ID: <SAT.16.OCT.1999.173226.0100.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

ECOLING at aol.com writes:

> Larry Trask continues to avoid the basic statement of the paradox,
> to muddy the waters with red herrings.
>
> And he continues to knowingly misrepresent others' views.

No; I do not.

Lloyd, I take very considerable offense at being accused of deliberate
misrepresentation.  This, to my mind, is just about the gravest charge that can
be laid against any scholar.

When taking issue with you or anybody else, I take the greatest care to present
your case as accurately as I can.  In your case, that has proved difficult,
because not infrequently I find that your words make little or no sense to me.
But I have never knowingly misrepresented you, and I think you should be
ashamed of yourself for asserting such a thing.

> No one has said that linguists do not normally think at all of any factors
> beyond mutual intelligibility.  So attributing it to one's opponents in a
> discussion is a serious misrepresentation.  (Nor has anyone said they
> do not normally think of other factors when creating a serious definition.
> They may choose a definition which does not incorporate every detail
> of which they are fully aware.)
> This misrepresentation is however consistent with
> what Larry Trask repeatedly does.  (See further below.)

Lloyd, look at your earlier postings.  You have repeatedly brandished mutual
intelligibility as the sole or principal criterion used by linguists.  You have
called this a "highly technical definition", to be contrasted with other
possible definitions.  You have suggested strongly that the man in the street
normally uses a much wider range of criteria in identifying languages than do
linguists.  And you have constantly cited a passage from Lyle Campbell's book,
extracted it out of its context, and brandished it explicitly as though it were
Campbell's own attempt at a universal definition -- which it is not.  Moreover,
you have done this even though you have apparently not read the book, and even
though you apparently do not understand what Campbell is trying to do, or why.
Several respondents, including me, have pulled you up sharply on the list for
this piece of misbehavior.

And you are accusing me of deliberate misrepresentation?

> Saying that many linguists commonly use a definition of distinct
> languages referring in some way to "mutual intelligibility"
> in no way implies that they are in any sense unaware of other factors
> which would enter into a refined definition.

Then why did you never admit this in your several postings?

You kept calling mutual intelligibility a "highly technical definition".
Now we are to understand that, by this phrase, you meant something that falls
considerably short of a "refined definition" -- whatever that might be.
Is that it?

See what I mean when I tell you I have trouble understanding what you write?

> Nor do they or we need to be lectured about mutual intelligibility
> being a gradient phenomenon (70% or etc.) as Larry Trask does.
> We are all quite aware of that, thank you very much.

Then why did you show no awareness of it while claiming that mutual
intelligibility was a highly technical definition and the one normally used by
linguists?

> NOR does it imply that such a simple definition is used only for children
> nor that it is "not a serious definition", as Trask has attempted to argue.

Nonsense.  I have said no such thing.  You are putting words into my mouth.

What I have said is this:

Mutual intelligibility is not the sole or usual criterion invoked by linguists
for identifying language boundaries.  It is only one of many.  It is not even a
very good criterion, but it is the one we must fall back on, as best we can,
when nothing else is available.

Find me a passage in one of my earlier postings in which I assert that mutual
intelligibility is suitable only for children.  And find me a passage in which
I assert, in so many words (you have used quotation marks) that mutual
intelligibility is "not a serious criterion".  Do it quickly.

If you can't do it, would you like to ponder the force of your phrase
"knowingly misrepresent[ing] others' views"? ;-)

> Lyle Campbell (whom Larry Trask professes to admire) uses exactly
> that definition in his book *American Indian Languages*
> which many consider a definitive reference work on the current
> status of knowledge of genetic relations in this field.

I think Lloyd's use of Campbell's book has already been dealt with more than
adequately.

> These are all red herrings.  Trask simply refuses to deal with
> the paradox raised.  He clearly does not like the obvious conclusion.

Sorry, but I have seen no paradox.  As I have pointed out several times,
publicly and privately, if you insist on claiming that "same language" and
"different language" constitute coherent, principled and definable notions,
then you will only fall into confusion and absurdity.  As indeed I believe
Lloyd has done here.

> As pointed out previously, the conclusion almost certainly stands
> EVEN IF one changes the definition to suit him, AS LONG AS
> the definition of "same" vs. "different" language does not preclude
> that some dialects of a language can change substantially so that
> (under one's favorite definition) they count as a distinct language,
> while other dialects can in the same time span change so little that
> one is more comfortable treating them as still the same language.
> The only way to avoid this appears (so far) to be a definition which
> circularly prevents the paradox by  defining ANY CHANGE HOWEVER
> SMALL as meaning we no longer have the "same language".
> This certainly does violence to any normal definition of
> same vs. different language (see also the next paragraph).

There is no "normal definition".  The relation "is the same language as" cannot
be given rigorous content.

> (Of course, saying there is no such thing as same vs. different
> language also evades it.  But that is a perversion of the English
> language, and a denial of normal usage among both linguists
> and lay people.

Aha!  Exactly.  Lloyd is taking his understanding of "normal usage" among both
linguists and laymen, and he's trying to reify it into something with rigorous
content, so that he can deduce consequences by rigorous logic.  Can't be done,
Lloyd.

> In a most recent message, Trask affirms this is his
> position, but then fails to admit that he should not have pretended
> to be answering the paradox with his many other red herrings,
> which appear relevant to the statement of the paradox only if one DOES
> admit that the notions of same vs. different language mean something.
> Because without that, the statement of the paradox means nothing
> and so should not be under discussion at all.)

Lloyd, this last sentence sums up my position magnificently.
That's just what I've been trying to say.

> On Trask's continued attmempts to discredit others:

Gee whiz, Lloyd -- you've really got it in for me, haven't you?
While you're at it, would you also like to blame me for corrupting the nation's
youth, a la Pat Ryan, or for the Reichstag fire?  ;-)

>>> Unless of course the writer literally means as he writes
>>> that mutual intelligibility is "one of many factors which may help to
>>> determine whether varieties are best regarded as two languages
>>> or as a single language".  Note the "one of", in which case the
>>> response should have been not "NO, WRONG", but
>>> "YES, WITH ADDITIONAL SPECIFICATIONS".

[LT]

>> Eh?  I say it's one of many factors, and you complain that I am overlooking
>> other factors?  What does this mean?

> Mr. Trask should have asked first, if he did not know what it means.

So your obscurity is my fault, because I failed to ask you for clarification
before replying to your public posting?  I see.  Anything else you'd like to
lay on my shoulders before we continue?

Actually, I couldn't have burned the Reichstag, because my mother had only just
turned 15 at the time, and she wouldn't even meet my father for another seven
years.  As for corrupting the nation's youth, well, most of the youth I recall
attempting to corrupt already seemed to know more about it than I did. ;-)

> As I have pointed out to him elsewhere, it means that he should not always
> try to find fault with the expressions of others' views, by saying they are
> wrong, then giving his own version which includes their views as part.  That
> is both rude and not entirely honest (at least I would consider myself
> dishonest if I did that).  Rather he should agree with his interlocutors as
> far as he can, and say he accepts their views as a PART of his own when he in
> fact does (as in this case he clearly did), and say that he needs to add some
> refinements or modifications before he can agree fully.
> It's an attitude and politeness problem, and also one of misrepresentation.

No, Lloyd.

The problem here is that, insofar as I can understand your position at all, I
disagree with it *fundamentally*.  Your entire case appears to me to rest upon
postulates which I reject as false or incoherent.  That's what I've been trying
to say.

> As to other misrepresentations, Trask in the list paraphrased here
> implies he disagrees with others of us on a long list of items.

> Trask says he does *not* believe that mutual intelligibility is *the*
> criterion
>      for setting up language boundaries.
> He says he does *not* believe that it is the primary or sole criterion
>      used by linguists in general.
> He says he does *not* believe that it constitutes a "serious technical
> definition".

> He says he does *not* believe that it can be applied in a principled way.

> He says he does *not* believe that the man in the street has a better
>      conception of language boundaries than professional linguists do.
> He says he does  *not* believe that individual languages just exist
>      as discrete entities "out there".
> He says he does *not* believe that the question "Are A and B the
>      same language or different languages?" is generally meaningful
>      or capable of being answered in a principled way.
> He says he does *not* believe that a language can remain unchanged over time.

> And Trask says he is afraid that this cumulation of disagreements
>      doesn't seem to leave him many points of contact with me.

> As has been apparent from his many communications, Mr. Trask
>      repeatedly tries to paint others as having the views listed above,
>      and similar ones.

> Every one of these is a misrepresentation, and Mr. Trask has been
> repeatedly informed of this fact.  So it is a deliberate misrepresentation.

Interesting.

Lloyd cites a series of beliefs which he imputes to me -- correctly, as it
happens, though I'm not at all sure that I've made all these points on the
list.

He now states the following: "Every one of these is a misrepresentation".

Lloyd, tell me: how the hell can my own assertions of my own beliefs constitute
a set of misrepresentations?

This discussion is becoming surreal.

Oops.  Gotta go, or my wife will have my ass.  Back later, if and when I have
the time.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From swheeler at richmond.edu  Sat Oct 16 18:25:07 1999
From: swheeler at richmond.edu (Stuart Wheeler)
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 14:25:07 -0400
Subject: Greater Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite Language Family
Message-ID: <SAT.16.OCT.1999.142507.0400.>

I apologize for a second posting.  But in my original message announcing the
University of Richmond Colloquium: "Greater Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite
Language Family," I inadvertently gave the wrong title for Prof. Colin
Renfrew's opening lecture.  The title should be "IndoEuropean Origins:  The
Case for Anatolia."  see http://hermes.richmond.edu/anatolia.

Stuart Wheeler


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sun Oct 17 03:15:13 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 23:15:13 EDT
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
Message-ID: <SAT.16.OCT.1999.231513.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/15/99 12:23:37 AM, Sean Crist wrote:

<<In an earlier post, I suggested that the speakers of Greek entered Greece
around 2100-1900 BCE.  Steven Long suggested that the SPEAKERS of Greek could
have been in Greece as early as 7000 BCE, and cites Renfrew as a source.>>
(caps mine)

Actually what I wrote was:
<<Based on the [archaeological] evidence above, there is NOTHING TO PRECLUDE
the conjecture that "Greeks were in Greece" during or even before the
Neolithic.  If one connects PIE with the first appearance of agriculture (a
la Renfrew), then that could move the date of "proto-Greek" OR ITS ANCESTORS
being in mainland Greece back towards 7000BC.>>

My first point of course was that there was no evidence of material culture
to PRECLUDE Greek, proto-Greek or IE speakers from being in Greece before the
dates Crist gave (2100-1900 BCE).  Crist referred to material evidence that
is apparently not there.

My second point was that IF you follow Renfrew, the material evidence of the
spread of neolithic agriculturalism might date essentially the same people
speaking an ancestor language of Greek as far back as 7000 BC.  This is NOT
inconsistent with the archaeological evidence, BTW.  And that is a VERY
IMPORTANT POINT.

Colin Renfrew's Archaeology and Language - given its date - is a formidable
piece precisely because it sticks with the hard evidence and appraises it
objectively.  And though I admire Mallory's In Search of... very much, it
should be said that Mallory's summaries of Renfrew's arguments are not
complete.  I'll try to point to certain items specifically in a later post.

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.

With regard to Renfrew's approach, Crist writes the following:
<<...the introduction of the agricultural cultural complex thru Europe is the
result of a population movement from Anatolia to the Balkans during the 7th
millenium BCE (which Renfrew accepts).  We're also forced to say that the
spread of the Indo-European languages implies a population movement.
Renfrew's response is to try to collapse these two migrations into one, thus
keeping the number of migrations to a minimum.>>

Actually, there are a better reason given by Renfrew for equating the spread
of neolithic agriculturalism with the spread of Proto-IndoEuropean.  Not the
least of which is the extent of IE dispersal at those periods in time when
ACTUAL DOCUMENTABLE EVIDENCE of language becomes available.

I once tried to find holes in the Neolithic Hypothesis on this list based on
the archaeological evidence.  Miguel Carrasquer Vidal did a darn good job of
presenting the case in a thread called appropriately "the Neolithic
Hypothesis" that may be preserved in the archives.  The strength of his
explanations is that he does know the archaeological evidence as well as the
linguistic.

Sean Crist goes on to write re Renfrew's theory:
<<Unfortunately, this solution cannot be made to work without ignoring a
huge amount of evidence.>>

I'm not sure what "huge amount of evidence" Sean is referring to.

Crist wrote:
<<An archaeologist here at Penn told me that he
was very "annoyed" at Renfrew for having put forward this view, and said
that if anyone with less than Renfrew's prestige had put it forward, it
simply would have been ignored as not worthy of consideration.>>

It's funny how much worse ideas can get through based on "prestige."  One
particular example comes to mind.

If there were any reason for archaeologists to be "annoyed" it would probably
be because they are becoming wary of conclusions many beginning to take the
position the evidence they are collecting to be particulary probative of
ethnic or linguistic conclusions in general.  Especially because of recent
accusations of allowing their work to support cultural bias.

In response to my request for an evaluation of another item that has been
discussed on this list, one rather eminent practioner simply wrote back to me:

<<Archeologist have become increasingly unhappy using
terms based upon language for labeling cultures which are
prehistoric--ie the culture has left no written documents upon which a
historican can exercise analysis. With rare exceptions, physical artefacts do
not include evidence about the language used by those who left the artefacts
recovered.>>

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sun Oct 17 03:36:19 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 23:36:19 EDT
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
Message-ID: <SAT.16.OCT.1999.233619.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/15/99 7:43:37 AM, sarima at ix.netcom.com wrote:

<<I sometimes think the critics of linguistic archaeology make too much of
this sort of continuity.  In a mixing of cultures in which one language
eventually displaces another, *naturally* many aspects of the culture of the
"losing" language will persist afterwards.>>

It's not a criticism of "linguistic archaeology" or "paleolinguistics".  It's
simply that material remains speak for themselves.  If you have "mixed
cultures", one can make any linguistic conclusions one feels appropriate.
That doesn't change the hard evidence and the fact that it may not endorse
any particular conclusion about the languages being spoken.

sarima at ix.netcom.com also wrote:
<<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
...".>>

And that is exactly the case.  If you are saying that material culture has
remained, than what would you expect him to report?  ANYTHING else would be
INCORRECT.

The point you've made is that the material culture can sometimes be
independent of language change - which is exactly what the problem is in
expecting that archaeological evidence can be used to support  e.g., the
presence or absence of Greek being spoken in parts or all of Greece in
prehistoric times.  Which is why I wrote ALTHOUGH THIS MIGRATION (from
Anatolia) MAY HAVE INTRODUCED GREEK INTO GREECE, THERE IS NO REAL
[archaeological] EVIDENCE TO JUSTIFY EVEN THIS CONCLUSION.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sun Oct 17 04:23:15 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 00:23:15 EDT
Subject: "Horse" in Native American Languages
Message-ID: <SUN.17.OCT.1999.002315.EDT.>

In connection with the posts below, I have a question for the list.  Any help
would be greatly appreciated:

Q: What word/words were used to refer to "horses" among the various Native
American languages/dialects after those animals were introduced by Europeans?
 Were the names unique to the various languages or did the same words cross
language borders?  Were they adaptions of European words or "home grown?"
Again, any help will be greatly appreciated.

In a message dated 10/15/99 7:43:37 AM, sarima at ix.netcom.com wrote:

<<Except that Renfrew can only reach this "conclusion" by ignoring many facts
about PIE that are quite secure (e.g. the universality of *ekwos, and the
original distinction between wlkwos and kuoon) and which are inconsistent
with what is known about early Neolithic culture (no domesticated equids and
no domesticated dog).>>

I do not know about "quite secure."  In fact, Renfrew did address this
general issue in terms of both convergence and technical innovations.  (We
would not date a proto-language of English and Russian for example based on
the fact that "harddrive" sometimes appears identically in both languages.)

Another important point is that "semantics" come creeping into the *ekwos
analysis.  "No DOMESTICTED equids" - for example - seems to disregard the
fact that horse bones are common in the debris of pre-neolithic sites in
Greece.  It seems they were the number one source of meat.  Was there a
different word for earlier wild horses versus later domesticates?  Are we
also possibly being presumptive that *ekwos was literally a horse rather than
something like a particular kind of horse - true horses being only one kind
of horse-like animal that appears in the archaeological evidence.

I am not too sure about what the story is with <<the original distinction
between wlkwos and kuoon>> but much the same questions might arise if
"hounds," "curs" and "dogs" actually always represented dogs of different
purposes rather than dogs in general.  Simple equivalencies over the course
of thousands of years I suspect always carry a high measure of uncertainty.

Regards,
Steve Long


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sun Oct 17 13:13:26 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 14:13:26 +0100
Subject: excluding data
Message-ID: <SUN.17.OCT.1999.141326.0100.>

ECOLING at aol.com writes:

[LT: on proposed alternatives to my criteria]

>> Are you ever going to answer these questions?

>  Larry has repeatedly made the statement above.
>  It is a red herring, avoiding dealing with the poins which WERE raised.

It is not a red herring.  I have put my criteria on the table with considerable
explicitness.  Lloyd and others have repeatedly implied that there is, or might
be, something wrong with my criteria.  I have therefore asked for alternative
criteria.  I have seen none, except for Lloyd's suggestion that 1700 is a
better cutoff date than 1600 and his insistence that sound-symbolic words
should be self-consciously added to the list according to no specified
criteria.  I have agreed that the first is possible, but dismissed the second
as lacking in specifics and intrinsically circular.

>  I have repeatedly answered these questions.
>  I have done so here yet again.

Nope.  I have yet to see a set of fully explicit criteria for choosing, in a
principled manner, how words should be included or excluded.

>  Partly the answer is fewer exclusions, this will give better results
>  because of earlier awareness of the full range of native and
>  ancient vocabulary.

No.  "Fewer exclusions" is not in the least specific.  What criteria should be
invoked to determine inclusion or exclusion?

>  Anything more specific has to refer to specifics which
>  have been given elsewhere, some of them here yet again.

Sorry, but I don't recall seeing any further specifics.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sun Oct 17 13:35:19 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 14:35:19 +0100
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
Message-ID: <SUN.17.OCT.1999.143519.0100.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Sean Crist writes:

>  With all of this background in mind, we can see the general ideological
>  framework which is leading Renfrew to seek the kind of solution which he
>  has done.  Renfrew wants to keep to an absolute minimum the number of
>  prehistoric migrations which we have to posit.  He'd probably prefer that
>  we not need to posit _any_ prehistoric migrations, but even Renfrew would
>  surely concede that the spread of a language over a large area implies a
>  population movement.

Actually, he doesn't, and he's quite explicit about it.

Renfrew allows language spread by wholesale population movement in just two
circumstances: the first settlement of previously uninhabited areas, and spread
by elite dominance.  Otherwise, he sees language spread as proceeding by
diffusion across established populations along with the spread of technology
and culture.  In particular, he sees the spread of IE as having proceeded in
this way.

>  Technology in agriculture, pottery, metallurgy, etc.
>  can plausibly spread by diffusion without a large-scale movement of
>  populations; but language (other than loan words) does not diffuse this
>  way.  Verb conjugations, etc. only spread when speakers move.

This is precisely the position which Renfrew attacks.  And, to be fair, it is
not difficult to point to cases in which prestige languages have spread,
displacing earlier languages, without massive population movements.

>  So what Renfrew is trying to do is kill two birds with one stone.  Suppose
>  we assume that the introduction of the agricultural cultural complex thru
>  Europe is the result of a population movement from Anatolia to the Balkans
>  during the 7th millenium BCE (which Renfrew accepts).  We're also forced
>  to say that the spread of the Indo-European languages implies a population
>  movement.  Renfrew's response is to try to collapse these two migrations
>  into one, thus keeping the number of migrations to a minimum.  If you're
>  assuming that it's a bad thing to posit prehistoric migrations, this is
>  the sort of solution you'd like to try for.

I think it's rather that Renfrew prefers to posit a minimum of population
movement and a maximum of diffusion.

>  Unfortunately, this solution cannot be made to work without ignoring a
>  huge amount of evidence.  An archaeologist here at Penn told me that he
>  was very "annoyed" at Renfrew for having put forward this view, and said
>  that if anyone with less than Renfrew's prestige had put it forward, it
>  simply would have been ignored as not worthy of consideration.  But
>  Renfrew's earlier contributions (i.e. to the notion of process
>  archaeology, to C-14 recalibrations, etc.) are so well respected that he
>  has to be answered.  He has been answered indeed.
>
>  Mallory (p. 164 ff.) discusses the whole issue at some length, and makes
>  the following arguments:
>
>  -Renfrew proposes that Anatolia is the homeland of the Indo-Europeans.  If
>  so, it is very odd the Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic existed in the midst of
>  languages (Hattic and Hurrian) which are not only not Indo-European but
>  which bear no typological resemblance to Indo-European. If there were any
>  language family which we might guess to be a sister of Indo-European, it
>  would be Finno-Ugric, which would argue for a Ukrainian homeland, not an
>  Anatolian one.

Well, as Mallory himself has pointed out at length, mainly in his article in
the first Blench and Spriggs volume, there are very many criteria which may be,
and have been, invoked in arguing for the location of a linguistic homeland --
some of them even mutually incompatible.  For an Anatolian homeland, the
presence of non-IE languages in Anatolia violates just one of these proposed
criteria, the exclusion principle.  But Anatolia is arguably supported by a
different principle, the linguistic relationship principle.

>  -There is clearly a substantial non-Indo-European substrate in Greek, both
>  in place names and in loan words.  This would be a bit surprising if
>  Indo-European speakers had been in the area since the beginning of the
>  Neolithic.

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.

>  -Most importantly, placing the initial dispersion of the Indo-Europeans at
>  the beginning of the Neolithic around 6500 BCE in entirely incompatible
>  with the reconstructed Indo-European vocabulary.  Words such as yoke,
>  wheel, etc. are reconstructed for PIE, but this technology is not attested
>  until much, much later- namely, not much after 4000-3500 BCE, which is the
>  date which Mallory and others put forward as the final date of IE
>  linguistic unity.

This is exactly the point which troubles me the most.  But Renfrew has in fact
met it head on in his latest paper on the issue, presented at a symposium in
Cambridge last summer and due to be published in the proceedings early next
year.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sun Oct 17 13:37:49 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 14:37:49 +0100
Subject: Campbell's def. of "language"
Message-ID: <SUN.17.OCT.1999.143749.0100.>

Herb Stahlke writes:

[on Campbell's book]

>  By the way, unlike Larry, I think it was, I've found Campbell's intro very
>  well done,

No; it wasn't me.  I haven't uttered a single hard word about Campbell's book,
on this list or elsewhere.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sun Oct 17 13:49:56 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 14:49:56 +0100
Subject: PIE vs. Proto-Language
Message-ID: <SUN.17.OCT.1999.144956.0100.>

X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>  Let me just posit a slightly different scenario.  That the first change that
>  happened that moved early primates towards homo was the ability to make
>  complex sounds.  One of the core understandings of evolutionary theory is
>  that all adaptation is local and limited in time.
>  So this adaption would have had a very local and limited advantage - say, in
>  the ability to hunt communally or to signal with precision where food or
>  danger was on an ad hoc basis.

>  But with the ability to make more complex sounds would have come a number of
>  additional features that became more long term.

Clarification, please: what is meant here by "complex sounds"?

It is not obvious to me that the sounds produced by human vocal tracts are more
complex than the sounds produced by other creatures -- acoustically more
complex, I mean.  I would suggest rather that our sounds are more numerous than
those of other creatures, and that, crucially, he have the more-or-less unique
ability to combine sequences of meaningless sounds into meaningful units.
Other creatures generally operate on the principle of 'one-sound-one-meaning',
but we don't.

And it is the emergence of this duality of patterning that seems to me to
require an explanation.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sun Oct 17 14:04:14 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 15:04:14 +0100
Subject: Contributions by Steve Long
Message-ID: <SUN.17.OCT.1999.150414.0100.>

Stanley Friesen writes:

>>> This actually accords with what one book on linguistic change suggested is
>>> the *main* cause of language change: a social desire to differentiate one's
>>> group from some other group.  ...

[LT]

>> I don't know of any book or article which makes such a strong claim as this,
>> and I must confess I find it implausible.  But there *has* been some recent
>> work showing that this desire for linguistic distance has been a major
>> factor in certain cases.

> I may have slightly overstated (without the actual book, I cannot get a
> quote: all I know is the source of this is certainly NOT Hock's book).

> But I am fairly certain that the book at least cast doubt on the importance
> of "mis-hearing" by children in language change.  So, I think saying the
> author asserts that it is the most important cause of change is reasonable.

The idea that all, most or much language change results from imperfect learning
by children has very occasionally been defended, but few linguists, I think,
take it seriously: there is just too much evidence against it.

At the same time, I know of nobody who is currently defending the claim that
all or nearly all language change results from a desire for linguistic
distance.  Of course, we know that such a desire can be important, and we have
data on a number of cases in which it has clearly been a major factor.  But
*all* language change?  Who is defending such a view?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sun Oct 17 14:13:22 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 15:13:22 +0100
Subject: Basque 'sei'
Message-ID: <SUN.17.OCT.1999.151322.0100.>

Max Wheeler writes:

> We shouldn't assume, without looking at the evidence, that the current
> distribution of laminal versus apical /s/ phonemes in Europe can be projected
> way back into the past.

Indeed.  Those who don't know it might like to look at the following article,
which in fact argues for a rather complex distribution of apical and laminal
sibilants in several European languages in the medieval period, including a
contrast between the two in some of them:

Martin Joos (1952), 'The medieval sibilants', Language 28: 222-231.  Reprinted
in M. Joos (ed.) (1957), Readings in Linguistics I, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, pp. 372-378.  In an appendix to the reprinted version, Joos
notes the existence of a laminal/apical contrast in Basque, and wonders if this
might represent a preservation of a former European areal feature.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sun Oct 17 15:23:57 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 16:23:57 +0100
Subject: Basque 'sei'
Message-ID: <SUN.17.OCT.1999.162357.0100.>

Roz Frank writes:

> Four items.

> 1) Larry Trask has brought into play what appears to be compelling toponymic
> evidence in order to refute the claim that <sei> might have been copied into
> Euskera from Gascon. Yet Seguy (1951) whose research is discussed in Ruffie
> and Bernard (1976) indicates that the final element of such the place names
> was rendered variously as <-os>, <-osse>, <-ons> <-ost> and <-oz>. If one
> assumes that the original suffixing element was in all cases <-otz> "cold"
> (which is not entirely clear), there seems to be a certain ambivalence
> concerning which sibilant was chosen to represent the original Basque suffix
> in Gascon. The relevant map with the isoglosses is reproduced in Trask 1996:
> 41). It also indicates attestations of corresponding Aragonese endings in
> <ues> and <ueste>.

Yes.  If this toponymic ending is of Aquitanian/Basque origin, then the
presence of the single Romance sibilant in any given area is readily
understandable.  There is indeed reason to suspect an Aquitanian origin, given
the distribution of the ending, but Basque <hotz> 'cold' doesn't look a good
bet, since it's hard to see why this should recur in dozens of toponyms.

> 2) Larry Trask hasn't mentioned (with respect to this item) that in Euskera,
> /z/ regularly undergoes palatalization, e.g., in the case of the pronoun <zu>
> "you" which commonly becomes <xu> (palatalized) in northern dialects, and
> that Azkue and others write or represent that sound as <s> with a "tilde."
> Furthermore, palatalization of sibilants in Basque creates a situation in
> which both the letter <z> and the letter <s> can become conflated and
> represented by the same letter, e.g., as <s> although at times with a "tilde"
> (cf. the dozens of examples of this in Azkue's dictionary).

Yes; palatalization occurs in various circumstances in Basque.  But, in native
words other than expressive formations, it's always secondary.

> Among the commonplace palatalizations in northern dialects we have the case
> of <sei> (Azkue II: 247).  This permutation is so common in other dialects of
> Euskera that when I learned Basque, primarily through contacts with native
> speakers of the language from Goierri in Gipuzkoa (a southern dialect), I
> thought that it always had a palatalized sibilant.

The variant <xei> for <sei> is indeed found in parts of Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa.
But, as usual, this palatalized variant is secondary.  The textual evidence
shows clearly that <sei> is the original form, and hence the form to be
considered.

> 3) Furthermore, in reference to whether <sei> was copied at some time in the
> past from some non-Basque language, one could construct the following
> argument.  In the case of the numbers 5, 7, 8 and 9, if one were to assume
> that they were all indigenous to Euskera (that none of them are "loans" not
> even ancient ones, (cf. Miguel C.'s contribution suggesting the contrary) we
> would find that we could argue that earlier all of them ended in a consonant
> cluster that had /z/ as an element: <bortz> (*<bortzi> 5, <zazpi> (*<zatzi>
> or *<zaptzi>) 7, <zortzi> 8, and <bederatzi> 9. Such a reconstruction would
> make <sei> an anomaly in the series and, hence, suggest that it was copied
> from some non-Basque language, e.g., perhaps an IE language, which was in
> contact with it at some time in the past.

I think this is going too far.  Both <z> and <s> are frequent in Basque, with
the first being more frequent, and either may occur in any arbitrary word.  The
occurrence of numeral-names with both does not strike me as a problem to be
explained, nor does the greater frequency here of the laminal, which is more
frequent generally in the language.

> The past 2500 years would have brought it into close contact with Celtic,
> Latin/Romance, Germanic (Visogoths) speaking peoples. As a result, there
> would have been a number of opportunities for this IE item to have entered
> the language.

But no plausible IE source has been identified.  Latin and Romance, the usual
sources of loans into Basque, appear to provide no plausible sources.  I don't
know much about Celtic here, but I've never seen a proposed Celtic origin.
Germanic, like Romance, retains a final sibilant in the word for 'six', and
anyway it's not even clear that the Visigoths were still speaking Gothic when
they settled in Spain.  You have to come up with a specific proposal involving
a specific language.

Finally, nobody is suggesting a non-native origin for the Basque names of the
numbers above 'six', so a borrowing of 'six' alone would be isolated and
mysterious.

> 4) I believe that Larry Trast argued that in the case of words copied
> (early?)  from Latin and ending in <x> (sorry I can't find the exact email),
> the Basque word never drops the final sibilant complex, i.e., it is copied
> into Euskera as /tz/ (again forgive me if I"m misquoting). However, there
> would seem to be a few words that don't follow this rule, e.g., Basque
> <trebe> which I was once told comes from Latin <trebax>. Are there others?

It is hard not to see a connection between Basque <trebe> 'adroit, skilful,
expert', and also 'cunning', and the more-or-less synonymous Latin <trebax>.
But the Basque word can't possibly derive directly from <trebax>.

First, Latin loans into Basque almost invariably enter in the accusative, not
in the nominative, and the Latin accusative <trebacem> doesn't end in a
sibilant.

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>.

Actually, Basque <trebe> is a bit of a puzzle.  The Latin word, itself of Greek
origin, was apparently uncommon, and it appears to have left few traces in
Romance.  The unreliable Lhande notes a supposedly synonymous <treba> ~ <treva>
in unspecified varieties of Romance, but the major Romance sources at my
disposal recognize no such word.  Quite possibly the Basque word is borrowed
from an obscure Romance continuation of the Latin word, but it can't be
borrowed from Latin.

> Conclusion: things are somewhat more complicated than they might appear to be
> at first glance.

True.  But that doesn't mean we can't work out a good deal of the truth.

> Although I don't believe we are any closer to a definitive solution to the
> problem, there does seem to be evidence that could be mustered for several
> different scenarios. The four points above are meant only to provide a bit of
> additional data for the analysis, not necessarily to suppport one position or
> another.  I leave it to the experts to figure out whether any of the above
> information helps one cause over the other.

Well, my own view is that there exists absolutely no reason for seeing Basque
<sei> as anything other than native and ancient -- that is, as going back at
least to Pre-Basque.  The word is in no way unusual or problematic within
Basque.  Whether, as Miguel C V suggests, the Basque word itself goes back
still further to a very ancient pan-Afro-Eurasianism, I can't say.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From Odegard at means.net  Sun Oct 17 10:57:10 1999
From: Odegard at means.net (Mark Odegard <Odegard@means.net>)
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 10:51:10 -6
Subject: The last native speaker of Latin.
Message-ID: <SUN.17.OCT.1999.105110.6.>

If one wants a candidate for the 'last native-speaker of Latin', I
suggest Isidore of Seville, (c. 560-636).

Of his Latin, it is said:

"His style, though simple and lucid, cannot be said to be
classical. It discloses most of the imperfections peculiar to all
ages of transition. It particularly reveals a growing Visigothic
influence. Arevalo counts in all Isidore's writing 1640 Spanish
words."

http://www.knight.org/advent/cathen/08186a.htm

By comparison, Jerome is about c. 342-420.

There is a movement to have Isidore named Patron Saint of
the Internet.

--
Mark Odegard   mailto:odegard at means.net


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Mon Oct 18 05:20:53 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 01:20:53 EDT
Subject: the UPenn trees /PIE chronology
Message-ID: <MON.18.OCT.1999.012053.EDT.>

On Thu, 7 Oct 1999, Stanley Friesen (sarima at ix.netcom.com) wrote:

<<I question the assumption that the Anatolian languages necessarily split
off earlier than the others.  Given the linguistic and archaeological facts,
I suspect that the northern European languages, and probably Proto-Tocharian,
split off at least as early as Anatolian.  Thus I see an original three or
four-way split, not a simple bidding off of Anatolian...>>

Sean Crist replied (message dated 10/15/99 4:36:35 AM):
<<You must be new on this list; during August and September, the question of
the phylogeny of the IE languages was hashed over in great detail.  I'm
curious as to what linguistic and archaeological evidence you have in mind;
your claim is at odds with the work of Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor which I have
been discussing.  If you like, I can forward you some of the emails which I
sent out as a part of this dialog.>>

Just a couple of notes:

1. Whatever was "hashed over in great detail about the UPenn tree," there
wasn't much if anything that necessarily contradicts Mr. Friesen points.
Since the UPenn tree provides only "relative chronologies" there's nothing
that conflicts with Mr. Friesen's apparent point which might be that PIE
dispersed first and then "split up" into different languages or groups of
languages.

2. The "phylogeny" (more properly "trees") produced by the UPenn group are of
two different kinds -

One is the so-called "pure phylogeny" which does NOTHING but "measure of the
consistency of the historical linguist's linguistic judgements,..."  Note
that the measure is of "CONSISTENCY" not ACCURACY or VALIDITY.  What the
"pure phylogeny" does not do is say whether any theory (Ringe's or someone
else's) is correct or not.
As the web site that reports on this tree explains the methodology can be
used "to quantify the support for different evolutionary hypotheses."  What
it basically does is rearrange pre-selected data until it matches the
methodologist's notion of "consistent" groupings
of data - called "convexity" which essentially means nothing more than that
common PRE-SELECTED data should fall together in certain favored
sub-groupings.

(BTW, I'd strongly urge Mr. Friesen or anyone interested on the list to go to
website itself for a more through and accurate explanation of the method than
is available in any past postings on this list - pace Sean Crist.  The site
begins at http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~histling/home.html
If anyone has a problem opening or printing the papers - the files are
unfortunately in postscript form - let me know and I may be able to provide
you with Acrobat or text versions.)

3. The other "phylogeny" referred to on the website may reflect - I believe -
the point of view of Ringe rather than Warnow, who is a computer specialist.

Adjustments were made (it is not clear when) to the "IE" data which was ONLY
then processed.  There are all kinds of questions that can be raised about
the validity of these "directionality" corrections as well as to the basic
data itself.  I have now read the papers myself and asked a number of experts
to look them and I will be getting to those problems in a future post.

Suffice it to say, for the purposes of Mr. Freisen's points, that the tree
actually does no more than reflect Prof. Ringe's (et al.) positions on what
is appropriate data and what is not - and it does not reflect simple raw data
in any sense.  The processing does nothing more than provide an arrangement
of those judgments (about 350 pieces of "data" derived from various sources)
that is consistent in a certain graphical way.  Matters of pre-attested dates
are still entirely dependent NOT on the algorithm, but ON THE DATA which is
determined BEFORE any processing occured.  Most of this data - including the
"directionality" adjustments are NOT available to us, so we simply do not
know if they are speculative, valid or otherwise.

So with regard to Mr. Friesen's statement that he questions <<the assumption
that the Anatolian languages necessarily split off earlier than the others>>
I sincerely doubt whether the UPenn trees or our discussions of them give
here will enlighten him much.  If anything related to the trees might, it
would be Prof Ringe's explanation of why Mr. Friesen's position would or
would not be the case - since this explanation would be what is reflected a
priori in the trees.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Mon Oct 18 06:40:38 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 02:40:38 EDT
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
Message-ID: <MON.18.OCT.1999.024038.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/15/99 1:18:35 AM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu wrote:

<<The arrival of the Greeks may not have disrupted the local culture
in any great way e.g. ... or.... a continuous arrival of technologically less
advanced people whose language was adopted by the elite>>

Good point.  One archaeologist who was active in the area has described to me
what he would dig for to test what he calls the Greeks as "migrant workers"
hypothesis.  He's mentioned it on a list and got a consensus answer that a
truly transient population probably would leave no material remains that
could be correctly identified as separate from the culture that was "hosting"
them.

A separate issue is really whether our latest picture is now "favoring" a
different theory altogether of how Greek (the language) got to Greece.  The
evidence points only to a signficant "migration" from Anatolia, but does that
tell us anything about the language question?

With regard to your peaceful influx scenario - like the Lefkandi I migration
starting about 2500BC that seems to be the only clearly identifiable one of
the EH/early MH period - Herodotus says that the inhabitants of Attica were
all originally "Pelagasians" who voluntarily adopted the Greek language
because it was to their mercantile advantage (which is consistent with one of
Mallory's formulas for the spread of IE.)

Someone else brought up however that the situation might be analogous to the
Slavic invasions of the Balkans.  For a long time, it was commonly said that
the Balkans had been depopulated and the Slavs had merely moved in.  It was
only after the events were synced up properly with the Byzantine records that
it started becoming plain that the old towns and manufacturing facilities of
the Balkans were not abandoned, they were attacked and rather thoroughly
destroyed.  But apparently the invading "southern" Slavs used only
degradeable wooden utensils and imported or looted metal tools and
weapons,etc., - and very little ceramics or uniquely native metalwork - so
that a gap appears in the stratigraphy.

Prehistory would be stuck in such situations, because archaeology can only
recover what is recoverable.  So it's correct to say that "the absence of
evidence" - an important issue - is not always enough to preclude the fact
that an event like the Greek "northern" migration happened.  All we can say
is that the material evidence of it can't be identified.

Regards,
Steve Long


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Oct 18 08:22:46 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 09:22:46 +0100
Subject: Africa vs. Americas, Multilateral Comparison
Message-ID: <MON.18.OCT.1999.092246.0100.>

ECOLONG at aol.com writes:

>  For a more succesful future for historical linguistics in general,
>  as for any other field,
>  it is essential that we use issues which generate public excitement
>  and channel that interest in productive ways.

Well, I agree that we should try to keep the public aware of our findings, of
course.

But it's a sad fact that journalists, even on supposedly serious publications,
generally prefer sensational but ill-founded ideas to sober but unspectacular
work.

If you publish a book "proving" that Etruscan is Basque -- as somebody recently
did -- you get substantial and even drooling coverage in major newspapers.
If you then write to those newspapers explaining that they have reported garbage
as serious work, you get ignored.

>  Historical linguists shouldbe at the forefront of actively
>  exploring correlations between language, ethnicity, blood groups,
>  dentition types, DNA studies, and all other sources of information
>  which can give clues to the history of humanity.

Why?

Historical linguists have no competence in these other areas, and many of us
are skeptical that there exists anything there to be found.  Surely we are
better off sticking to what we do best, and merely making sure that our results
are publicly available.

Anyway, as usual, the sensational reports concerning languages, genes and teeth
have received a good deal of popular coverage, while the critiques advanced by
specialists in all the relevant fields have received rather less coverage.  It
is not so easy to popularize good work in the face of competition from shoddy
but eye-catching work.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au  Mon Oct 18 10:32:56 1999
From: jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au (Jon Patrick)
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 20:32:56 +1000
Subject: Excluding Basque data
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 30 Sep 1999 09:33:03 +0100."
 <Pine.GSO.4.03.9909300847200.25900-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <MON.18.OCT.1999.203256.1000.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

My Apologies to the list for reposnding rather late to this item. I have been
overwhelmed with classes.

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999 09:33:03 +0100 (BST) Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
wrote in repsonse to Lloyd Anderson,
a long message which I will deal with in only a few parts-

    On Sun, 26 Sep 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote:

    [on my statement that databases do not free us from choosing criteria]

    > It is very different,
    > because no "exclusion" of data need be a permanent exclusion,

    And who has ever suggested that any exclusions should be permanent?
    Certainly not me.  Read what I've written.

    > because different users can choose different criteria  for proceeding,
    > and because the same user can change his or her mind at different times
    > and choose different criteria for proceeding.
    > One does not have to be "right" on the first choice,
    > there are no serious consequences for making an initial error.

    But this is equally true regardless of the technology in use.
    Look: databases do not save you from the consequences of your decisions.
    They only allow you to investigate the consequences of making different
    decisions more rapidly than working on paper does.  Convenient, of
    course, but there is no point of principle here.

    > With a paper method in which one cannot go back and change one's mind,

    And who has ever suggested such an approach?

    > there is a truly excessive focus on being "right" the first time round.

    No, there isn't.  The emphasis is only on being *cautious* the first
    time round.  But how does a database permit us to throw such caution to
    the winds without fear of error?

    > And disastrous consequences if one is not.

    There are many ways of achieving disastrous consequences in scholarly
    work.  And I cannot see that a policy of massive inclusion is a better
    way of avoiding disaster than a policy of prudent exclusion.

The debate on the use of databases I feel doesn't get to the nub of the
matter. Larry is correct in that databases do not stop disasters nor ecuse one
for a lack of caution. However Lloyd I believe is correct from the operational
perspective. I think databases are important because they add two features
that are not readily available using pen and paper methods of analysis.
Firstly comprehensiveness and secondly transparency. The latter being
dependent on the former. I think Larry doesn't feel either are important
undoubtedly due to faith in his own integrity and that's his right.
The moment data is lodged into a database and then systematically analysed by
a method that is invariant on each data item we have a more reliable result
because all of us collectively can see the data and the results the method
produces (I assume there is public access to the database). This is not
available by a pen and paper method as the data and the methods are not as
readily visible or dispersible. So the difference is in terms of access by the
public (us) and accountability. I notice that Larry more often than others
tells one to go read the texts   when we don't understand him, whilst that is
valid at one level, it also a strategy that lowers the accountablity of an
argument because public access to it is more limtied.

    >>I flatly deny this, and I challenge you to back up your assertion.

    > Like Jon Patrick, I believe that Larry Trask's criteria MAY IN EFFECT
    > bias the results to favor hypotheses which he himself espouses.
    > This DOES NOT MEAN that he is consciously aware of this,
    > (nor that he is deliberately manipulating the data,
    > as he seems to have inferred he was being charged with).
    > Quite the contrary, it probably results from his being so convinced of
    > certain hypotheses that he can scarcely conceive of them not being
    > correct.
    > Others may find it easier to conceive of that
    > (as is so often true in research, nothing unusual here).

    This is no answer to my challenge.

    You assert that you personally believe that my criteria "may in effect"
    bias the findings.  But you have signally failed to explain how this
    result might come about.

    So tell me: how do my principal criteria of early attestation,
    widespread distribution, and absence from neighboring languages "have
    the effect" of biasing my results on phonological form?

Simply, it is possible that the words used to currently define the
phonological form of early euskara are drawn from words that already conform
to these criteria. Hence Larry's "beliefs" about the forms of early-euskara
will be vindicated by an analysis of words that conform to his criteria.
Alternatively it might be said he have chosen these criteria because they will
produce a word list that matches the "beliefs" he has already constructed
about early-euskara phonolgy, afterall he has  told us that  he has a pretty
good idea of what the results are.

As such a situation is a possibility then it is sensible to look at the merits
of the criteria of themselves.
I would comment
a. early attestation -it is known words were missed in early dictionaries and
documents
b. widespread distribution - it is known the lesser dialects (northern,
Roncevalles) provide important information on early euskara.
c. absence in neighbouring languages - open to interpretation/debate for some
words whether they are original or borrowed.

cheers
Jon
______________________________________________________________
The meaning of your communication is the response you get


From jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au  Mon Oct 18 10:55:34 1999
From: jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au (Jon Patrick)
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 20:55:34 +1000
Subject: Excluding data
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 30 Sep 1999 11:38:29 +0100."
 <Pine.GSO.4.03.9909301126150.25900-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <MON.18.OCT.1999.205534.1000.>

    Date:       Thu, 30 Sep 1999 11:38:29 +0100 (BST)
    From:       Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>

    On Mon, 27 Sep 1999, Jon Patrick wrote:

    > I'm concerned that the current extent of the thesis on early Basque
    > phonology is already based on the subset of data restricted by your
    > non-phonological criteria.

    But how can this be so?  How can my non-phonological criteria for
    selection affect the phonological properties of the words selected?
    Please give me a reply of substance, and not just vague, dark hints that
    something or other sinister is going on.

No dark hints - it is entirely possible that the criteria have been selected
so that
they only admit words that will provide the answer that you "believe" is true.

    Further: what *alternative* criteria do you propose for identifying the
    Basque words which are most likely to be native and ancient?  I've
    already put my criteria on the table.  What are yours?

MY approach is defined by a method rather than by criteria and produces a
study wider and lengthier in scope. I believe that it is necessary to take the
Azkue list of monomorphemes and for each meaning (not word) determine which
can been shown to be borrowed. The residual represents the data set of native
basque words. Any further evidence of morphological devleopment would need to
be included in the database.  I also propose that the analysis of all meanings
needs to presented in a database that contains justification for each decision
of categorisation. Such a database then has to become a public piece of
evidence for others to process as they see fit.   Only then can issues such as
this or that criteria for limiting the dataset in analysis  be fairly
appraised, as only then would one scholar be able to deal with the SAME data
set as others and evaluate their own pet theories in a direct and publicly
accountable display. That is, we all could actually evaluate the effect of
your criteria per se, or in competition with any other criteria anyone cared
to produce.

    > This thesis is the basis of many of your
    > comments as immediately below and I muse over the question which
    > should come first, the rules that declare a word's form to be
    > "curious" or the systematic and rigourous analysis of all the words.

    My observation that a particular word has a "curious" form has
    absolutely nothing to do with whether it goes into my list or not.
    In my view, the words <ke> `smoke' and <mutur> `snout, muzzle' have very
    curious forms indeed, but they meet my criteria and so must go into my
    initial list, whether I like it or not.  Once I've chosen my criteria, I
    have to stick to them.

    When I observe that a given word has a "curious" form, that happens
    because I've already done a good deal of work on Pre-Basque phonology,
    and I already have a pretty clear idea of what's going to emerge when
    the whole thing is done -- though, as I've already said, I do expect to
    find a few surprises waiting for me.  But I never exclude a word merely
    because I judge it to have a "curious" form.

Larry, that's precisely the worry, that your criteria are excluding entirely
valid words. Whilst I understand they seem perfectly sensible to you, others
don't share the same view because they are excluding and people are concerned
that excluded words are never actually available for them to scrutinise the
validity of excluding them. Now you can tell us to go and look up the words
ourselves but that is now excluding not only those words but us also from the
process as we don't know what specific words you have excluded.
hence my proposal above -one starts by showing everyone the comprehensive list
and telling them why EACH item is excluded.

Jon
______________________________________________________________
The meaning of your communication is the response you get


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Oct 18 14:39:09 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 15:39:09 +0100
Subject: Change and What Remains
Message-ID: <MON.18.OCT.1999.153909.0100.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

[snip a quote from my textbook]

> You know full well what you yourself wrote in your textbook.  You can't with
> "the best will in the world" forget that you yourself drew a line at which
> point a language is no longer the same language: 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.)

> You can say that that quote was not meant for specialists, only for students.
> But you really CAN'T say you don't understand what it meant.  It meant that
> MUTUAL COMPREHENSIBILITY was the measure of when a language is no longer the
> same language.  If you find that an inadequate definition for
> "professionals", that's fine.

Let me clarify a bit.

When a language splits into daughters, there comes a time when we must finally
speak of distinct languages.  For example, I have no problem in regarding, say,
Portuguese and Romanian as distinct languages, even though they have a common
ancestor.

But one of my points on this list has been that the time when this occurs is
not, and cannot be, well defined.  That is, there was no moment when people
ceased to speak Latin and began to speak Portuguese.  And all of my objections
to various postings on this list have centered on this fact, and on related
facts.  All the points I have objected to, it seems to me, depend crucially
upon the assumption that such a moment exists, and that the notion of "same
language" can be given a precise and principled sense.  This I deny.

Nor does the passage in my book commit me to any view that mutual
comprehensibility is the sole or principal criterion for drawing language
boundaries.

> But please don't pretend that a language
> "changing enough" to be become a different language - ancestor or otherwise -
> is something you don't understand.

In the context in which this notion has featured recently on this list, I find
this notion incoherent -- as I hope I have made clear by now.

> It is precisely how you described Latin
> changing into other languages: "Within another couple of centuries, speakers
> of Latin in Spain, France, Italy... could no longer understand each
> other,...it no longer made much sense to apply a single name to this babel of
> regional varieties...."

Yes, but again this passage was written for beginning students.

> I wrote:
> <<The coexistence of ancestor with daughter language is obviously a separate
> question.>>

> Larry Trask replied:
> <<I don't see how.  A living language never remains identical from one
> generation to the next.>>

>  With the help of "the best will in the world" I'm sure you can "see how":

> There is no need for the ancestor to remain IDENTICAL in order for it to be
> the same language, by mutual comprehensibility standards.  You drew the line
> between former dialects and new languages in your textbook at the point where
> the dialects "cease to be mutually comprehensible at all."  That is far, far
> from the point where a language is no longer IDENTICAL to its former self.

Yes, but.

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

Second, I repeat: there is no principled or coherent basis for deciding that
daughter A is "the same language" as its own ancestor while daughter B is not.
And the positions I have argued against all seem to assume the contrary.

> As far as requiring that an ancestor must be IDENTICAL to its former self
> when a descendent shows up, why would you set such a standard?  When is such
> a standard ever applied in any science that observes identity over time?

Fine.  But you and Lloyd Anderson apparently want to defend a notion along the
lines of "A and B are the same language but are not identical".  And this
notion, I think, cannot be given any coherent content -- at least not
sufficiently coherent for the purposes you appear to have in mind.

> You are not identical in shape or size to the person you were when you were
> two years old.  Morphologically, even down to the cells you once were made up
> of, you are not IDENTICAL to "Larry Trask" at that age.  However, any
> biologist would be willing to say you were the same organism.  Members of
> biological species are hardly identical among themselves or over time.  But a
> specialist can easily identify the bones of a domestic cat or a human from
> 200 years ago and confidently distinguish the two species.

No doubt, but so what?

If we had a recording of somebody's speech from around AD 400, could we
confidently identify it as representing either Latin or Romance?  I don't think
so.  Languages do not behave like organisms, and reasoning from one to the
other is often fatal.

Anyway, it is not even true that biologists can always distinguish species with
confidence.  This applies to living creatures as much as to fossils.  At
bottom, the notion of "same species" is just as elusive as that of "same
language".

> It is totally inconsistent to require that the ancestor stay IDENTICAL to
> itself in order to be called the same language.  If you want to find a way to
> make it a different language,  the obvious thing any scientific methodology
> would do is point to an ESSENTIAL change, one that alters the DEFINING
> CHARACTERISTICS of the language.  E.g., the point where the biologist or
> biochemist or doctor would say that the organism being viewed is no longer
> "Larry Trask."

Sorry, but I don't follow.  In fact, I am astounded to see the notion of
"essential" properties being invoked.  To me, this smacks of something straight
out of medieval discourse.  And it's incoherent.

Something called 'English' has existed for well over a thousand years, but that
something has undergone dramatic changes.  What would you put forward as the
"defining characteristics" of English?  As the "defining characteristics" of
any particular stage of English?  As the "essential changes" that sharply
differentiate one variety from another?

[on my comments on generational differences]

> With "the best will in the world", I cannot believe you are asking this.
> This all started with my asking if the peak on the UPenn tree meant that PIE
> co-existed with Anatolian.  And you think I meant that your parents are
> speaking an ancestor language of modern English?

I think you're tangling up different postings on different points.

My comment about PIE and Anatolian, as I recall, simply drew attention to two
different uses of the label 'PIE' -- no more.

> No, you don't think that.  You were quite confident in describing the
> relationship between an ancestor language and a daughter and even a sister.
> You wrote: <<So, that top node, with its two DAUGHTERS, represents an initial
> split of the single language PIE, with one DAUGHTHER being the ANCESTOR of
> Anatolian, and the other DAUGHTER being the single common ANCESTOR of
> everything else.  We now often speak of `broad PIE' -- the ANCESTOR of the
> whole family -- and `narrow PIE' -- the ANCESTOR of everything except
> Anatolian.  Narrow PIE is a SISTER language of Proto-Anatolian...>> [Caps are
> mine]

> Did you mean that there were some parents who were speaking "wide PIE" at the
> same time that the young people were speaking "narrow PIE?"  Is that what you
> meant by an ancestor?  I don't think so.  So why would you think that's what
> I meant?

I didn't think that's what you meant.  But, after things got going, I found
myself deeply puzzled as to what you did mean.  My observations about
generational differences led me to observe that there appeared to be at least
one sense -- admittedly a trivial sense, in my estimation -- in which we might
say that mother and daughter languages could co-exist.  And I simply asked
whether this sense is what anybody on the list had in mind.

> And BTW did you mean that "wide PIE" was not "identical" to "narrow PIE"?  Or
> did you mean that "wide PIE" was totally incomprehensible to speakers of
> "narrow PIE"?  Which was it?

Neither.  I was only drawing attention to two different uses of the label 'PIE'
-- no more.  You should not read any more into that posting.

> Apparently the only distinction you make
> between "wide PIE" and "narrow PIE" is by their descendents - you don't even
> seem to consider whether they were identical or mutually comprehensible or
> not.

Indeed I did not, because that had nothing to do with the purely terminological
point I was making.

> I will tell you what I meant and I think that if you use anything close to
> "the best will in the world," you will have no problem understanding it.  I
> will not assume that you are cynically pretending to misunderstand me.

Oh, I do tend to be a bit cynical by nature, I guess -- but, no, I have not
been deliberately trying to misunderstand you or anyone else.  And I get rather
cross when somebody accuses me of doing this.

> In your textbook, you wrote about dialects fragmenting and forming different
> languages:  "And it is clear that such fragmentation of single languages into
> several different languages has happened countless times..."

> Up to that point, a dialect is still just a variety of the original language.
> (See your Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology where you define "dialect" as
> "a regionally or socially distinctive variety of a language, differing from
> other varieties in its grammar and/or lexicon.")

True.  But why relevant?

> This is all that is required for "an ancestor language to coexist with its
> descendent" - by your own terms above :
> Given ten co-existing, changing dialects "of a language" - say, Latin as an
> example - one dialect is the first to become "mutually incomprehensible."
> The other nine are all still mutually comprehensible.  The nine are still
> "varieties" of Latin.  The nine are dialects of the "ancestor language."  The
> new language is a descendent.  They co-exist.

Nope.

Once again, you are engaged in reification.  That is, you are assuming that,
because we sometimes find it convenient to speak of dialects, then those
dialects must actually exist as real, discrete entities "out there".  But they
don't.

Anyway, all you have cited here is a hypothetical case in which Latin splits
into two main varieties which are no longer mutually comprehensible.  The fact
that *you personally* choose to classify one of them as "nine dialects" and the
other as "one dialect" is not a piece of reality, but only your own imposition.

> I think with enough of the best will in the world, you can understand why
> this is a serious, good faith counterargument to your statement - in terms
> drawn from statements that you yourself have published.  If you have
> rethought those terms, that's fine and understandable.  But I do hope that
> you will not take the position that what I wrote above is something
> particularly difficult for you to understand.

Well, what more can I say?

In my view, the relation "is the same language as" cannot be coherently given
the kind of precise and principled content which you appear to require for your
arguments.  Except in a very broad and rough sense -- which is insufficient for
the kinds of conclusions you want to draw -- language varieties simply cannot
be divided absolutely into "the same" and "not the same".

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Oct 18 15:41:47 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 16:41:47 +0100
Subject: The Parent/Daughter Question (was Contributions)
Message-ID: <MON.18.OCT.1999.164147.0100.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

[LT]

> <<Is modern English "the same language" as Proto-Germanic?  As PIE?  If not,
> then at what stage do we have a cutoff point between one language and the
> next, and why?>>

> I'm sure that Larry Trask's apparent position here - that Proto-Germanic and
> modern English can't be linguistically distinguishable as separate
> "languages" - deserves a much more formidable counterpoint than this
> non-specialist correspondent can offer.

No; this is emphatically not my position.  I may be a cantankerous old fart,
but I'm not mad. ;-)

Recall my question: is 1999 English "the same language" as 1998 English?  If
you answer "yes" to this, then it appears to me that you are doomed to arrive,
inexorably, at the unpalatable conclusion just described.  Since I regard this
conclusion as unacceptable, and since I can see no principled way of avoiding
it if the answer to my question is "yes", then I conclude that there must be
something wrong either with my question or with the answer "yes".  We may
therefore conclude either that 1999 English is not the same language as 1998
English, or that the very question is incoherent.  Take your pick.  But I favor
the second.

The only way round this is to posit sudden discontinuities in the history of
English.  For example, as another correspondent has suggested, we might argue
that, while 1484 English was the same language as 1485 English, 1485 English
was *not* the same language as 1486 English.  This ploy evades the undesirable
consequences, but at terrible cost: it requires us to regard English as "the
same language" for a period of perhaps centuries, and then to disappear
overnight in favor of a different language.  And I don't see this as a
defensible position, either.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Oct 18 15:57:38 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 16:57:38 +0100
Subject: Basque 'sei'
Message-ID: <MON.18.OCT.1999.165738.0100.>

Stephane Goyette writes:

[LT]

>> Perhaps, but how old is the Gascon phonology?  As I've pointed out
>> elsewhere, place names appear to show Gascon /s/ corresponding to Basque
>> laminal <z>, not to apical <s>.

> I'm not sure I follow. In the case of these place names, one is dealing
> with Basque (or 'Aquitanian') names borrowed into Late Latin/Early
> Romance, which only had one sibilant: laminal and apical /s/ would both be
> borrowed as Latin/Romance /s/, whatever its exact point of articulation
> was.

Yes.  If the relevant toponyms are of Aquitanian origin, this follows.  Or,
at least it follows if Gascon only had a single sibilant at the time.  And
just such a conclusion has been drawn by a number of people from the
geographical distribution of the toponyms of relevant form, even though no
really plausible identification for the ending in question can be provided
from within Basque (I dismiss <hotz> 'cold' as implausible).

It would be very helpful, here and elsewhere, if some kind of firm date could
be placed upon the appearance of the apical /s/ in Ibero-Romance -- but I
have never seen a serious attempt at this.  Has anybody?

Since Latin /s/ almost invariably enters Basque as the laminal <z>, it seems
safe to conclude that the Latin sibilant was laminal, or at least usually
laminal.  In Basque, we can catch a glimmering of the replacement of the
Latin laminal by the Ibero-Romance apical.  For example, Latin <scribere>, or
some early Romance reflex of this, was borrowed as <izkiri(b)atu> 'write',
with the laminal sibilant accompanied by other phonological characteristics
of early borrowings.  This is still the form today in the east.  In the west
of the country, however, the usual word for 'write' is <eskribatu> ~
<eskribitu>, from Castilian <escribir>, with an apical sibilant and with
other phonological characteristics of late borrowings.

Sadly, we can't date any of this, since the Romanists have no dates to offer
us as a standard.   But I stress again that any attempt at seeing Basque
<sei> 'six' as a loan from Romance, quite apart from its other problems,
requires a "late" borrowing into Basque -- whatever that may mean in real
time.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Oct 18 16:49:45 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 17:49:45 +0100
Subject: Possessives
Message-ID: <MON.18.OCT.1999.174945.0100.>

Pat Ryan writes:

[LT]

>> The English possessives like `my' are determiners because they behave
>> like determiners.  They do not behave like pronouns, and so they are not
>> pronouns.  And they certainly don't behave like adjectives.

> It seems to be the rationale of the approach Larry espouses to assign words
> to classes based on their ability to occur in certain positions within
> grammatically well-formed sentences --- what I would call the slot-theory.

More traditionally, the slot-and-filler approach.  This is one kind of
distributional approach.  More generally, distribution is arguably the single
most important general criterion for setting up parts of speech -- especially
for morphologically impoverished languages, or for items in any language which
exhibit little or no morphology.  Inflectional and derivational possibilities
are also valuable criteria, where these exist, but distribution is, so to
speak, the bottom line.

> That is certainly one method of analysis; and, in certain cases, I would
> admit it may be useful.

> But, it is not the only useful rationale that may be used, a broad-minded
> position that I have not seen Larry espouse in any context.

Not sure what "broad-minded" means here.  Parts of speech are grammatical
categories, and they can only be identified by grammatical criteria.
And non-grammatical criteria like meaning are out of order.

> His preference is a direct outgrowth of the school to which he subscribes,
> and the definitions that school generates.

Didn't know I belonged to any school.  All contemporary work on parts of speech
I have ever seen operates with essentially the same criteria.  Couldn't name a
single linguist working today with significantly different criteria.

> His definition of 'pronoun' (as contained in his dictionary) is: "The
> lexical category, or a member of this category, whose members typically
> function as noun phrases in isolation, not normally requiring or permitting
> the presence of determiners or other adnominals, and whose members typically
> have little or no intrinsic meaning or reference."

Yep.  And words like 'my' do not fit this definition.

Think I'm weird?  Look at Peter Matthews's dictionary, or at David Crystal's
dictionary.  Look at the work of such linguists as Paul Schachter or
Hans-Juergen Sasse.  Hell, even a good modern desk dictionary of English
usually gets this right.  I have the Collins here (British; maybe not available
in the US); it defines 'pronoun' correctly, and it labels 'my' a determiner.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com  Tue Oct 26 00:35:48 1999
From: ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1999 17:35:48 -0700
Subject: the Indo-European mailing list
Message-ID: <MON.25.OCT.1999.173548.0700.>

Dear Readers,

I find myself in a difficult position.  I have received complaints about
the running of this list which have led me to postpone sending out any
messages for a week; the input queue now contains more than 100 messages.
Before I resume sending to the list, I have some things to say.

This is the Indo-European mailing list.  The assumption is that those who
post here are at least familiar with the basics of historical linguistics,
even if they are not Indo-Europeanists themselves, and rightly so, in my
opinion.

The topics of discussion on this list have always been broader than *just*
Indo-European studies narrowly construed, because every Indo-Europeanist of
my acquaintance in the last 30 years has had broader interests than just IE
linguistics, and has welcomed input from other linguists and from other
disciplines.

For several weeks, there has been a large number of posts to the list on
several topics related to the issue of how we, whether as Indo-Europeanists
or more generally as historical linguists, deal with the imperfections of
our data, in the interpretation or in the selection thereof.  Discussions
frequently have turned on misunderstandings between pairs of writers,
whether based on differences of theoretical background or on the level of
background knowledge that is assumed here, and have in turn engendered
meta-discussions on and off the list about how these discussions have been
conducted.

The on-list meta-discussions stop now.  I have frequently returned posts to
the author for removal of commentary addressed to personality rather than
to topics under discussion; I will now make it my policy *always* to do so.
If you as a reader do not like the way a writer has expressed a point of
view, take it up with the writer in private.

I will turn off the incoming queue address tonight, before this message
goes out, and begin emptying the queue, which will take approximately 72
hours.  I would appreciate your holding responses until all messages on a
particular subject have gone out; to facilitate this, I will send out every
message now in the queue with the same Subject: header at the same time,
in order as received.

								Rich Alderson
								Indo-European
								list owner and
								moderator


From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu  Mon Oct 25 17:42:53 1999
From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus)
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1999 12:42:53 -0500
Subject: Milan conference program posting
Message-ID: <MON.25.OCT.1999.124253.0500.>

Dear Rich,

We just got a link up to the Milan conference on our website:

http://www.dla.utexas.edu/depts/lrc/iedocctr/

then under Links.

You may already have this, but I only found out when Lehmann came, handed
me the program, and announced that he would be in Milan this week! So I got
the program up as soon as I could.

Best,  Carol

[ Moderator's note:
  Although this is addressed to me by name, I think it belongs on the list.
  I've seen nothing else about it that I recall.
  --rma ]


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Tue Oct 19 02:54:51 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 22:54:51 EDT
Subject: language origins
Message-ID: <MON.18.OCT.1999.225451.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/15/99 1:45:35 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk wrote:

<<Language, I'd say, is a lot *more* complex than calculus.  But I don't
think degree of complexity is the issue.  The point is that our language
faculty appears to be part of our biological inheritance in a way that the
ability to construct or use calculus is not.>>

I think there is a whole trend - at least since guys like Wittgenstein - to
consider calculus just a particular rule-directed form of language.  Most
assuredly, we would not have calculus if we did not have language, and the
same might be said of any kind of formal logic.

Even if one tries to make a distinction here between non-verbal and verbal
logic, the fact is that verbal logic just demonstrably carries a much greater
amount of information when it comes to communication between two people.  An
"eminent" theorist in this field sent me a note (semi-name dropping)
reminding me that the great majority of our use of language is in talking to
ourselves.  That seems very true, and it points to the fact language's
enormous benefit as a MANAGER of information.  Newton devising calcalus was
Newton talking to himself.  Language as information manager allowed him to
manage the details of calculus AND retain those details as he went along.

So, even if we didn't invent language, we well might have INVENTED ITS
COMPLEXITY.  How much of that complexity, by natural selection, found its way
into the evolving structure of the brain is another question.

<<I think we learn a first language because our ancestors, at some point,
evolved a very specific biological proclivity to learn and use language.>>

My ex definitely had such a "proclivity."

Just to offer an alternative point-of-view.  If we are talking here about
"language" as communication - a great many animals have such specific
biological traits.  If we are speaking of language as the ability to transfer
information via sound, that too is not unique to humans.  If we are taking
about what is unique to humans - something human "ancestors" evolved
specifically - then that refers to language in a different sense.  And
comlexity is the most obvious difference between human language and other
forms of communication.  Human language just carries an ENORMOUS lot more
hard-science-quantifiable information in it.  Ask Jonpat.

The complexity of structure in human sounds or written words seems logically
to reflect an original complexity in the environment.  It would make no sense
for a species to devote all those valuable resources to develop complex brain
structures (or alternatively to invent complex language systems) unless there
was some corresponding complexity to initiate it.  The simple life form is
often in evolution more sucessful than the complex one.  (And BTW neither big
brains nor the ability to speak necessarily increases your survival chances
in local and short term situations - and these are the ones that determine
survival value in a trait.)  So was that complexity in the generating
environment the same one that still operates today?  Was it human society
right from the start that created language?  Obviously if we humans were not
as social as we are, we would not have needed anywhere as much language as we
have.

<<All physically normal human infants in passably normal surroundings learn a
language.  Even in highly abnormal surroundings, they will do their best to
learn a language, and they will succeed if there's any significant
reinforcement at all.  They do this at an age when they can hardly do
anything else, and they go about it in a highly orderly and consistent way.>>

I don't think we know this.  In fact, I think everything points to children
being very haphazard about making sounds until they start getting regular
feedback.  And a child who doesn't make sounds is considered "abnormal"
precisely because we KNOW that this will hinder development of language.
Whether language is innate or not, lack of language in most human cultures is
not favored - for the obvious reasons that the main vehicle of human cultures
is language.  That is enough to make a silent child "abnormal."  (Reminds me
of the joke about little Johnny at the dinner table suddenly saying "the
potatoes are cold."  The parents and sisters and brothers drop their knives
and forks in shock.  The mother says: "Johnny, we thought you couldn't talk.
For 13 years you never said a thing.  And now it turns out you can talk and
all you can say is "the potatoes are cold!?"  So, Johnny says: "Well, up till
now, everything has been okay.")

The fact is that no individual has ever been observed developing a "natural"
language from scratch.  There is Bickerton's argument for example that in
Hawaii creoles developed out of pidgin in only a single generation,
demonstrating an innate structural propensity for language complexity.  But
it is easy to point out that the children who devised the creoles did have a
model of complexity to imitate all around them, even if they did not adopt
its specific elements.

The real test is the one we can't ethically conduct - how much language would
a human child show who had never been exposed to any of the cultural
contingencies that demonstrably bring forth language?  There is no such
experiment on record.  But it just MIGHT show that, without human culture,
the "language centers" of the brain can easily and naturally and sucessfully
go to work on other things.  (There is some evidence for this.)

So, perhaps it's legitimate to hypothesize that language isn't inherited, but
that the need to be part of a human culture is - and that there is no way to
become part of a human culture without learning some vehicle of language -
even if it is as limited as Helen Keller's, for example.

Regards,
Steve Long


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Wed Oct 20 04:23:34 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 00:23:34 EDT
Subject: language origins
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.002334.EDT.>

>sarima at ix.netcom.com writes:

>I agree, I just do not think the whole of this model is yet completely
>established. >>

-- very true.  This is an area where complete understanding of the human (and
pongoid) genomes will greatly increase our knowledge.

It seems to me that language is an outgrowth of the capacity to conceptualize
and manipulate symbolic representations of reality.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Tue Oct 19 03:05:32 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 23:05:32 EDT
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <MON.18.OCT.1999.230532.EDT.>

>vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu writes:

>Kamil Zvelebil, in his original review of McAlpin, pointed out several
>problems; his more recent books seem to indicate guarded acceptance, but
>still he leaves himself some escape hatches.

-- yes, it's not a settled question.  For one thing, our knowledge of Elamite
proper is still so patchy!

On the whole, though, it seems to be gaining acceptance.  An Elamo-Dravidian
speech community through Iran to the Indus and beyond in the Neolithic and
Early Bronze Age, later disrupted by the intrusive Indo-Aryan and
Indo-Iranian languages, does fit the archaeological and historical data
rather nicely.

(Eg., the specifically Indo-Aryan linguistic element in the Mitannian kingdom
which can be shown to definitely preceed about 1600 BCE, but postdate 2000
BCE.)

And it accounts for the presence of Dravidian loanwords in Vedic, and their
absence in Avestan.

>Anyway, i:zham nowadays refers to Sri Lanka or rather the northern parts of
>it. I am not sure why anyone should have rushed to connect this to Elam.

-- I agree; that sounds like folk-entymology to me.


From edsel at glo.be  Tue Oct 19 07:52:22 1999
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 09:52:22 +0200
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.095222.0200.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

-----Original Message-----
From: Vidhyanath Rao <vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu>
To: Indo-European at xkl.com <Indo-European at xkl.com>
Date: Tuesday, October 19, 1999 4:38 AM
Subject: Re: Pre-Greek languages


>Eduard Selleslagh <edsel at glo.be> wrote:
>> after all, Elamite - which was in the same situation - was
>> finally recognized as Dravidian

>Actually, Dravidianologists profess agnosticism or reservations: The most
>sympathetic view seems to be that a connection is believable but not
>proven. Kamil Zvelebil, in his original review of McAlpin, pointed out
>several problems; his more recent books seem to indicate guarded
>acceptance, but still he leaves himself some escape hatches.

>>[rather strangely late, if you ask me, because
>> the word Elaam still exists in Tamil, I was told]

>I don't know what Elamites called themselves and how they pronounced it.
>In Modern Tamil it is i:zham, where the `zh' stands for the same sound as
>in `tamilzh'. In some dialects, it comes out a retroflex l, but the older
>pronunciation (and still the standard pronunciation) is not quite an l.
>People have claimed success in teaching it to Americans starting from some
>American varieties of r. Some attempt to connect retroflex s of Sanskrit
>to it (and the transliteration as zh or z-underdot seems to come from
>Cyrilic which makes sound like a shibilant). It seems to me that the
>difficulty is describing it due to ignoring the most important bit: the
>tongue moves along the roof of the mouth >while< the sound is being made.

>Anyway, i:zham nowadays refers to Sri Lanka or rather the northern parts
>of it. I am not sure why anyone should have rushed to connect this to
>Elam.

[Ed Selleslagh]

Thanks for the useful comments.

1. The word Elaam: it's the usual (inaccurate?) western press transcription of
the name of the region you describe (cf. the independence guerrilla war) as
part of the native name of the pro-independence movement (I can't recall its
complete name).  So, it might be regarded as the native name for 'a Tamil
homeland' (in casu in Sri Lanka). That, together with the fact that both
regions are/were Dravidian, explains why Elam (Persia) might be - rightly or
wrongly - connected to Elaam (Iizham, Sri Lanka). I don't think that's
'rushing' it, only mildly speculating without grave danger.

2. The name of Elam (SW of the Zagros mountains in SW Iran): it is based upon
the Assyrian designation Elamtu, itself derived from the indigenous name
<(h)alamtu>. Greek: Elymaiïs. It is mentioned in the Bible (books of Esther
and Genesis XIV). In Achemenid old Persian it's (h)uzhi, which seems to
indicate an original pronunciation of the l like Tamil L, described (in Meillet
& Cohen) as a 'voiced retroflex palatalized sibilant, often confounded with
double underdotted l, ditto d, r or even y'.

[N.B. Sometimes the name of its capital Sousa (Hebr. Shushan) was used to coin
a name for the country.]

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.

It is very likely that the present-day Dravidian territory is the result of the
Dravidians and/or their language being relegated to the E and SE, almost
certainly by the IE Indo-Iranians.

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?

4. The Dravidian language family is probably of great interest to the study of
the upper nodes of the Indo-Hittite (or whatever) Stammbaum. I guess one day it
will be connected to it, several nodes above the PIE/Anatolian split. (There
are sometimes strange resemblances with IE: the -b- futurum and -<double
underdotted d>- perfectum in Tamil, the -r- medio-passive in Kurukh, etc. Pure
coincidence?)

Unfortunately, my impression is that it is rather undervalued.

Does anyone have any news about the present status of this still highly
speculative part of language (pre-)history?

Ed.

Dr. Ir. Eduard Selleslagh edsel at glo.be
B-9120 Haasdonk
Belgium


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Oct 19 08:56:49 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 09:56:49 +0100
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.095649.0100.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Sean Crist writes:

[LT on Colin Renfrew's recent article]

>> 3. Many of the problematic words in Greek (though not all of them) must have
>> been borrowed into Greek, *not* during the first Greek settlement of Greece,
>> but much later, during the Bronze Age, when the Greeks came into contact wih
>> the advanced Minoan civilization.  These words are thus not ancient
>> substrate words in Greek, but late adstrate (or even superstrate)
>> borrowings.

> How does Renfrew claim to know this?  If we assume that the speakers of
> Greek were somewhere in what is now Greece from a date as early as Renfrew
> would like to claim, it would be very surprising if they didn't borrow
> words for trade items, etc. from their neighbors to the south.  Cf. the
> Latin loan words in Germanic (wine, cheese, street, etc.)

Renfrew's argument is that a number of the troublesome words in Greek appear to
reflect a sophisticated urban civilization of a type which is not known to have
existed anywhere in the Aegean area until the rise of the palace civilization
in Minoan Crete in the second millennium BC.  Since the referents of these
words could not have existed earlier, he concludes, the words could not have
been present in Pre-Greek or in Greece before the Greeks, but must have been
borrowed into Greek later, after contact with the Minoan civilization.

[LT]

>> Renfrew acknowledges some difficulties with this scenario, pointed out by
>> John Chadwick and others.  In particular, the problematic words which are
>> names for flora and fauna indigenous to Greece cannot readily be explained
>> as late borrowings from Minoan, and are more likely to be substrate words of
>> some kind.  But Renfrew does not see this as a serious obstacle to his
>> scenario.

> Not only that, but many of the place names in Greece (Corinth, Salamis,
> Larisa, Samos, Olympus, Mycenae) are not of Greek origin, which is not
> what we would expect if the speakers of Greek had been in the area for a
> long time.

In the same article, Renfrew suggests that these place names are indeed
pre-Greek but not pre-IE.  He sees them as reflecting an IE presence in Greece
and the Aegean at a time before the Greek language had crystallized out.  He is
also inclined to see them as probably Anatolian.

> I ought to pull that article and take a look at it.  I had heard that
> Renfrew had backed off from some of his claims, but if he published this
> as late as 1998, it sounds like it is not so.

Oh, I know Colin fairly well, and I can assure you that he has not backed off
from his major claims, though he has modified his views on some of the details.
Last August he gave a talk at the Cambridge symposium on time-depth in
languages in which, among other things, he addressed the problem of the
horse-and-wagon words in IE.  This will appear in the proceedings, to be
published early next year.  I'm one of the editors, so it's partly down to me
how fast we can get the volume out.

Almost at this very moment, Colin is in the States giving a talk on his
Anatolian homeland for PIE.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl  Tue Oct 19 18:44:28 1999
From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 19:44:28 +0100
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <007401bf1747$304f8d60$5510063e@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.194428.0100.>

>By the way, no one ever did tell me if the plural of Sprachbund
>was -unds, -|nde, or -unde.   I guess I go for the middle one, making it a
>language-association, rather than a language-collection.

Sprachbuende/Sprachb"unde, or, for those with a really cosmopolitan
mail-reader, Sprachbünde


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Tue Oct 19 18:05:15 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 14:05:15 EDT
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.140515.EDT.>

>Odegard at means.net writes:

>So. As a seat-of-the pants theory that cannot be proved, the Anatolians
>were, oh, 3100, 3200 BCE while the other group of IE-speakers, the group
>that was ancestral to all the other IE languages, were still hopelessly
>land-lubbers up where the steppe merged into forest. Anatolian can be seen
>as a happenstance offshoot that got lucky and left us written records 2500
>years later.

-- seems sensible, except that it's 1500 years later, not 2500.  1000 years
later if you count the Anatolian/IE names found in the records of the
Assyrian merchant colonies in Anatolia in the early second millenium.


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Tue Oct 19 18:50:50 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 14:50:50 EDT
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.145050.EDT.>

On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, Larry Trask wrote:
<<Many of the problematic words in Greek (though not all of them) must have
been borrowed into Greek, *not* during the first Greek settlement of Greece,
but much later, during the Bronze Age, when the Greeks came into contact with
the advanced Minoan civilization.>>

Sean Crist wrote (dated 10/19/99 1:51:17 AM) :
<<How does Renfrew claim to know this?>>

Well it's hardly a wild guess.  Starting in the early Middle Helladic, around
Middle Minoan IA, Cretan imports are not only found on the Greek mainland,
but are also manufactured there in a few very discrete colonies.  The
Mycenaean culture will shows many obvious debts to Minoan influences many
centuries later.  But this Minoan influence is not really apparent BEFORE
this time.  In fact, conversely, there is even evidence earlier of Korakou
(Greek mainland EH II-III culture) making its way to Crete.

Sean Crist also wrote:
<<If we assume that the speakers of Greek were somewhere in what is now
Greece from a date as early as Renfrew would like to claim, it would be very
surprising if they didn't borrow words for trade items, etc. from their
neighbors to the south.  Cf. the Latin loan words in Germanic (wine, cheese,
street, etc.)>>

Well, what trade goods would you be talking about in 6000-4000BC? Minoan
innovations might be quite different from neolithic ones, simply because
Crete was relatively undeveloped at the time.  And it is not clear that Crete
represented the language group that may represent the most ancient substrate
- Semitic.

First of all, the MAJOR misunderstanding is that we are talking about
"speakers of Greek" at this point.  Renfrew's premise is that an IE ancestral
language is in Greece at the time.  And that it might be a linear ancestor of
Greek.

Just as importantly, Greece is Renfrew's second or third step in his
hypothetical IE diffusion, so we would in theory be finding ourselves dealing
with dialects much closer in time to PIE than to documented Greek.

And that's where there IS EVIDENCE of word commonalities between very early
Greece ("narrow PIE" or something like it) and "southern" neighbors.

In a message on this list dated 2/4/99 12:49:05 AM, we learned the following:
<<In Gamq.relidze--Ivanov, you can find (e.g.)

IE *tauro- + Sem. *t_awr- "bull"

IE *ghait.- + Sem. *gadj- "goat"

IE *agwno- "lamb" + Sem. *`igl- "young animal"

IR *qe/op- + Sem., comp. Akkad. uk.u:pu, OHebr. k.�p_, Aram. k.o:p_a:

"monkey"

IE *bhar(s)- "grain, cereals" + Sem. *burr-/*barr-

IE *dhoHna:- "cereals, grain" + Sem. *duh,n- "millet"

IE *Handh- "edible plants" + Sem. *h.int.(at-) "wheat"

etc. See also V.M. Illic^-Svityc^'s article (1964) and other IE-Sem articles.

Alemko Gluhak
...Linguistic Research Institute of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts
gluhak at hazu.hr>>

When I read "IE *bhar(s)- "grain, cereals" + Sem. *burr-/*barr-", it stopped
me.

"Melie^dea puron..." the Illiad (8.180), "kata puron alessan" - grind wheat.
Pu_ros in Homeric Greek is wheat.  Or sometimes just grain.

Larry Trask also wrote:
<<In particular, the problematic words which are names for flora and fauna
indigenous to Greece cannot readily be explained as late borrowings from
Minoan, and are more likely to be substrate words of some kind.  But Renfrew
does not see this as a serious obstacle to his scenario.>>

And the Greeks themselves had a memory of non-Greeks living among them from
earliest times.  There is NO QUESTION that Greece was populated BEFORE the
coming of agriculture and that those settlements persisted well into the
neolithic.  In northern Europe, pre-agriculturalist cultures persisted right
into the Bronze age without evident discontinuity.  Indigenous plant names
(see "squash") even when they sound not very tasty, are known to persist in
this way.

Sean Crist wrote:
<<Not only that, but many of the place names in Greece (Corinth, Salamis,
Larisa, Samos, Olympus, Mycenae) are not of Greek origin, which is not what
we would expect if the speakers of Greek had been in the area for a long
time.>>

I believe that this question has been encountered before on this list and
that it has been suggested that these names may be from an IE language,
specifically Anatolian.  If they were in fact not IE, then that suggests only
that IE was not the first language group to be spoken in Greece - which is
NOT INCONSISTENT in any way with Renfrew's scenario.  What qualifies as a
"long time" is not really an operational term in these 1000 years time-bite
scenarios.

BTW, what was the story with "Knossos" again?  What kind of a word is it?

Regards,
Steve Long


From Georg at home.ivm.de  Tue Oct 19 23:34:59 1999
From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 01:34:59 +0200
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19991015183030.0096eeb0@popd.netcruiser>
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.013459.0200.>

>>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. 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.

>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 !?!

>(They do indicate an early appearance of proto-Iranian
>peoples to the east of Mesopotamia)

Indian

>>Even if you don't buy Anatolia as the PIE homeland, why couldn't Anatolian
>>have entered Anatolia across the Caucasus or from east of the Caspian Sea,
>>through Iran?

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

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

>and the *total* lack of any pre-Armenian IE substratal
>influences in any of the non-IE languages of the Caucasus.
>
>For the second you have to explain why the Sumerians, Old Bablyonians and
>Assyians make NO mention of any possible pre-Anatolian peoples, while they
>*do* give indications of the existence of proto-Iranian peoples in Iran
>(look at the Mitanni words for charioteering).

Indian

Just asking ...

Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
+49-228-69-13-32


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Oct 20 02:42:10 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 19:42:10 -0700
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <199910150946.EAA00815@orion.means.net>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.194210.0700.>

At 04:46 AM 10/15/99 +00-06, Mark Odegard <Odegard at means.net> wrote:
>My own current view is that Anatolian moved from what is now SE
>Bulgaria into Anatolia via the Black Sea (yeah, boats).
>... The did not go over the mountains
>into Thessaly and thence into nothern or central Greece. They went to
>Troy! An easier route when you have boats.

Actually, this is quite an interesting possibility.  Certainly I agree, the
earliest IE type cultures in Anatolia appear in the Troy area.

>So. As a seat-of-the pants theory that cannot be proved, the
>Anatolians were, oh, 3100, 3200 BCE while the other group of
>IE-speakers, the group that was ancestral to all the other IE
>languages, were still hopelessly land-lubbers up where the steppe
>merged into forest. Anatolian can be seen as a happenstance offshoot
>that got lucky and left us written records 2500 years later. The rest
>of us, of course, were still chasing aurochesen somewhere rather
>north of the Black Sea.

Actually by that date the IE speakers were apparently very widespread
indeed, from the Corded Ware groups in northern Europe to the Afanasievo
culture of central Asia.  That is an east-west range of over 3000 km.

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


From gwhitta at gwdg.de  Wed Oct 20 11:37:20 1999
From: gwhitta at gwdg.de (Gordon Whittaker)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 12:37:20 +0100
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.123720.0100.>

In the ongoing debate between Stanley Friesen and Larry Trask concerning
early  Indo-European  movements and whether or not the Caucasus was a
transit region, the point was raised by Stanley Friesen that "cultures with
written history predate the probable appearance of the Hittites ... None of
these written sources give *any* indication of any likely pre-Anatolian
people anywhere near Mesopotamia" and that "the Sumerians, Old Bablyonians
and Assy(r)ians make NO mention of any possible pre-Anatolian peoples".

This is somewhat misleading. While it is perfectly true that there are no
obvious references to any Indo-European group predating the written record
of Anatolian, there is a considerable amount of evidence in the Mesopotamian
writing system and in the vocabularies of Sumerian and Akkadian for just
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. Up till recently there had been no attempt in
print to identify this language (or languages) or to marshal evidence from
the writing system bearing on this question. The whole matter is commonly
referred to as the Sumerian Problem.

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'. By orphan readings I mean values
without any known link to actual Sumerian words in the depicted semantic
domains. Usually, the phonetic value is reassigned to a rough homophone in
Sumerian. Thus, *pesh* has the logographic value 'be broad',
*gurush/geresh*, the value of a sign depicting a vehicle with runners (sled)
or alternatively wheels (wagon), has the logographic value 'young
man/able-bodied worker'. In other cases the entire logographic value was
borrowed, as in the case of *nirah* 'snake, adder', recalling IE *neh-tr-ah
'snake, adder', or *umbin*, variously 'nail, claw', 'wheel', 'container for
pig and sheep fat', represented by one sign depicting a claw or nail. The
latter value recalls IE terms for 'nail', 'navel', and 'salve'. And so on.

Now that early phonetic renditions of Sumerian terms are known from Ebla
(ca. 2300 B.C.), Old Sumerian forms of well-known terms are coming to light.
The Sumerian term for 'ewe' is *u* (with subscript 8), preserved as *us* in
a compound. This word crops up in Ebla in the earlier form *uwi* (and
'vowel-harmonized' as *uwa*), reflecting IE *how-i- 'sheep'. Early
speculation about a link between Sum. *gud* 'bull, ox' and IE *gwou-s
'bovine' can now be turned on its head. Final Sum. *d/r* corresponds
regularly to IE nom. case marker *-s. I'll leave it at that for now.

The problem with all of this is simply that it is unacceptable to most
Assyriologists to pursue such lines of enquiry, much for the same reason
that Indo-Europeanists used to discount excellent evidence for a PIE word
for wine -- it doesn't belong because the Indo-European speakers were
allegedly nowhere near wine-growing regions originally. Or, as Calvert
Watkmns succinctly put it to me, " What are Indo-Europeans doing in
Mesopotamia anyway?"

Germans have an appropriate expression, that 'nicht sein kann, was nicht
sein darf'!

-----Urspr|ngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Stanley Friesen <sarima at ix.netcom.com>
An: Indo-European at xkl.com <Indo-European at xkl.com>
Datum: 19 October 1999 23:03
Betreff: Re: Pre-Greek languages

>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.
>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.  (They do indicate an early appearance of proto-Iranian
>peoples to the east of Mesopotamia)

>>Even if you don't buy Anatolia as the PIE homeland, why couldn't Anatolian
>>have entered Anatolia across the Caucasus or from east of the Caspian Sea,
>>through Iran?

>The first is made unlikely by the lack of IE-related cultural artifacts in
>the Caucusus and the *total* lack of any pre-Armenian IE substratal
>influences in any of the non-IE languages of the Caucasus.

>For the second you have to explain why the Sumerians, Old Bablyonians and
>Assyians make NO mention of any possible pre-Anatolian peoples, while they
>*do* give indications of the existence of proto-Iranian peoples in Iran
>(look at the Mitanni words for charioteering).


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Fri Oct 22 06:57:45 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 1999 02:57:45 EDT
Subject: Pre-Greek languages (Horses and such)
Message-ID: <FRI.22.OCT.1999.025745.EDT.>

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?

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

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?

<<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 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."

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.
This is a very large chronological gap with the evidence in the Ukraine,
especially with the hypothesized soft bits.  I believe earlier evidence of
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 Hellanic - at more or less the same
time as evidence first appears in Troy.  This is about a thousand years after
the first apparent evidence in the Middle East.  And western European
evidence is even later.

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.

Not that this "absence of evidence" eliminates any theory.  But separating
the evidence from the theories does help us to know what evidence the
theories are being built on.

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

And this whole question of toponyms in Greece.  Why don't we encounter this
problem so extensively in northern and western Europe?  We know there was an
existing population there from well before 2000 BC or even 4000 BC.  What
happened to that substrate?  Why aren't there all these non-IE or unknown IE
place names distributed all over Europe?

There's a lot here that just doesn't seem to be answered by pointing to
isolated pieces of evidence.

Regards,
Steve Long


From petegray at btinternet.com  Wed Oct 20 20:22:22 1999
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 21:22:22 +0100
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.212222.0100.>

>other
> Anatolian languages had a more typical IE verbal system,

Let me wave my flag again.    Even if they are more like the Greek-Sanskrit
system, I still don't believe we can equate this with general IE.   There is
some argument that the Germanic-Hittite system might have at least as strong
a case for being closer to the original PIE.   As for attested IE, it may be
difficult to identify what the "IE" system is, given the variety.

Peter


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Oct 22 13:27:40 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 1999 14:27:40 +0100
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <FRI.22.OCT.1999.142740.0100.>

Pete Gray writes:

> Thank you, Larry, for the summary of Renfrew's article.  I am continually
> amazed how poorly stocked the great libraries of England are on PIE!

>> I'm responding to the idea that
>> ... Greek itself evolved within Greece ... out of a more-or-less vanilla
>> variety of PIE which had already
>> occupied the territory.

> You mention that Renfrew "acknowledges some difficulties" and it may be that
> he answers my question in the article.    I would like to know how he
> maintains this position in the light of a fairly probable Greek -
> Indo-Iranian - Armenian Sprachbund, which on some views is innovative, not
> merely retentive or conserving.   Does he suggest that somehow the I-I-ans
> also originated within Greece?  Or that the vanilla ur-pre-Greek had already
> acquired the characteristics it shares with II and Armenian before its
> speakers occupied the terrritory - which would make it much more raspberry
> ripple than vanilla?   Or does he believe that the shared characteristics
> are mere retentions?   Any of these positions is open to serious question.

Renfrew does not devote much attention to this issue in the article I was
citing.  My own conversations with him suggest to me that he does not regard
the proposed Greek-Armenian-I-I Sprachbund as so well established as to be a
major stumbling block, but I may be putting words into his mouth here.  (Though
note Clackson's book, which largely dismisses the Greek-Armenian idea as
unsubstantiated.)

> By the way, no one ever did tell me if the plural of Sprachbund
> was -unds, -|nde, or -unde.   I guess I go for the middle one, making it a
> language-association, rather than a language-collection.

Oh, I'm quite sure that the <Bund> of <Sprachbund> is the word meaning
'alliance, league', and not the homophonous word meaning 'bunch, bundle'.
So, the German plural should be <Sprachbuende>.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Tue Oct 19 20:21:06 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 16:21:06 -0400
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <007601bf1747$31b7a8e0$5510063e@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.162106.0400.>

On Fri, 15 Oct 1999, petegray wrote:

> Stanley Friesen may be in good company in maintaining that the NW IE
> languages separate early - this is the position taken by Lehmann among
> others.

Well, for whatever an argument from authority is worth, there are several
prominent Indo-Europeanists who have reached conclusions approximating
those of Ringe et. al., but on the basis of different kinds of
argumentation from those used by Ringe et. al. But let's set that aside
and argue this on the basis of evidence rather than on authority.

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 partly because the problem is a very hard one,
computationally speaking.

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.)

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU  Tue Oct 19 06:28:28 1999
From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 01:28:28 -0500
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.012828.0500.>

>[Ed Selleslagh]

>I forgot to mention that in Modern Greek (NeoEllinik=F3) the use of the
>definite article before proper names is standard practice, e.g. O Yorghos
>("the George", written Ho Gio:rgos). And of course also with titles, like in
>Spanish:  o k=EDrios ("el se=F1or", written Ho Kyrios) XYZ, i kir=EDa ("la
>se=F1ora", written He: Kyr=EDa) XYZ. I know of no special connotation.

This is already standard in the Greek of the New Testament (mainly first
century AD).  I haven't looked at classical stuff from the 4th or 5th century
BC for many years, but I don't remember seing the promiscuous personal article
there.  Certainly it's not in Homer, where there hardly seems to be an article
at all (just spotty weak demonstratives).

Leo

Leo A. Connolly                         Foreign Languages & Literatures
connolly at memphis.edu                    University of Memphis


From mrr at astor.urv.es  Tue Oct 19 11:12:35 1999
From: mrr at astor.urv.es (Macia Riutort Riutort)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 13:12:35 +0200
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.131235.0200.>

Lieber Larry,
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. 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). Im letzten Jahr
hatte ich in derselben Klasse zwei Iciar (23 Jahre alt und 27 Jahre alt). 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.
Andererseits habe ich noch nie eine Frau kennengelernt, die Amada heißt,
obwohl ich, um die Wahrheit zu sagen, gestehen muß, daß ich Amandas kenne.
Mit freundlichen Grüßen

Macia

>Well, the only way I can think of to decide whether <Maite> originated in the
>Basque Country is to check the historical records, if there are any.

>But <maite> happens to be an ordinary Basque word, and moreover a most
>appropriate one for naming a woman: it means 'beloved' in Basque, and is hence
>a translation equivalent of Romance female names like French <Aimee> and
>Castilian <Amada> -- and perhaps of something in Catalan?

>I'd be interested to hear what the Spaniards or the Catalans think of the
>female name <Arantxa>.  This is unquestionably of Basque origin -- it's a
>Marian name, from the Basque word for 'thorn' -- yet it is now far from rare
>in Spain: there's famous tennis player with this name, and she claims no
>Basque ancestry that I know of.  Is the name perceived as Basque in the
>Peninsula generally?

>Larry Trask

[ Moderator's 7-bit-friendly transcription:

Lieber Larry,

Arantxa wird in Katalonien doch als baskischer Name empfunden. Es ist
n{\"a}mlich so, dass es besonders in den Jahren 1977-1980 zu einer gewissen
Mode wurde, Kinder auf baskische Namen zu taufen. So habe ich zur Zeit in einer
Klasse eine Ar{\'a}nzazu (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 ({\"u}brigens, Arantxa wird hier in
Katalonien als Koseform zu Ar{\'a}nzazu verwendet). Im letzten Jahr hatte ich
in derselben Klasse zwei Iciar (23 Jahre alt und 27 Jahre alt). Im Gegensatz zu
all diesen Namen, die, wie gesagt, als baskisch empfunden werden, wird der Name
Maite als Abk{\"u}rzung von Maria Teresa empfunden. Als ich eine der
Kolleginnen, die so heissen, fragte, sagte sie mir, dass sie nicht auf die Idee
gekommen w{\"a}re, Maite als baskisch zu sehen. F{\"u}r sie und ihre Familie
ist der Name einfach eine Koseform.
Andererseits habe ich noch nie eine Frau kennengelernt, die Amada heisst,
obwohl ich, um die Wahrheit zu sagen, gestehen muss, dass ich Amandas kenne.
Mit freundlichen Gr{\"u}ssen

  --rma ]


From mcv at wxs.nl  Tue Oct 19 16:19:02 1999
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 16:19:02 GMT
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <E11cAe4-0004CA-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.161902.GMT.>

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote:

>Well, the only way I can think of to decide whether <Maite> originated in the
>Basque Country is to check the historical records, if there are any.

>But <maite> happens to be an ordinary Basque word, and moreover a most
>appropriate one for naming a woman: it means 'beloved' in Basque, and is hence
>a translation equivalent of Romance female names like French <Aimee> and
>Castilian <Amada> -- and perhaps of something in Catalan?

I suppose Amat (Cast. Amado as in Alonso) is a Catalan name,
although I can't think of any examples (and Altavista only gives
me Amat as a family name).  I seem to recall the existence of a
provencalizing Aimat or Aymat, at least in the Middle Ages.

In any case, although Maite is generally associated with Maria
Teresa, and people generally don't know that the word means
anything in Basque, there may be an association between the name
and the "North".  Mainly because of the song "Maitetxu mia".

>I'd be interested to hear what the Spaniards or the Catalans think of the
>female name <Arantxa>.  This is unquestionably of Basque origin -- it's a
>Marian name, from the Basque word for 'thorn' -- yet it is now far from rare
>in Spain: there's famous tennis player with this name, and she claims no
>Basque ancestry that I know of.  Is the name perceived as Basque in the
>Peninsula generally?

Because of the <tx>, it's probably perceived as Basque or
Catalan.  Since "Arantxa" doesn't mean anything in Catalan, I
suppose most Catalans at least will tend to perceive it as
Basque.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl


From sarant at village.uunet.lu  Tue Oct 19 17:16:57 1999
From: sarant at village.uunet.lu (Nikos Sarantakos)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 18:16:57 +0100
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <007d01bf16ff$8c3ad280$d806703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.181657.0100.>

At 13:20 15/10/99 +0200, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

>I forgot to mention that in Modern Greek (NeoEllinikó) the use of the
>definite article before proper names is standard practice, e.g. O Yorghos
>("the George", written Ho Gio:rgos). And of course also with titles, like in
>Spanish:  o kírios ("el señor", written Ho Kyrios) XYZ, i kiría ("la
>señora", written He: Kyría) XYZ. I know of no special connotation.

No, there is no special connotation.

Now, this is extreme nit-picking perhaps, but in Modern Greek
there is no "written Ho Gio:rgos". Rough breathing (which you
note with H) is neither written since 1981, nor pronounced
since much earlier, so it is dubious
why H should be used for transliteration of Modern Greek.

ns


From roz-frank at uiowa.edu  Wed Oct 20 01:43:37 1999
From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 20:43:37 -0500
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.204337.0500.>

At 04:04 PM 10/15/99 +0100, you wrote:
>Roz Frank writes:

>[on Basque <bat> 'one' from *<bade>]

>> In other words, for you the meaning of <bedera> is "one apiece"? I think
>> you defined it this way in an earlier mailing, also.

>Yes.  The word has other meanings, but 'one apiece' is the most widespread,

Just how wide-spread in your opinion? And what are those other meanings?

>and, more importantly, it's the earliest sense recorded -- in Leizarraga, in
>1571.

I'm curious what precisely the sentence was in which the term had that
meaning. Could you provide it?

I'm assuming it might be something like "Bakoitzari liburu bedera" (which
could be glossed roughly as "a book to each one"). Or is found it some
other context? It is important to pay attention to the nuances of the term.

>>  Hence, the data set under analysis consists solely of <bedera> and
>> <bederatzi> since these are the only two examples mentioned by Michelena,
>> right?

>Primarily, yes.  There are one or two other words which may also be connected,
>but these are less clear.

Could you share with us what are these other one or two words are precisely?

>> You have shared with us two statements concerning the etymology of <bat>:
>> First your own which you phrased as follows:

>> 1). that <bat> "is pretty clearly derived from earlier *<bade>."

>> Then you provided us with a paraphrase or synopsis of Michelena's
>> statements on the topic:

>> 2). that in Michelena's opinion the etymology from *<bade> "lacked
>> compelling evidence" and hence
>> "was not secure." It should be considered, therefore, "only a plausible
>> suggestion."

>> Having read over Michelena's comments, I believe your summary of them,
>> provided above, is quite accurate and appropriate. It expands on
>> Michelena's representation of *<bade> as "*<bade>?". He clearly didn't feel
>> fully confident about it. Also, above you state that you "endorse Gavel's
>> and Michelena's suggestions," once again emphasizing the tentative nature
>> of the reconstruction and once again a very measured statement on your part.

>Correct.

>> However, there is a third instance in which you have spoken about this same
>> problem although in rather different terms. Specifically on that occasion
>> you stated the following:

>> "It is most unusual for a native Basque word to end in a plosive, and <bat>
>> is clearly from earlier *<bade> or *<bada>  suggested by  the morph <bede->
>> in derivatives as (northern) <bedera> 'one apiece' and <bederatzi> 'nine'."

>> To my knowledge Michelena did not list the second etymon *<bada>, although
>> perhaps he did so on some other occasion, i.e., not in his work _Fonetica
>> Historica Vasca_.

>The variant proposal *<bada>, which I do not endorse, was not made by
>Michelena, but by somebody else more recently.  Sorry; I've forgotten who it
>was.

I have not found any reference to it except in your book which doesn't list
a citation for the source. If you listed it also in your doctoral
dissertation (1979?), perhaps you included the citation in that version.

>> As you will recall, the above quote is found on page 273 of your book _The
>> History of Basque_. Your statement, therefore, seems to contradict what you
>> have shared with us on the IE list or at least to be far less cautious.
>> Furthermore, I note that in your book you list <bede-> as a morph, not as
>> *<bede->. Earlier on this list you also affirmed that <bedere(n> contains
>> the same morph, if my memory serves me right.

>No; I didn't affirm any such thing.  I merely noted that it was possible.

>As for <bede->, this is an attested morph, and so it gets no asterisk.

I'm not following this discussion here very well. First, I thought that in
this scenario <bedere>, <bedere(n)> and <bedera> are proposed as related
items, i.e., as sharing the same elements or at least the same
root-stem/morpheme. And, second, I thought that you/Michelena were
proposing that the root-stem/morpheme of <bedera> was *<bede>. And then
from that assumption, proposing that <bat> should be reconstructed as
*<bede>. Other than this, if <bede> is an attested morph, could you give me
a source/explanation for your allegation.

I repeat: to my knowledge, *<bede> is not attested in Euskera outside of
its hypothesized existence, i.e., from a reconstruction of <bedera> from
*<bede>. Stated differently, the morph *<bede> comes into exsistence as the
reconstruction of <bat> because of the fact that <bedera> is deconstructed
as *<bede-ra>. This latter reconstruction of <bedera> is what brings the
morpheme *<bede> into being; otherwise it is not attested anywhere.
Correct? It all depends on whether one accepts this derivation for <bedera>.

>> Before you wrote your book, did you discover additional evidence -beyond
>> that presented by Gavel and Michelena- which strengthened your conviction
>> concerning this version of events? And if you did find additional proof for
>> this position, could you share it with us?

>> Furthermore, based on your statements in the email on this topic cited
>> above ("I can claim no credit."), you seem to be saying that all you have
>> done is repeat the positions of Gavel and Michelena, nothing more. Yet in
>> this section of your book you do not cite or otherwise overtly refer to the
>> specific works of Gavel nor Michelena where they discuss this problem.
>> Indeed, your statement "<bat> is clearly from earlier *<bade> or *<bada>"
>> leaves the impression that there is no other possibility: that yours is a
>> summary of the consensus opinion.

>I am more enthusiastic about *<bade> than Michelena was, that's all.

Why?

>I don't know if there exists a consensus.  But I know of nobody who has
>criticized Michelena's proposal of *<bade>.

Do you know of anyone other than yourself who has discussed it at any
length? Remember, as you yourself stated, Michelena wasn't particularly
convinced by the data. So he wasn't really inviting people to agree or
disagree with him. Stated differently, he wasn't setting it up as something
to be defended or criticized. In fact, as far as I know, this item is not
something that has been debated at all in print, other than a brief email
discussion which took place on Basque-l some time back.

Best wishes,
Roz
************************************************************************
Roslyn M. Frank
Professor
************************************************************************
Department of Spanish & Portuguese
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242
email: <roz-frank at uiowa.edu>
fax: (319)-335-2990


From dwanders at pacbell.net  Tue Oct 19 10:29:04 1999
From: dwanders at pacbell.net (dwanders at pacbell.net)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 10:29:04 +0000
Subject: Indo-European Studies Bulletin
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.102904.0000.>

A new issue of the Indo-European Studies Bulletin has just
appeared. The IES Bulletin is affiliated with the Indo-European
Studies Program at UCLA.

Volume 8, Number 2 August/September 1999
Contents

Articles:
"A Review of Recent Baltological Research" by Rick Derksen
"The Cimmerians  -- Their Origin and Expansion" by Andrzej Pydyn
"TheUse of Computers in Historical and Comparative Linguistics"
    by Javier Martínez and James Bisso

Reviews:
The Mummies of Ürümchi by Elizabeth W. Barber (K. Jones-Bley)
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Indian Epigraphy, A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit,
    Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages by Richard
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Conference Reports:
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From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Oct 20 03:00:43 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 20:00:43 -0700
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <007601bf1747$31b7a8e0$5510063e@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.200043.0700.>

At 08:43 PM 10/15/99 +0100, petegray wrote:

>I didn't post very much in that discussion myself, because I didn't think it
>was worthwhile, but myy guess is that I am not alone in being both (a)
>relatively silent about it and (b) totally convinced that the discussion has
>not yet proved anything.

Certainly I do not find the contents of the UPenn Web site convincing as
yet.  (I haven't yet read the detailed articles, as they are in postscript,
and I do not seem to have a postscript display app here).

I have some preliminary comments on the UPenn tree, and my general take on
applying phylogenetic analysis to languages which I will present shortly.

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


From DRC at stargate1.auckland.ac.nz  Tue Oct 19 06:42:12 1999
From: DRC at stargate1.auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 19:42:12 +1300
Subject: Nors Josephson's Theory about a linguistic and
 culturalinfluence of Ancient Greek on East-Polynesia
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.194212.1300.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Another tiresome piece of mock-linguistics (retailed by Charles Berlitz,
wouldn't ya know?). I think this came up a year or so ago, but perhaps
not on this list. The only really amusing part is that some of the
Hawaiian words (such as those for "bread" and "plough") are actually
from Greek -- 19th century loanwords introduced by educated
missionaries.

Is this the same Nors Josephson who has a day job as a musicologist?

Ross Clark

>>> <X99Lynx at aol.com> 10/15 2:39  >>>
In a message dated 10/13/99 5:33:08 PM, MF1107 at mclink.it wrote:

<<I should like to know some scholarly opinion about N. Josephson's theories
concerning a presumptive linguistic Greek influence on Pacific area (ex. gr.
cf. N. Josephson, Greek Linguistic Elements in the Polynesian Languages,
Universitaetsverlag C. Winter, Heidelberg, 1987; or Idem, Eine
archaisch-griechische Kultur auf der Osterinsel, Universitaetsverlag C.
Winter, Heidelberg, 1999 ).>>

For those interested, there's a brief page on Josephson's '87 piece with word
comparisons at:
http://www.ancientgr.com/Unknown_Hellenic_History/Eng/Words_in_Hawai.htm

(the url may wrap around in e-mail and have to be deleted back to one line)

S. Long


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Tue Oct 19 18:59:00 1999
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 18:59:00 -0000
Subject: Nors Josephson's Theory about a linguistic and
 culturalinfluence of Ancient Greek on East-Polynesia
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.185900.0000.>

Dear Steve and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: <X99Lynx at aol.com>
Sent: Friday, October 15, 1999 1:39 AM
Subject: Re: Nors Josephson's Theory about a linguistic and
    culturalinfluence of Ancient Greek on East-Polynesia

> In a message dated 10/13/99 5:33:08 PM, MF1107 at mclink.it wrote:

> <<I should like to know some scholarly opinion about N. Josephson's theories
> concerning a presumptive linguistic Greek influence on Pacific area (ex. gr.
> cf. N. Josephson, Greek Linguistic Elements in the Polynesian Languages,
> Universitaetsverlag C. Winter, Heidelberg, 1987; or Idem, Eine
> archaisch-griechische Kultur auf der Osterinsel, Universitaetsverlag C.
> Winter, Heidelberg, 1999 ).>>

> For those interested, there's a brief page on Josephson's '87 piece with word
> comparisons at:
> http://www.ancientgr.com/Unknown_Hellenic_History/Eng/Words_in_Hawai.htm
> (the url may wrap around in e-mail and have to be deleted back to one line)
>
> S. Long

I have not read Josephson's book so my comments will be based solely on what
can be seen at the website referenced above.

In three examples, the Hawaiian word contains a <t>:

toko-toko, 'wood'; tarra, 'courage'; aeto, 'hawk'.

These are respectively compared with Greek doko's, tha'rros, and aeto's.

While the extreme reduction of the consonantal inventory in Polynesian
languages might lead to a situation where Greek d/th/t *all* show up in
Polynesian as <t>, it would take many more examples than are contained on
the webpage to make it worthy of serious consideration.

Though I am suspicious of misapplications of theories of random coincidences
and the associated mathematical rationales, I see nothing at the website
that would persuade me that these few correspondences are not legitimate
examples of random relationships.

In the case of some words, not containing stops, like angou (suffocate),
nou-nou (thought), manao (think), the possibility of common descent from
some earlier language should be considered.

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 meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er
mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sat Oct 23 15:34:39 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sat, 23 Oct 1999 16:34:39 +0100
Subject: Nors Josephson's Theory about a linguistic and cultural
 influence of Ancient Greek on East-Polynesia
Message-ID: <SAT.23.OCT.1999.163439.0100.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

I've just had a look at the little Web page recommended for Nors Josephson's
idea of Greeks in the Pacific around 950 BC.  For anyone who enjoys this sort
of thing, I'd like to cite a much earlier scholar who developed not only the
idea of Greek words in the Pacific, but also the idea of Hawaiian words in the
pre-Columbian Americas, and indeed all other conceivable permutations of such
notions:

Arnold D. Wadler (1948), One Language: Source of All Tongues, New York:
American Press for Art and Science.

The late Professor Dr. Wadler, whose colorful academic career is movingly
described in a brief preface, was there firstest with the mostest.  Nobody who
is interested in pan-global linguistic connections can afford to overlook this
masterpiece of 1930s multilateral comparison, now sadly out of print.  Joe
Greenberg, eat your heart out. ;-)

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Oct 19 08:34:08 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 09:34:08 +0100
Subject: Respect goes both ways!
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.093408.0100.>

Vidhyanath Rao writes:

[LT]

>> I am completely mystified.  The relation "is the same as" is
>> unquestionably transitive. [Rest of the argument deleted]

> As philosophers have been aware for two or more thounsands of years, this
> argument leads to conclusions which make all science questionable [for one
> extreme example, read Nagarjuna].

> Am I the same person I was when I wrote the previous sentence? After all,
> merely by breathing, the set of atoms that make up me (whatever that
> means) has changed. But if you say yes, by a long chain of equivalences,
> it must follow that I am the same person that I was when I was conceived.
> But was I even a person at that point?

Sure.  I don't dispute this at all.

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.  The problems only arise when we try to decide whether the
relation can be appropriately applied to entities in the world.

In the case of languages, I have argued that the relation cannot, in general,
be meaningfully applied at all.  The strange and unpalatable consequences
that I have objected to on this list seem to me to derive wholly from the
inappropriate application of this relation to language varieties.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Oct 19 08:43:55 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 09:43:55 +0100
Subject: Campbell's def. of "language"
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.094355.0100.>

Ed Selleslagh writes:

[snip examples]

> So, according to Campbell: Spanish = Italian, and West-Flemish or Limburgish
> do not belong to the same language as Holland Dutch.

Wonderful, Ed, wonderful!

But, in fairness to Campbell, let's recall that his definitions were never
intended to be universal: they were only a policy designed to let him get on
with his book on American languages.

Still, Ed's examples are a superb counter to any attempt at raising mutual
intelligibility to universal status as a criterion for drawing language
boundaries.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Tue Oct 19 18:01:13 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 14:01:13 EDT
Subject: Mutual Intelligibility. [was Re: Misrepresenting others'
 views]
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.140113.EDT.>

>Odegard at means.net writes:

>But if you, the modern linguist, did a word-for-word
>phonemo-grammatico-lexical analysis, you'd see it was the *same* language.

-- no, you'd see it was a closely related language.  That is, after all, how
you _get_ new languages -- dialect divergence.

>The question becomes pointed when you also ask if the language of the
>Makedones was really 'Greek'.

-- probably a closely related but distinct language, or an extremely
divergent Greek dialect, a somewhat arbitrary distinction; but we don't have
enough information to be sure and probably never will.  The other evidence --
personal names, religious practice -- would seem to indicate that the
Makedones proper were fairly close to Greek.  In any case, their upper class,
by Alexander's time, were bilingual in Macedonian and standard Greek, roughly
as the Russian aristocracy used to be in Russian and French.

(It's a pity we have even less on Molossian (Epirote) and so forth.  My own
guess, which is no more than that, is that there was a fringe of
related-to-Greek languages around the northern edge of Greece proper, a relic
of the folk-movements which originally brought proto-Greek south from the
Balkans.  Phyrgian seems, on what scanty evidence we have, to have stood in
some close relationship to Greek -- eg., use of a cognate of "wannax" for
"king".)

>What happens when there are major grammatical innovations, but of a such
>transparent nature that the next-door cognate has no problems understanding it
>(e.g., collapsing locative ablative and instrumental into dative+preposition)?
>My answer is they are separate languages, inasmuch as both speakers will
>regard the other's speech as 'ungrammatical'.

-- If the two dialects are perfectly mutually comprehensible, it is, to be
frank, absurd to regard them as separate languages.


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Tue Oct 19 18:20:13 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 13:20:13 -0500
Subject: Updates regarding UPenn tree
In-Reply-To: <00d701bf178e$5c5a9b60$24a394d1@roborr.uottawa.ca>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.132013.0500.>

But why the Irish dialect form <fuisce> said [I believe] to actually be
Scots Gaelic uisge beatha via  English whisky/whiskey and the alternate
forms Whelan and Phelan for what seems to be the same lastname? Did the
f/*w alternation survive in some places?

>Gaelic has an f/zero alternation (f/fh orthographically), and also what
>looks like an  s/f alternation (Lenited IE *sw develops to Goidelic f
>(non-lenited sw becomes s) and Welsh chw (there are not many examples, and
>these are often obscured by subsequent sound chnages and levellings).

>Gaelic f is actually a development of Indo-European *w in non-lenited
>position (lenited *w develops to zero).  cf. fear/fhear (< IE wir-);
>Brythonic  develops IE *w to g(w) in non-lenited position, cf. Welsh gwr (<
>IE *wir-).

[snip]
>Robert Orr

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Tue Oct 19 18:10:37 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 14:10:37 EDT
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.141037.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/19/99 1:41:33 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu writes:

<< n fairness to Renfrew, *ekwos is not probative.  It's true that the horse
had not >been domesticated at the early date for PIE unity which Renfrew
postulates; but >you need not have domesticated the horse to have a word for
it.  The PIE speakers >could have been hunting wild horses for their meat,
for example. >>

-- the words for wheel, wheeled vehicle, 'to journey by wheeled vehicle', and
for axle, plow, yoke, coulter-pin, etc., are rather more probative.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Tue Oct 19 18:11:42 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 14:11:42 EDT
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.141142.EDT.>

<< On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, Stanley Friesen wrote:

 > Except that Renfrew can only reach this "conclusion" by ignoring many facts
 > about PIE that are quite secure (e.g. the universality of *ekwos, and the
 > original distinction between wlkwos and kuoon)  >>

-- on the other hand, the domestic dog is firmly dated to at least 15,000
BCE, so wlkwos/kuoon doesn't count.


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Oct 20 02:50:01 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 19:50:01 -0700
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.991015101727.3740C-100000@unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.195001.0700.>

At 10:23 AM 10/15/99 -0400, Sean Crist wrote:
>In fairness to Renfrew, *ekwos is not probative.  It's true that the horse
>had not been domesticated at the early date for PIE unity which Renfrew
>postulates; but you need not have domesticated the horse to have a word
>for it.  The PIE speakers could have been hunting wild horses for their
>meat, for example.

This could be a bit tricky - did the wild horse have a range corresponding
to the extent of IE speakers postulated by Renfrew prior to its
domestication?  I cannot remember if the quagga extended into northern
Europe.  And even if it did, it is not clear it would be given the same
name as _Equus caballus_ (or its wild antecedents).

Without a locally present animal to apply the word to, it would be expected
to either die out or be transferred to some other animal.  If the latter
occurred it would not now have the uniformity of meaning it in fact has.
(Look at what happened to some of the tree names in areas where the
original tree was not present).

There is also the word for "metal" or "copper", which indicates a
post-neolithic culture for the PIE speakers.

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


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Oct 20 03:20:20 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 20:20:20 -0700
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
In-Reply-To: <0.182295de.253a9e33@aol.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.202020.0700.>

[ Moderator's note:
  I have combined two messages from Mr. Friesen into this single posting, since
  the second was additional commentary on the first.
  --rma ]

At 11:36 PM 10/16/99 -0400, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 10/15/99 7:43:37 AM, sarima at ix.netcom.com wrote:

><<I sometimes think the critics of linguistic archaeology make too much of
>this sort of continuity.  In a mixing of cultures in which one language
>eventually displaces another, *naturally* many aspects of the culture of the
>"losing" language will persist afterwards.>>

>It's not a criticism of "linguistic archaeology" or "paleolinguistics".  It's
>simply that material remains speak for themselves.  If you have "mixed
>cultures", one can make any linguistic conclusions one feels appropriate.
>That doesn't change the hard evidence and the fact that it may not endorse
>any particular conclusion about the languages being spoken.

All I really look for is that it be *consist ant* with the model that is
developed using a combination of evidence from many sources.  It need not,
*on* *its* *own*, uniquely support any particular model.

><<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
>...".>>

>And that is exactly the case.  If you are saying that material culture has
>remained, than what would you expect him to report?  ANYTHING else would be
>INCORRECT.

I am not expecting them to report anything else.  What I was reacting to
was, perhaps, not what you were actually saying.  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.

>The point you've made is that the material culture can sometimes be
>independent of language change - which is exactly what the problem is in
>expecting that archaeological evidence can be used to support  e.g., the
>presence or absence of Greek being spoken in parts or all of Greece in
>prehistoric times.  Which is why I wrote ALTHOUGH THIS MIGRATION (from

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

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

Message-Id: <4.1.19991020082121.00980b40 at popd.netcruiser>
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 08:45:51 -0700
Subject: Fwd: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE

[ moderator snip ]

>All I really look for is that it be *consistant* with the model that is
>developed using a combination of evidence from many sources.  It need not,
>*on* *its* *own*, uniquely support any particular model.

To follow up on this matter in more detail:

What we see in Polynesia and Roman Gaul is a mixture of continuity and
change.  And the change is often such that it, itself, involves admixture
of native and imported elements.

To take the case of Roman Gaul, as more apropos to the Early Helladic of
Greece, we see the following effects superimposed upon the continuity of
Gaulish culture:

1. Extensive destruction of older settlements
2. (Re-)Estblishment of settlements with a different site layout (generally
a hybrid of Italic and Gaulic town plans).
3. Application of Roman technology, and to some degree artistic styles, to
typically Gaulic artifacts, causing a subtle change in style in these
artifacts.

It is almost exactly this pattern we see in the EH II to EH III transition.

Note, I am far from convinced that this is the arrival of the Greeks: it
may as easily represent the arrival, or beginning of the arrival, or a
pre-Greek IE substratum.  The Greeks may not have arrived until the
two-wheeled war chariot showed up near the end of the MH (around 1600 BC).

Certainly if a late unity of Greek and Indo-Iranian is valid (the
Greek-Armenian-Indo-Iranian Sprachbund), then Greeks are almost certainly
to be associated with war chariots, as that seems to be a late innovation.

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


From adahyl at cphling.dk  Wed Oct 20 13:51:12 1999
From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 15:51:12 +0200
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.991015101727.3740C-100000@unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.155112.0200.>

On Fri, 15 Oct 1999, Sean Crist wrote:

> It's true that the horse had not been domesticated at the early date for
> PIE unity which Renfrew postulates; but you need not have domesticated
> the horse to have a word for it.  The PIE speakers could have been hunting
> wild horses for their meat, for example.

That is not even necessary. I think the PIE speakers had a word for
every animal just _living_ in the area.

Adam Hyllested


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Thu Oct 21 15:39:44 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1999 08:39:44 -0700
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
In-Reply-To: <0.68f3dc5f.253c1ae6@aol.com>
Message-ID: <THU.21.OCT.1999.083944.0700.>

At 02:40 AM 10/18/99 -0400, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 10/15/99 1:18:35 AM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu wrote:

><<The arrival of the Greeks may not have disrupted the local culture
>in any great way e.g. ... or.... a continuous arrival of technologically less
>advanced people whose language was adopted by the elite>>

>Good point.  One archaeologist who was active in the area has described to me
>what he would dig for to test what he calls the Greeks as "migrant workers"
>hypothesis.  He's mentioned it on a list and got a consensus answer that a
>truly transient population probably would leave no material remains that
>could be correctly identified as separate from the culture that was "hosting"
>them.

I doubt, however, that "migrant workers" could impose their language on an
area.  A language must be prestigious for a native population to abandon
their old language for a new one.  It was the prestige of Latin that led to
Gauls abandoning Gaulic in favor of Latin.  The bottom line is that there
must be a perceived advantage to speaking the new language to justify the
trouble of learning it, and of speaking it enough at home to make it a
birth language for ones children.

>With regard to your peaceful influx scenario - like the Lefkandi I migration
>starting about 2500BC that seems to be the only clearly identifiable one of
>the EH/early MH period - Herodotus says that the inhabitants of Attica were
>all originally "Pelagasians" who voluntarily adopted the Greek language
>because it was to their mercantile advantage (which is consistent with one of
>Mallory's formulas for the spread of IE.)

Actually, I suspect that *most* "Greeks" were originally "Pelasgians".

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


From Georg at home.ivm.de  Tue Oct 19 23:28:33 1999
From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 01:28:33 +0200
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19991015181910.0099a530@popd.netcruiser>
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.012833.0200.>

>At 11:28 AM 10/13/99 -0400, Sean Crist wrote:
>>-Renfrew proposes that Anatolia is the homeland of the Indo-Europeans.  If
>>so, it is very odd the Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic existed in the midst of
>>languages (Hattic and Hurrian) which are not only not Indo-European but
>>which bear no typological resemblance to Indo-European.

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

If you allow for a little snide (which is not directed against you):

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 ...

St.G.

Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
+49-228-69-13-32


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Wed Oct 20 02:30:26 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 22:30:26 -0400
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
In-Reply-To: <0.92d12bd9.253a9941@aol.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.223026.0400.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

On Sat, 16 Oct 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com 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.

It's quite true that the reconstructed IE vocabulary puts certain
constraints on the possible dates for the final IE unity.  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.
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.
Other such examples could be given.

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?

> Actually, there are a better reason given by Renfrew for equating the spread
> of neolithic agriculturalism with the spread of Proto-IndoEuropean.  Not the
> least of which is the extent of IE dispersal at those periods in time when
> ACTUAL DOCUMENTABLE EVIDENCE of language becomes available.

Suppose that we accept that the latest period of PIE unity was 4000-3500
BCE.  The first written records are dated to the second millenium BCE.
I'm prepared to accept that 2000-2500 years is enough time for a mobile
and warlike culture to spread over such distances.

> In response to my request for an evaluation of another item that has been
> discussed on this list, one rather eminent practioner simply wrote back to
> me:

> <<Archeologist have become increasingly unhappy using terms based upon
> language for labeling cultures which are prehistoric--ie the culture has left
> no written documents upon which a historican can exercise analysis. With rare
> exceptions, physical artefacts do not include evidence about the language
> used by those who left the artefacts recovered.>>

It depends on what you're trying to do.  If you're trying to explain the
internal economy of a prehistoric culture, to explain how and why it
changed over time, to work out the diet and life expectancy, etc., then
there's no particular need to try to figure out what language was spoken
in that culture, or whether it is the ancestor of any language attested in
the historical record.  You can do perfectly good archaeology without
concerning yourself with language.

That's not the only sort of question which one might ask, however.  We
observe that a family of related languages has a particular geographical
distribution, and we also reconstruct a particular vocabulary for the
proto-language, and perhaps also a detailed phylogeny of that language
family.  With this information in hand, it's very reasonable to ask what
the archaeological record can tell us about where and when the
proto-language was spoken, and how it came to have the later distribution
which we observe.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Wed Oct 20 04:20:40 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 00:20:40 EDT
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.002040.EDT.>

>sarima at ix.netcom.com writes:

>The appearance of horse-bits (for riding) in the Sredny-Stog culture is quit
>telling here.  (Mallory does not actually mention this, as it was not yet
>known when he wrote his book).>>

-- very true; they showed up just where he predicted them.

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.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Wed Oct 20 04:56:58 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 00:56:58 EDT
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.005658.EDT.>

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>Colin Renfrew's Archaeology and Language - given its date - is a formidable
>piece

-- nobody much in this field takes it at all seriously because it ignores all
the _linguistic_ evidence, and in fact flatly contradicts everything learned
by comparative and historical linguistics over the past 250 years.  Either
our reconstructive linguistics are all wrong, or Renfrew is wrong.

And Renfrew has shown repeatedly that he doesn't understand the linguistic
arguments he's attempting to critique.

>Not the least of which is the extent of IE dispersal at those periods in time
>when ACTUAL DOCUMENTABLE EVIDENCE of language becomes available.

-- we know from historical examples that languages can spread very quickly
over very large areas, so this is not a significant argument.

We also know that the spread of a language doesn't necessarily leave much
archaeological evidence at all.


From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu  Wed Oct 20 11:54:32 1999
From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 07:54:32 -0400
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.075432.0400.>

Stanley Friesen <sarima at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> The appearance of horse-bits (for riding) in the Sredny-Stog culture is
> quit telling here.  (Mallory does not actually mention this, as it was not
> yet known when he wrote his book).

I don't know if bits themselves have been found in datable context. What I
remember is report of a horse head (skeleton) that showed evidence of bit
wear. There was some problem dating this. David Anthony dated it to about
4000 BCE. Later attempts to date the bones suggested about 3000 BCE. I
don't know if this has been resolved.

There is another major problem: It is usually assumed that Indian
chariotry goes back to PIIr or PIE times. If PIE already had bits, why
were bits unknown in India till 4th c BCE? And why are cheek pieces of the
type used with nosebands found in Myc. Greece and the steppe during 2nd m.
BCE, and not bits? [I think that the four little disks shown in the
photots about the Sintasha cemetries are such cheek pieces, though the
articles I have seen pass over them in silence.]

Littauer has raised these specific questions, I am not aware of any
responses by David Anthony.

---

For an informative description of early bits etc, see Littauer in
Antiquity ``Bits and pieces'' sometime in later 60s.
There are articles in South Asian Archaeology 1993 about cheeck-pieces
from various areas together with comparative charts.

---


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Wed Oct 20 18:10:19 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 14:10:19 EDT
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.141019.EDT.>

>larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:

>Actually, he doesn't, and he's quite explicit about it.

>Renfrew allows language spread by wholesale population movement in just two
>circumstances: the first settlement of previously uninhabited areas, and
>spread by elite dominance.  Otherwise, he sees language spread as proceeding
>by diffusion across established populations

-- which is palpably absurd; the historical record is full of large-scale
movements of population.

Renfrew has to assume that as soon as written records aren't present, the
whole structure of historical causality immediately and radically changes.

It's as clear a case of torturing the historical evidence to fit on the
Procrustian bed of theory as I've ever seen.


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Oct 20 15:20:26 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 08:20:26 -0700
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
In-Reply-To: <E11cqTX-0002xx-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.082026.0700.>

At 02:35 PM 10/17/99 +0100, Larry Trask wrote:

>This is precisely the position which Renfrew attacks.  And, to be fair, it is
>not difficult to point to cases in which prestige languages have spread,
>displacing earlier languages, without massive population movements.

And in this, I think Renfrew is probably closer to right than he is in
other areas.  Where he falls down is in failing to realize that this means
that even a subtle change in material culture can represent a switch of
language.

Indeed, I quite agree that IE probably spread largely by elite dominance,
with only the tribal overlords actually migrating to the new areas.  (Note,
prior to modern communications, language spread by elite dominance requires
that at least *some* speakers of the new language move into the new area).

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 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.

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

>This is exactly the point which troubles me the most.  But Renfrew has in fact
>met it head on in his latest paper on the issue, presented at a symposium in
>Cambridge last summer and due to be published in the proceedings early next
>year.

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

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


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Wed Oct 20 15:16:42 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 11:16:42 -0400
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
In-Reply-To: <E11cqTX-0002xx-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.111642.0400.>

On Sun, 17 Oct 1999, Larry Trask wrote:

>>  ... Verb conjugations, etc. only spread when speakers move.

> This is precisely the position which Renfrew attacks.  And, to be fair, it is
> not difficult to point to cases in which prestige languages have spread,
> displacing earlier languages, without massive population movements.

I'm wondering what cases you've got in mind; in all the ones I can think
of (Prussian, Oscan, etc.), the area to which the language spreads is
under some sort of political domination by the area from which the
language is spreading.  And this, in turn, involves some kind of military
movement, which is a sort of movement of speakers.

> 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.

I could potentially buy that in the case of words for cultural items, but
not in the case of the large number of non-Greek toponyms in Greece.

>>  -Most importantly, placing the initial dispersion of the Indo-Europeans at
>>  the beginning of the Neolithic around 6500 BCE in entirely incompatible
>>  with the reconstructed Indo-European vocabulary.  Words such as yoke,
>>  wheel, etc. are reconstructed for PIE, but this technology is not attested
>>  until much, much later- namely, not much after 4000-3500 BCE, which is the
>>  date which Mallory and others put forward as the final date of IE
>>  linguistic unity.

> This is exactly the point which troubles me the most.  But Renfrew has in
> fact met it head on in his latest paper on the issue, presented at a
> symposium in Cambridge last summer and due to be published in the proceedings
> early next year.

Well, I'll look forward to reading it.  It isn't available online
anywhere, is it?

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de  Thu Oct 21 08:38:58 1999
From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze)
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1999 10:38:58 +0200
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
Message-ID: <THU.21.OCT.1999.103858.0200.>

Stanley Friesen schrieb:

> At 11:28 AM 10/13/99 -0400, Sean Crist wrote:
>> -Renfrew proposes that Anatolia is the homeland of the Indo-Europeans.  If
>> so, it is very odd the Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic existed in the midst of
>> languages (Hattic and Hurrian) which are not only not Indo-European but
>> which bear no typological resemblance to Indo-European.

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

As far as I remember the IE list already had a lengthy discussion of a
possible affiliation of Hattic, Hurrian etc. to 'North Caucasian'. So I
won't pick all the whole matter but will restrict myself to some basic
(and rather trivial) claims:

1) [in re Sean Crist]: 'Typological resemblance' can NEVER be a
criterion to support a hypothesis concerning language affiliation. This
is common sense in the linguistic community, I think. Obviously,
however, it cannot be repeated often enough. 

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]. All we have is a rather strong evidence for 'West Caucasian'
(Abkhaz, Abaza; Ubyx, Adyghej, Kabarda) and a NOT SO STRONG evidence for
what is called East Caucasian (29 languages, if we neglect the position
of certain dialects of Dargwa etc.). Neither Proto-WC nor Proto-EC have
ever been reconstructed as more or less 'complete' language systems,
hence it is rather difficult to tell, HOW they really looked like
[believe me, I have been working in this domain since more than 25 years
and very often got desparated when trying to say more about these
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. Only if we can tell HOW the systems of WC and EC looked alike
say 5000 years ago (we generally calculate that EC has split up 3000 -
2500 BC and we need an additional time gap (say 2000 years) to
accomodate for the high degree of 'divergencies', Hattic, Hurrian etc.
show) AND only if we are able to reconstruct earlier forms of Hattic,
Hurrian etc. via internal reconstruction than we might get a point of
reference that would allow us to judge any possible affinity of any
language of Ancient Asia Minor to those that are (at present!) spoken in
the Caucasus. The desastrous 'results' of an ad hoc comparison between
the languages in question can be easily checked with the help of D.
Diakonoff/ S.A. Starostin 1986. Hurro-Urartian as an East Caucasian
Language. München (Kitzinger) (see my review in Kratylos
1987:154-59).

W.S.
--
[Note: My email address has been modified: Please use
W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de!]
___________________________________
| Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze
| Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft
| Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen
| Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1
| D-80539 Muenchen
| Tel:	+89-21802486 (secr.)
|      	+89-21805343 (office) NEW ! NEW !
| Fax:	+89-21805345
| Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de
|http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/
_____________________________________________________


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Tue Oct 19 19:52:59 1999
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 19:52:59 -0000
Subject: Refining early Basque criteria
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.195259.0000.>

[ moderator edited with author's consent ]

Dear Larry and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Sent: Friday, October 15, 1999 4:09 PM

<snip>

> [on words like Basque <ama> 'mother' and <tu> 'spit']

[PR]

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.

An interesting statement on this topic may be found at my website:

<"http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/comment-Baby-Talk.htm">

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.

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 meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er
mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)


From stevegus at aye.net  Tue Oct 19 19:14:18 1999
From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 15:14:18 -0400
Subject: Linear A to Linear B
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.151418.0400.>

petegray wrote:

> Much of Larry's posting appears to me reasonable and common sense, except
> that here I wish to add a quibble.   It seems to me more likely that the
> idea that a language could be written down did not develop in isolation in
> Crete, but was imported from somewhere.    We know that when this happened
> elsewhere, it was very common for the inspiring script to be adapted to the
> new language, rather than for a totally new script to be developed ex nihilo
> (although I grant there are one or two exceptions).    This adaptation often
> meant inadequacies or infelicities in the resultant script.

My impression would be that this is often a matter of cultural prestige;
the prestige of Chinese and Sumerian/Akkadian writing was so great,
that  the one was (badly) used for unrelated languages across Asia, and
the other made into an ill-fitting script for Hittite.  Closer to home,
it hardly seems that the Latin script works well for English, and it
never has; but English speakers learned their letters from people who
looked to Rome as the font of religious and political truth.  The Arabic
script was also adopted to languages that were ill suited to use it,
again as a matter of religious tradition.

On the other hand, the more original the script, the more thought seems
to have gone into its creation.  The Brahmi script may have borrowed the
idea of writing, and maybe a few letter shapes, from a Semitic alphabet;
but it seems to have been extensively remade by sophisticated
grammarians for the purpose of writing Indic languages.  Greek (and
Roman) alphabets were consulted by St. Cyril, but he realized he needed
more, and invented dozens of new letters to create Cyrillic.  The Korean
Hangul script seems to owe something to Chinese writing, at least in the
square shapes and calligraphic forms of the character combinations; but
it is equal to the task of writing Korean.  It has been said that
Sequoya did not quite grasp the notion of alphabetic writing, since his
Cherokee script contains oddly shaped signs reminiscent of Roman letters
used capriciously and without regard to their original values; but his
syllabary is well adapted to the task of writing Cherokee.

The Cretan scripts seem to follow this pattern.  Linear B seems to
resemble Linear A, at least in its general appearance and the shapes of
the characters.  When Greek was written using this script, it was
obvious that it enjoyed some prestige even if it didn't work very well.
But if Linear A is poorly matched to the language it was used for, what
language was it well-made for?

--
Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law
Fox & Cotner:  PHONE (812) 945 9600   FAX (812) 945 9615
http://www.foxcotner.com

Nummus ubi loquitur, fit iuris confusio;
Pauper retro pellitur, quem defendit ratio,
Sed dives attrahitur pretiosus pretio.


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Oct 20 02:58:08 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 19:58:08 -0700
Subject: Linear A to Linear B
In-Reply-To: <007501bf1747$310fd020$5510063e@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.195808.0700.>

At 08:32 PM 10/15/99 +0100, you wrote:
>Larry asks for responses in a posting where he says:
>> Linear A was used to write the unknown language we call Minoan.  In all
>> likelihood, it was invented for the purpose of writing that language.

>Much of Larry's posting appears to me reasonable and common sense, except
>that here I wish to add a quibble.   It seems to me more likely that the
>idea that a language could be written down did not develop in isolation in
>Crete, but was imported from somewhere.    We know that when this happened
>elsewhere, it was very common for the inspiring script to be adapted to the
>new language, rather than for a totally new script to be developed ex nihilo
>(although I grant there are one or two exceptions).    This adaptation often
>meant inadequacies or infelicities in the resultant script.   I would
>therefore be very cautious in using the argument that the script of Linear A
>must reflect the language well, since it was "invented" for linear A.

If Linear A were in some sense imported, one would expect to see *some*
prior trace of it elsewhere.  We do not.  Instead we see prior pictorial
inscriptions in Crete.

Also, importing the *idea* of writing does not necessarily imply importing
a script.  It seems likely that Mesopotamia influenced Egypt in the
formation of hieroglyphic writing, but the Egyptians *still* seem to have
gone ahead and invented their own system.  And, more controversially, I
suspect much the same thing happened with regard to the Chinese script,
many years later.

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


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Wed Oct 20 04:57:48 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 00:57:48 EDT
Subject: Linear A to Linear B
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.005748.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/15/99 12:48:37 AM, Larry Trask wrote:

<<We've been seeing quite a bit of speculation on this list about possible
stories for Linear A and Linear B.  Well, look.  The conventional position, as
I understand it, is this... [given below]

I know of no single piece of substantial evidence that conflicts with the
standard interpretation.  Does anybody?  If not, then what reason can
there be for constructing ever more complex, ever more implausible and ever
more outlandish alternatives?  What can we possibly gain from this? How does
any given alternative story account for the known facts better than the
standard story?>>

Well, I'll try not to belabor this then, if there is nothing to gain in
anything but the standard explanation.

But there is now some evidence that may "conflict" with the standard
explanation.  And I don't know if an alternative explanation accounts for the
facts "better" than the "standard" explanation (Larry's criteria) but there
are some that seem to work just as well.

As I mentioned before there is new evidence.  Two years ago, it could be
stated with confidence as to Linear A that "Only three sites outside of Crete
itself have so far produced examples of true texts (as opposed to an
individual sign or two) in this script: Ayia Irini on Keos, Phylakopi on
Melos, and Akrotiri on Thera."

This seems to no longer be the case as a number of true texts in Linear A and
an intermediate form between A and B form of it were recently found at
"Canaanite" sites in Isreal.  I posted some information about it earlier
based on it presentation at the UCinn symposium in '97.  I've been told these
findings will be published soon.  M. Finkelberg, who was the first to present
this new evidence, has suggested that:  "Since it can be shown that the
script of the Lachish inscription is intermediary between Linear A and Linear
B, it can further be inferred that the place where the direct graphic
predecessor of Linear B developed should be sought in areas other than Minoan
Crete..." (Abstract: Bronze Age Writing: Contacts between East and West/THE
AEGEAN AND THE ORIENT IN THE SECOND MILLENNIUM,1997)

The importance of these findings apparently centers around two facts, both of
which might put into question the origins and content of Linear A and the
relation of Linear A to B.

1. There is apparently a large gap in time between Linear A and B that leaves
open what the direct source of B was.  ("For many years, the tablets at
Knossos were dated within the period ca. 1425-1385 B.C.  [end of LM II or ca.
1425 B.C. (Evans); early LM IIIA2 or ca. 1385 B.C. (Popham)], but there is a
growing consensus that they are to be attributed not to the destruction
horizon of ca. 1385 B.C. at Knossos but rather to a subsequent destruction of
the site sometime in the mid- to later 13th century, that is, to a period
broadly contemporary with the Linear B tablets from the Mainland. The most
recent and perhaps most decisive piece of evidence in favor of a later
dating in the 13th century B.C. for the Knossos tablets is the discovery
of a pair of tablets at Chania in a LM IIIB1 destruction context, one of
which appears to have been written by a scribal hand already known at
Knossos.")  This means that there might be AS MUCH AS 400 years potentially
separating Linear B from Linear A. ("The latest Linear A inscriptions appear
to be no later than LM I and hence all predate the supposed Mycenaean
occupation of Knossos in LM II and early LM IIIA.")

The finding of "transitional" Linear A-B in Canaanite settlements apparently
in the intervening period therefore would suggest that Linear B was not
necessarily the Greek adoption of a "Minoan" script, one that may have been
out of use in Crete for some time before it was adopted by the Mycenaeans.

2. The findings also raise the question of whether Linear A itself arose in
Crete, by the very fact that the "proto" scripts of Linear A - called
"pictograms" or "glyphs" - have been found in Anatolia, in the Aegean and
elsewhere.  The assumption has always been that these were merely Minoan
trade markings - like the "token" markings used prior to the development of
cuneiform.  But the appearance of Linear A and transitional text outside of
Crete might leave open the idea that only the accident of clay inscriptions
preserved the Minoan versions of Linear A.   So that one might consider that
the difficulty in deciphering Linear A may lie in the fact that it did not
actually evolve in a Minoan context.  (See message dated 10/19/99 12:54:01
PM, from petegray at btinternet.com: <<I would therefore be very cautious in
using the argument that the script of Linear A must reflect the language
well, since it was "invented" for Linear A.>>)  Part of the ambiguoty is
created by the fact that even Linear B contains a large amount of either
pictograms, ideograms or logograms.  A true pictogram would intend to have
meaning without regard to spoken language.  Apparently one explanation being
considered for the Lachish inscriptions is that Linear A might not reflect a
single language but instead an intentionally multiregional accounting script
using multi-cultural symbols.

Both these alternative don't seem "ever more implausible and ever
more outlandish" and they do seem to have some factual advantages over the
"standard" explanation.  And I certainly hope I haven't wasted anyone's time
by presenting them.

Larry Trask wrote:
[Linear A was used to write the unknown language we call Minoan.  In all
likelihood, it was invented for the purpose of writing that language.  Minoan
was not Greek, was not closely related to Greek, was very likely (though not
certainly) not even IE, and was very possibly a language of which we have no
other knowledge.

Linear B was used to write an archaic form of Greek.  It seems highly likely,
perhaps even close to certain, that Linear B is derived in some way from
Linear A, most likely that it simply represents a modification or adaptation
of Linear A for the purpose of writing an entirely different language.

Now, as far as I can see, this scenario is not only the simplest possible one
but the most obvious interpretation of the evidence at our disposal, such as
that evidence is.  The scenario seems to be entirely consistent with the
evidence.]

Regards,
Steve Long


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Oct 22 14:26:26 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 1999 15:26:26 +0100
Subject: Linear A to Linear B
Message-ID: <FRI.22.OCT.1999.152626.0100.>

Pete Gray writes:

>  Larry asks for responses in a posting where he says:
>> Linear A was used to write the unknown language we call Minoan.  In all
>> likelihood, it was invented for the purpose of writing that language.

> Much of Larry's posting appears to me reasonable and common sense, except
> that here I wish to add a quibble.   It seems to me more likely that the
> idea that a language could be written down did not develop in isolation in
> Crete, but was imported from somewhere.    We know that when this happened
> elsewhere, it was very common for the inspiring script to be adapted to the
> new language, rather than for a totally new script to be developed ex nihilo
> (although I grant there are one or two exceptions).    This adaptation often
> meant inadequacies or infelicities in the resultant script.   I would
> therefore be very cautious in using the argument that the script of Linear A
> must reflect the language well, since it was "invented" for linear A.

Sure.  I have no objection to this in principle.  But I'm not aware that there
exists any great evidence that Linear A was derived in any manner from any
earlier writing system.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From edsel at glo.be  Tue Oct 19 23:01:06 1999
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 01:01:06 +0200
Subject: Basque 'sei'
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.010106.0200.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

-----Original Message-----
From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv at wxs.nl>
Date: Tuesday, October 19, 1999 12:35 PM

[snip]
>One problem with apical vs. laminal /s/ is the lack of data.
>Because of the fact that the two *are* distinguished
>phonologically in Basque [I'm not aware of any other language
>where this is the case], and this fact linked with the
>observation that the default /s/ in Castillian is apical, has led
>to a decent amount of data being available for the areas
>surrounding Basque and Castilian.

[Ed Selleslagh]

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

The Castilian s and z/c (theta) are the descendants of the old Basque-type
distinction, I believe. S. American Spanish spoken by indigenous peoples mostly
uses a (more or less) laminal s for orthographic s and z.

What about Arabic? It certainly has various sibilants.

[MCV]
>As to myself, were it not for the fact that I've studied a bit
>phonetics, I would have spoken Dutch with apical /s/ my whole
>life without even knowing it (now I do so knowing it: too late to
>change now).  Nobody ever told me, or probably even noticed...

[Ed]

The Dutch pronunciation of s varies with the main dialect groups.  In Holland
it is almost always apical, in Flanders much less so, especially in the central
area (Brabants). In Antwerp it is laminal.

This has probably to do with the fact that Dutch dialect groups have different
origins (Ingwaeonic, Frankish, Saxon,...) and are not the result of divergence.
Dutch is rather the result of convergence.

You're not alone: Michelena once wrote that until his father (I think) drew his
attention to the different pronunciation of Basque s/z (orthographic), he
hadn't noticed it himself.

[MCV]
>In that sense, it's not unlikely that the current distribution of
>apical and laminal /s/ *can* be projected "way back into the
>past".  Unlike other phoneme substitutions, this is one that
>might have gone completely unnoticed, in say the Roman era,
>without any purist pressure whatsoever to replace it with "real",
>laminal, Latin /s/.

>Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl

[Ed]

The historic spelling systems may cloud it somewhat, but Aquitanian and
Medieval Basque seem to indicate that at least in this case the apical/laminal
distinction can be projected 'way back'.  And Iberian, that seems to share some
characteristics with Basque, undoubtedly had two sibilants and two rhotics in
its semi-sillabary 'alphabet', just like Basque and even Castilian (Z/C-theta
is treated as a sibilant in Peninsular Spanish), even though the values may
have been different or have shifted.

In my opinion, the real problem arises when one jumps from one phyllum or
branch of it to another one, while within the same language or closely knit
family there is only a shift to be expected, and possibly a breakdown of a
distinction.  When originally differing lects converge into one language,
anything may happen, but almost never a further differenciation of phonemes.

Ed.

Dr. Ir. Eduard Selleslagh edsel at glo.be
B-9120 Haasdonk
Belgium


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Wed Oct 20 20:46:51 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 15:46:51 -0500
Subject: Basque 'sei'
In-Reply-To: <E11csAe-0003ue-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.154651.0500.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

	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.

[snip]>
>
>It is hard not to see a connection between Basque <trebe> 'adroit, skilful,
>expert', and also 'cunning', and the more-or-less synonymous Latin <trebax>.
>But the Basque word can't possibly derive directly from <trebax>.

>First, Latin loans into Basque almost invariably enter in the accusative, not
>in the nominative, and the Latin accusative <trebacem> doesn't end in a
>sibilant.

>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?

>Actually, Basque <trebe> is a bit of a puzzle.  The Latin word, itself of
>Greek origin, was apparently uncommon, and it appears to have left few traces
>in Romance.  The unreliable Lhande notes a supposedly synonymous <treba> ~
><treva> in unspecified varieties of Romance, but the major Romance sources at
>my disposal recognize no such word.  Quite possibly the Basque word is
>borrowed from an obscure Romance continuation of the Latin word, but it can't
>be borrowed from Latin.

[snip]

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Wed Oct 20 01:29:57 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 21:29:57 -0400
Subject: Possessives
In-Reply-To: <016501bf1773$88c430a0$5b14153f@oemcomputer>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.212957.0400.>

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

> [SC]
>> Just to amplify on this point, consider "a counterfeit dollar".  The whole
>> point here is that the item in question is _not_ a dollar; it doesn't
>> belong to some subset of dollars in the way that a black dog belongs to a
>> subset of the dogs.  Likewise with "a fake moustache", "an imposter
>> policeman", etc.

> [PR]
> One of the most challenging things about interpretation of any language is
> that words, spelled and pronounced the same, do not always mean the same
> things.

> In the phrase, "a counterfeit dollar", the "dollar" cannot mean a 'real
> dollar', obviously that would be self-contradictory. It means, in this
> phrase, rather 'something that looks, feels, etc.  like a dollar'. In that
> category, there are the 'real' ones and, another circle for the
> 'counterfeit' ones.

> But, for the sake of discussion, let us pretend to assume that it means
> 'real, genuine dollar'. Then what part of speech is 'counterfeit', and how
> would you say it is used syntactically?

Based on its distribution, it's obviously an adjective.  Despite its
semantics, it has exactly the same syntactic distribution as, say,
'green'. The point was that you can't always model adjectives strictly as
things which form subsets over nouns, which is what I understood you to be
saying in an earlier post.

Some commentary.  In mathematical terms, a language is a set of finite
strings over some set of symbols (and, folks, I am determined to ignore
anyone who takes me to task for defining the word 'language' in this sense
in this context).  The task of the syntactician of natural languages is to
produce a model which correctly assigns the right strings to the 'accept'
and 'reject' bins.  For example, a model of English is incorrect if it
accepts "John Mary loves"; it's also incorrect if it rejects "John loves
Mary".

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.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From ECOLING at aol.com  Wed Oct 27 22:29:54 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 18:29:54 EDT
Subject: Revised Re: Campbell's def. of "language"
Message-ID: <WED.27.OCT.1999.182954.EDT.>

The paradox that, with the usual meaning of the terms,
a language and its own descendant can coexist,

arises precisely because ANY definition which involves
matters of degree, and which uses a cutoff point to make the
answer to its question a discrete answer, will yield that result.

(One may of course call it a paradox or not, that is immaterial.
It's not a paradox when one understands it,
just like many other paradoxes,
but the result still remains, however inconvenient.)

"Mutual intelligibilty" is a minimally complex criterion
which has this property of turning a gradient measurement
into a yes-or-no answer.  So it is ideal for stating the
paradox clearly, and I used it precisely for that purpose.

Non-transitivity of "is the same language as" is an automatic
consequence of converting a gradient measure into such a
categorical answer, just as non-transitivity will be a property
of any other predicate whose meaning is of the type
"is in the same category C as", when it derives
from a gradient measure (sufficient similarity for some
practical purpose).

***

Even with Larry Trask's or anyone else's preferred definition,
adding other parts to a complex criterion,
the paradox originally mentioned will normally STILL obtain
as long as that definition contains a component which thus
derives a discrete answer from a gradient.
(I add "normally" only because a clever mathematical logician
might possibly be able to devise some odd combination of conditions
which indirectly make the paradox impossible to set up,
not because I believe any definition anyone has ever actually used
would be able to escape the paradox.)

Unless one defines the terms circularly to evade it,
or unless one denies (implausibly) that two dialects of the same
language can change at radically different rates so that one of them
would be considered the "same language" as the parent,
the other would not (under one's preferred definition,
WHATEVER that preferred definition is) .

WHATEVER definition one uses,
of the gradient measure type,
this is simply the paradox of different rates of gradient change,
combined with a categorial concept based on a gradient measure.

***

Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics


From ECOLING at aol.com  Thu Oct 28 16:50:50 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 1999 12:50:50 EDT
Subject: 9 specifics on Including and excluding data
Message-ID: <THU.28.OCT.1999.125050.EDT.>

This is a consolidation of a list of nine (9) specific suggestions
to modify Trask's criteria for data to be included as
potential candidates for early Basque.
It was originally sent on October 20th, this is a revision on October 28th.

Seven of these specific proposals were stated previously in messages
available to Trask before he wrote the message to which this is a reply,
in which he said that specific proposals had not been received.
Two of them were sent to the list before receiving Trask's message
of October 20th, but Trask would not have seen them yet.

***

>Lloyd and others have repeatedly implied that there is, or might
>be, something wrong with my criteria.  I have therefore asked for alternative
>criteria.  I have seen none, except for Lloyd's suggestion that 1700 is
>a better cutoff date than 1600 ... [and one on expressives, see below]

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.

***

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 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.

***

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

***

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 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).

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.
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.

Here is the information from Trask:

>For example, <uko> 'forearm', is nowhere attested before the 17th-century
>writer Oihenart, but then it appears to be attested *only* in Oihenart,
>so it will fail to be included anyway.

>But this example raises another interesting point.
>Though <uko> itself is not found outside of Oihenart,
>its transparent compound <ukondo> (and variants>
>'elbow' (from <uko> plus <ondo> 'bottom') is close to universal in the
>language, and recorded from 1596.
>Now <ukondo> must be excluded as obviously
>polymorphemic, but I will have to decide whether its existence should or
>should not license the listing of <uko>,
>which itself does not meet my criteria.
> At the moment, I have not yet decided, though I lean toward the negative.

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

***

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

***

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

>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.

>I have agreed that the first is possible,

[but Trask argued against the important part of it,
suggesting that a list of ranges of vocabulary subject matter are
not native, a topic which might be explored in greater depth
by those who know the field, I disclaim competence here
except to evaluate the logic of proposals]

>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.

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

***

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

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.

***

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.

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.

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.

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

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.  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.

***

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.

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

***

Sincerely,
Lloyd Anderson


From ECOLING at aol.com  Thu Oct 28 19:35:16 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 1999 15:35:16 EDT
Subject: Revised: Refining early Basque criteria
Message-ID: <THU.28.OCT.1999.153516.EDT.>

[The following message has been re-written,
at the request of the list moderator.
In addition, in order to avoid duplication,
I have cut parts of it which were better treated in
a message sent later, titled
"9 specifics on Including and excluding data".
Please see that message in conjunction with this one.
LA]

We are gradually reaching greater clarity concerning Larry Trask's criteria.
When he has said that he only wants to include the "best" cases,
that is quite different from trying to include only cases which are
highly likely to have been in early or proto-Basque.

So in a sense, I could immediately agree with ALL of his criteria if
our goal were only the *absolutely* "best" cases,
because that means that every reasonable criterion we can think of
should be satisfied maximally, otherwise by definition
the proffered example could not be a "best" case.
But I think linguists very rarely use that goal in such an absolute sense,
and Larry doesn't quite either.

Taking it literally,
it would have an unfortunate logical consequence,
if applied in a truly absolute sense.
Our data set would become hopelessly small,
because we could always discover that some members of our tentative
data set actually scored higher on some criterion than others,
so the "others" would have to be dropped as not absolutely "best".
This simply means we must use common sense.
But then "best" does not have an absolute meaning,
and we are really looking for "better" to some sufficient degree.
Thus, all practical considerations are relevant, not absolutes.

***

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

***

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).
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.)

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"

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).

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.

An example of the kind of response:

[LA]
> I have repeatedly pointed to the problem of selection against
> sound-symbolic vocabulary through accidents of limited recording,
> having the effect of biasing our notions of canonical forms.
> Using Larry's mention of the difference of subject matters
> between 16th-century and 17th-century documentations,
> it is easy to explain why using too early a cutoff in time,
> or requiring too many or the wrong dialect attestations,
> can systematically bias against vocabulary in certain semantic
> fields, because these, like sound-symbolic items more generally,
> were not within the subject matter favored by the documents.

[LT]
>Possibly, but not a problem for me.

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?  I simply don't follow this failure to appreciate the
snowballing consequence of certain kinds of errors,
or perhaps rather the certainty that he already knows the answers.
Because that seems to me to imply that he is only seeking the "best"
*examples* to *illustrate* *conclusions he has mostly already drawn*,
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.

***

Here is an example where I think Trask's emphasis on the absolutely "best"
vocabulary is somewhat out of the mainstream.

[Example was <uko> and <ukondo>, please see the other message
"9 specifics on Including and excluding data"
so it is all treated in one place, no duplication here.]

***

Trask has often missed the more subtle and sophisticated paragraphs
in previous messages, or simply answered:

[LT]
> This is becoming extremely abstract.

***

Notice the complete non-sequiturs here:

[LA, clarifying that including nursery words and expressives,
for the purposes of having a truly representative sample of
early Basque, is NOT the same thing as handling the difficulties
of reasoning about external comparisons, precisely because
expressives may not undergo all of the sound changes which
apply to other words.
Therefore, of course, arguments from the *difficulty*
of the latter task are not arguments to exclude such words.]

> It DOES make it difficult to use such words in trying to prove
> a deep genetic relation between languages, because one must then
> have sufficient knowledge of sound-symbolic forces to argue
> something more specific is shared between particular languages,
> not merely a vague resemblance.
> That is quite a separate issue.

Trask's reply:

[LT]
>Yes, but I don't think that <ama> 'mother' is
>"only vaguely" a nursery word, or
>that <tu> 'spit' is "only vaguely" an imitative word.

We were both assuming that these were very clearly
a nursery word and an expressive word, that was not at issue.

>[on words like Basque <ama> 'mother' and <tu> 'spit']
>
[LA]
>> That does not argue either for or against such words actually being
>> inherited from Proto-Basque.
>
[LT]
>Of course, but not the point.

If one is seeking words which are likely to be inherited from
Proto-Basque, and one indicates that some feature of them
does not argue either for or against such words
actually being inherited, it must by definition be relevant to the
method of finding words which are likely to be inherited from
Proto-Basque.

Trask has several times been explicit that he does not want
to include nursery words, and does not exclude them explicitly,
but is glad when his other criteria manage to exclude them.
I have not understood why he should be glad of this.

***

I do understand from Trask's most recent message that it is widely
suspected that there are words from third languages borrowed into
both early Basque and early Ibero-Romance (no other Romance),
and Trask wants to exclude such from his considerations.
This does skate on the edge of excluding not merely one or two,
but perhaps quite a number, of words which really were in early Basque,
but this kind of data DOES have a different status.  So tag it,
don't exclude it, would be my suggestion.

***

[on Swadesh list and borrowing of even basic vocabulary,
please see now instead the later message
"9 specifics on Including and excluding data".]

***

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.

Trask's further comments emphasizehis belief
that vocabulary in a number of topics is clearly borrowed:

[LA]
> Thinking of subject matters attested or not, we have the following,
> which ties this issue back to the specifics of subject matter noted
> by Larry Trask for 16th vs. 17th centuries:
> If only two dialect areas have documents in certain subject matters,
> then vocabulary specific to those subject matters will be systematically
> excluded by requiring their attestation from more than two dialect areas.
> This is obviously undesirable.  It suggests that a moderate position might
> be to categorize documentary attestations by subject matter,
> and vary the number of dialect areas required according to the number
> of areas attesting documents in each subject matter.
> Of course in practice, this can be done in another way.
> Record ALL vocabulary items for a particular concept,
> and study the UNIFORMITY of etyma for that concept,
> without much regard AT FIRST for whether it comes from two or from five
> areas.
> If variants for a particular concept cannot be established as loans from
> neighboring languages, then remaining variety of non-cognate terms
> argues against immediately positing any of the conflicting forms
> as candidates for very early Basque (even though one or more
> of them MIGHT be a direct descendant of very early Basque).
> Additional argumentation would then be necessary, either way.
> Of course things are not this simple,
> but Larry Trask is an expert at using all of these varied sorts of
> information.

[LT]
>Well, much of this is very reasonable,
>but only for a different task from the one I have in mind.

How would Larry characterize such a "different task"?
It seems highly reasonable to think about this when selecting
words which are likely to be inheritances from Proto-Basque.

***

Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Oct 20 03:10:49 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 20:10:49 -0700
Subject: Wheeled Vehicles.
In-Reply-To: <199910160410.XAA13326@orion.means.net>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.201049.0700.>

At 11:10 PM 10/15/99 +00-06, Mark Odegard <Odegard at means.net> wrote:
>There are some practical requirements if you are to have sturdy,
>steppe-worthy wagons and carts. The first of them, of course, is a
>source of wood. While there were trees the river valleys of the
>steppe, the real source for lumber would have been the southern edge
>of the North European forest -- the forest which is essentially
>co-extensive in area as is the 'incessantly discussed' Corded Ware
>horizon.

However, there is also evidence of trade over relatively wide areas from
this time.  Artifacts from the Balkans appear in Yamnaya burials, for
instance. Indeed copper from a relatively few mines can be found over large
areas of southeast Europe and western Asia.  So it is quite possible the
PIE peoples *traded* for the wood they needed.

>they are to share a single material culture? Mallory, in the closing
>pages of his 89 book seems suspicious of the reputed IE-ness of the
>Corded Ware horizon.

Overall, however, I find the argument *for* an IE association with the
Corded Ware cultures to be stronger than the argument against.

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


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Wed Oct 20 04:37:53 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 00:37:53 EDT
Subject: Wheeled Vehicles.
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.003753.EDT.>

>Odegard at means.net writes:

> ca. 3500 and 1000 BC and not be detected as a loan word.

-- at a minimum, the wheeled-vehicle terminology must have been acquired
before Tocharian or Indo-Aryan split from the main body.  That's certainly no
later that 2000 BCE, and probably a good deal earlier.

For that matter, the light, spoke-wheeled, bentwood-and-wicker chariot was
pretty fully developed in the 21st century BCE, and in the traditional
Androvonovo area.

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).

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.

Incidentally, chariots feature in Scandinavian rock-art as early as the
1300's BCE.

>>From this we can see that while the shared wheeled vehicle terminology
>cannot be explained as loan words between individual Indo-European
>languages, they also need not be explained as the fourth millennium BC terms
>either -- they could have diffused later. [pp. 15-16]

-- that depends on assuming an implausibly late and large area for PIE.

>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.


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Oct 20 03:12:32 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 20:12:32 -0700
Subject: Phylogeny
In-Reply-To: <001101bf17bc$285ae800$95f0abc3@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.201232.0700.>

At 09:07 PM 10/15/99 +0100, petegray wrote:

>By the way, in all the discussion of the UPenn tree, no one has referred to
>the book:
>"An Indo-european classification, a lexicostatistical experiment" by Joseph
>B Kruskal et al (Transactions of the American Philological Society, vol. 82,
>part 5).

>This may also show some strengths and limitations of a purely
>computer-generated model.

I have studied it on at least two occasions, and am quite skeptical of
their results.

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


From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu  Fri Oct 29 11:25:10 1999
From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 07:25:10 -0400
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY
 ANDLANGUAGE)
Message-ID: <FRI.29.OCT.1999.072510.0400.>

<JoatSimeon at aol.com> wrote:

>> sarima at ix.netcom.com writes:

>> The appearance of horse-bits (for riding) in the Sredny-Stog culture is quit
>> telling here.  (Mallory does not actually mention this, as it was not yet
>> known when he wrote his book).>>

> -- very true; they showed up just where he predicted them.

I will apreciate references to this (to publications on the finds of
>actual bits<).

> 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.

If we use chariots to mean >highly maneuverable< light two wheeled
vehicles, the jury is still out. The Shintasha burial simply left
impressions of spoked wheels. There is no evidence for the
``transmission'' that marks the true chariot. There is at least one point
in which the Shintasha evidence fails. See the article by Littuer and
Crowell in Antiquity (1996 or 1997).

Putting spoked wheels and horses on ox-carts does not make a chariot
anymore than putting an internal combustion engine and mag wheels in an
horse carriage will make it a racer. The transmission must match the
source of motive power or else it will just slef-destruct.


From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk  Fri Oct 29 07:48:50 1999
From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard)
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 07:48:50 GMT
Subject: Subject: Re: NEWS re Black Sea Flood
Message-ID: <FRI.29.OCT.1999.074850.GMT.>

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
. Trask wrote:
> But how could the Black Sea have been a freshwater lake during a period
> when it had no outlet to the sea?

  The Caspian Sea also has an outlet: into a big narrow-necked bay called
Kara Bogaz Gol (Turkic for "Black Bay Lake"), and THAT is maximum saline and is
the ultimate sink for that drainage basin's salt.

  Re the Black Sea : perhaps this happened. The Ice Age came. The sea level
sank below the sill in the Bosporus. The straits got blocked with alluvial fans
washed in from side valleys such as the Golden Horn at Istanbul. So the Black
Sea wouldn't refill until the sea had overtopped and broken that natural dam.
(I read that a similar natural catastrophic dam-burst was why in Nevada and
area (USA) Lake Bonneville suddenly drained down to the Lake Provo level.)


From varny at cvtci.com.ar  Sun Oct 31 01:48:04 1999
From: varny at cvtci.com.ar (Vartan and Nairy Matiossian)
Date: Sat, 30 Oct 1999 22:48:04 -0300
Subject: Fwd: Re: Pre-Basque Phonology
Message-ID: <SAT.30.OCT.1999.224804.0300.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Larry Trask wrote:
> I can claim no credit here, but I do endorse Gavel's and Michelena's
> suggestions.  But note that, for lack of compelling evidence, Michelena
> did not regard the reconstruction *<bade> as secure, but only as a
> plausible suggestion.  This reconstruction is nothing like as secure as
> some others, like *<ardano> `wine'.

> Incidentally, this last word might intrigue the IEists on the list.
> Basque is unusual among European languages in showing no trace of the
> widespread `wine' word.  Its *<ardano> (with a number of regional
> reflexes in the modern language) has often been compared with Albanian
> <ardhi> and Armenian <ort>, both `wine', the suggestion being that the
> `wine' word spread across Europe, displacing an older widespread word
> from all but these three languages.  Don't know if there's anything in
> this.

I would like to make a correction. Armenian <ort'> (not <ort>) doesn't
mean 'wine', but 'grapevine, grape'. There are two plausible hypotheses
regarding its IE origins, by Pedersen and Ajarian. The latter adds that
Albanian <ard, ardhi> is unrelated to the Arm. term. Incidentally,
"wine" is "gini" in Armenian, both English and Armenian terms coming
from a common PIE source, seemingly borrowed from Proto-Semitic
(according to V. Illyich-Svidich).

Vartan Matiossian
Casilla de Correo 2, Sucursal 53
1453 Buenos Aires
Argentina


From jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au  Sat Oct 23 06:13:09 1999
From: jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au (Jon Patrick)
Date: Sat, 23 Oct 1999 16:13:09 +1000
Subject: Azkue's dictionary
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 12 Oct 1999 11:47:03 +0100."
 <E11azPN-0006Ss-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SAT.23.OCT.1999.161309.1000.>

[ Moderator's note:
  This message has been languishing while I cleared up several other backlogs.
  My apologies to Mr. Patrick for letting it go for so long.
  --rma ]

ON Tue, 12 Oct 1999 11:47:03 +0100  larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote:

a response to Lloyd Anderson about the use of Azkue's dictionary. I comment
that his objections were centred firmly around its ease of use for
etymological studies not on the merit of the content itself and by default
Larry's answer justifies Lloyd's assertion, namely:

    >  On the whole, it seems from Larry Trask's review of it that Jon Patrick
    is
    >  on very solid ground in using Azkue's dictionary as a basis for
    >  analytical studies.
Larry reponded:
    But only, I think, if a detailed knowledge of Basque linguistics is first
    superimposed on the raw data.

Larry's response to Lloyd's comment struck me as an oblique but transparent
attack on the merit of my contribution to the analysis basque, being the only
person on the list without a "detailed knowledge of Basque linguistics", who
is debating the topics. Yes, I admit that I'm rising to a bait that will be
disclaimed but that's OK , I'm a grown up, I can take responsibility for my
own incompetencies.
Let me assure Larry that he has no fear of me claiming to come anywhere near
his hippopotamic knowledge base of Basque. A competency I am in awe and
admiration of.
However I am not running blind in this work.


Jose Ignatio Hualde who made a contribution to the list a few weeks ago is
supporting the work as the expert with detailed knowledge of basque. Likewise
he is in collaboration with Joseba Lakarra undoubtedly the one of most
respected living historical linguists of Basque, and more to the point both of
them are native basque speakers. As well I have presented my methods and their
putative results in a seminar to Filology Dept at the Uni of the Basque
Country in Gasteiz, where it was complimented on and considered as worthy of
publication. A point Lakarra himself took the time to make to me. Since that
time I have established a collaboration with that Dept and 2 of their PhD
students spent a month with me this summer working on preparing the data of
the Azkue list for  analysis. Furthermore I have stated publicly that whatever
I produce in terms of computational analysis has no meaning by itself but has
to be interpreted in the context of the filological traditions of the study of
Basque.

In summary the native speaking experts think my approach is sound, work
collaboratively with me, let their students lose in my hands and want me to
publish my results.  Somehow in someway I can only guess I just might be doing
something right.

Jon
______________________________________________________________
The meaning of your communication is the response you get


From jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au  Fri Oct  1 07:17:39 1999
From: jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au (Jon Patrick)
Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 17:17:39 +1000
Subject: Excluding data
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 28 Sep 1999 11:56:00 +0100."
 <Pine.GSO.4.03.9909281146180.22992-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.OCT.1999.171739.1000.>

ON Tue, 28 Sep 1999 11:56:00 +0100 (BST)  Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
said

    On Sun, 26 Sep 1999, Jon Patrick wrote:

    > Let's agree to differ. My position is that if can't be shown to be
    > non-basque then it is basque.

    Too strong for me.  I prefer this view: if there exist reasonable
    grounds for *suspecting* it may not be native Basque, then we should
    exclude it.

    > If it can't be shown to be modern then it is old.

    Far too strong for me.
<snip>

    > How old is anybody's guess.

    Precisely, and not good enough for my purposes.

Larry, I think it is useful for us now to agree to differ on these points and
move on to new topics
cheers

Jon
______________________________________________________________
The meaning of your communication is the response you get


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Oct  1 08:07:54 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 09:07:54 +0100
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19990928170655.009a6810@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.OCT.1999.090754.0100.>

On Tue, 28 Sep 1999, Roslyn M. Frank wrote:

> [LT]

>>> The female given name <Maite> is
>>> the usual Basque equivalent of the Spanish name <Maria Teresa>,
>>> resulting from an accidental similarity in form between this name and
>>> the Basque word <maite>, which I would gloss as `beloved', not as
>>> `love'.

> To my knowledge the nickname for all my friends who are called Maria
> Teresa is Mari Tere sometimes spelled Maritere.

Yes; this is also possible.  But I have met more than one woman named
`Maria Teresa' in Spanish but called `Maite' in Basque.  All of them are
women who are now over 45 years old; that may be significant.

> Moreover, although I know that first names are often reduced
> phonologically when abbreviated, your derivation of Maite from Maria
> Teresa seems a bit strained, that is, based on my experience. In it
> you propose that the first and middle name both have undergone major
> reduction. I'm not saying that it's impossible, just that it's more
> complicated.

I *did not say* that `Maite' was a reduced form of `Maria Teresa'.
I said that `Maite' was often used as a Basque equivalent of the Spanish
name, purely because of a resemblance in sound.

The Basque equivalents of Spanish names are variable in nature.  For
example, the medieval Spanish male name `Fortun' came into Basque as
the non-obvious `Orti', a name no longer in use, but the source, via the
medieval patronymic <-z>, of the familiar Basque surname `Ortiz'.
The Spanish male name `Jose Maria' comes into Basque commonly as `Joxe
Mari', but also frequently as the less obvious `Txema'.

> The test would be to see whether Spanish speakers from Andalucia
> recognize Maite as being composed of Maria Teresa or whether they
> would say that it sounds like a Basque name.

Spanish-speaker from Andalucia?  What would they know about it?
I think the test is to ask some Basque women called `Maite' whether
their Spanish name is `Maria Teresa'.  I don't suppose all of them will
answer "yes", since the name has perhaps now acquired an independent
existence in Basque, but I've already met some who did answer "yes".

> We also need to remember that under Franco there was an approved
> list of given (Christian) names and Basque ones were not included
> (nor were many others).

Indeed, but we are mainly talking here about colloquial Basque versions
of Spanish given names, and these were in use before and during the
Franco era.

> So far I haven't found a single native Spanish speaker (or Basque
> one) who "recognized" Maite as an abbreviation of Maria Teresa. But
> I've only asked a dozen speakers so far.

Ask a few more.  You'll find some.  Try older Basques.

> Then on your gloss of "maite" as "beloved", fine. But keep in mind,
> also that in English it is common for the expression "love" to be
> used as a form of address for another person, not just a female one,
> right, Love?

Sure, but why is this relevant?

Basque <maite>, in its definite form <maitea>, is of course a common way
of addressing a sweetheart of either sex.  It is literally `(my)
beloved', even though it is functionally roughly equivalent to English
`love' here.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Oct  1 15:10:08 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 16:10:08 +0100
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19990928173038.0098b820@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.OCT.1999.161008.0100.>

On Tue, 28 Sep 1999, Roslyn M. Frank wrote:

> [LT]

>>>> And <bat> `one' is pretty clearly derived from earlier *<bade>.

> Does your last statement mean that you would argue that *<bade>
> should be the reconstructed form and that <bedera> derives from
> *<badera> and then that later went through vowel assimilation to end
> up as <bedera>?

Yes.  This is Michelena's analysis, and I endorse it.  (Basque <bedera>
= `one apiece', `one each'.)

> Also, does this mean that you would consider <bederen> and <bedere>
> as further evidence for reconstructiing *<bade> as the proto-form.
> And does it follow that you would consider <bederen> and <bedere> as
> additional supporting evidence for the following statement made by
> you, namely, "the well-supported observation that final plosives in
> lexical items are almost always secondary in Basque (probably
> absolutely always)?

These items don't have final plosives, so they are not directly
relevant.  But northern <bedere(n)> `at least', `as for' very likely
also contains the same stem.

> An aside. Doesn't the combination "probably absolutely always"
> strike you as semantically confusing? I thought "always"  was
> "always" and by its own nature admitted no exceptions. Hence, it
> wouldn't ever need a modifier/qualifier like "absolutely" whereas
> "probably" undermines the entire edifice.  Just trying to translate
> your meaning/intention.

I had just written `almost always', so I then wrote `absolutely always'
to emphasize my statement.  Poor style, no doubt, but native to me.

> Returning to the topic. Stated differently, isn't the "well
> supported observation" you mention above based, in part, on the
> elimination of such commonplace examples as <bat> "one"  that if
> accepted as "evidence" would prove the contrary? It is the
> reconstruction that eliminates the attested form from consideration
> as "evidence," right? In summary, the word <bat> "one", according to
> your analysis, shouldn't be listed as a monosyllabic root-stem in
> Jon's list.

The position is this.  Modern Basque contains a modest number of lexical
items ending in a plosive /t/ or /k/.  Very many of these are either
obvious loan words (like <ganibet> `knife', from Gascon) or obvious
expressive formations (like <zirt-zart> `decisively').  After these are
eliminated, only a few remain, and in most of these the final plosive is
clearly of secondary origin, as in western <bart> `last night' (from
<barda>, preserved in the east), and western <bost> `five' (from
<bortz>, also preserved in the east).

Since this leaves only a couple of plosive-final items unaccounted for,
we may reasonably surmise that these too contain plosives of secondary
origin.  In fact, it's not easy to think of an example other than <bat>
`one'.  But the apparent derivatives like <bedera> `one each' and
<bederatzi> `nine' seem to point to an original *<bade> for this word.

Note also that <bat>, unlike most other numeral names, is postposed to
its head -- and postposed items in Basque frequently undergo irregular
reductions in their phonological material.

As for whether we should count <bat> as an original monosyllable, well.
In many other cases the evidence that a modern monosyllable derives from
an earlier disyllable is overwhelming.  In this case, I think the
evidence is deeply suggestive, but rather less than overwhelming.  So it
depends on how strong you judge the evidence to be.  My own view is that
the evidence is probably just about good enough to reconstruct *<bade>,
and so I wouldn't count the word as a monosyllable.  But another
specialist might genuinely disagree with me, and hence count the word as
a monosyllable.  I wouldn't object to that, but I am pretty confident
that it will turn out to be the only monosyllable ending in a plosive --
at least among the words meeting my criteria for probable native and
ancient status -- and hence that it will stand out sharply from the
other words in the list.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Fri Oct  1 20:19:11 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 15:19:11 -0500
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19990928170655.009a6810@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.OCT.1999.151911.0500.>

	I've heard many times [including from a couple of women named
Maite] that Maite is an abbreviated form of Maria Teresa and tried to
figure out how you could get Maite from that name. The closest thing I
could think of was "Mari Tere", which are used separately in Spanish but,
as far as I know, not together.
 	I imagine that what may have happened was that Spanish speakers
asked what the name meant in Spanish and the parents just threw out Maria
Teresa because of the superficial resemblance. Although Maite is pretty
different from Maria, there isn't much else in Spanish that's close in
phonological terms.
	A similar thing has happened in the US Southwest where Spanish
Jesus is often "translated" as "Jesse", Fernando as "Freddy", Concepcion as
"Connie", Luz as "Lucy", Angeles as "Angie" or "Angela", Jesusa as "Susie"
or "Susan"

[snip]

>We also need to remember that under Franco there was an approved list of given
>(Christian) names and Basque ones were not included (nor were many others).

>So far I haven't found a single native Spanish speaker (or Basque one) who
>"recognized" Maite as an abbreviation of Maria Teresa. But I've only asked a
>dozen speakers so far.

>Then on your gloss of "maite" as "beloved", fine. But keep in mind, also that
>in English it is common for the expression "love" to be used as a form of
>address for another person, not just a female one, right, Love?

>Agur t'erdi,
>Roz

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Oct  2 01:19:24 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 21:19:24 EDT
Subject: Change and What Remains
Message-ID: <FRI.1.OCT.1999.211924.EDT.>

I wrote:
<<Simply bringing up "ceaseless change" tells us nothing about whether enough
"remained" of ancestor so that it could co-exist with the daughter.)>>

In a message dated 9/26/99 5:00:40 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk replied:
<<Sure.  But your position appeared to be that absence of change in a
living language was a serious possibility, and that's what I was
objecting to.>>

Just to untangle the two issues:  the absence of change was always a pure
hypothetical.  The coexistence of ancestor with daughter language is
obviously a separate question.

I hypothesized a language that did not share any of the (300?) "innovations"
that went into the UPenn tree.  When you stated that an ancestor cannot
co-exist with a daughter, I did my best to conform to that 'rule' by
hypothesizing a string of "languages".   Others questioned the parent
/daughter statement before I did.

If you look back at the thread, you'll see that "ceaseless change" was used
to support your no-parent-with-daughter position.  And with regard to that,
let me write again that bringing up "ceaseless change" tells us nothing about
whether enough "remained" of the ancestor so that it could co-exist with the
daughter.

Regards,
Steve Long


From iglesias at axia.it  Sat Oct  2 20:35:32 1999
From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi)
Date: Sat, 2 Oct 1999 13:35:32 PDT
Subject: Manx language
Message-ID: <SAT.2.OCT.1999.133532.PDT.>

Some time ago, there was a discussion in which Manx Gaelic was mentioned.

As I remember, the gist was that the originally "normal" Q Celtic language
(a form of Gaelic) was drastically simplified as a result of contact with
Germanic languages, first the Old Norse of the Danes and later English,
which also provided the spelling system. The process was described by
someone as a form of "creolisation". The process was compared to the effect
that the Norman conquest had on English.

Does anyone remember in what context this question was raised or are there
any other comments on Manx?

Regards
Frank Rossi
Bergamo, Italy
iglesias at axia.it


From roz-frank at uiowa.edu  Sun Oct  3 04:03:34 1999
From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank)
Date: Sat, 2 Oct 1999 23:03:34 -0500
Subject: Excluding Basque data
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9909300847200.25900-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SAT.2.OCT.1999.230334.0500.>

At 09:33 AM 9/30/99 +0100, Larry Trask wrote:
[snip]

>So tell me: how do my principal criteria of early attestation,
>widespread distribution, and absence from neighboring languages "have
>the effect" of biasing my results on phonological form?

Could you share with us once more precisely what these criteria are? I seem
to recall that earlier you listed them but I can't locate that email.

Could you also define more precisely what you mean by "widespread
distribution"? For example, what would an unacceptable distribution be?
Present in only the Gipuzkoan and Bizkaian dialects? Present in the
"northern" dialects of Iparralde (French Basque region) but not in any of
the other dialects? Or contrarily would you argue that the phonology of a
term used in all dialects always should takes precedence over one that is
limited to one dialectal variant only?

Izan untsa,
Roz

************************************************************************
Roslyn M. Frank
Professor
************************************************************************
Department of Spanish & Portuguese	
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242
email: <roz-frank at uiowa.edu>
fax: (319)-335-2990


From Odegard at means.net  Sun Oct  3 00:45:01 1999
From: Odegard at means.net (Mark Odegard <Odegard@means.net>)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 00:39:01 -6
Subject: NEWS re Black Sea Flood
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.003901.6.>

On 30 Sep 99 at 14:28, Larry Trask wrote:

> But how could the Black Sea have been a freshwater lake during a period
> when it had no outlet to the sea?  The Black Sea has a number of major
> rivers flowing into it, and presumably has had these for a very long
> time.  Rivers carry salt.  If they carry it into a lake with no outlet,
> then the lake just gets saltier and saltier: witness the Caspian Sea,
> which is in just this position.

Eventually such lake will turn quite saline, as with the Great Salt
Lake or the Dead Sea. But it does take time, and depends on the
quantity of fresh water flowing into it. My reading indicates the old
Pontine Lake was slightly brackish, with something of the quality of
a bracing mineral water: 'hard', but drinkable. Even today, the
surface waters of the Black Sea are 'fresher' than the deep waters
fed by the inflow from the Med.

The waters of the Caspian are nearly fresh up near the Volga, with
increased salinity as you progress southward. Even in its most salty
parts, the Caspian is still not yet as salty as the ocean. There was
an issue of the National Geographic on this a couple or three months ago.

Mark Odegard mailto:odegard at means.net
17 2nd St NE, Box 68
Waukon, IA 52170-0068
319-568-2142


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Sun Oct  3 00:47:05 1999
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 00:47:05 -0000
Subject: Possessives
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.004705.0000.>

[ Moderator's note:
  If Mr. Trask wishes to address any substantive issue raised in the following,
  I will post such a response.  However, since this discussion is degenerating
  quickly, I am calling a halt to further posts on the topic.
  --rma ]

Dear Larry and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 1999 10:22 AM

> On Mon, 27 Sep 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote:

> [LT]

>>> OK; some facts.  First, Beekes does not use the term `possessive
>>> pronoun' at all in the passage cited by Ryan: he uses only the term
>>> `possessive', which no one can object to.  Hence Ryan's rather snide
>>> comments are pointless.

>> [PR previously]

>> Well, fact: Beekes does not use "determiner";

[LT]
> Indeed, but not relevant.  You were maintaining that Beekes agreed with
> your characterization of items like `my' as possessive pronouns.  But he
> does not.

[PR]
It is obvious to me and to any IEist who has read Beekes that you are
entirely unfamiliar with his work, and are arguing, as you normally do,
purely from your standpoint of your argument.

"The Possessives" in Beekes are in section 15.3.3; Section 15 is "The
Pronoun"; 15.2 is "The Non-Personal Pronouns", including 15.2.1 "The
Demonstratives"; 15.3 is "The personal pronouns"; and preceding "The
Possessives" at 15.3.3 are 15.3.1 "The (Non-Reflexive) Personal Pronouns";
and 15.3.2 "The Reflexive".

Two things should be obvious to everyone from this method of organization:

1) Beekes considers "possessives" a subcategory of personal pronouns, and

2) Beekes uses "possessives" as a shorthand for 'possessive pronouns' in the
same way he uses 'reflexives' as a shorthand for 'reflexive pronouns'.

If Beekes classed "possessives" as 'determiners', he would surely have
discussed them under 15.2!

[PR previously]
>> fact: "possessive" is
>> defined in AHD as: "of, pertaining to, or *designating* a noun or
>> pronoun case that expresses belong or other similar relation".

[LT]
> Like most general-purpose dictionaries of English, the AHD is presenting
> a very old-fashioned view of English grammar.  In fact, the AHD is
> perhaps slightly better at defining grammatical terms than are some
> other desk dictionaries, but its definitions are still, in general, not
> acceptable for linguistic purposes.

[PR]
I believe you sincerely think your views are only "modern" ones whereas I
regard your views as just one view among many different new and many more
old views.

>> [LT]

>>> Second, Beekes is talking about PIE, while I was talking about English.

>> [PR previously]

>> So what?

[LT]
> "So what?"?  Well, Mr. Ryan, it may come as a surprise to you that the
> grammatical facts of all languages are not identical.

> In English, possessives like `my' are clearly determiners, and not
> pronouns.  But the same is not true of all languages.

> In Basque, for example, possessives like <nere> `my' exhibit *none* of
> the properties of determiners and cannot be regarded as determiners.
> Instead, the Basque items are case-marked NPs.

> The grammatical status of possessives varies widely among languages, and
> what is true of PIE need not be true of any other language.

[PR]
Well, Professor Trask, it surely will come as no surprise to you that I
resent strongly being chided for ignorance of facts that would be known to
anyone (including me) who participates on this list --- particularly when
the insult is unrelated to the discussion under hand.

One of the principal benefits of terming this class of words "possessive
pronouns" is that it enables us to identify comparable classes of words in
IE, English, and Basque --- even though the details of their employment may
differ.

And I notice you sidestepped the issue of terminology with Basque. You
certainly cannot call <nere> a possessive pronoun because, according to your
dictionary, possessive pronouns are "determiners'. So if <nere> is not a
determiner, it cannot be a possessive pronoun. And an entry for "possessive"
as a word class (as opposed to a case) does not exist in your dictionary. So
just what is <nere>? I hope you will not tell us that "space considerations"
forced you to omit a category that is necessary to describe the word classes
in the language of your speciality, Basque!

[ moderator snip ]

>> [PR previously]

>> Possessive pronouns (BT = Before Trask)  have two forms: an
>> adjectival use: 'her', etc. and nominal use: 'hers'.

[LT]
> Also wrong, though indeed once widely believed.

> Items like `my' have no adjectival properties and cannot be classed as
> adjectives.  Look at two adjective frames:

> the ___ book
> That book is ___.

> These slots accept adjectives, like `big', `red', `new', `expensive',
> `dirty', `interesting' and `terrible'.  But they don't accept items like
> `my':

> *the my book
> *That book is my.

> Instead, `my' goes into slots like this one:

> ___ new book

> Among the other words that go into this slot are `the', `a', `this' and
> `some': in other words, the class of determiners.  QED.

[PR]
QED? The only thing you have demonstrated is that *you* prefer the play the
"slots" over other methods of analysis!

It must be frustrating to you and Comrie that terms and definitions contrary
to those your prefer are "indeed once widely believed". I think it should be
obvious from our discussions and the linguists I have mentioned that the
"once" is blindly wishful thinking on your part.

The essential quality of any adjective is that it designates a subcategory
of a catgeory of objects. 'Black dog' can be represented logically as a
small circle ('black') within a larger circle ('dog'). Possessive pronouns
can be represented logically in exactly the same way. Of course, this is
exactly the same situation as when nouns are used attributively: "newspaper
account".

Your "slot analysis" is interesting; but we can say, with equal accuracy,
that possessive pronouns are a class of nominals that stand for other
possessive NP's ('my' = 'the speaker's', etc.); and that they have two forms
depending on whether they modify another NP (attribute) or constitute an
independent NP.

I think your basic problem is that you need to take a serious look at your
definition of 'adjective'.

<snip>

[PR previously]
>> Now, if we say 'His was nice', the 'his' stands for a possessive N
>> like 'John's'. The 'his', or 'her(s)', must have a nominal referent;
>> and it stands for ('pro') this nominal referent.

[LT]
> The interpretation is not relevant.  When we are doing grammatical
> classification, we must look at the grammatical behavior.  And `my'
> behaves like a determiner, not like a pronoun.  It is semantically
> *related* to a pronoun, of course, but that's a different matter.
> The noun `arrival' is not a verb because it's related to the verb
> `arrive'.

[PR]
Perhaps not when you're playing the 'slots' but that is not the only game in
town by a long shot!

I sincerely feel sorry for you if you cannot see that.

[PR previously]
>> Now I have no great objection to terming "her" a "possessive
>> determiner" but using this terminology eliminates the interesting
>> connection with pronouns, which I find superfluously
>> disadvantageous.

[LT]
> Well, does applying the label `noun' to deverbal nouns like `arrival',
> `decision' and `creation' also seem to you "superfluously
> disadvantageous"? ;-)

> These things are nouns because they behave like nouns, even though they
> are related to verbs.  And items like `my' are determiners because they
> behave like determiners, even though they are related to pronouns.

 [PR]
I remember the first manifestations of the 'slot system' as opposed to
teaching grammar in the training I received as an aspirant foreign language
instructor.

This 'grammarless' method of teaching language was then extended to English
instruction in the US, and the terrible language skills of today's youth are
directly attributable to this method of instruction, IMHO.

Frankly, I prefer science to gambling.

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/Athens/Forum/2803/index.html and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit
ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim
meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun Oct  3 07:11:19 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 03:11:19 EDT
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.031119.EDT.>

>larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:

<<  I think they tend rather to support the idea that Linear A was used to
write a language quite different from Greek, and that Linear B was merely
cobled so as to produce something in which it was possible to write Greek.  A
system invented from square one for writing Greek would surely have done a
better job.  >>

-- mea culpa, I was unclear.  You've summed up exactly what I meant to say.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun Oct  3 07:13:04 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 03:13:04 EDT
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.031304.EDT.>

Speaking of which, it's interesting to see the degree of archaism in the
Mycenaean Greek of the Linear B tablets.  Some of the vocabulary is
strikingly close to the PIE originals.

An enormous pity we have so little written, and that that doesn't include
anything but economic documents -- some poetry or epics would be very
valuable.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun Oct  3 07:16:05 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 03:16:05 EDT
Subject: SV: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.031605.EDT.>

>lmfosse at online.no writes:

> Aartun analyses Linear A as a Semitic language. His work has been critiziced
> from certain quarters here in Norway. I don't know of any reviews of his
> books.

-- I certainly find that more credible than hypothesizing that Linear A is
used to write any IE language -- certainly any IE language of the 2nd
millenium BCE.

Linear B, modified to do better with Greek, still mucks up the inflectional
system something fierce.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun Oct  3 07:17:59 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 03:17:59 EDT
Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language)
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.031759.EDT.>

>Georg at home.ivm.de writes:

>True enough. But this is possible because the morphological systems of these
>languages are still transparent enough to do this. >>

-- it could be worse, of course.  Look at the problems with Afro-Asiatic...
and then imagine we had to do it from _current_ Afro-Asiatic languages!


From colkitto at sprint.ca  Mon Oct  4 07:50:17 1999
From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 03:50:17 -0400
Subject: Contributions by Steve Long
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.035017.0400.>

I've only just read the first part of Larry Trask's posting, so this is a
bit impertinent, but there is a comment that can be made right away on one
of his points.

>Is Scots a variety of English or a separate language?  Well, a number of
>Scots have argued that it is a separate language, and, if it had not
>been for the Act of Union in 1707, we might all recognie Scots as a
>distinct language today.  But, because of that Act, we don't.  There are
>no linguistic considerations here: just political ones.

Actually, there is a linguistic consideration.  Scots used to have a large
number of distinctive lexical items, differentiating it from "English".
Many of these are now rare in everyday speech, thus reducing the amount of
differentation.

Due to the Act of Union (what about the Union of the Crowns?)  Perhaps.


From Georg at home.ivm.de  Sun Oct  3 09:50:29 1999
From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 11:50:29 +0200
Subject: Perfective-Imperfective (2) - Habitual
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9909301035460.25900-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.115029.0200.>

>However, I query the rest, which raises a familiar point, discussed by
>Comrie in his book: how often does an action have to be performed in
>order to be habitual?  There can, of course, be no absolute answer to
>this: habitual actions just shade off into occasional actions, with no
>sharp dividing line.

>Take a real case.  My friend Alex never buys or carries cigarettes, and
>she normally doesn't smoke at all, but every once in a while -- maybe
>once a week at most, generally less often -- she accepts a cigarette
>when she's with friends who are smoking.

>Now: does Alex smoke?  I would say she doesn't, but possibly not
>everybody has the same intuition.  Next time I see Alex, I'll try to
>remember to ask her if she smokes.  My guess is that she'll say "no",
>or, at best, "once in a while".  I'll be very surprised if she says
>"yes".

While it is correct to say that there simply is a continuum between
occasional and habitual actions, best grasped by a prototype approach. And
what these prototypes are is in most cases language-specific, no, let's say
culture-specific.
In a world where habitual smoking is often close to plain addiction, often
paired with the notion that the smoker may not be able to fully control
this behaviour, suffer from the fact of being one etc. etc., and the habit
of smoking is the focus of public discussions and stuff, the statement "She
smokes" will put the person considerably closer to the "habituality" end of
the continuum, than, e.g. the statement "She eats fish".
"Does she eat fish ?" (I'm inviting for a party and intend to serve some as
the main attraction)
"Does she smoke ?" (I'm inviting for a party and some Americans will be
among the guests [;-)])
Also, the question "Do you smoke ?" has definitely different values on the
habituality-scale when asked by my doctor, or by someone after an opulent
dinner offering a dessert cigar.

St.G.

PS: I smoke like a fish.

Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
+49-228-69-13-32


From Georg at home.ivm.de  Sun Oct  3 11:51:56 1999
From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 13:51:56 +0200
Subject: Contributions by Steve Long (long ;-)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9909301701010.25900-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.135156.0200.>

LT:

>Well, Steve Long will doubtless be bemused to find himself the subject
>of discussion on this list.  But Lloyd Anderson has made it so, and,
>since Lloyd has quoted me repeatedly in his posting, I guess I might
>respond to a few of his points -- especially since I think that Steve
>and Lloyd are both gravely wrong on certain fundamental points.

>I think both have fallen badly into the reification fallacy.  The
>reification fallacy lies in inventing a name, and then concluding that,
>since we have a name, there must exist something "out there" for the
>name to refer to.

>In the linguistic case, the fallacy lies in assuming that names like
>`English', `German' and `Italian' must designate actual entities in the
>real world, because the names exist.

Once in a while one should say when some posting really hits the bull's
eye, and this statement does. Excellent. Like what followed.

>[Pete Grey]

>>> Imagine a situation where a group of spakers of a language go and settle
>>> elsewhere, where substrate and other factors make their language change
>>> swiftly, while those who stayed at home enjoy a very much slower rate of
>>> change.    After some years, and political upheaval, we can see a situation
>>> where the settlers are deemed to be speaking a different language from that
>>> which they brought with them years before.

I confess that I, learning about the thread entitled "Can parent and
Daughter coexist [which I haven't been able to follow], intuitively thought
about such a scenario to say "yes", but I'm happy to admit that I'm glad I
haven't.

LT:
>Is the English of 1999 "the same language" as the English of 1998?

In the spirit of your argument: no, 'course not. But one
attitudinal/sociological factor should not be overlooked: Though changes
have taken place, 1999 English speakers *think* they are using the "same"
language as they were doing a year before. And, of course, the changes in
any individual's ideolect will indeed be infinitesimal (but some speakers
will have died, taking their ideolects with them into their graves,
mass-media will have introduced new lexical items into the speech of many
people aso. aso.). I simply suspect that there are two meanings of "same"
here. Maybe it will be useful to speak of a more mathematical "sameness"
(never observable between even the speech of two individuals from one
family, or maybe even between two days for one individual) and a more
"fuzzy" notion of "prototypical" sameness. Of course, 1998 and 1999 English
are not "same-1", but they are of course more "same-2" than 1999-English
and 1799-English, or English and Scots, which in turn are more "same-2"
than English and Dutch, next English and Danish, E. & Gothic, E. &
Lithuanian etc.
To require the notion "same" only for the idealized situation ("same-1") is
one extreme, the other extreme being to use "same" for English and
Tokharian.
For the latter "historical identity" will be a term which may be put to
some usefulness, provided it is never confused with "same-1", but, then,
who will ever do so ?

LT:

>Take a real case in this vein.  Is modern Greek "the same language" as
>ancient Greek?  If not, where's the cutoff point?  And why do we call
>both of them `Greek'?  But, if you think they are the same language,
>then what's your response to the observation that Pericles and an
>Athenian taxi-driver couldn't understand each other at all?

Correct. Straightforward identity is not the thing. But "historical
identity". In the Greek case, we can illustrate this with the following:
ever since the other Ancient Greek "dialects" were ousted by Attic (yes,
there is Tsakonian, but this is only an example), the language has been
transmitted in the "normal" way, i.e. from parents to child (simplified !),
with every new generation *intending* to speak the "language" (it's time to
introduce the quotes here ...) of the preceding one, *aiming* at their
norm, yet introducing change after change etc., we all know that.
In the Greek case, no sizable group of speakers worth speaking of has ever
seperated from this "mainstream" of vertical descent with every generation
being convinced to speak just the language of the older one(s). When such a
seperation does occur, it doesn't have to involve physical seperation of
the migration type, cultural reassignments of subgroups without physical
dislocation of whole groups may suffice. Such a seperation, however it does
come about (it doesn't have to be a historical "catastrophe", contact may
simply peter out for hosts of reasons), will lead to speakers interpreting
their we-group as different from "them", gradually leading to an
interpretation of any differences in linguistic usage between "us" and
"them" as marking "different languages", however close their lects may be
in purely linguistic terms (this is currently happening in Yugoslavia, as
Larry noted; the opposite does also occur: witness the overnight extinction
of language with 2 1/2 Mio. speakers recently. Cannot happen ? Has
happened: Moldavian; I'm not properly informed whether this has happened to
Tadzhik yet).
This has, of course, also linguistic consequences. Innovations spreading in
"their" variety are no longer copied in "our" one, since "we" simply don't
talk to "them" any longer, or less often aso. (This is, btw., the gist of
the wave-model, so hotly debated long ago, but in reality not in opposition
to any stammbaum-model: they are just two aspects of the same thing).
Now, in the first scenario, separation-free vertical continuity with
maintained group-identity, it is hard to avoid some "sameness"-metaphor,
for which "historical identity" might well do the job.
What about "sameness" after seperation ? Of course, speakers of seperated
varieties will foster the same ideology, namely that they simply continue
to speak like their ancestors did, mostly blaming "them" for not to. Of
course, there is also some degree of "sameness", but for this the
"relatedness"-metaphor is generally used, involving at least the following
assumptions:
There is "historical identity" between the lects under discussion; however,
since more than one variety ("language", i.e. the conglomerate of
linguistic, but mostly also political, cultural and ideological notions
which leads people to single out such a construct, giving it a single name)
may claim the right for this kind of "sameness", and the coexisting
varieties may thus not be chronologically ordered in the way we can treat
the speech of Pericles and our Athens taxi driver (nobody could understand
Pericles today without learning his lg.).

This doesn not answer the cardinal question whether a parent language and
its daughters may coexist, yet, since every language of thursday is a
changed variety of wednesday's language, this appears meaningless. But not
quite.
If we, for a moment, abstain from any attempt to "define" a "language",
which seems to be as impossible as to define any term of everyday language
in scientific terms, a different approach might bring about that there are
possibilities where to speak of coexisting parents and daughters  could
after all make some sense.
I have in mind not "languages", but linguistic *items*. By "item" (a term
used in David Nettle's interesting new book on "Linguistic Diversity") I
understand, very loosely "defined", just everything languages are made up
of (I know that views of "languages" as "sets" consisting of "elements" are
grossly simplified and not at all adequate, but few people will deny, I
hope, that some aspects of language may well be treated this way; certainly
the lexicon is by and large describable as a set with elements), words,
morphemes, accent patterns, syntactic rules, everything one could describe
and put a name on. Now, I do maintain that, with linguistic *items*, parent
and offspring can coexist, and often do. A simple example: the Germanic
words for "king" are derived from a reconstructable Proto-Germanic item
*kuningaz, which, by definition "no longer exists". Yet it was borrowed
early into Finnish, where it survives to this day as /kuningas/.
Discounting the small difference this example still presents, I hope the
picture is clear: a parent and its offspring may coexist, and of course
there are more and better examples where, in a given family, forms may
exist, which simply haven't underwent any significant change since earliest
times. Or take Italian /akwa/ against, say, French /o/. Of course, the
French does not go back to the Italian (neither the "languages", nor these
"items", but the parent form of French /o/ was, at times, /akwa/; this
remained unchanged in Italian; the items are certainly not "same-1", but
"same-2" they are, and Italian speakers still copy the form, which French
speakers have changed so dramatically over the centuries. Of course, one
could insist on our inability to assert "sameness" on the level of each and
every phonetic detail of vowel openness or V-1 time, or prosody and stuff,
but there is a level of abstraction (the phonological one), where the
notion "same" for Latin aqua and Italian /akwa/ makes sense.
So, on the item level, parent and offspring can coexist, and they often do
(in some close-knit language families, like e.g. Turkic, they very often
do, i.e. what has to be reconstructed for the proto-lg. is very often
attested largely or totally unchanged in some modern language).

To sum up: since the notion "language x" is a fuzzy notion, discredited by
the very fact of the inevitability of constant day-to-day language change,
more so by the nonlinguistic motives which often lead to the reification,
as Larry said so brilliantly, of "languages", the question of whether
parent and daughter *language* can coexist is meaningless or, consequently,
to be answered in the negative, as Larry did.
On the level of single linguistic items, this is not necessarily so, only
if one insists on /aqua/ being uttered by Cato the Elder and /acqua/
uttered by Luca Cavalli Sforza have no right whatsoever to being treated as
"the same" item on whatever level of abstraction.
The question, whether "language" A and B, sharing this and that set of "the
same" items are the "same language" or not, or after which precise amount
of divergence-increasing changes they cease to be is not really a
meaningful question of linguistics, it may even not be a meaningful
question for philosophers. Constructivism takes care of most of these
pseudo-problems.

St.G.

[ moderator snip ]

Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
+49-228-69-13-32


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sun Oct  3 13:21:07 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 14:21:07 +0100
Subject: Fwd: Re: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19990929211028.009a0970@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.142107.0100.>

On Wed, 29 Sep 1999, Roslyn M. Frank wrote:

>> [LT]

>>>> And <bat> `one' is pretty clearly derived from earlier *<bade>.

> Larry, is this theory on *<bade> yours or did you glean it from some
> other souce? And if it isn't yours, could you share with us who
> first came up with it and when? Did that person use the same
> explanation?

The comparison of <bat> with <bederatzi> `nine', and the consequent
suggestion that <bat> must derive from something of the form *<bad->,
was first made by Henri Gavel early in this century.  The further
comparisons with <bedera> `one apiece' and other items, and the proposed
reconstruction *<bade>, were put forward by Michelena, in his book
Fonetica Historica Vasca, p. 134 and p. 235.

I can claim no credit here, but I do endorse Gavel's and Michelena's
suggestions.  But note that, for lack of compelling evidence, Michelena
did not regard the reconstruction *<bade> as secure, but only as a
plausible suggestion.  This reconstruction is nothing like as secure as
some others, like *<ardano> `wine'.

Incidentally, this last word might intrigue the IEists on the list.
Basque is unusual among European languages in showing no trace of the
widespread `wine' word.  Its *<ardano> (with a number of regional
reflexes in the modern language) has often been compared with Albanian
<ardhi> and Armenian <ort>, both `wine', the suggestion being that the
`wine' word spread across Europe, displacing an older widespread word
from all but these three languages.  Don't know if there's anything in
this.

The Basque word is securely recorded from the 12th century, making it
one of the first Basque words to be recorded outside the ancient
Aquitanian materials.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Sun Oct  3 08:58:54 1999
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 08:58:54 -0000
Subject: accusative and ergative languages
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.085854.0000.>

Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: Ralf-Stefan Georg <Georg at home.ivm.de>
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 1999 3:51 PM

First let me say that I am happy that R-S has again joined our discussions.
Though we infrequently agree, he always contributes a fresh thought or two
which stimulates me to re-examine my premises.

<snip>

[PR previously]

>> Pat interjects: (after I once again pointed out that no split-free erg lg
>> is known, but split-free nominative lgs do exist):
>> Oh, so "our" type of languages, accusative-type, can be *split-free* but
>> "their" type of languages, ergative-type, cannot be. Akkusativ ueber alles!

[R-S]
> So much to say here. Overlooking the rhetoric, involving national
> stereotypes and an allegation of racism on my side,

[PR interjects]
Ralf-Stefan, ease up. Do I have to put in a 'funny-face' whenever I attempt
to say something funny?

First, I understand the distinction between "ueber alles" and "ueber
a/Allen". Second, I would not dare to stereotype you; for me, at least, you
are unique, a rara avis. Third, since almost everyone agrees that 'race' is
a term which signifies *nothing* (of course, I do not think so but please
let us leave that aside), 'racism' is only a misdemeanor not a felony; and,
I certainly do not think you are a 'racist' on the basis of anything you
have written that I have read --- in any case.

[R-S continued]
> I should at least say
> that I think I said more than once that I find the notion of "ERG/ACC
> "type" of languages" rather unfruitful and only marginally meaningful.
> Also, I'm not claiming that "our" languages (maybe the "Standard Average
> European" ones) are entirely free of ergative structures. Larry has pointed
> out marginal ergativity in English by drawing attention to the behaviour of
> the -ee suffix. There is also marginal ergativity in German, as I found out
> recently (no, I don't know whether this has been noticed before by someone,
> but it probably has); for your amusement, here it is: look at the verbal
> prefix /zer-/ (roughly translatable as "asunder" othl.), denoting that some
> object is dissolved or dismembered by the verbal process. When prefixed to
> a transitive verb, you'll find that the Patient is the undergoer of
> dissolution: zerstoeren, zerschlagen, zersaegen aso. aso., when the verb is
> intransitive, it is S which is dissolved/dismembered: zerfliessen,
> zergehen, zerschellen, zerspringen aso. (those may be fewer). Maybe there
> are more prefixes of this kind, but I haven't majored in German like you,
> so you could look for more.
> The message is that, if you look hard enough, it will be possible to find
> more "hidden ergativity" is languages commonly held as split-free ACC,
> though you usually have to look harder here than in so-called ERG lgs. when
> you are after instances of accusativity. So far, the empirical fact that no
> split-free ERG language seems to be known, othoh split-free ACC lgs. do
> exist, is still valid and to shatter it, you'll need empirical work showing
> that it is not correct.
> Defending ideology by trying to allege that the opposite position is also
> mere ideology is not the way to win over people. In this case it is
> ideology (yours) against empirical facts.

[PR]
All good points. I am wondering how you would react to the proposition that
'passive' in ACC languages fulfills a roughly analogous role to 'splits' in
predominantly ERG languages? 'Splitting', AFAICS, seems to be a method of
fine-tuning the indication of directness (and intentionality) of the
agentivity, and I am wondering if other mechanisms in ACC languages are not
really functionally if not formally equivalent.

The fact that some ERG languages have what appears to be a 'passive' is,
IMHO, not a valid objection to this proposition.

[PR previously]

>> What you seem not to be able to grasp because of your unfamiliarity with
>> languages like Sumerian is that the ergative "subject" is frequently NOT
>> EXPRESSED. And, I am not even sure that "subject" is a useful term to
>> apply to relationships between ergative and nominative languages.

[R-S]
> I'm not trying to appear as an expert on Sumerian, which I happily admit
> not to be, though I'm pretty much convinced that the examples I gave from
> this language earlier this year managed to show that Sumerian is not a
> pure, split-free ERG lg. They were from the literature, part of which you
> recommended yourself, and you could not show that I misunderstood something
> found there due to my lack of knowledge of the language. But, then, every
> grammar is only a secondary source, and the real answer will, here as
> elsewhere, only be found in the primary data of the texts themselves.
> That "subject" is frequently not expressed in Sumerian is irrelevant to the
> question (in fact to any question surrounding any kind of ergativity
> debate). It can be left unexpressed in quite a range of languages, be they
> dominantly ERG or ACC. On the question, whether "subject" is a useful term
> here, a lot has been said during this thread, which I won't try to repeat
> here. I'm with you that it maybe a potentially misleading term, only
> insofar a host of definitions of this traditional term are on the market.
> But once we get our definitions clear, there should be no real reason for
> not using this (or any other traditional) term in this discussion.

> OK, nuff said, I'm looking forward to your book on ergativity ;-)

[PR]
As you may have intuited from the ongoing discussion of the "superordinate"
verbal category, it may not be possible to reach agreement on a definition
or even a term for which a definition is needed!

My 'hidden agenda' is that, because I believe I can see that CVC(V) roots
can be analyzed into S-V combinations, I am almost forced to consider the
relationship between S and V primary, and V with A secondary.

Now, let me say, just for the record, that, of course, there is no
relationship between S and SUBJECT as we have been discussing it.

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/Athens/Forum/2803/index.html and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit
ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim
meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sun Oct  3 14:11:49 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 15:11:49 +0100
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <007201bf0b6f$86fbfd80$a803703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.151149.0100.>

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

> True.  Paul Arnold thought Linear A was Proto-Basque, but he used a
> number of non-ancient words to translate the texts.

Ah, I don't know this work.  Is it possible to provide a reference to
it?

I've read F. G. Gordon's 1931 book Through Basque to Minoan, which is an
absolute scream.  Gordon seems unaware that Basque possesses such
ornamental features as morphology, syntax, and rules of word-formation,
and he is also unaware that not all modern Basque words existed
thousands of years ago, in the same form and with the same meaning.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Sun Oct  3 09:18:02 1999
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 09:18:02 -0000
Subject: Perfective-Imperfective (2) - Habitual
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.091802.0000.>

Dear Miguel and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv at wxs.nl>
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 1999 5:48 PM

> "Patrick C. Ryan" <proto-language at email.msn.com> wrote:

>> As for soler, a Spanish expert would have to make a judgment here but I
>> suspect strongly that soler in the present tense can be exactly rendered
>> by *another* English idiom:

>> 'to be used to V+ing', as in

>> 'Lisa is used to smoking', which looks at habituality from its affect on
>> the agent.

> That would be "Lisa esta acostumbrada a fumar".  "Lisa suele
> fumar" can be translated as "Lisa usually smokes", or simply
> "Lisa smokes".

Thank you for your input.

My Spanish dictionary (Simon and Shuster's International Dictionary 1973),
although admittedly not a scholarly one (at circa 1600 pages, it is not
exactly a pocketbook either), in the listing under <soler>, glosses it as
"to be in the habit of, be accustomed to".  And, of course, under
"accustomed", the first listing is <acostumbrado>.

Is it therefore appropriate to say that:

'Lisa suele fumar'

can be interpreted as: 'Lisa is accustomed to smoking'?

And if 'Lisa is used to smoking' is equivalent to 'Lisa is accustomed to
smoke', is it possible, in some contexts, for 'Lisa suele fumar' to be
interpreted as virtually equivalent to 'Lisa esta' acostumbrada a fumar'?

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/Athens/Forum/2803/index.html and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit
ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim
meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)


From edsel at glo.be  Sun Oct  3 14:51:43 1999
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 16:51:43 +0200
Subject: Pre-Basque phonology (fwd)
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.165143.0200.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Even though it may no longer be relevant, I wonder if this message ever got
sent.

[ Moderator's note:
  I've checked the incoming archives; this message was never received before.
  --rma ]

-----Original Message-----
From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
To: Indo-European at xkl.com <Indo-European at xkl.com>
Date: Friday, September 24, 1999 4:20 AM
Subject: Re: Pre-Basque phonology (fwd)


[snip]
>As far back as we can reconstruct, the best choice is an original
>*<aho>.  The origin of this is beyond our powers of recovery.

[Ed Selleslagh]

What about Lat. <anu-> (o-stem), which has a basic meaning of 'ring/ring
shaped'? The semantic proximity seems obvious, like the association of the
letter O with an open mouth.

Intervocalic -n- > -h- or -zero- is common in Basque (The latter also is in
Galician/Portuguese: Lisbona > Lisboa, and not only for -n-: Salavedra >
Saavedra [Oldhall], palacio > pa?o).

[snip]

>[on Basque <sei> `six']

>> But I think in another venue you argued that <sei> was a loan word
>> in Euskera.

>No, I did not.  Quite the contrary: I have several times argued
>*against* the proposal, put forward by several other people, that <sei>
>is borrowed from Romance.  The problem is the phonology.  The Latin for
>`six' was /seks/, and all the descendants of this in Romance varieties
>in contact with Basque have a final sibilant, as far as I know, as in
>Castilian /seis/ and French /sis/.  Now, when Basque borrows a Latin or
>Romance word containing a final sibilant, it *always* renders that
>sibilant with some sibilant of its own, without exception.  So, Latin
>/seks/ should have produced a Basque *<zetz> or something similar, while
>Castilian /seis/ should have produced a Basque *<seits> if borrowed
>early or *<seis> if borrowed late.  But the only Basque form recorded
>anywhere is <sei>, and hence I conclude that a borrowing from Latin or
>Romance is impossible.

[Ed]

Maybe it was a very early loan from a pre-Roman/Latin local Italic (or
Celtiberian?)?

Remember two things:
1. Lusitanian (Cabe?o das Fraguas) looks a lot like Q-Italic.

2. 'six' is 'sei' in Italian, wich is also from Latin, like 'seis' in
Castilian. Of course, Italian was not in contact with Basque (unless some late
Romans already spoke something that began to look like it), but some northern
Italic, or maybe Celtic (but in any case IE, like Cantabrian??), language may
have been.

So, even though Romance must probably be excluded, it may still be a loan from
a related local language. Unfortunately, we know very little about most

Ed.


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sun Oct  3 16:09:14 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 17:09:14 +0100
Subject: Basque 'sei'
In-Reply-To: <37f4993c.3120963@mail.wxs.nl>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.170914.0100.>

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:

[LT]

>> Second, there's the problem of the sibilant.  Basque has two contrasting
>> voiceless alveolar sibilants: a laminal, notated <z>, and an apical,
>> notated <s>.  Now, in early loans from Latin, Latin /s/ is almost always
>> rendered as the laminal <z>.  The same is true at all periods of loans
>> from Gallo-Romance: the laminal /s/ of Occitan and French is rather
>> consistently rendered by the Basque laminal <z>, not by the apical <s>.
>> In contrast, the apical /s/ of Ibero-Romance is equally consistently
>> rendered by the Basque apical <s>.

> But Gascon-Be'arnais is Ibero-Romance in many ways, including
> it's apical <s>.

Very interesting.  I didn't know that.

But how old is this apical /s/ in Gascon?  In his inadequately
celebrated article `Lat. S: el testimonio vasco', Michelena points out
that the ending <-os> ~ <-osse>, so common in Gascon place names,
corresponds regularly to Basque <-otz> ~ <-oze>, just as the related
Aragonese <-ue's> does.  This suggests strongly that the laminal <z> was
the ordinary equivalent of Gascon and Aragonese /s/ at an early stage,
and hence that the apical pronunciation of /s/ in modern Gascon must be
a later development there, just as it appears to be in Ibero-Romance.
So, any attempt at deriving Basque <sei> `six' from Gascon would have to
see the borrowing as rather late.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Sun Oct  3 16:21:01 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 12:21:01 -0400
Subject: NEWS re Black Sea Flood
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9909301425280.25900-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.122101.0400.>

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Larry Trask wrote:

> But how could the Black Sea have been a freshwater lake during a period
> when it had no outlet to the sea?  The Black Sea has a number of major
> rivers flowing into it, and presumably has had these for a very long
> time.  Rivers carry salt.  If they carry it into a lake with no outlet,
> then the lake just gets saltier and saltier: witness the Caspian Sea,
> which is in just this position.

Your question makes sense, and I don't know the answer to it.  I just
checked a map of the Pleistocene glaciation, and it didn't get nearly far
enough south to cover the Black Sea area, or I would have thought that to
be the explanation.

Whatever the explanation, we know that the fish, etc. in the earlier Black
Sea were freshwater type creatures.  At the time of the flood in question,
there is an abrupt and wholesale change in the life-forms in the Black Sea
to salt-water species from the Mediterranean.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Sun Oct  3 16:24:43 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 12:24:43 -0400
Subject: SV: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <01BF0B6A.7B5266E0.lmfosse@online.no>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.122443.0400.>

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Lars Martin Fosse wrote:

> Aartun analyses Linear A as a Semitic language. His work has been critiziced
> from certain quarters here in Norway. I don't know of any reviews of his
> books.

If Linear A is a Semitic language, it doesn't appear to inflect in the
manner known from e.g. Hebrew and Arabic, i.e. by inserting inflecting
vowel melodies into the consonant frame of the lexical item.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com  Sun Oct  3 16:43:53 1999
From: 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com (Damien Erwan Perrotin)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 18:43:53 +0200
Subject: re pre-greek language
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.184353.0200.>

There is many problems about the pre-greek languages of the Aegean, and
Linear A is only one of them.
Linear A is autochtonous and cannot be derived from cuneifor or
hieroglyph, so it must have evolved from local pictograms and thus
reflects the language it was first designed for (even if it was not
perfect). But that is not the main reason for thinking that the
indigenous language of Crete was not Greek.
First, there is an handfull of late inscription in the Greek script
transcripting a local language (notably at Phraisos) which has not been
dechiphered.
Second there is medical egyptian payrus quoting a formula "in the
language of keftiou", while not vocalized, this formula is not Greek.
Third there is the toponymy of Crete (and of a great part of mainland
Greece. This toponymy is not Greek. The problem is that a number of
place-names can be interpreted as IE, while not greek : thus
knossos : the hill (Irish cnoc, Old English hnec)
Argissa : the white place (from *arg-)
Gortyne : the closed place (IE *ghert-).

these toponyms are found in the central mediteranea area, up to Etruria
(Crotona, Cortuna), but that could an effect from the sea people
invasion or not.
fourth, Greek borrowed words from other languages, notably technical
terms as well as words related to an "aristocratic way of life"
(bathroom, whore...). At least one of these tongues was etruscan-like
(Greek opuiein versus Etruscan puia).
fifth : at least one Aegean language was recorded : lemnian, known
through a rather obscure stele. It seems close to Etruscan.
So, it is unlikely (at best) that Greek was the only language in the
region even during classical times, and unlikelier that it was the
tongue of the minoan state(s)
Personnally, I would favor a peri-indo-european etruscan like hypothesis
(because of the toponymy, but proofs are lacking for that.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun Oct  3 16:48:23 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 12:48:23 EDT
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.124823.EDT.>

<< X99Lynx at aol.com

>And the term "designed for a language" assumes something about the skill and
>purpose of scribes who were matching symbols to meanings

-- Other scripts of the era match the sounds of the languages for which they
were developed very well.  Why should early Greeks be any dumber?


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Sun Oct  3 11:53:19 1999
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 11:53:19 -0000
Subject: PIE vs. Proto-Language
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.115319.0000.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: Ralf-Stefan Georg <Georg at home.ivm.de>
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 1999 3:13 PM

<snip>

> St.G. (on Pat's assumption that "most linguists" favor monogenesis of
> language):

[R-S]
>>> I'm flabbergasted. I would like to know *one* of those, who did/does what
>>> you claim "most linguists" do.

[PR previously]
>> Of course, I have no real way of knowing but I presume this writer might:

>> "The hypothesis of the monogenesis of language is one that most linguists
>> believe to be plausible. Indeed, the appearance of language may define
>> modern <em>Homo sapiens</em>." Philip E. Ross (Staff writer) in "Hard
>> Words", pp. 138-147, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, April 1991.

{R-S]
> Not knowing the staff writer of ScAm, nor his credentials in the field of
> lx., I won't comment on this part. But there is a non sequitur here.
> Indeed, it might be right to "define modern homo sapiens" inter alia by the
> capability of speech. This has, however, nothing to do with the question
> whether the actual *systems* (languages) people have been using for all
> those millennia derive from one and only common ancestor. Humans are
> endowed with the capacity of learning, processing and handling linguistic
> systems, but nothing tells us that this capacity should have led to its
> actual exploitation once and only once in the history of humankind. The
> statement as above once more confuses language (as a cultural artefact)
> with the biological makeup of modern man. The fact that certain primates
> have the ability to use certain tools for simple operations does not mean
> that every observable instance of tool use in certain primate groups is due
> to transmission from an original "invention of tool use" (though I hasten
> to add that *some* very intricate patterns of tool use among primates are
> known to be transmitted by teaching-and-learning-processes, often viewed as
> emergent culture among primates).
> Again: homo sapiens is a biological species endowed with certain
> intellectual abilities, among which the ability to develop, learn and
> handle such a complicated thing as language is possibly the most remarkable
> one. The next step, from homo sapiens to, say, homo loquens is not I
> biological one, but a cultural one. Nothing prevents us from assuming that
> it could have happened more than once, maybe even often, or, in short:
> language is a tool.

[PR]
I am afraid that we will not be able to settle this question to the
satisfaction of either of us.

So much hinges on at what point we begin to regard the noises that early man
was making as 'language'. As another thread on this list attests, that does
not seem to be a question that all can answer with consensus.

I am convinced by the genetic evidence that modern humans are, at least,
principally descended from a single ancient (pre-)human stock, whether out
of Africa, which I think likeliest, or from another place.

Was this ancient group capable of 'language'? I think so but I would not
unequivocally assert it. It justs seems to be the simplest scenario, hence,
possibly, the most probable.

If you believe that a scenario of 'language' developing in separated human
groups (hence unrelated except indirectly by the biological potential to
develop it) is preferable,  then tell me, if the original stock (presuming
you buy the genetic argument) was capable potentially of language, what
prevented that potential from being realized? Would you go so far as to
assert that 100(-150) ya there was *NO* language?

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/Athens/Forum/2803/index.html and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit
ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim
meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Sun Oct  3 18:53:53 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 13:53:53 -0500
Subject: NEWS re Black Sea Flood
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9909301425280.25900-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.135353.0500.>

	Possibly it was a temporary lake created by melting glaciers, liek
Lake Bonneville

>On Mon, 27 Sep 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

>> The incoming salt water, more dense than the fresh water it
>> displaced, plunged to the bottom of the lake bed, transforming it
>> into a sea where the depths support no life.

>But how could the Black Sea have been a freshwater lake during a period
>when it had no outlet to the sea?  The Black Sea has a number of major
>rivers flowing into it, and presumably has had these for a very long
>time.  Rivers carry salt.  If they carry it into a lake with no outlet,
>then the lake just gets saltier and saltier: witness the Caspian Sea,
>which is in just this position.

>Larry Trask

[ moderator snip ]

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Sun Oct  3 19:30:59 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 14:30:59 -0500
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <001001bf0b7f$25d177a0$d405703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.143059.0500.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

[snip]

	Nicknames beginning with Mari- seem considerably more popular in
Spain than in Latin America. Maribel, Marisol, Mariluz, Marilu, Maricarmen
seem almost stereotypically Peninsular. Maritza & Marisa [Maria Isabel]
seem to be exceptions, in that they are quite common in Latin America.
	Chema, Chepe [Jose], Pepe, Charo, Chayo [also < Rosario], Pancho
and Paco are common in Latin America.
	It makes me wonder if Mari- names didn't become nationally popular
in Spain relatively recently

>I am very surprised at Prof. Pineros' puzzlement: We have Murcian friends
>(Murcian Spanish is very close to Andalusian) : one is called Maite, short for
>Maria Teresa, the other one called Maica, short for Maria del Carmen. I do
>know what their real given name is, I'm not guessing. The reduction is of
>course the dropping of the intervocalic r of Mari.  By the way, Maica's
>daughter is also a Maria del Carmen, but they call her Mai (probably a
>reduction of Mari)! I'm quite sure she never intended a Basque name, because
>she and her family strongly dislike the idea that Spain is plurilingual. They
>even object to Spanish being called Castilian.

	Mai [or May] is also a nickname for Margarita in Latin America

[snip]

>I am not surprised at all at these extreme reductions: just think about Paco
>from Francisco, Chema from Jose Maria via Josema, Charo from Rosario, Concha
>from (Inmaculada) Concepcion, Chalo from Gonzalo. The remarkable thing is that
>they obey rules that look rather Basque than Castilian : F > P,
>diminutivization by palatalization of the sibilant,...

[snip]

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Sun Oct  3 19:35:04 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 14:35:04 -0500
Subject: Updates regarding UPenn tree
In-Reply-To: <LPBBJHPIGJGDEKDCLOBFKEJMCEAA.mclasutt@brigham.net>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.143504.0500.>

/hw/ > /f/ does happen in a Scottish dialect of English

>Are there any actual examples of *hw >*f in PGmc post-Grimm (other Dr
>Crist's guess at *penkwe > *finhw- > *finf)?  It would seem that the
>alveolar /n/ might preclude any assimilation of /hw/ to /f/.  Just thinking
>off the top of my head.

>[ snip ]

>Actually, it occurs to me that this change might just as easily have been
>post-Grimm's Law as pre-.  *penkwe would give *finhw- by Grimm's Law and
>by the raising of /e/ before nasals.  It could readily be the case that
>learners would mishear /hw/ as /f/ in this environment, reanalysing it as
>*/finf/, which is the correct PGmc reconstruction. I can't think of any
>problem with this right off.

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Sun Oct  3 20:17:45 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 15:17:45 -0500
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <007201bf0b6f$86fbfd80$a803703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.151745.0500.>

	There is a compilation of Cretan vocabulary by R. A. Brown. I've
always wondered how it was received by specialists
	Here's a bit from my notes
	Brown relies heavily on Hesykhios, pointing out that there are 224
Cretan citations in his compilation and that 25% of them are non-Greek,
with some showing connections with pre-IE and pre-Semitic sources.
	He states that 40% of Cretan place names are pre-Greek. He adds
that some "formative elements" are shared with Anatolian place names
	He sees elements of common substrate in Greek, Anatolian and
Armenian and that a common substrate may have been spoken in the Aegean,
Greece, Crete, Anatolia and the Balkans
	He cites Classic historians on the early/pre-history of Crete
	He claims there are no obvious connections between Eteo-Cretan,
Cypro-Minoan and Lemnian
	He sees no Semitic place names in Crete and no Semitic influence
except for Linear B sa-sa-me and ku-mi-na and 3 pot terms that show up in
Ugaritic [but no other Semitic languages]
	There are terms that are cognate with pre-Greek, with pre-IE
substrate [including Etruscan]
	He includes examples of Praisian and Eteo-Cretan inscriptions
	There is an inscription from Psychro/Psuxro that ends with 3 Linear
A type symbols,which may be mere imitations
	The phonological inventory given for Eteo-Cretan is
a e i o u [short and long]
ai oi au eu
t/d
k/g
p/b or f/p
s
S/tsw
r l m n
y w [semi-vowels]

	He feels that Linear B came from a "mainland version" of Linear A.
he notes that A & B share about half their signs
	Based on Linear script and loan words, the phonological inventory
for Minoan is
a e i o u
ai oi au eu
stops were contrasted as non-marked, palatalized and labialized
they were voiced, unaspirated unvoiced and aspirated unvoiced
e.g. /t/ /ty/ /tw/
labial stops may have shifted /p > ph/, /b > p/
the only voiced vs unvoiced contrast in stops occurs in dentals with
alternation of t-d-l in Greek borrowings
liquids were syllabic l r m n
consonant clusters were limited to possible /s + stop/
/stop + r, l/ is common
/ps/ is common

[ moderator snip ]

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From sarant at village.uunet.lu  Sun Oct  3 21:27:04 1999
From: sarant at village.uunet.lu (Nikos Sarantakos)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 22:27:04 +0100
Subject: Pre-Basque phonology (fwd)
In-Reply-To: <007301bf0b6f$87a24fa0$a803703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.222704.0100.>

At 20:12 30/09/99 +0200, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv at wxs.nl>
>Date: Thursday, September 30, 1999 4:08 AM

[ moderator snip ]

>>This root has initial ku-, which we can assume gives /k/ in Greek
>>(unlike labiovelar *kw and palatal + glide *k^u, which merge into
>>/p/, at least before /a/ and /o/).  There are no counterexamples,
>>as far as I know.

>[Ed Selleslagh]
>I already suspected something of the kind. Thanks for the clarification.
>What do you mean by 'there are no counterexamples'? Do you mean of 'kuV-
>becoming /p/ in Greek'?

Sorry to reveal my ignorance once again -but I am somehow puzzled
about the etymology of <kapnos>.
According to my  IE-loyal dictionary, <kapnos> comes from <*pap-nos>
which would come from IE *k(w)ep- meaning "smoking, boiling",
cf. sanskr. kup-yati "it is boiling" etc.

Now, don't misunderstand me -I do want to believe the mainstream
IE theory (although, as I said, I have the hunch Greek is older
than believed) but I can't buy this etymology. I would like to,
but I think it is full of holes. And this is not the first Greek
word that I have seen being put into IE shoes that (in my
rustic opinion) just don't fit.

nikos sarantakos


From mcv at wxs.nl  Sun Oct  3 21:25:33 1999
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 21:25:33 GMT
Subject: Pre-Basque phonology (fwd)
In-Reply-To: <007301bf0b6f$87a24fa0$a803703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.212533.GMT.>

"Eduard Selleslagh" <edsel at glo.be> wrote:

>I already suspected something of the kind. Thanks for the clarification.
>What do you mean by 'there are no counterexamples'? Do you mean of 'kuV-
>becoming /p/ in Greek'?

Yes.  At lease the kvas/cheese word (*kuat-) is apparently not
attested in Greek.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Mon Oct  4 02:46:13 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 22:46:13 EDT
Subject: PIE vs. Proto-Language)
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.224613.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/03/1999 2:30:03 AM, Georg at home.ivm.de writes:

PR quoted:
<<"The hypothesis of the monogenesis of language is one that most linguists
believe to be plausible. Indeed, the appearance of language may define modern
Homo sapiens." Philip E. Ross (Staff writer) in "Hard Words", pp.138-147,
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, April 1991.

<<Not knowing the staff writer of ScAm, nor his credentials in the field of
lx., I won't comment on this part. But there is a non sequitur here.
Indeed, it might be right to "define modern homo sapiens" inter alia by the
capability of speech. This has, however, nothing to do with the question
whether the actual *systems* (languages)....>>

Yeah.  And this multi-meaning of the word "language" can be a real problem in
the discussion of broader language issues among list members here.  In
correspondence with certain linguists, I've noticed a laudatory habit of
being precise about the way the word is being used - the physiological event,
the act of communication, speech versus the written word, and (once again)
the Saussurian distinction between the act of speaking and as a specific
"system of language" maintained by members of an identifiable speech
community.  As I've pointed out before, "language" among biologists can refer
to any behavior that has a communicative effect without regard to species.
My impression is that the quote re monogenesis above refers to the
distinction often made by paleobiologists - language as the emergence in
humans of speech capabilities that other primates were/are not
physiologically capable of.   The current issue in this area circles around
what evidence in fossil finds suggests the emergence of physiological
features that would make human speech complexity possible.

Regards,
Steve Long


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Mon Oct  4 03:13:20 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 23:13:20 -0400
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <37f59ce3.4056048@mail.wxs.nl>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.231320.0400.>

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:

> Sean Crist <kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu> wrote:

>> First of all, the script appears to be designed for a language with a much
>> simpler syllable structure than that of the Indo-European languages.  The
>> best guess is that Linear A represents a language whose syllables were
>> something like the type of modern Japanese or Hawaiian, i.e. mostly
>> CV-type syllables, unlike IE which allows very complex onsets and codas
>> (e.g. English "splints", where one syllable has the structure CCCVCCC).

> Not necessarily.  While the language for which Linear A was
> invented is unlikely to have had complex consonant clusters, it
> doesn't follow that it had only CV-type sylables.

I know; that's why I said 'mostly', and also why I picked the example of
Japanese, which does have a limited set of syllable codas.

> The only
> options available at the time were complex logosyllabic systems
> like Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform or Egyptian and Anatolian
> hieroglyphics or simple open syllabaries (in their stripped down
> version, consonantal alphabets), as used in the Semitic Levant.
> The Cretans chose the latter system.

That's assuming that any of these systems had an effect on the development
of Linear A.  I don't think we know this; as far as we know, it developed
in isolation (but I could be mistaken, because I haven't looked thoroughly
into this.)  I think it's been suggested that Egyptian might have had an
indirect effect, but only as a kind of stimulus diffusion, not thru the
dirrect borrowing of specific symbols.

> Except, oddly enough, in the case of t ~ d (assuming this was
> taken over from Linear A: there's nothing special about Greek /d/
> (as opposed to /g/, for instance) which might have prompted
> this).  So we're looking for a language that had at least two
> kinds of dental stops (not necessarily /d/ and /t/), and maybe
> two kinds of velar stops too (Lin. B <kV> vs. <qV>), but could
> get by with single <p> for the labials.  Another characteristic
> is the lack of distinction between /l/ and /r/, and possibly two
> kinds of sibilants (Lin B. <s> and <z>).  (The other consonants
> of Lin B. are <j>, <w>, <m> and <n>).

Yes; I wasn't going into this much detail.  If I'm remembering right,
Linear B also occasionally represents kh- separately from k-.  Just a few
odd glitches in the system.

It's hard to know exactly what to make of this.  Possibly, some of these
symbols had quite different values in Linear A, and whoever worked out
Linear B made the best use of them he/she could, despite apparently being
unwilling to come up with wholly novel symbols.  There were apparently
enough extra symbols around to represent a some of the Greek contrasts,
but not all of them.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Mon Oct  4 03:44:13 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 23:44:13 -0400
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.19990930194157.00727758@l.pop.uunet.lu>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.234413.0400.>

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Nikos Sarantakos wrote:

> My own personal unscientific gut feeling is that Greek is certainly
> not autochthonous, but possibly much older than generally
> acknowledged.

It depends on what you mean by that.  In a sense, all of the currently
living Indo-European languages are of the same 'age', in that they all
develop from the same prehistoric language which had its final unity at
some prehistoric date (i.e., before the split of Anatolian from what
became the other IE languages).

Or perhaps you mean that the Greek-speaking presence in what is now Greece
goes back further than e.g. 2100-1900 BCE.  The most widely accepted view
is that the destruction of sites which we find in that period represent
the invasion of speakers of an early form of Greek.  The preceding
cultural tradition in Greece is substantially different.  Given that the
latest date of PIE unity is around 4000 BCE (again, pace Renfrew), there's
only so much of a time range to play with; you might manage to make a case
that the Greeks were in Greece a little earlier, but not massively
earlier.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Mon Oct  4 04:07:34 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 00:07:34 EDT
Subject: NEWS re Black Sea Flood
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.000734.EDT.>

I quoted:
<< The incoming salt water, more dense than the fresh water it
displaced, plunged to the bottom of the lake bed, transforming it
into a sea where the depths support no life.>>

In a message dated 10/03/1999 1:00:44 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:
<<But how could the Black Sea have been a freshwater lake during a period
when it had no outlet to the sea?  The Black Sea has a number of major
rivers flowing into it, and presumably has had these for a very long
time.  Rivers carry salt.  If they carry it into a lake with no outlet,
then the lake just gets saltier and saltier: witness the Caspian Sea,
which is in just this position.>>

It's a valid point.  I don't know what the scientists involved would say, but
my guess is that they would say it's a matter of degree.

Salinity is the relative concentration of ions dissolved in the water.
Salinity in lakes is not only increased by lack of outflow, but also by the
chemical composition of the inflow and the geology it passes through.  And
another factor is the amount of climatic evaporation.   The Great Salt Lake
is an example of especially high salinity due to the chemical makeup of the
surrounding area - which includes the famous Bonneville Saltflats.   The
Caspian Sea is an example of a closed lake or inland sea where the evidence
is of a large reduction in water level even in historical times.  You'll see
the climatic factor sometimes phrased as "salt lakes only occur in arid
regions."

The Black Sea is fed by rivers that don't flow through regions of high
aridity, evaporation or especially concentrated salineous chemical deposits.
So at least the inflow would tend to be less preconcentrating than those of
heavily saline lakes like the Great Salt Lake or the Dead Sea.  Climatic
evaporation would also seem to have been less of a factor, especially in the
north.  So the relative salinity of the Black Sea 'before the flood' might
still be conjectured to have been less than ocean-high levels of the entering
Mediterranean.

Regards,
Steve Long


From iglesias at axia.it  Mon Oct  4 14:34:02 1999
From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 07:34:02 PDT
Subject: Manx Language
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.073402.PDT.>

After sending my original message, I found the reference I had in mind,
which is as follows and goes back to the end of January 1999:

" JoatSimeon at aol.com:

>The general rule would seem to be that a thin stratum of immigrant
>conquerors loses its language and takes up that of the majority.

The experience of Old Norse speaking invaders/settlers in the Hebrides
and the Isle of Man seems to bear this out.  In Lewis and Harris, the
Vikings, if it is safe to call them that, were temporarily dominant
enough to leave a large number of Norse placenames on the ground, which
have survived to the present in Gaelicized form.  Furthermore, the
Gaelic of the islands has some eccentric phonological features, such
as pre-aspiration of voiceless stops and devoicing of voiced stops,
which appear to be a Norse legacy.  Otherwise, the Norse language
didn't survive there.

The situation on Man seems to have been more complex and a lot more
interesting.  Manx Gaelic lost a lot of grammatical features that
Irish and Scottish Gaelic have retained, such as the copula, which
was replaced by the substantive verb, the distinction between the
palatal and non-palatal consonant series, the autonomous [unspecified
subject] verb forms, most declensional forms, and so on.

All these losses have been noted in semi-speakers of certain Irish
and Scottish Gaelic dialects which are on the verge of death.  The odd
thing about Manx is that these were features of the language way back
when it was still vital and intact, in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Why these signs of "decay" in a vital Gaelic dialect?

The interesting theory lays this at the feet of the Norse,  who
politically dominated the island ca. 900.  After a few generations of
intermarriage, there would have been three languages going: Norse,
Gaelic, and Norsified Gaelic (with all the defects of modern semi-
speakers).  The speakers of proper Gaelic would have been people of
low status with whom the Norse did not see fit to intermarry, while
the speakers of "broken" Gaelic would be the offspring of higher status
Norse-Manx alliances.  These families would have continued to dominate
the island, and after some generations have lost their Norse, by which
time their "broken" Gaelic would have become established as the prestige
language.

If this scenario is true, a corollary to the rule "that a thin stratum
of immigrant conquerors loses its language and takes up that of the
majority" would be that a slightly thicker stratum transforms the
majority language as they adopt it.  Was this what happened to English
after 1066 and all that?

Dennis King "

My reference to "creolisation" was partly right and partly wrong. It was
right in the sense that the message was sent in a context related to "IE as
a creole" and wrong in the sense that Manx was mentioned as an example of
"superstratal influence".

Any other comments

Thanks and regards
Frank Rossi
Bergamo, Italy
iglesias at axia.it


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sun Oct  3 18:36:51 1999
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 19:36:51 +0100
Subject: NEWS re Black Sea Flood
Message-ID: <SUN.3.OCT.1999.193651.0100.>

Larry said:
> But how could the Black Sea have been a freshwater lake during a period
> when it had no outlet to the sea?  ...: witness the Caspian Sea,

On the other hand, witness the Sea of Galilee, which remains fresh.  An
outlet to drain salt away does not have to go the sea.

Peter


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Oct  4 07:53:36 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 08:53:36 +0100
Subject: Basque 'sei'
In-Reply-To: <Pine.A41.3.95q.990930002729.48160A-100000@aix1.uottawa.ca>
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.085336.0100.>

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999 s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca wrote:

> I remain agnostic regarding whether SEI is a Romance loanword or not, but
> I stand by my earlier statement: there is no phonological reason why /sei/
> couldn't be a Romance, or more specifically, Gascon loanword. See below.

> I refer you to Rohlfs again: he clearly states, a few paragraphs
> before mentionning the shift of final -s to -j, that Gascon /s/ is
> apical, and is realized just as /s/ in Ibero-Romance is. Hence we
> would indeed expect it to be borrowed as /s/ and not /z/ in Basque.
> (This fact is confirmed by the ALF, where the transcription is
> phonetic rather than phonemic: Gascon (s) is almost always apical).
> Basque /sei/ is therefore what would be expected if we were dealing
> with a loanword from Gascon.

Perhaps, but how old is the Gascon phonology?  As I've pointed out
elsewhere, place names appear to show Gascon /s/ corresponding to Basque
laminal <z>, not to apical <s>.  Recall that Latin /s/ was almost
invariably borrowed as Basque <z>, and so it appears that the apical /s/
of Ibero-Romance and Gascon is at least a post-Roman development.
But just how late could a Gascon word for `six' be borrowed into Basque?
After all, the Basque names for `7, 8, 9, 10' and so on are decidedly
non-Romance.

With respect, I don't think the facts of modern Gascon are necessarily
relevant, since the Basque word is certainly not borrowed from modern
Gascon.  Is there any possibility of dating any of the relevant Gascon
phonological developments?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Oct  4 09:11:06 1999
From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max Wheeler)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 10:11:06 +0100
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.101106.0100.>

-- Begin original message --

> From: "Roslyn M. Frank" <roz-frank at uiowa.edu>
> Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 17:08:57 -0500

> The test would be to see whether Spanish speakers from Andalucia recognize
> Maite as being composed of Maria Teresa or whether they would say that it
> sounds like a Basque name.

> So far I haven't found a single native Spanish speaker (or Basque one) who
> "recognized" Maite as an abbreviation of Maria Teresa. But I've only asked a
> dozen speakers so far.

-- End original message --

Well, so Maite isn't short for Maria Teresa in America. Big deal! It's pretty
universal in Spain, including, evidently, among people who have no connection
with the Basque country and have no reason to suppose that _maite_ is a
meaningful element in Basque.

Max
______________________________________________________________
Max W. Wheeler
School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer
BRIGHTON BN1 9QH, G.B.

Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975 Fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 Email: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk
______________________________________________________________


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Oct  4 09:16:53 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 10:16:53 +0100
Subject: Change and What Remains
In-Reply-To: <64791ba8.2526b79c@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.101653.0100.>

On Fri, 1 Oct 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> Just to untangle the two issues:  the absence of change was always a
> pure hypothetical.  The coexistence of ancestor with daughter
> language is obviously a separate question.

I don't see how.  A living language never remains identical from one
generation to the next.  See below.

> I hypothesized a language that did not share any of the (300?)
> "innovations" that went into the UPenn tree.  When you stated that
> an ancestor cannot co-exist with a daughter, I did my best to
> conform to that 'rule' by hypothesizing a string of "languages".
> Others questioned the parent /daughter statement before I did.

> If you look back at the thread, you'll see that "ceaseless change"
> was used to support your no-parent-with-daughter position.  And with
> regard to that, let me write again that bringing up "ceaseless
> change" tells us nothing about whether enough "remained" of the
> ancestor so that it could co-exist with the daughter.

Sorry, but, with the best will in the world, I can't understand this.
What is the force here of `enough'?

The English that I speak is, in a reasonable sense, a daughter of the
English my parents spoke.  And the English the young people are speaking
back home, which is already noticeably different from my own, can be
regarded as a daughter of the English I speak.  In that sense, I
suppose, a language can co-exist with its own daughter.  Is that what
you mean?

My 22-year-old niece has acquired some of the vowel changes collectively
known as the Northern Cities Shift.  As a result, her vowel system is
conspicuously different from mine, and I occasionally have trouble
understanding her.  Her parents (my generation) have no trouble
understanding her, because they're exposed to the youngsters' speech all
the time, but they don't talk like her.  But I don't get home very
often, and, when I do get home, I'm startled by the young people's
English.

All of the several generations can talk to one another, just as I could
talk to my grandparents when they were alive.  But my grandparents
didn't sound exactly like my parents, either.  And my Aunt Catherine,
who's now pushing 100, sounds remarkably different from the youngsters,
and even from me.

As I said, ceaseless change.  The incomprehensible English of King Alred
is separated from us by scarcely more than forty generations.
Chaucer's speech, separated from us by no more than 25 generations,
would also be utterly incomprehensible to us.  Even Shakespeare, only
about 16 generations ago, would probably be largely incomprehensible to
us if we could hear him speak -- and some specialists believe we would
not be able to understand him at all.  What will our descendants, 20 or
25 generations from now, make of the sound recordings we'll be leaving
them?

So, apart from the trivial case of me and my niece, how can a language
co-exist with its own descendant?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Oct  4 09:47:44 1999
From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max Wheeler)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 10:47:44 +0100
Subject: Manx language
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.104744.0100.>

-- Begin original message --

> From: "Frank Rossi" <iglesias at axia.it>
> Date: Sat, 02 Oct 99 13:35:32 PDT

> As I remember, the gist was that the originally "normal" Q Celtic language
> (a form of Gaelic) was drastically simplified as a result of contact with
> Germanic languages, first the Old Norse of the Danes and later English,
> which also provided the spelling system. The process was described by
> someone as a form of "creolisation". The process was compared to the effect
> that the Norman conquest had on English.

> Does anyone remember in what context this question was raised or are there
> any other comments on Manx?

-- End original message --

I can't tell you the original context of the discussion, but the situation
you describe doesn't seem applicable to Manx, which was not 'drastically
simplified' except possibly, by some speakers, in the last stages (20th
century) of language death. The toponymy of the Isle of Man has a very large
Norse element, but the general vocabulary of Manx may not have a lot more
Norse in it than entered other Goidelic varieties. It has a considerable
amount of Norman French, and, of course, Early Modern and Modern English, but
there again not in proportions vastly different from those in, say, Welsh.

Some loss/regularization of grammatical irregularities (e.g. weakening of the
mutation system, gender marking) is characteristic of late (i.e.
19th-20th-century spoken Manx) but this could be taken to be characteristic
of language death rather than creolization (which implies a stage of
'inadequate learning' by non-native speakers).

Max
______________________________________________________________
Max W. Wheeler
School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer
BRIGHTON BN1 9QH, G.B.

Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975 Fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 Email: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk
______________________________________________________________


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Oct  4 13:19:59 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 14:19:59 +0100
Subject: Excluding data
In-Reply-To: <E11XomM-0000Ue-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.141959.0100.>

On Fri, 1 Oct 1999, Jon Patrick wrote:

> Larry, I think it is useful for us now to agree to differ on these
> points and move on to new topics

Fine by me, Jon, but I note that you have not yet proposed any
alternative criteria for identifying native and ancient Basque words,
nor have you yet explained why you think my criteria are less than
ideal.  No comments on these points?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Oct  4 14:15:10 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 15:15:10 +0100
Subject: Excluding data: Azkue's dictionary
In-Reply-To: <E11XomM-0000Ue-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.151510.0100.>

Before we abandon this thread, I might make a few comments on Azkue's
1905 dictionary of Basque, which Jon Patrick is using to set up his
database.

This dictionary offers some advantages as the source of a database, but
also a few drawbacks.

On the plus side, it is pretty comprehensive.  Very few Basque words
recorded at all before 1905 are missing from it.  It includes virtually
all words used in writing before Azkue's compilation; it includes a
number of words reported by linguists and lexicographers even though
they are absent from the written texts; and it includes a sizeable
number of words collected by Azkue himself in his investigations.
Until the completion of the Basque Language Academy's new dictionary,
Azkue's will remain the most nearly comprehensive Basque dictionary we
have.

Moreover, Azkue is punctilious about recording provenances.  Not only
for each word, but for each distinct sense of a word, Azkue records the
region in which, as far as he knows, the form and meaning are attested.
This is valuable information.

A further virtue is that Azkue enters bound morphemes, something that
few Basque dictionaries do -- though Azkue's accounts of these are not
always satisfactory.

But there are also major drawbacks.

First, the dictionary contains a number of errors.  Some of these are
ghost words resulting from typos, from Azkue's mishearing of a local
word, or from his misunderstanding of an inflected form in print.  These
errors number at least some dozens, though most of them were later noted
by Michelena in his article on the dictionary and in other writings.
These errors really need to be corrected in any large-scale use of the
book.

Second, Azkue, who rather fancied himself as an etymologist, included
entries for a fair number of non-existent words, of which the most
infamous is his putative *<iz> `water', which has probably been seized
upon by more delighted comparativists than any single genuine Basque
word.  These little fantasies are never overtly marked as such, though
most of them are identifiable by some such annotation as "now reduced to
a radical" or "no longer in use as an independent word".  Any entry with
such an annotation should be discarded.

Third, when -- as so often -- a word exists in several regional
variants, Azkue enters each variant separately in its own alphabetical
place, and he hardly ever provides cross-references.  Consequently, any
attempt at using his dictionary without heavy editing will lead to
multiple entries for single words.  This is potentially a serious
problem: for example, the Basque word for `strawberry' exhibits at least
twenty regional variants.  This is admittedly an exceptional case, but
very many words exhibit two to six regional variant forms, and accepting
Azkue's headwords without suitable editing will produce badly skewed
results.

Fourth, Azkue generally provides only a single headword for homophones
of unrelated meaning.  This too will skew the results, though in a
different direction from the preceding.

Finally, of course, Azkue makes no attempt at reporting dates of first
attestation -- a grievous shortcoming for certain purposes, including
mine.

These shortcomings add up to potentially formidable difficulties in
compiling a useful database from its headwords.

I suggest that a much better dictionary for the purpose is Sarasola's
1996 dictionary.  This is not so comprehensive as Azkue, but the words
excluded are those which are only marginally reported anyway.  In
contrast to Azkue, Sarasola provides dates of first attestation, and he
also gathers regional variants under a single headword, with
cross-references where necessary.  Moreover, he lists the known senses
in the order in which they are attested -- a very valuable feature for
historical work.  I consider it unlikely that many attested Basque words
which are genuinely native and ancient are excluded from this
dictionary.  The sole obvious shortcomings are that Sarasola is much
less explicit than Azkue in recording the regions in which each word is
attested, and that the book does not enter bound morphemes.

I suggest that, for any study of ancient Basque words, Sarasola's
dictionary is a better choice than Azkue's, though it might be usefully
supplemented by the information in Azkue, especially for provenances.
But, of course, Sarasola's dictionary is written entirely in Basque,
which is not very convenient if you can't read Basque.  Azkue's, in
contrast, is Basque to Spanish and French.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From alderson at netcom.com  Mon Oct  4 20:08:16 1999
From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 13:08:16 -0700
Subject: Contributions by Steve Long
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.990930110255.7581A-100000@unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
 (message from Sean Crist on Thu, 30 Sep 1999 12:19:30 -0400 (EDT))
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.130816.0700.>

On 30 Sep 1999, Sean Crist wrote:

> Of course, people had noticed that there were certain things shared by Italic
> and Celtic; it had certainly been previously proposed that Anatolian was an
> 'aunt' to the other IE languages, etc.; but there was previously no way of
> pursuing the question in a systematic and unified way.

[ snip ]

> You obviously missed my post where I corrected myself on this point.  There
> were actually two characters added which were crucial to forcing Celtic and
> Italic into a single sub-branch.  Even before those two additional characters
> were added, Italic and Celtic were always next to each other on the tree; and
> on two of the best runs, an indeterminate structure was produced for which
> one resolution was an Italo-Celtic grouping.  So the tree was already on the
> verge of an Italo-Celtic grouping before these additional characters were
> added.

I've now read the technical report in which the early results were published.
As it appears from Mr. Crist's comments on the UPenn tree, further work has
continued to refine the original results.

Is the list of characters published anywhere electronically accessible?  I'd be
curious to see what the definitions for the Hittite vs. the world codings were
--it may very well be that a different view of laryngeals, for example, would
change the outcome greatly.

I have a larger problem with the tree as a whole, now that I know more of the
details:  Only one language from each sub-family was used to provide input, and
I believe that *this* choice may very well have biased some results.  I would
be much happier if the Italic and Celtic languages were not from the respective
"Q" branches thereof.  Does any of the papers provide information on how long a
run of the program to interpret the characters actually runs (rather than the
theoretical O(<mumble>) specification)?  How much time would be added by data
from other languages?

								Rich Alderson


From roz-frank at uiowa.edu  Mon Oct  4 22:49:39 1999
From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 17:49:39 -0500
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <37f8b200.9461948@mail.wxs.nl>
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.174939.0500.>

At 06:58 PM 9/30/99 +0000, you wrote:
>"Roslyn M. Frank" <roz-frank at uiowa.edu> wrote:

>>So far I haven't found a single native Spanish speaker (or Basque one) who
>>"recognized" Maite as an abbreviation of Maria Teresa. But I've only asked a
>>dozen speakers so far.

>In Catalonia it's certainly common.  I know several Maite's
>(Maria Teresa's) and a Maipe (Mari Pepa, i.e. Maria Josefa).

Interesting. I need to widen my sample!!
Roz

>=======================
>Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
>mcv at wxs.nl


From roz-frank at uiowa.edu  Mon Oct  4 23:46:57 1999
From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 18:46:57 -0500
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9910010851400.25900-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.su
 sx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.184657.0500.>

At 09:07 AM 10/1/99 +0100, Larry Trask wrote:
[RF]
>> Then on your gloss of "maite" as "beloved", fine. But keep in mind,
>> also that in English it is common for the expression "love" to be
>> used as a form of address for another person, not just a female one,
>> right, Love?

[LT]
>Sure, but why is this relevant?

>Basque <maite>, in its definite form <maitea>, is of course a common way
>of addressing a sweetheart of either sex.  It is literally `(my)
>beloved', even though it is functionally roughly equivalent to English
>`love' here.

Let us agree to disagree about which form is the common used as a form of
address, one with a "definite article" or one without. Clearly we have have
different views about this situation as was demonstrated in the case of our
earlier discussion on whether <beltz> was a proper nickname for a bear,
rather than <beltza>. From your previous comments, you do not wish to
concede that in such circumstance the <mugagabe> unsuffixed form is often
used.

Contrarily, there is no question, as I believe I've said before, that when
translating from French of Spanish Basque speakers will add the "definite
article" to what is the unsuffixed form of the word in the Romance
languages. But that is a different case. In the case of nicknames there are
circumstances in which the suffixed form is common and there are also many
cases where both forms can be encountered.

I think part of our disagreement might be caused by the existence of two
slightly different definitions of what is meant by the words "the common
way of addressing someone." If one calls out to another and addresses the
person with a nickname, that word will not necessarily take what is called
the "definite article." I think you may have cited a couple examples of
this yourself. The problem is complicated further by the fact that the
"distal demonstrative" in Euskera has been appropriated as a "definite
article" but that role is still not identical to that of a "definite
article" in a language such as Spanish or English where, conceptually,
there *are* definite and indefinite articles.

If, on the other hand, one writes a letter, there is clearly the option of
using the "definite article" along with their "nickname" when "addressing"
the person.

Then there are many examples of the numens who populate Basque folklore and
mythology. The (nick)names of many of these beings, e.g., Praka Gorri "Red
Pants", appear without the definite article. However, I might refer to this
same character, when writing in Euskera, in a given sentence as Praka
Gorria. But when I do, I've changed the status of his (nick)name to
something like "The One with Red Pants." It can be done, the "definite
article" can be added, but when it is the name takes on a different nuance
of meaning.

In summary, I don't think one can come up with a hard and fast rule that
covers all the individual cases. And when one turns to the so-called proper
names the waters become even muddier. So, let's just agree to disagree on
this particular point.

Roz

************************************************************************
Roslyn M. Frank
Professor
************************************************************************
Department of Spanish & Portuguese	
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242
email: <roz-frank at uiowa.edu>
fax: (319)-335-2990


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Tue Oct  5 00:11:48 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 20:11:48 -0400
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <54aad6e4.25250d30@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.201148.0400.>

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> But this is precisely the same objection that was made to Linear B as Greek.
> And as you observe it is the common reason given for the difficulty in making
> out the nuances of Mycenean as it appears in Linear B: <<Linear B is actually
> a very bad script for representing Greek; it doesn't represent the
> distinction between voiceless, voiceless aspirated, and voiced stops.>>

> Just as Linear B might be bad for Greek, Linear A might be worse.  But that
> definitely does not mean it is not Greek.  And the term "designed for a
> language" assumes something about the skill and purpose of scribes who were
> matching symbols to meanings and perhaps sounds when writing technology was
> primitive to say the least.

OK, then, why can't we read it if it's Greek?  Linear A and Linear B have
many of the same characters.  If both are Greek, the only way this could
have happened would be if the scribes at some point decided to keep the
same characters, but give them all new values, much as if we decided that
starting tomorrow, we're going to start using the letter <f> to represent
[a], etc. I can't think of any other case in history where such a thing
has happened; it's hard to see why anyone would do such a thing.

Also, as I already said, based on the distribution of the characters in
the Linear A writings, it looks like the Linear A languages doesn't
inflect by adding suffixes to the end of the word.  How can it possibly be
Greek, then?

> <<If the sound values in Linear B are any indication, it appears that an
> extemely large number of the Linear A words end in -u, whatever this means
> (in any case, it isn't what you generally find in IE languages).>>

> As you note this is evidence but not conclusive.  A shift in vowel sounds
> (e.g., from -u to -i or -oi) that might have prompted the change from A to B
> would actually work the other way.

But we know that no such change happened in pre-Greek.  Attested Greek
[oi] generally represents PIE *oy, etc.; _not_ earlier *-u.

> It is also another thing to muddy the waters with a certainty we simply don't
> have.  This was the cardinal sin that happened with Linear B and it seems
> that we haven't learned our lesson yet.

If Linear A ends up being deciphered and turns out to be Greek, I'll say
that I was wrong and will change my view.  I don't know where you keep
getting this 'certainty' business; you're attributing a certainty to me
which I don't hold and which I never voiced. I'm simply correctly
reporting that based on our current state of knowledge, Linear A does not
appear to be Greek.

> Too much certainty about the
> ancioent past is probably a bad thing:

> <<In 1949 Ventris had sent out a questionnaire on Linear B to over 40 leading
> authorities on Aegean questions (including archaeologists, linguists and
> historians); he privately distributed the replies in 1950 as The Languages of
> the Minoan and Mycenaean Civilizations (known as the "Mid-Century Report").>>
> Not even one suggested that the texts might be in Greek.

> But most were CERTAIN it wasn't.

Yes; and when a convincing case turned up that they were wrong, nearly all
scholars in the area changed their views accordingly.  This is how
scholarly study progresses; there's no shame in the fact that the field
was once wrong on this question.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Tue Oct  5 00:27:54 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 20:27:54 -0400
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <007801bf0b7b$b6e7f100$783063c3@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.202754.0400.>

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, petegray wrote:

> Sean Christ wrote:

Actually, it's Crist, not Christ.  It rhymes with 'wrist'.

>> ... Linear A is not Greek
>> First of all, the script appears to be designed for a language .....  The
>> best guess is that Linear A represents a language whose syllables were
>> something like the type of modern Japanese or Hawaiian, i.e. mostly
>> CV-type syllables,

> This makes a number of assumptions, which can be questioned.
> Firstly, was the script "designed" for the language, or was it adapted, as
> cuneiform was for Hittite?

I could be wrong on this, but my understanding is that Linear A hasn't
been shown to have been directly borrowed from any other known script
system. To the contrary, we have some of the earlier local pictographic
system which it seems to have developed from.

> Secondly, can we really assume that the apparently syllabic nature of the
> script reflects the nature of the language?

We can't be sure, since we don't know what language Linear A represents.

> Thirdly, I believe no other scripts in that area at that time were truly
> alphabetic or capable of expressing complex consonant clusters (please
> correct me if I'm wrong here).   We have consonantal scripts with no vowels,
> and syllabaries.   Speakers of a non-semitic language with consonant
> clusters might have had a choice of Linear A or nothing.

This is assuming that the scribes were aware of other writing systems and
borrowed one, as opposed to coming up with a wholly novel system.  Even if
it's the case that Linear A was borrowed, I think we at least need to say
that it was greatly remodelled from whatever earlier system we decide to
connect it with.  Whether the scribes in question would have likely to
independently think up the idea of an alphabetic writing system is
something I don't know.

> Fourthly both Maori and Japanese write a final vowel -u where the syllable
> is in fact often dropped.    If linear A is a syllabary, some sort of final
> vowel has to be written.   How nice, if there were some consistency in
> Linear A,  writing -u for a final vowel that was not to be pronounced!

It's true that final -u usually drops off after a voiceless consonant in
Japanese, but it's transparently true that it's still phonologically
present (i.e., this is not just a dummy vowel in the Japanese writing
system). For example, it's true that the -u isn't pronounced in _neko
desu_ "It is a cat", but it _is_ pronounced in _neko desu ne_ "It is a
cat, isn't it?"

We don't know anything about this sort of low-level detail for the Linear
A language, so we can't say what phonetic fate -u might have had there.
It's surely possible that it deletes, but we don't know.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
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From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Tue Oct  5 00:35:49 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 20:35:49 -0400
Subject: Updates regarding UPenn tree
In-Reply-To: <LPBBJHPIGJGDEKDCLOBFKEJMCEAA.mclasutt@brigham.net>
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.203549.0400.>

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote:

> Are there any actual examples of *hw >*f in PGmc post-Grimm (other Dr
> Crist's guess at *penkwe > *finhw- > *finf)?  It would seem that the
> alveolar /n/ might preclude any assimilation of /hw/ to /f/.  Just thinking
> off the top of my head.

Well, I'm not Dr. Crist yet; give me another year or so.  It might help if
I stopped writing on this list and wrote my dissertation instead. :-/

What we know is that PIE *penkwe somehow comes out in PGmc as *finf.  I
don't know right off of any other cases where PIE *p..kw comes out in PGmc
as *f..f.  Actually, I don't know right off of any other cases where a
word with PIE *p..kw survives into attested Germanic.  We might have to
say that this is a sporadic change if it just happens in this one word.

All I was saying was that I don't think this change necessarily has to be
pre-Grimm; I think it could be post-Grimm just as easily.  I'd be glad if
someone can correct me on this; it would mean we can tell more about the
relative chronology if we can say that it can't have happened that late.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
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From roz-frank at uiowa.edu  Tue Oct  5 00:52:13 1999
From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 19:52:13 -0500
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <l03130325b41ac4851d8d@[209.147.211.53]>
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.195213.0500.>

At 03:19 PM 10/1/99 -0500, Rick Mc Callister wrote:
>	I've heard many times [including from a couple of women named
>Maite] that Maite is an abbreviated form of Maria Teresa and tried to
>figure out how you could get Maite from that name. The closest thing I
>could think of was "Mari Tere", which are used separately in Spanish but,
>as far as I know, not together.
> 	I imagine that what may have happened was that Spanish speakers
>asked what the name meant in Spanish and the parents just threw out Maria
>Teresa because of the superficial resemblance. Although Maite is pretty
>different from Maria, there isn't much else in Spanish that's close in
>phonological terms.
>	A similar thing has happened in the US Southwest where Spanish
>Jesus is often "translated" as "Jesse", Fernando as "Freddy", Concepcion as
>"Connie", Luz as "Lucy", Angeles as "Angie" or "Angela", Jesusa as "Susie"
>or "Susan"

Obviously we have a number of different interpretations of what
happened/happens with this item. I wonder if Miguel (or someone else) could
speculate on whether the distribution of such highly reduced nicknames is
higher in Cataluyna. I'm not referring specifically to the "alleged"
reduction of Maria Teresa to Maite, but rather in general.

(An aside: now that I think about it, I do know someone from Catalunya who
calls his girlfriend "Mai".)

Phonologically speaking in other circumstances I don't think that Euskera
regularly looses the intervocalic /r/. That's my impression. I also don't
know what the relationship would be between the set of (unconscious)
phonological rules used to produce such nicknames and the set used for the
rest of the language.

Nor do I know if this is a topic that has been subjected to serious study.
Without having looked into the literature, I would suggest that what we may
be looking at is the question of whether there are different sets of rules
that are brought into play by speakers of a given language to produce items
belonging to different parts of the lexicon, e.g., phonoestetic expressions
(is that the right term?) versus "regular" words. Or stated differently, do
speakers have access to two different (although perhaps largely
overlapping) phonological repertoires that are then drawn into play by them
depending on the circumstances?

Has anyone done a cross-linguistic study of such forms? How similar are
these patterns cross-linguistically and/or what conclusions can be drawn
concerning the relationship holding between them and the standard
phonotactic rules of the same language?

For example in Euskera, as Larry has pointed out, emphasis is often
expressed not by just repeating the same word. For example, we find
<gorrigorri> "very red" (lit. "red, red"), but also there are many
instances in which the first letter of the second word/expression is turned
into an <m>, to produce compounds, e.g., <hikamika> "a falling out, tiff,
verbal fight," an
expression that I've always assumed came from <hi-ka>, from repeatedly
accusing the other person by saying "You (did this...).. You (did that)."
In this interpretation <hi> would be the second person pronoun. Actually
<hika> is often used to refer to the notion of "addressing the other in
<hi>, in the allocutive forms of the verb that that form of address requires.

A form like <esa-mesa-ka> based on the verbal stem of <esan> "to speak, to
say" refers to "gossip". Here the iterative suffix <-ka> with its often
gerundive force, is added to the compound <esamesa> to form a word in its
own right, a (de)verbal noun (?).

This last example,I believe, shows the way that a rule governing an
expressive formation (I refer merely to the addition of the <m> to the
second <esa>) in a given language can end up producing a "real" compound.
Obviously this creation is based on a real verbal stem in Euskera, i.e.,
<esa->, not on a purely phonoestetic or onomatopeic form. But the rule that
governs the insertion of the <m> comes from the "other" set of rules.

In this case the question would be, does this formation bring into play the
regular rules or are there subrules to these rules that can be accessed
which allow for expressive formations?

In short, are the two systems really as separate as they are sometimes
portrayed to be? A topic that has been brought up before on this list.

Comments?

Izan untsa,
Roz

************************************************************************
Roslyn M. Frank
Professor
************************************************************************
Department of Spanish & Portuguese	
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242
email: <roz-frank at uiowa.edu>
fax: (319)-335-2990


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Tue Oct  5 02:56:54 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 22:56:54 -0400
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <007201bf0b6f$86fbfd80$a803703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <MON.4.OCT.1999.225654.0400.>

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

> I like the comparison (BTW, is Kirisuto such a transcription of Crist?).

My login is kurisuto, which is the katakana-ized version of my family
name Crist.  "Kirisuto" is the katakana-ization of "Christ".

If I understand your post correctly, you're speculating (and I appreciate
the cautious terms in which you do so!) that there could be a connection
between Iberian and Linear A.  I can't rule this out, but of course such a
connection hasn't been shown, as you acknowledge.

I think this is probably a good place to make the following observation.
It is probably the case that during most of the long period of human
existence, the norm has been extreme linguistic diversity.  The phenomenon
of a language being spoken over a wide area is probably a fairly recent
one; I don't know that it ever happens except as the product of
empire-building.  When we go into places where there hasn't been a long
history of empires (e.g. New Guinea), what we find is that every little
village has its own language.  It wouldn't be surprising if every local
clan in prehistoric Europe similarly had its own language.

When the Indo-Europeans, Semites, etc. spread over a wide area, they
probably erased an enormous number of local languages in the process.  At
the beginning of the historical period, we can still catch glimpses of the
earlier diversity: Hattic, Hurrian, Etruscan, etc. don't appear to be
related to each other or to any other language we know.  Basque probably
represents the sole outcropping remaining from the earlier old European
diversity.

When we find these tantalizing bits of older languages just barely peeking
into the historical record, it's tempting to try to connect them with each
other. If we can actually establish a connection, that's great (and in the
Mediterranean basin, such connections might be somewhat more likely, since
transportation has always been relatively easier).  It's certainly not
wrong to make the attempt.  We should bear in mind, tho, that we should
expect to find cases of languages which can't be connected with anything.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
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From ECOLING at aol.com  Tue Oct  5 19:30:41 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 15:30:41 EDT
Subject: "six" and "seven" Mediterranean
Message-ID: <TUE.5.OCT.1999.153041.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/3/99 3:19:52 AM, mcv at wxs.nl writes:

>I don't think it's a Gascon borrowing, but surely there's more
>than just chance resemblance between the numeral names for "6"
>and "7" as found all over the Mediterranean:

>Egyptian:       sjsw (*sds-)            sfxw (*sp'3-)
>Berber:         sd.is                   sa (*sab-)
>Akkadian:       s^is^s^et (*s^id_s^-)   sebet (*sab3-)
>Indo-European:  swek^s ~ s^wek^s        sep(h3)tm
>Georgian:       ekwsi                   s^vidi
>Etruscan:       s^a                     semph
>Basque:         sei (*s^ei)             zazpi (*sasbi)

These are language families which for the most part are
thought to be unrelated or unrelatable, except for the first
three which are parts of Afro-Asiatic.

Agreed, this seems to be far beyond chance.
though any individual resemblance, when looked at in isolation,
may be reasonably taken as possibly just chance.

What are currently the standard accounts of these facts?

Borrowings?  in which directions and at what dates?
Plausible if trade was promoted by certain traders
at certain times, I guess.  Mycenaean?  Egyptian?  Phoenecian?
Predecessors of any of these?  Who?
Even for basic numerals????  It is known to happen.
Yucatec at least, among the Mayan languages,
retains numerals only up to 5, after that it is Spanish.

Or
Ultimate common origins,
     despite the fact that proto-languages are not yet constructible
     to relate all these four language families?

A mixture of the two explanations above?
Some additional explanations?

Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics


From ECOLING at aol.com  Tue Oct  5 19:30:58 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 15:30:58 EDT
Subject: Excluding Basque data
Message-ID: <TUE.5.OCT.1999.153058.EDT.>

In Larry Trask's recent reply on this subject,
I think most of the ground has been covered.
Larry does not feel that using a tagged database is superior to other methods,
though he does acknowledge that with a computer database one can
more quickly investigate alternatives. Some of us believe that is a very
substantial benefit, and that it does allow us more easily to search
for ways we may make biasing assumptions, and to explore alternative
hypotheses so the benefit is very substantial indeed.

People's bottom-line judgements simply differ on these things.
None of these judgements are a priori wrong,
and none of us has the right to assume that the alternatives are
a priori wrong.

>> Ruling out the question of bias in selection of data, by including
>> in the data set only that data which fit the criteria, as opposed to
>> grouping the data so that different analysis can be performed, does
>> deny the ability to analyze any assumptions which may, wittingly or
>> not, be embodied in the criteria.

>Sorry, but this makes no sense to me.

And to me, it is obvious, that flexibility in handling the data
under alternative assumptions sometimes makes all the difference,
between being able to question an assumption,
and being unable to question it effectively,
because of practical considerations of our thinking abilities,
or limitations of time, or whatever.

I think these kinds of issues have been adequately discussed,
and we are not likely to make further progress on them immediately.

***

Many of the rest seem to me to be preferences in choice of terminology,
which may have flavors we prefer one way or another.

***

On matters still worth discussing, at least for clarification:

>But, so far, neither you nor Jon Patrick nor anyone else has made a
>single substantive suggestion as to how my criteria bias the data.
>Instead, you just keep hinting vaguely that it might do so, but without
>any specifics.

No, I have repeatedly focused on one specific area where I could not merely
support the general concerns of others not to exclude too much,
but could add something from my own typological knowledge.
Namely...

Sound-symbolic words are
BOTH different in canonical forms
AND underrepresented in vocabularies etc.
and the coincidence of these two properties
means it is dangerous to exclude them.

As to sound-symbolic words,
Larry says he does NOT insist on their having the same canonical
forms as other vocabulary, does not exclude them on that basis.
(I surely thought he was using canonical forms as one of his
criteria for setting up his initial lists?  Was that not true?
I do not intend to go back into the extensive correspondence
to check on this.  Others can do so if they wish.)

In any case, another criterion is explicit or implicit in the
following:

>But, in fact, the vast majority of sound-symbolic items in Basque do
>*not* satisfy my other criteria.  Hence my approach will immediately set
>them apart from the words which are the best candidates for native and
>ancient status.  Once that's established, *then* these distinctive words
>can be investigated to determine their own phonological characteristics.

Notice in the way the middle sentence follows the first sentence
that Larry treats his approach (his criteria) as if his criteria were
pretty much the same thing as selection for "the best candidates for
native and ancient status".  Others of us believe that must always be
kept on the surface of awareness as an empirical question,
not taken for granted;  it is precisely a core question!

If what Larry says above about Basque is true of other languages
to a simlar degree, then should we conclude that sound-symbolic
items are NOT good candidates for native and ancient status,
in general?  That would seem to be implied by the paragraph
just quoted.  Yet to me that shows there must be something wrong
with the argument.

That is not to say we treat sound-symbolic
words exactly the same way as other words.
Just as the English "pavilion" from French "pavillon"
is the normal French development by the sound laws, and "papillon"
is a sound-symbolic form which has resisted a sound change,
so we might suspect Basque <pinpirin> may have not undergone all of the
sound changes which most of the vocabulary did in the history of
Basque, independent of the question whether it is a recent loan
or some primaeval vocabulary item inherited from 10,000 years ago.
So even the supposedly air-tight logic of sound laws cannot be
used unequivocally to include or exclude vocabulary from native
vs. borrowed categories.  A shocker, and not a wild card we want
to use without severe limits or controls, or else the entire enterprise
falls.  But a shocker we cannot escape by waving magic wands
or waving words.  It's a fact of reality.
(English "tiny", which went through the great vowel shift,
and "teeny", which did not go through the great vowel shift,
was retained or regenerated or reborrowed from a dialect,
would be a similar case,
unless the dialect-borrowing solution is adopted.)

(Trask says:
> I exclude sound-symbolic words like <pinpirin> `butterfly'
>from my initial list, not because I don't like their forms, but because
>they do not satisfy my primary criteria.  In the case of <pinpirin>, I
>exclude it because it is attested at all only in one small corner of the
>country.)

Among Larry Trask's other criteria were the distribution across all
of the dialects, not the occurrence in only a few.
As I took pains to point out in previous messages, that criterion is biasing.
However reasonable, even obvious, it may appear to a historical linguist
(including seeming obvious to me too, I may add)
it may still disproportionately bias against sound-symbolic words,
because of the spotty record of those
who record vocabularies in not collecting such words,
thereby reducing the number of dialects in which they are attested,
quite independently of whether they actually were used in those dialects.
The entire class of such words may not be recorded, or very few of them,
it is not simply that their recording is randomly slightly less full.

And this enormous underrepresentation can then indirectly lead to
initial conclusions on canonical forms which are
too simple and neat, too consistent,
including canonical forms which are
underrepresentative of sound-symbolic forms.

Such initial conclusions on canonical forms can then have
cascading secondary effects on inclusion or exclusion of additional
vocabulary in the lists.  Even if /bat/ (from the recent discussion of
/bade/ /bedere/ etc.) were the only form included with a final
stop consonant, being exceptional would not prove it is not part of
pre-Basque.  All (?) languages have more common and rarer forms,
and have peripheral forms, especially when the ambiguities of
fast speech and slow speech borderlines are considered,
and when a few short high-frequency items are considered.
Yet we must also pay attention to differences of canonical forms,
as they sometimes DO clue us in to different strata of vocabulary
which may be relevant in historical-comparative studies.

>I have proposed that obvious and recognizable sound-symbolic items, like
><tu> `spit', might reasonably be excluded at the outset.  But I'm not
>wedded to this, and I don't mind if others want to include them when
>they satisfy the other criteria.

How about if they do not satisfy the other criteria, or some of them,
and if the inclusion of such exceptional forms then
enters into the determination of what are true canonical forms,
and even what those other criteria should be,
and cycles back to affect judgements of what forms are exceptional or not,
or to what degree (frequency or structural),
and EVEN to affect which forms are included in the analysis?
It is indeed circular not in a bad sense, but should be recognized as
circular.

Larry says his criteria do not have any biases (I think he believes
they cannot, as he thinks he has formulated them), yet here he himself
says he is excluding a form, mentioning in this paragraph only that it
is sound-symbolic (as if that were a sufficient reason?
I do not want to assume that, but at least here no more was given).
I do not remember whether he gave any other reasons for
excluding <tu>?

Trask refers to this:
>...criticizing me for selecting criteria appropriate only
>to the task I have in mind, and not to other conceivable tasks that
>someone else might like to pursue.

Trask clearly believes his criteria are obviously
appropriate to the task he has in mind.
Others are not quite so certain that that is all his criteria do,
believe they may do some other things as well.

The matter of biasing assumptions is almost always very
difficult to analyze, because if it were easy, we would already
have solved it, by eliminating the unwarranted assumptions.

I have absolutely no doubts that Larry Trask's knowledge is in general
crucial to finding good candidates for proto-Basque forms,
but that is not the same thing as saying there may not be unknown biases
even in his work.  It's simply our status as fallible human beings
who are not omniscient.

>At the same time, no questions about the
>nature of Pre-Basque words can possibly be answered without first
>identifying the words that were present in Pre-Basque.

Seems self-evident, doesn't it?

Actually, this sort of statement is often not true of normal science.
We might answer some questions about the nature of pre-Basque words,
then make progress on identifying which words were present
in pre-Basque, then answer more questions about the nature of
pre-Basque words, including CHANGING some of the earlier
answers, then make more progress on identifying which words
were present in pre-Basque, excluding some we had previously
included and including some we had previously excluded.
It is the edifice AS A WHOLE which is ultimately evaluated.
There may not exist a step-by-step process
of getting there with anything like certainty along the way.
So we can use a step-by-step process WITHOUT assuming
certainty along the way.  Which is why it is so important to
be able to change assumptions EASILY.

>Adding to your
>database words that did not exist in Pre-Basque cannot offer the
>slightest assistance, and may well spoil the results.

Of course.  Everyone agrees in one sense, if they are mixed
with words which did exist in pre-Basque.
But who is omniscient enough to know in every case
which words did not exist in pre-Basque?
Larry is not claiming he is, explictly is not,
yet the method he proposes is stated in such absolute terms
("first" identifying the words that were present in
Pre-Basque) that it does appear to rely on omniscience.

It is simply not so straightforward.

>Is this such a
>difficult point to follow?

The last part about not wanting to add words that did not exist
in pre-Basque is not at all hard to follow, everyone agrees with it.

That does not logically force all of the other decisions that
Larry wishes to make in advance, though he is of course
right to make his own best attempt.

Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics


From ECOLING at aol.com  Tue Oct  5 23:15:36 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 19:15:36 EDT
Subject: Respect goes both ways!
Message-ID: <TUE.5.OCT.1999.191536.EDT.>

The obligation of respect goes both ways!
Yes it certainly does.
It is owed even to those with whom we disagree,
and even if they are not professionals in our field.
There is an obligation to gracefully acknowledge their
contributions where they are correct,
even if they are wrong about some other things.

I am once again extremely disappointed at the lack of respect
shown by members of my chosen profession for someone
who is not a professional in historical-comparative linguistics,
who has made some invalid points,
and also some valid points they have not been willing to acknowledge.

Two members of this list have replied to my post
defending Steve Long on certain limited issues only.
Since it is not really important who the individuals are
who have not shown the appropriate respect to Long,
I will for the most part not name names (only once,
when necessary for a citation from a person's other work).

Especially one of those who disagrees with Steve Long on some issues
appears to be changing the terms of discussion
in order to maintain their position that Steve Long is universally wrong,
(or if right, only trivially, meaninglessly so).
He denies the validity of a technical definition and
does not follow through the logical consequences of
that definition which he himself recognizes in practice.
Of course it is easier to criticize a target set up by the critic himself
for the purpose, than to criticize what others have actually said.

This same correspondent in a previous debate REPEATEDLY
changed the terms of discussion
from "what has Greenberg done"
to "what has Greenberg claimed he has done",
while denying he had so changed the discussion.
Of course it is easier to criticize the value of some things Greenberg
claims he has done than to criticize what Greenberg has actually done.

So what?
Certainly not part of co-operative content-focused
discussions or debates.

That kind of debating tactic needs to be seen for what it is.

***

Point 1 in defense of Steve Long on one specific

>> Family Tree representations can be much improved.
>
>Sure, but this is not news.  We linguists have realized since family
>trees were invented that they represent considerably less than the whole
>truth.  The literature is full of proposals for improving our trees.
>But it's hard.  Linguistic reality is so complex that highly realistic
>trees become imossible to interpret in a useful way.

My point was that Steve Long said family tree representations had some
problems, and that he was correct in one of the problems he identified,
specifically that as often displayed they can make it look as if there are
innovations on one branch, not on another,
without being explicit about whether this is the case or not.
Later discussions said BOTH that there could be innovations on
both branches, AND that in several cases there might not be innovations
on one branch.  This rather highlights the problem, does not dispose of it.

An appropriate response might be to say that the particular failure that
Steve Long was pointing to has been noted in the literature, and that
the solutions proposed are A, B, and C...
Of course there may be complexities, as noted in the quote above,
and of course if one pushes the level of detail sufficiently,
trees like any other visual diagram become impossible to interpret easily.
However, pointing that out is not a constructive
nor a respectful response to Steve Long.
Another respondent pointed out similarly that one cannot mark
EVERY innovation on the branches of a tree.  While obviously true,
that is not directly relevant to my point which was that SOME
should be marked (I did not specify that every one should be).
Presumably the ones marked should be the salient ones,
those considered most important or secure by the historical linguists.
It is also quite beside Steve Long's original point.

Since correspondents apparently believe that Family Trees can be
improved, it would not have hurt to say so.
Saying "it is a complicated matter" does not excuse one from the
obligation to promptly say one agrees when in fact one does agree.

The second correspondent's reply concerning Point 1. actually notes
that one can choose a middle-road position:

>If you want, you can just include the "best hits"  of the innovations in
>each branch,

That was a co-operative response, to the point of the substance.

But regarding especially the first correspondent's reaction on
this Point 1, ...

I would like to see where the particular respondents
were PREVIOUSLY gracious and respectful of Steve Long
in expressing publicly on the list that he was correct in ANY part of this
(and, just incidentally, respectful of the rights of our many silent readers
to have accurate information communicated to us by professionals).
Or can that not be acknowledged for fear it might lead someone
to treat something else Steve writes (right or wrong) with more respect?
What is the problem here?
Politics, it would seem.
As my teacher James McCawley once said,

"Madison Ave. Si,
 Pennsylvania Ave. No"

In other words, he was saying that advertising is OK,
but not political manipulation of the terms of debate.
(In a world in which we have seen even more abuses of marketing
than when Jim McCawley made that statement,
I wonder whether he would still maintain the
first half of the above quote without modification?)

***

Point 2 in defense of Steve Long on a second specific
(there were additional specific points beyond these two,
which the commentors did not choose to respond to
-- please go back to the original message defending
Steve Long for those points, I will not repeat them here)

I pointed out that Steve was correct in a very limited technical sense
that a language and its descendent
could exist AT THE SAME TIME
IF WE USE A DEFINITION of "SAME" vs. of "DIFFERENT" LANGUAGE
which was commonly being used on this list.
That is all.
It says nothing about  what happens if we use other definitions.
I was explicit in my earlier message:
"Using that definition, Steve was right."
(We can regard this as a PARADOX of the definition;
I wish I had used the term "paradox" in my earlier posts on this topic)

One of those correspondents I believe failed to mention
my explicit statement that I was not proposing my own definitions
but using definitions which had recently been used on this list?
At least, I missed mention of this if it was there.
The other said that was not his own definition, but see below
for evidence that it is in practice a part of his definition at least!
(And if it actually were a definition he did not use,
then his own definition would be non-responsive, non-co-operative,
irrelevant to that part of the discussion,
though it could be quite legitimate to explore his own definition
in a different part of the discussion, not pretending to be a response.)

[LA]
>> Parent and daugher languages can indeed in theory co-exist,
>> exactly as Steve Long said.

[response]
>No, they can't, as I'll try to show below.

[LA]
> I use here the definition of distinctness of "languages" preferred by
> most linguists, including the experts on this list, that is, fuzzily,
> "forms of speech which are mutually unintelligible".

[I could have stated that slightly better as a definition of "same language"
vs. "different language", but no matter]

[response]
>Sorry, but I don't think this is the definition of `languages' used by
>most linguists.  If anything, it's closer to the man-in-the-street's
>perception.  Linguists are aware that mutual intelligibility or the lack
>of it is only one of many factors which may help to determine whether
>varieties are best regarded as two languages or as a single language.
>I could cite examples for hours -- Chinese, Italian, Dyirbal -- but I'll
>leave that now.

The above seems to be EXACTLY THE REVERSE of the bulk of the
recent discussion which said that political and cultural reasons may lead
people to call very different languages by the same name,
as if they were the same language.  (Note the counterfactual.)
Folks-in-the-street are perhaps even MORE aware than linguists
of many of the other factors other than mutual intelligibility,
which they normally do not think of at all.

Unless of course the writer literally means as he writes
that mutual intelligibility is "one of many factors which may help to
determine whether varieties are best regarded as two languages
or as a single language".  Note the "one of", in which case the
response should have been not "NO, WRONG", but
"YES, WITH ADDITIONAL SPECIFICATIONS".

Even in that case, a co-operative response
would have been to very carefully craft examples in which the other
factors also operate in a way those who stated the paradox would
want them to, to try to see whether the paradox would still stand
with the more complex definition.  Manipulating the other factors
for descendents A vs. B of mother M can indeed be done, I feel sure,
so that B would be a "different" language by the more complex definition,
while A would be the "same" language as M by that more complex
definition.  But it is not my responsibility to do so.

And I think the objectors would still object,
because they would take even the tiniest change,
contrary to their own definitions of WHATEVER kind,
to force A and B to both be distinct languages from M
if either one were admitted to be so.  Not on an empirical basis,
but on a purely definitional basis.  Take the following as
evidence that they would object on a priori grounds,
not on empirical grounds at all!

>I stick by
>my claim that the following situation cannot exist among natively learned
>languages:
>
>          A
>         / \
>        A   B
>
>where the right branch has innovated and the left has undergone no change
>whatever.  This is true whether A and B are mutually intelligible or not.
>I am not interested in debating this point any further.

This looks like a refusal to deal in empirical facts,
rather choosing to define the problem away, by using the phrase
"undergone no change whatever".
Circularly, any language will change very slightly over the course
of only a few days.  So defining the problem away in this
case is completely uninteresting, because purely definitional.
I was dealing with an empirical situation, not with pure words.

If we treat the above position as an EMPIRICAL claim
then the following claim is almost certainly false:
**
that given two dialect areas of a language in different areas,
it is not possible that
over the same time span for each area,
one dialect can change almost not at all,
the other area change so substantially as to become mutually
unintelligible with the former beyond some measurable criterion.

**

I was not discussing other possible definitions,
I was discussing a common highly technical definition,
mutual intelligibility, about which I was completely explicit.
The paradox can almost certainly be reformulated,
whatever definition of "distinct language" one prefers,
as long as it is not circularly contorted to exclude the empirical
possibility that dialects of a language can change
at radically different rates.

I believe the political-cultural identifications of "language"
are much closer to the man-in-the-street's definition
than is the highly technical definition of mutual intelligibility,
which I believe most linguists do prefer
at least in some contexts of distinguishing language from dialect.
It is often mentioned, so at the very least, it is cavalier to simply
treat it as inappropriate.
Further, these two components of possible definitions
were contrasted in our earlier discussions.

It is extremely rude to discuss B and pretend to defeat A which was
explicitly clear and was not the same as B.
A good debating technique, perhaps effective
under some circumstances, but not forthright or co-operative.
Gracious co-operation requires that one discuss what
it is perfectly obvious that other people mean, not something one
substitutes for it.  It is certainly often simpler to try to ridicule
something people did not say than what they actually did say.

(One of the two correspondents also asked at the end of their message
where I got my degree.  Since that is of course irrelevant to the
content under discussion, it is ad hominem, and given the rest of this
supposed debate, I suspect it is a prelude to another avenue of attack,
to attempt to discredit someone who is defending Steve Long,
even if that defense is explicitly on only a couple of limited points.
So I answered the irrelevancy privately.)

One correspondent believes they have defeated the claim thusly,
while quoting at first from Pete Gray, who was trying to be helpful
by pointing out that a part of the disagreement might arise because
people were discussing different questions:

>[Pete Gray]
>
>>> Imagine a situation where a group of speakers of a language go and settle
>>> elsewhere, where substrate and other factors make their language change
>>> swiftly, while those who stayed at home enjoy a very much slower rate
>>> of change.
>>> After some years, and political upheaval, we can see a situation
>>> where the settlers are deemed to be speaking a different language from
>>> that which they brought with them years before.
>
>>> I suspect that [one contributor] is saying that the stay-at-homes are
>>> also speaking a different language, by definition;
>>> while some others are saying
>>> that if the changes are few enough, it should be defined as the parent
>>> language.   And of course, both sides are right - which is why there
>>> is so little understanding on both sides.
>>> The debate is ultimately based simply
>>> on our definition of what a single language is.

[response]
>But we have no such definition, nor do I believe that one is possible.

[LA]
>> If we now apply the definition to a situation of one mother M and
>> two dialects A and B, where one dialect A has changed so little in
>> say 100 years that we have no excuse for saying M and A are
>> different languages, by our standard definition of different vs.
>> same language, we must by that definition say they are the same
>> language (and NOT merely for political reasons, one of a zillion red
>> herrings in this discussion),

[respondent]
>Right.  So a language can co-exist with its own descendant?
>I don't think so, and I think this conclusion can be destroyed by what
>Llyod elsewhere calls "simple logic".

The correspondent now proceeds BOTH to evade the
common-sense version of what Pete Gray pointed to above,
and also to evade the technical formulation given earlier.

The common-sense version is that in the same time frame,
one dialect of a language may change so little that we consider it
for all practical purposes the same as its parent,
while another dialect of that same language can change substantially
so that we consider it a separate language.  (Presumably
when this happens, the social conditions causing the greater change
will also involve the kinds of political-cultural divides which would
trigger the correspondent's preferred definitions for "distinct
language", as for example if some of the speakers of the mother
language migrated to an area where they mixed with numerous
speakers of some substrate language, while other speakers of the
mother language did not so migrate or mingle.)

The more technical version of the same uses the technical definition
of mutual intelligibility used by some PROFESSIONALS
(note, not laymen) to define the same dilemma.

The correspondent also proceeds to use an example
WHICH DOES NOT FIT THE CONDITIONS LAID DOWN
above, and is therefore irrelevant to the paradox as it was
posed, as if that example were a counterexample.
The correspondent also proceeds to put words in my mouth
which are certainly contrary to what I would ever say,
and I think obviously contrary to what anyone else would want
to say, even to what any other sane person would believe
I would say, given my care to specify "mutual intelligibility"
as a technical definition I was using for the purposes of the discussion.

>Is the English of 1999 "the same language" as the English of 1998?
>I take it that Lloyd and Steve would at once answer "yes".

Probably I would, if we are talking about the same dialect.
I can conceive of very unusual circumstances in which I would
have to answer "no" if different dialects are concerned.
Even this initial posing of an example is not careful to state
"among people P" and "among the same people P" for earlier and later times,
is not as careful as my recent formulation of
the statement of the definitional paradox.
How Steve Long would answer I should not speculate about.
Lumping Steve Long and me is another sign of lack of care
and precision, and one manifestation of
lack of respect by the correspondent.

>So: is the English of 1998 "the same language" as the English of 1997?
>If you answered "yes" the first time, you must answer "yes" now.

No, that does not follow.  The relation is not transitive.

I am sure the correspondent knows perfectly well it is not transitive.
So why bring up this kind of an example and act as if the persons
being criticized believed the relation is transitive?

>But you can see where this leading.  If the answer is "yes", then, by
>transitivity, the English of 1999 is "the same language" as the English
>of King Alfred the Great 1000 years ago.  Are you happy with this?  The
>two varieties are not at all mutually comprehensible, since the changes
>in 1000 years have been dramatic.

And therefore,
since the correspondent knows I would not want to answer yes
(it is the most elementarily obvious conclusion from what I have written
previously) it is obvious that the relation I used the definition of
is not transitive, the correspondent has proven that.
Isn't that interesting!
The definition I made explicit was not a transitive definition
(which goes unremarked by the correspondent).
What an odd coincidence!
Surely I could not have been careful
enough to think this through in advance?
Nor knowledgeable enough to know this in advance?
Must be a coincidence.

The correspondent here is using a different definition,
and just incidentally, it seems to be a definition of "language"
more used by the man-on-the-street (i.e. a political-cultural definition).
I believe earlier discussions were explicit that this was more
the man-on-the-street's definition.

I have not previously accused the correpondent of being an ignorant
layman, though that is apparently what the correspondent is accusing
me and Steve Long of being (in more than one way).

The correspondent seems simply unwilling to face the fact that
one particular technical definition of
what makes two dialects distinct languages,
a definition used by some professional linguists
(and part of the definition used by almost all),
carries with it a paradoxical answer that yes,
what Steve Long said is in principle possible,
a language and a descendant distinct language can co-exist.

Inconvenient, perhaps, but a consequence of that technical definition.
Not my technical definition,
rather one used by many professional linguists
when using "same language" in an ideal sense,
not colored by political or cultural preferences of users.
And, just perhaps, co-operativeness would dictate that one should
propose another more easily operationalized definition.
Remember that for those who use that definition, they all recognize
that intelligibility is a matter of degree,
the fact that the definition necessarily involves fuzzy borderline
examples does not bother them, that is just the nature of reality.
But in the meantime, graciousness and respect for others
would dictate that one discusses USING that definition,
or admit that one's discussion is simply not relevant to the point raised
about the paradox.
(As stated above, even using what the commentor prefers as
a definition, the paradox probably remains in the same form.)

Here is the consequence of trying to deny the conclusion by
clever manipulations of words (quoted from my previous message).
The correspondent does not deal with this -- to do so would reveal
that the correspondent was changing definitions and thus not defeating
the claim actually made about the paradox, but some other straw-man
claim set up by the correspondent in order to knock it down.

[LA]
>Now if we wish to deny this conclusion,
>I can only see doing it by changing the definition of "same language",
>though that would be cheating,
>or by admitting explicitly that in this context we
>DO NOT MEAN THE SAME THING as we did in other contexts
>by "same language" and "different language".
>(In other words, that no matter how small the difference is between
>M and A, in this context of discussion we will insist they are not the
>same language. Probably because our symbol system, our family tree,
>is influencing how we think about reality, is substituting itself for the
>reality which it is supposed to faithfully represent!)

Evidence that this was the correct analysis of the strategy of debate
is provided by the absolutist phrase "undergone no change whatever"
used in one of the responses received this weekend.

One correspondent ends by saying:

>In sum, I firmly believe that the question `Are related varieties A and
>B the same language or different languages?' is one devoid of
>linguistic content.  And all discussions predicated upon the belief that
>this is a linguistically meaningful question with a linguistically
>meaningful answer are badly misguided.

Steve Long this morning sent me a reference to p.177 of Larry Trask's
"Historical Linguistics" where he claims to be quoting Trask to the effect
that 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."
Here it appears that Trask is indeed using just the criterion he says
he does not use, at least as a part of his definition which in this
case is a determining part.
Even if the quotation Long sent me is within a
context of a criticism of the technical "mutually intelligible"
definition, it still demonstrates that Trask CAN think logically
using this definition, and come to the exact same conclusion
as I believe anyone else.  Simply common sense.
If so, why does he refuse to do so in the present discussion on our
email list?
Is the reference Steve Long sent me correct, anyone?

Even before receiving this reference,
I wrote the following paragraph:
If the correspondent really believes there is NO acceptable technical
definition of "same language" vs, "different language",
then perhaps the correspondent should simply have said that
and declined to participate in this discussion.
Or hand their linguistic diploma back to the institution which granted it.
To discuss the question presupposes that one thinks the terms
actually mean something.  And the correspondent apparently actually
does think they mean something, witness the example about
modern English and the English of 1000.  We can't have it both ways.

The other recent correspondent replies to the defense of selected
limited points made by Steve Long by beginning:

>Your post is so very long that I am only going to respond to a few major
>points.  It's really hard to wade thru a post when it gets this long.

Length is necessary when the respondents change the definitions
and do other things which greatly confuse the discussion.
Returning to clarity, while being fair to everyone, is a lot of work.
I personally resent having to do that work.
But the issue of respect is important enough I am willing to do it,
repeatedly if need be, to deal with further red herrings.

This debate would have been very much shorter,
more amicable, and more productive, if the correspondents
had simply admitted, yes, Steve Long is correct technically
about points (a,b,c), and co-operatively discussed with him
what might be practically done about the problems he had identified,
how much information about common innovations might be
placed on the branches of a tree, that perhaps it is wiser to
NOT have a continuous line which could be regarded as a "stem",
or whatever else they wished to suggest.
It is perfectly appropriate to point out at the same time
that Steve Long was wrong about other points (d,e,f,...).

We got instead a stonewalling on every point that Steve raised,
as if his status as not a professional in this field required
that we demolish his every argument, whether the individual
arguments had merit or not.  Probably not in every case,
but this response was a massive pattern by some correspondents.

***

One of the correspondents writes:

>I think that Steve
>and Lloyd are both gravely wrong on certain fundamental points.

Notice the magisterial tone, "fundamental points",
unspecified even in what follows, like the Joe McCarthy hit list,
very much like the words "fundamentally flawed"
which have become a code among academics in reviewing books
for "worthless, unprofessional, do not read that author".

>I think both have fallen badly into the reification fallacy.  The
>reification fallacy lies in inventing a name, and then concluding that,
>since we have a name, there must exist something "out there" for the
>name to refer to.
>
>In the linguistic case, the fallacy lies in assuming that names like
>`English', `German' and `Italian' must designate actual entities in the
>real world, because the names exist.

I am absolutely not guilty of the simplistic error of reification in this
matter.
That correspondent can of course not quote any words I have
said which substantiate such a charge, since the correspondent
also uses language names ("English" or "German" or "Italian", for example).
Especially since the definition I was using explicitly denies it,
by laying down a criterion for "different language" which blocks
mere continuation of a language name by maintaining tradition,
and forces one explicitly to recognize instability, continuous change.

He is arguing against something it is perfectly legitimate to argue against.
BUT he is arguing against something I have not given any evidence
of believing.

I think the correspondent knows perfectly well
I have not made that error.
In which case I believe what he said is slanderous or libelous
(take your pick, email is a strange being).

It is also a red herring, because the definitional paradox
stands on its own.
(Even if I had made the error, which I did not,
it would be irrelevant to the logic of the definitional paradox.)

Progress in many sciences consists in recognizing that
seeming paradoxes are not so very odd after all,
that we may not have understood what some of the consequences
might be for definitions commonly used.

We could have avoided most of this by not trying to evade
the paradox with verbal slight-of-hand,
and that would itself have been much easier if
principles of respect for all were more generally adhered to.

Especially the obligation to try to find the positive and useful
in everyone's contributions.

***

Sincerely,
Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics


From alderson at netcom.com  Tue Oct 12 01:22:04 1999
From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 18:22:04 -0700
Subject: Apology to Pat Ryan and Larry Trask
Message-ID: <MON.11.OCT.1999.182204.0700.>

Recently, I received in the Indo-European input queue a message from Pat Ryan
which appeared to be a highly intemperate criticism of Larry Trask.  As has
been my custom, I sent a note to Mr. Ryan stating that I thought it beyond the
pale, and indicating that I would post it with an invitation to Mr. Trask to
respond to the substantive issues, but that I would then cut off any further
discussion on the topic.

Because of outside pressures, I had not been able to send out the list daily,
and wished to get things moving again.  I therefore published everything then
waiting in the queue, including the message in question, without waiting for a
response from Mr. Ryan; I thereby did him an injustice.  Mr. Ryan assured me by
return mail that the apparent intemperate remarks were intended as humorous,
and that he would have submitted a revised version of the message with explicit
"smileys" on the statements to which I objected had I given him the chance.

I apologize to Mr. Ryan for this, and to Mr. Trask for making him the apparent
victim of an attack which was not so intended.  Mr. Trask has responded, with
some forbearance and some explicitly marked humour; this response will be sent
out shortly.

Although I declared the thread closed, seeing only the potential for a long
exchange without interest to the readers of the list, even the two gentlemen
involved, I would like to reverse that decision.  Both writers have shown a
willingness to keep to the issues, and so long as that is true, the discussion
seems useful to me and, I hope, to the other readers of the Indo-European list.

								Rich Alderson
								list owner and
								moderator


From gordonselway at gn.apc.org  Wed Oct  6 01:41:00 1999
From: gordonselway at gn.apc.org (Gordon Selway)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 02:41:00 +0100
Subject: Contributions by Steve Long
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.024100.0100.>

At 3:50 am 4/10/99, Robert Orr wrote:
>I've only just read the first part of Larry Trask's posting, so this is a
>bit impertinent, but there is a comment that can be made right away on one
>of his points.

>>Is Scots a variety of English or a separate language?  Well, a number of
>>Scots have argued that it is a separate language, and, if it had not
>>been for the Act of Union in 1707, we might all recognise Scots as a
>>distinct language today.  But, because of that Act, we don't.  There are
>>no linguistic considerations here: just political ones.

>Actually, there is a linguistic consideration.  Scots used to have a large
>number of distinctive lexical items, differentiating it from "English".
>Many of these are now rare in everyday speech, thus reducing the amount of
>differentation.

>Due to the Act of Union (what about the Union of the Crowns?)  Perhaps.
===
[Though it is distinctly tangential, this may be of interest.  It also
reminds us that speech exists in communities, I suppose, and that different
forms of language, registers, &c may co-exist within one community -
whatever that may be : people who are in touch with each other?  people who
recognise each other when they meet?]

A complex story.

There are still differences at several levels (and some of them no doubt
enabled a master to identify where my family had recently come from when I
was a schoolboy, even though to a casual hearer I would probably have
seemed to speak standard RP English), some of which in specific cases
certainly parallel Gaelic idiom.  [Eg cia mar/what like?]

Given that the other family input into my idiolect is distinctly
'mummersetshire', I can effectively become incomprehensible (and weave a
fair number of local dialect peculiarities into my speech on occasion) in
both western English and south-western Scots (or indeed Ulster Scots).
Though it's easier to be the passive recipient than the active instigator
of discourse in Scots.  A definite problem can be my intonation, which may
be what can baffle people in England, even when the words and the 'accent'
are standard English.

There was a conscious change towards standard English after the
Reformation, possibly because there were no available translations of the
bible in Scots.  The metrical psalms were also in the same language, even
where they had Scots authors.

On the other hand, the language of civil administration and the law
continued to be Scots rather than English well after the Union (of the
Parliaments, that is).  The movement in 1603 was of folk off to London with
Jamie, not of the English to Edinburgh and beyond.  [And btw when the Edict
of Nantes was revoked by Louis XIV in 1685, the French calvinists moved to
England and parts of Ireland, rather than to Scotland where they would have
been among co-religionists, in any numbers.]

There certainly are distinct differences between the vernaculars in Glasgow
and London, and the differences in Scotland may be being cultivated.  Being
in an institutional distinct country may assist.

Gordon
<gordonselway at gn.apc.org>


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Oct  6 02:38:37 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 19:38:37 -0700
Subject: Contributions by Steve Long
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9909301701010.25900-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.su
 sx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.OCT.1999.193837.0700.>

At 05:34 PM 9/30/99 +0100, Larry Trask wrote:
>Is Serbo-Croatian a single language, or are Serbian, Bosnian and
>Croatian three different languages?  Well, until a few years ago,
>practically everybody, including the locals, was happy to agree there
>was only the one language.  But, since the breakup of Yugoslavia, things
>have changed: the locals are now insisting heatedly that there are three
>different languages.  No linguistic change led to this change of view:
>only political events did.  But now the linguistic changes are
>following, as the three groups scramble to distance their own speech
>from that of the others.

This actually accords with what one book on linguistic change suggested is
the *main* cause of language change: a social desire to differentiate one's
group from some other group.  (Unfortunately I cannot locate the book right
now).

>Right.  So a language can co-exist with its own descendant?
>I don't think so, and I think this conclusion can be destroyed by what
>Llyod elsewhere calls "simple logic".

>Is the English of 1999 "the same language" as the English of 1998?
>I take it that Lloyd and Steve would at once answer "yes".
>So: is the English of 1998 "the same language" as the English of 1997?
>If you answered "yes" the first time, you must answer "yes" now.
>But you can see where this leading.  If the answer is "yes", then, by
>transitivity, the English of 1999 is "the same language" as the English
>of King Alfred the Great 1000 years ago.  Are you happy with this?

There is another way out of this dilemma.  At least in many cases
substantial language change occurs in a *single* generation.  In the
history of English, one such case occurred during the Wars of Roses, and
separates Middle English from Modern English.

And it is occurring right now for the Blackfoot language, with older tribe
members speaking Old Blackfoot, and the younger ones speaking New
Blackfoot.  The changes are quite substantial, and include replacement of
vowel+glottal stop with a long/creaky vowel.

>Take a real case in this vein.  Is modern Greek "the same language" as
>ancient Greek?  If not, where's the cutoff point?

One of two places:
1. at some historical point where there was a major break between
successive generations.

2. at the point where any older dialects are not easily comprehensible to
someone knowing the modern literary standard language.  (Choosing the
literary standard here  deals with the issue of the subtle changes over
time in modern Greek).

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


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Oct  6 02:51:02 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 19:51:02 -0700
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <001001bf0b7f$25d177a0$d405703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.OCT.1999.195102.0700.>

At 10:05 PM 9/30/99 +0200, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:
>The Virgin Mary's role in (Catholic) Christianity has greatly increased over
>the centuries, especially in the 19th c., and it looks to me (no offense
>intended to people's religious convictions) that this is a consequence of the
>psychological gap left by banning Mari.

This may certainly have been part of it.  However, a large part of the
modern Marian treatment in Catholic Christianity goes back to the
assimilation of the Romano-Egyptian worship of Isis.  (Of course, if it
happened once it could happen more often, and we could have a major
composite here).

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


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Oct  6 03:10:29 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 20:10:29 -0700
Subject: re pre-greek language
In-Reply-To: <37F787C4.533E0C55@Compuserve.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.OCT.1999.201029.0700.>

At 06:43 PM 10/3/99 +0200, Damien Erwan Perrotin wrote:
>Third there is the toponymy of Crete (and of a great part of mainland
>Greece. This toponymy is not Greek. The problem is that a number of
>place-names can be interpreted as IE, while not greek : thus
>knossos : the hill (Irish cnoc, Old English hnec)
>Argissa : the white place (from *arg-)
>Gortyne : the closed place (IE *ghert-).

This could simply mean there were several layers of language replacement in
the area.  Certainly I think it likely that there *were* pre-Greek IE
languages in the general area of the Greek peninsula.  For one thing, I
think a route through the Balkans the most likely route for the entry of
Anatolian into Anatolia. (One Web site I found makes an interesting case
for some of the pre-Greek toponyms being from a language related to
Tracian, which combined with the above, puts two other IE languages in the
general area).

>these toponyms are found in the central mediteranea area, up to Etruria
>(Crotona, Cortuna), but that could be an effect from the sea people
>invasion or not.

Or they could be from an older incursion of IE speakers.

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


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Wed Oct  6 04:07:26 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 00:07:26 EDT
Subject: Mycenaean Scribes
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.000726.EDT.>

I wrote
<<And the term "designed for a language" assumes something about the skill
and purpose of scribes who were matching symbols to meanings>>

In a message dated 10/5/99 9:37:26 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com replied:
<<Other scripts of the era match the sounds of the languages for which they
were developed very well.  Why should early Greeks be any dumber?>>

Dumbness has nothing to do with it, of course.  Our first evidence of
Egyptian and Phoenician script are apparently pictograms and only later
acquired phonological equivalencies.  (See also, 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com
just wrote in a very informative post: <<Linear A is autochtonous and cannot
be derived from cuneiform or hieroglyph, so it must have evolved from local
pictograms...>>)

There's also the matter of your statement that early scripts "matched sounds
very well."  MCV recently pointed out, the sound matches were not necessarily
complete matches:

<< The only options available at the time were complex logosyllabic systems
like Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform or Egyptian and Anatolian
hieroglyphics or simple open syllabaries (in their stripped down
version, consonantal alphabets), as used in the Semitic Levant.>>

Another possibly that I haven't seen mentioned - I don't know what it would
be called - is where scribes are primarily transcribing with descriptors from
a foreign language.  I remember reading about a case of Italian warehousemen
during WWII being given German glossaries so that they could keep inventories
that could be read in German (transcribing from I guess inventories in
Italian.)  These warehousers did not have grammars and did not know German.
So when they came to something not in the glossary, they improvised, often
with Italian additions - a kind of written pidgin, I guess.

If Mycenaean clerks were similarly required to keep track of the kinds of
matters we see later in Linear B, then they may well have been asked to use a
foreign script to write in and the script may have represented a mixture of
Mycenaean and, say, Minoan.

Regards,
Steve Long

PS - Just as a very small matter of civility, it really isn't necessary to
imply a slur like "dumber" where you may have guessed I intended no such
thing.  I hope you understand why neither you or I would want to have our
conclusions re-characterized in those kinds of terms.


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Wed Oct  6 04:22:05 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 00:22:05 EDT
Subject: NEWS re Black Sea Flood
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.002205.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/5/99 10:17:47 PM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu wrote:
<<Possibly it was a temporary lake created by melting glaciers, like
Lake Bonneville>>

I'm on the road and don't have my books, but I believe that the basin of the
Black Sea was formed by continental drift.  It was part of a bigger sea that
included the Mediterranean many millions of years ago - the Telthys Sea (I
think).  The eventual reduction in sea level would have (I think) separated
it from the Med, many millions of years ago.

Glacial lakes are generally much younger, the Pleistocene ending only about
12,000 years ago.  E.g., the Great Lakes.  I'm not sure about the now extinct
(except for the GSL) Bonneville.

On Mon, 27 Sep 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com quoted a news release:
>> The incoming salt water, more dense than the fresh water it
>> displaced, plunged to the bottom of the lake bed, transforming it
>> into a sea where the depths support no life.

L. Trask wrote:
<<But how could the Black Sea have been a freshwater lake during a period
when it had no outlet to the sea?>>

Regards,
Steve Long


From mclasutt at brigham.net  Wed Oct  6 04:30:20 1999
From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin)
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 22:30:20 -0600
Subject: Updates regarding UPenn tree
In-Reply-To: <l03130335b41d5fbdb420@[209.147.211.53]>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.OCT.1999.223020.0600.>

Rick Mc Callister wrote:

> /hw/ > /f/ does happen in a Scottish dialect of English

John McLaughlin wrote:

>> Are there any actual examples of *hw >*f in PGmc post-Grimm (other Dr
>> Crist's guess at *penkwe > *finhw- > *finf)?  It would seem that the
>> alveolar /n/ might preclude any assimilation of /hw/ to /f/.
>> Just thinking
>> off the top of my head.

What are the details of this /hw/ > /f/ change?  Is it due to mishearing as
Crist suggests for PIE *penkwe > *PGmc *finf?  Is it a regular change or
conditioned?

John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
mclasutt at brigham.net

Program Director
Utah State University On-Line Linguistics
http://english.usu.edu/lingnet

English Department
3200 Old Main Hill
Utah State University
Logan, UT  84322-3200

(435) 797-2738 (voice)
(435) 797-3797 (fax)


From mclasutt at brigham.net  Wed Oct  6 05:02:01 1999
From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin)
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 23:02:01 -0600
Subject: NEWS re Black Sea Flood
In-Reply-To: <l03130332b41d56898bb7@[209.147.211.53]>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.OCT.1999.230201.0600.>

Rick Mc Callister wrote:
> 	Possibly it was a temporary lake created by melting glaciers, like
> Lake Bonneville
>

Living on the bottom of that former inland sea, I must correct your
understanding of Lake Bonneville.  It was not created by melting glaciers,
but by the accumulation of water by normal processes during the last
glaciation when the Great Basin was much more moist that it is today.  The
lake was drained by a natural disaster when an earthquake triggered a
massive landslide at the lake's outlet to the Snake River Plain.  The outlet
was opened by a sizable piece and the lake waters began flowing out at a
colossal rate, increasing the size of the outlet tenfold in a matter of
hours.  For six weeks (approximately) the efflux carved out the canyon of
the Snake River in Southern Idaho while the lake dropped by scores of feet
in depth.  This happened during about 10,000 BP around the end of the last
glaciation and the lake has been shrinking in size ever since as the climate
of the Great Basin dried out.  All the huge intermountain lakes of the last
glaciation in the Great Basin (Lahontan--western Nevada, Bonneville-western
Utah, and a score of smaller ones) went through a similar process--growth
during a cool, moist climate, death as the climate dried out and evaporation
exceeded precipitation.  If you want an example of a lake that might be
considered a true "glacial" lake, you need to use Lake Missoula (I think
that's the name, or it's at least close) in north central Montana.  It was
formed by glacial melt and held in place by a glacial "dam".  When the dam
occasionally broke during warming periods, the waters of Lake Missoula
scoured southeastern Washington to form the Scablands.

John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
mclasutt at brigham.net

Program Director
Utah State University On-Line Linguistics
http://english.usu.edu/lingnet

English Department
3200 Old Main Hill
Utah State University
Logan, UT  84322-3200

(435) 797-2738 (voice)
(435) 797-3797 (fax)


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Wed Oct  6 08:34:24 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 09:34:24 +0100
Subject: Excluding Basque data
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19991002225446.009b2e20@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.093424.0100.>

On Sat, 2 Oct 1999, Roslyn M. Frank wrote:

[LT]

>> So tell me: how do my principal criteria of early attestation,
>> widespread distribution, and absence from neighboring languages "have
>> the effect" of biasing my results on phonological form?

> Could you share with us once more precisely what these criteria are?
> I seem to recall that earlier you listed them but I can't locate
> that email.

OK.  I propose the following primary criteria.

1. Early attestation

The word should be recorded early.  I have proposed a cut-off date of
1600, since the first substantial literature appears in the 16th
century.  Someone else (Jon Patrick?) suggested 1700 instead.  This is
reasonable: the 16th-century texts are not numerous; they are all
written by clerics; and they are overwhelmingly religious, with many of
them being translations.  The 17th-century literature, in contrast, is
much more voluminous, and it includes the first lay writers, notably the
important Oihenart.  I'm happy with 1700, though I suspect it won't make
a great deal of difference.  But nothing later.

2. Widespread distribution.

There exists a fairly conventional system of dialect boundaries, and
words are commonly reported according to the recognized dialects in
which they are attested.  Since some dialects are smaller than others,
and also less well recorded, I suggest the following provisional
groupings:

	(a) Bizkaian
	(b) Gipuzkoan
	(c) High Navarrese, Salazarese, Aezkoan
	(d) Lapurdian, Low Navarrese
	(e) Zuberoan, Roncalese

Now, I suggest counting a word as widespread if it is securely attested
in at least four of these five groupings.  Insisting on attestation in
all five would be more rigorous, and is possible, but it would certainly
exclude an unknown number of good candidates for native and ancient
status.  For example, <(h)itz> `word' is universal except that it is
absent from Bizkaian, which has only the Romance loan <berba>.  We could
argue about the details, but I wouldn't like to relax the criteria much
beyond my proposal.

3. Absence from neighboring languages

Basque has borrowed a vast number of words from neighboring languages,
mostly from Latin and Romance, but also a few from Celtic and Arabic,
and also from Germanic, though all the Germanic loans seem to have
entered via Romance.  In contrast, very few Basque words have penetrated
into Romance.

This is the hardest criterion to formalize, mainly because there exist a
number of Basque words which *may* be borrowed but for which a secure
source acceptable to all has not been identified.  I suggest that, if
Agud and Tovar's etymological dictionary shows a widespread belief or
suspicion among specialists that a word is borrowed, then it should be
excluded -- even if the loan origin is not certain.  Caution is vital
here, in my view.

A decision must be made about the very few shared words which are
thought to be of Basque origin.  For example, everybody believes that
the Castilian and Portuguese words for `left (hand)' are borrowed from
Basque <ezker>.  A policy must be adopted here, but such words are
vanishingly few anyway, and the decision is most unlikely to have any
significant consequences.

These are my primary criteria.  I personally would like to exclude, in
advance, obvious nursery words like <ama> `mother' and obvious imitative
words like <tu> `spit'.  However, I agree that it may not be easy to get
general agreement as to which words "obviously" fall into one of these
categories.  Still, I am hopeful that appeal to universal properties of
such formations will allow me to exclude at least the most blatant
cases, such as my two examples: it is well known that words like <ama>
`mother' and <tu> `spit' occur in languages all over the planet.

> Could you also define more precisely what you mean by "widespread
> distribution"?

I've just done so.

> For example, what would an unacceptable distribution be?
> Present in only the Gipuzkoan and Bizkaian dialects? Present in the
> "northern" dialects of Iparralde (French Basque region) but not in any of
> the other dialects?

Both of these distributions would be unacceptable under my proposed
criteria.

> Or contrarily would you argue that the phonology of a term used in
> all dialects always should takes precedence over one that is limited
> to one dialectal variant only?

This raises another matter.  When -- as so often -- a word exists in
several regional variant forms, what form should go into the list?
My answer is that we should simply appeal to the known phonological
prehistory of Basque, and use the form which can be reconstructed as the
common ancestor.

For example, take the word for `wine', which has the following regional
variants:

	old B		<arda~o> (nasalized)
	B		<ardao>
	G, HN, Sal, Aez	<ardo>
	L, LN		<arno>
	Z		<ardu~'> (final vowel nasalized and stressed)
	R		<ardau~> (nasalized)

The combining form is <ardan->, as in <ardantza> `vineyard' (<-tza>
noun-forming suffix) and <ardandu> `ferment' (<-tu> verb-forming
suffix).  We therefore reconstruct *<ardano> for Pre-Basque, with
familiar developments leading to the attested variants and to the
combining form.

I hope this clarifies things.

Finally (this is not a reply to Roz, who I don't think has raised this
point), if anybody out there still believes that my primary criteria are
somehow likely to skew the results in some phonological way, or if
anybody thinks that there exist better criteria for the purpose of
identifying the best candidates for native and ancient status in the
language, let's hear about it.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Wed Oct  6 09:33:17 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 10:33:17 +0100
Subject: Scots
In-Reply-To: <021101bf0e3d$1a948c40$e78e6395@roborr.uottawa.ca>
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.103317.0100.>

On Mon, 4 Oct 1999, Robert Orr wrote:

> I've only just read the first part of Larry Trask's posting, so this
> is a bit impertinent, but there is a comment that can be made right
> away on one of his points.

>> Is Scots a variety of English or a separate language?  Well, a number of
>> Scots have argued that it is a separate language, and, if it had not
>> been for the Act of Union in 1707, we might all recognie Scots as a
>> distinct language today.  But, because of that Act, we don't.  There are
>> no linguistic considerations here: just political ones.

> Actually, there is a linguistic consideration.  Scots used to have a
> large number of distinctive lexical items, differentiating it from
> "English". Many of these are now rare in everyday speech, thus
> reducing the amount of differentation.

Yes, but I think the linguistic consequences have largely followed the
political ones.

Before the union of England and Scotland, many Scots were deeply
sympathetic to the idea that Scots was, or should be, a distinct
language from English.  If Scotland had remained independent, it is
possible that a standard form of Scots might have emerged, quite
different from standard English.  But the Act of Union put paid to these
ideas, as ambitious Scots moved south, with the result that the Scots
came to accept the standard language of England as their own standard.
I think the gradual disappearance of specifically Scots forms is mostly
a consequence of the political union.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From amm11 at hermes.cam.ac.uk  Wed Oct  6 09:51:19 1999
From: amm11 at hermes.cam.ac.uk (A. McMahon)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 10:51:19 +0100
Subject: Updates regarding UPenn tree
In-Reply-To: <l03130335b41d5fbdb420@[209.147.211.53]>
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.105119.0100.>

Yes; just to expand, hw > f is common in Aberdeenshire (North-Eastern)
Scots, in words like 'what', 'which' - and I think it can show up as a
bilabial fricative as well as the more common labiodental.

		April McMahon
		Department of Linguistics / Selwyn College
		University of Cambridge
		Cambridge, CB3 9DA, UK

		Tel: +44 (0) 1223 335830
		Fax: +44 (0) 1223 335837


On Sun, 3 Oct 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote:

> /hw/ > /f/ does happen in a Scottish dialect of English

[ moderator snip ]


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Wed Oct  6 08:06:37 1999
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 08:06:37 -0000
Subject: PIE vs. Proto-Language)
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.080637.0000.>

Dear Steve and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: <X99Lynx at aol.com>
Sent: Monday, October 04, 1999 2:46 AM

<snip>

> Yeah.  And this multi-meaning of the word "language" can be a real problem in
> the discussion of broader language issues among list members here.  In
> correspondence with certain linguists, I've noticed a laudatory habit of
> being precise about the way the word is being used - the physiological event,
> the act of communication, speech versus the written word, and (once again)
> the Saussurian distinction between the act of speaking and as a specific
> "system of language" maintained by members of an identifiable speech
> community.  As I've pointed out before, "language" among biologists can refer
> to any behavior that has a communicative effect without regard to species.
> My impression is that the quote re monogenesis above refers to the
> distinction often made by paleobiologists - language as the emergence in
> humans of speech capabilities that other primates were/are not
> physiologically capable of.   The current issue in this area circles around
> what evidence in fossil finds suggests the emergence of physiological
> features that would make human speech complexity possible.

Yes, this would be the interpretation of 'language' that I would prefer in
terms of the discussion of monogenesis.

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/Athens/Forum/2803/index.html and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit
ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim
meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)


From mclasutt at brigham.net  Wed Oct  6 13:20:38 1999
From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 07:20:38 -0600
Subject: NEWS re Black Sea Flood
In-Reply-To: <7bd3cfd4.25298206@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.072038.0600.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Steve Long wrote:

> I quoted:
> << The incoming salt water, more dense than the fresh water it
> displaced, plunged to the bottom of the lake bed, transforming it
> into a sea where the depths support no life.>>

> It's a valid point.  I don't know what the scientists involved would say, but
> my guess is that they would say it's a matter of degree.

> Salinity is the relative concentration of ions dissolved in the water.
> Salinity in lakes is not only increased by lack of outflow, but also by the
> chemical composition of the inflow and the geology it passes through.  And
> another factor is the amount of climatic evaporation.  The Great Salt Lake is
> an example of especially high salinity due to the chemical makeup of the
> surrounding area - which includes the famous Bonneville Salt flats.  The
> Caspian Sea is an example of a closed lake or inland sea where the evidence
> is of a large reduction in water level even in historical times.  You'll see
> the climatic factor sometimes phrased as "salt lakes only occur in arid
> regions."

> The Black Sea is fed by rivers that don't flow through regions of high
> aridity, evaporation or especially concentrated salineous chemical deposits.
> So at least the inflow would tend to be less preconcentrating than those of
> heavily saline lakes like the Great Salt Lake or the Dead Sea.  Climatic
> evaporation would also seem to have been less of a factor, especially in the
> north.  So the relative salinity of the Black Sea 'before the flood' might
> still be conjectured to have been less than ocean-high levels of the entering
> Mediterranean.

A note on relative salinity for the non-fluid dynamics people.  Water of
different salinities does not mix very well in any condition except over
long periods of time and exceptionally high current or wave activity.  The
Great Salt Lake is an example of this.  The lake is only several dozen feet
deep at its deepest point, but there are actually two lakes, one on top of
the other.  The lake we see is composed of a solution that varies from 10 to
30% salinity depending on the evaporation/precipitation ratio over the last
few years (we're in a higher precipitation cycle right now, so the lake is
rising and salinity is dropping--we in the Great Basin benefit from global
warming).  This lake is about two dozen feet deep.

The other lake lies beneath the other one and is composed of a heavy brine
solution that approaches 40-50% salinity (I'm remembering right now, so the
numbers may be off a little, but the relative salinity is right) and never
varies by precipitation cycle.  In fact, if this lower lake were ever
exposed to the air for any length of time, there would be a massive
explosion of dissolved hydrogen sulfide that would wipe out all life in the
Valley (about 2 million persons) like the volcanic CO2 gas cloud did in
Cameroon a couple decades ago.

These two layers don't mix.  They are virtually independent of one another.
One of the chemical companies around the lake (a major producer of magnesium
chloride, potassium sulfate, and road salt), actually uses this to their
advantage.  Their major brine collection ponds are about 30 miles away from
the main plant.  Instead of pumping the brine through pipes or running it
through surface canals, they have scoured an open trench on the lake bed.
The heavier brine from their first pond sinks into the trench and flows by
gravity along it until it reaches the plant site where it is pumped into
surface ponds.  Their loss through mixing with the upper lake water is only
about 1%.

What does this have to do with the Black Sea?  Well, 1) it demonstrates how
different salinity layers don't mix well in lakes, 2) heavier salinity water
sinks.  If the Black Sea had developed as a freshwater lake and was later
inundated by Mediterranean salt water, then the heavier sea water would have
settled to the bottom.  If, however, the Black Sea was a body of water with
greater salinity, then the influx of Mediterranean water would have floated
on top and not mixed with the higher salinity layer.  The layers of the
Great Salt Lake, however, developed different salinity layers without a
major influx of new water.  The lake naturally developed layers.  Could this
layered salinity have also happened in the Black Sea without postulating
radical influxes of new water?  Probably.  The sea invasion theory may or
may not be correct, but there are other natural explanations for different
salinity layers in inland bodies of saline water.

John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
mclasutt at brigham.net

Program Director
Utah State University On-Line Linguistics
http://english.usu.edu/lingnet

English Department
3200 Old Main Hill
Utah State University
Logan, UT  84322-3200

(435) 797-2738 (voice)
(435) 797-3797 (fax)


From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Wed Oct  6 17:16:45 1999
From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max Wheeler)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 18:16:45 +0100
Subject: Basque 'sei'
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.181645.0100.>

-- Begin original message --

> From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
> Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 08:53:36 +0100 (BST)

> But just how late could a Gascon word for `six' be borrowed into Basque?
> After all, the Basque names for `7, 8, 9, 10' and so on are decidedly
> non-Romance.

> With respect, I don't think the facts of modern Gascon are necessarily
> relevant, since the Basque word is certainly not borrowed from modern
> Gascon.  Is there any possibility of dating any of the relevant Gascon
> phonological developments?

-- End original message --

Firstly, just a reminder that it's misleading to speak of seis > sei as 'a
Gascon development' as if it were typical of ALL Gascon of ALL times.
According to Ronjat (I. 280) "altern. de tipe s/-i suivant liaisons en,,,pays
de Foix et quelques parlers aq[uitains] voisins" i.e. SE Gascon not adjacent
to Basque speaking region. He notes -s > -h in SW "aquitain" (i.e. Basses
Pyrenees, adjacent to Basque region), having noted on the previous page that
"les faits aq[uitains] S.-O. en liaison [sont] beaucoup plus recents que les
faits [du] l[anguedocien] occ[idental] plus aut" The rest of "aquitain" has
final -s unchanged. Luchaire (1879) on Pyrenean Gascon has abundant cases of
final /-s/ maintained, in dialect transcriptions. The only item I can see with
s-vocalization in any of his transcribed dialect texts is <mais> 'more' in
proclitic contexts before /j/ or /dZ/. Nothing similar in the documents he
cites. And <seis>, he notes, is often pronounced with an initial pal.-alv
fricative.

I think you need to be desparate to get Basque 15th-century <sei> 'six' out of
this. Even the Italian 'etymology' is less worse.

Max
______________________________________________________________
Max W. Wheeler
School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer
BRIGHTON BN1 9QH, G.B.

Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975 Fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 Email: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk
______________________________________________________________


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Wed Oct  6 17:12:51 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 18:12:51 +0100
Subject: Possessives
In-Reply-To: <003e01bf0d38$e5c536e0$239f113f@oemcomputer>
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.181251.0100.>

On Sun, 3 Oct 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote:

The moderator has -- mercifully -- pulled the plug on this thread, but
he has invited me to post a final comment.  Thanks, Rich -- I'll try to
be brief, by my standards.

> One of the principal benefits of terming this class of words
> "possessive pronouns" is that it enables us to identify comparable
> classes of words in IE, English, and Basque --- even though the
> details of their employment may differ.

Well, this reminds me of Abe Lincoln's little joke.  "How many legs does
a sheep have if you call the tail a leg?"  "Five?"  "No, four: calling
the tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."

Possessive items, in general, are "comparable" among languages only
insofar as they are translation equivalents.  Syntactically, they can
and do exhibit many different kinds of behavior, requiring them to be
assigned to various parts of speech, or sometimes to no part of speech.

The English possessives like `my' are determiners because they behave
like determiners.  They do not behave like pronouns, and so they are not
pronouns.  And they certainly don't behave like adjectives.

The Basque possessives like <nere> `my' exhibit none of the properties
of the Basque determiners and they cannot be classified as determiners.
They are also certainly not adjectives, since they behave nothing like
adjectives.  They are probably best regarded as case-inflected forms of
pronouns.

The Latin possessives like <meus> `my', on the whole, are probably best
regarded as adjectives, since they behave like adjectives in that
language.  They are certainly not determiners, and they don't look much
like pronouns, either.

Other languages use other strategies.  Some have no distinct possessive
forms at all, but simply adpose the free forms of pronouns to head
nouns.  Some use a particle to link a free pronoun to its head.  Some
use bound markers attached to head nouns, often markers bearing no
resemblance to free pronouns.  And some languages employ mixed
strategies with two or more of these in various combinations; examples
are Turkish and Jacaltec.

Classing all of these are "possessive pronouns" *tout court* is, at the
very least, unhelpful.

> The essential quality of any adjective is that it designates a
> subcategory of a catgeory of objects.

No, not at all.

This is a prototypical semantic property of adjectives in languages that
have them, but `adjective' is a syntactic category, not a semantic
category, and not all adjectives, even in English, have this property.

For example, consider `Susie is a mere child.'  Here the adjective
`mere' does not define a subclass of the class of children: children are
not divided into mere and non-mere varieties.  Or consider this one:
`Lisa is a heavy smoker'.  This time the adjective `heavy' does not
perform any subclassification of the set of smokers.  In fact, it
doesn't even apply semantically to smokers, or to Lisa: instead, it
applies to Lisa's habit.

> 'Black dog' can be represented logically as a small circle ('black')
> within a larger circle ('dog'). Possessive pronouns can be
> represented logically in exactly the same way.

For certain purposes, perhaps.  But this is not an argument that `my' is
a pronoun: rather, it appears to be a (feeble) argument that `my' is an
adjective -- which it is not.

> Of course, this is exactly the same situation as when nouns are used
> attributively: "newspaper account".

Indeed.  It begins to become clear that semantic tests are not very
useful for identifying syntactic categories.  But we linguists knew
that.

> I think your basic problem is that you need to take a serious look
> at your definition of 'adjective'.

Well, *one* of us certainly does. ;-)

[LT]

>> The noun `arrival' is not a verb because it's related to the verb
>> `arrive'.

> Perhaps not when you're playing the 'slots' but that is not the only
> game in town by a long shot!

> I sincerely feel sorry for you if you cannot see that.

You mean there's an Arkansas analysis in which `arrival' is a verb?
Most interesting.

[on the slot-and-filler approach]

> I remember the first manifestations of the 'slot system' as opposed
> to teaching grammar in the training I received as an aspirant
> foreign language instructor.

> This 'grammarless' method of teaching language was then extended to
> English instruction in the US,

I would hardly describe the slot-and-filler approach as "grammarless".
It is in fact a thoroughly grammatical approach.  Not so traditional, of
course, but certainly grammatical in nature.  Far more so than the
semantic approach which I dismissed above.

> and the terrible language skills of today's youth are
> directly attributable to this method of instruction, IMHO.

Dear me.  The linguistic shortcomings of our young people are to be laid
at the door of slot-and-filler grammar?

That's a new one on me.

Oh, by the way -- further bad news for the Arkansas school of linguistic
description.  I've recently written the entry on parts of speech for the
forthcoming encyclopedia of grammatical categories from Elsevier.  I'm
afraid my baleful influence is getting out of hand.  Doubtless the
nation's young people are in for yet another body-blow. ;-)

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From ECOLING at aol.com  Wed Oct  6 17:34:56 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 13:34:56 EDT
Subject: Africa vs. Americas, Multilateral Comparison
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.133456.EDT.>

In comparing Joseph Greenberg's work on
African language classification vs. on
Amerindian language classification,
it is of course important to note differences, partly in order to
discover whatever limitations there may be on the use of the
Multilateral Comparison technique.
Does its undeniable usefulness in the history of linguistics
tail off to very little after some approximate time depth?
Does its undeniable usefulness become much less under
certain kinds of social or linguistic conditions?

Herbert Stahlke is among those who have pointed out that
one must include in the techniques available to linguists
also those techniques which permit one to discover new
hypotheses for later more detailed examination.
Multilateral comparison has always been such a technique,
for hundreds of years
(and I hasten to add, though it should not be necessary,
that it long predated Greenberg and is independent of
any particular application of it, by Greenberg or by anyone else).
One cannot demand at the beginning of new hypotheses
that they arrive fully-formed from the head of Zeus,
complete with proofs to the most exacting standards of
long-established disciplines.

(As Thomas Kuhn says, most
of the work of most scientists consists in "mopping-up" small
details, new ideas are usually attacked, anomalies are not even seen,
are rarely collected to help open doors to new syntheses.)

So empirical studies of Greenberg's application of this technique
in his work on African language classification and in his work on
Amerind language classification are very important.
In this, we can treat the African vs. American as a variable,
and consider the different outcomes (of course trying to factor
out any other variables which are not essential to the technique
of Multilateral Comparison itself, but which are "accidental"
in the philosophical sense, accidents of how Greenberg may
have applied the technique in one vs. in the other instance.

John E. McLaughlin has taken a sceptical approach towards this,
claiming that the two situations are "apples" vs. "oranges".
(I attach below only the crucial parts of McLaughlin's most
recent posting in reply to Stahlke.)
I believe such an approach is not in the interests of science as a whole,
because it essentially tells us not to study a body of data available
to us.  It is also impossible for anyone to be so omniscient as to
know in advance that nothing fruitful can be derived.
I believe McLaughlin's urging us not to even study this question
is similar to or influenced by the general rejection of Greenberg's
work, and wish to remind readers that there was a similar reaction
at first to Greenberg's African language classifications.
(Which does NOT imply anything at all concerning the quality or
success of Greenberg's work on Amerind neither that it is of
the same quality or success, nor that it is not.)

Rather, the point of a study of the differences between Multilateral
Comparison applied to the African and the American contexts
is precisely to discover the empirical facts, whether the technique
works similarly or differently in the two contexts, with as many
specific detailed answers to this as possible.

We can imagine that there is a different time depth,
and I for one think this is a major variable, and agree with
McLaughlin and with many others on this:

[I have deleted the word "comparative" from the following
quotation, because Greenberg's method is not the comparative method.
But McLaughlin's use of it I think reflects in some way the general failure
of historical linguists to appreciate the real necessity for
both discovery procedures and testing procedures --
one should not confuse Multilateral Comparison with
much more detailed Comparative-Historical techniques.]

[JM]
>You have also hit upon the main problem with G's work--
>he IS trying to extend the [...] method [...] back to between 12 and 40k

It is not at all certain that the time depths are so different,
if one takes Africa as a whole, and considers substrate languages
or families (at least this is what I understand from some of Stahlke's
commentaries, and he should be a good source for this).
Nevertheless, within certain SUBSETS of the African materials,
the time depths will of course be less, as also within certain subsets
of the American materials.  Perhaps the technique of Multilateral
Comparison will be useful within such subsets, but not between them?
It should be clear that the issue is much, much more complicated than
any global a priori judgment that the time depth in the Americas is
uniformly greater
(that is not exactly what McLaughlin says, but I think it underlies
the tone of his suggestion that the method is worthless in the Americas).

Stahlke wrote:

> McLaughlin writes:

> Hmmmm.
> That's the difference between the Americas and Africa.  Africa's had a stable
> indigenous population.  The Americas haven't.  Indeed, it's quite possible
> that northwestern North America has been the site of many groups of people
> from Asia, speaking different languages, landing on the shores of or walking
> across the "bridge" to a New World.

> >>>>>>>>>>

Stahlke responds:

> This apparent difference is deceiving.  The Khoi-San languages, with or
> without the Tanzanian pair, represent a clearly distinct group probably
> originating in southern Africa.  Although all but substratal information on
> pre-Bantu pygmy languages has disappeared, and the substratal information
> isn't any better than in most other parts of the world (worse, in fact), they
> must have represented at least one ancient language family that has
> disappeared.  Beyond those, the major migrations appear to have east to west
> (most of Niger-Congo) and north to south (Cushitic, Nilotic, and Bantu, in
> that order).  Nilo-Saharan, if Songhay belongs in it, may represent a central
> Sahara to Great Lakes migration.  Cushitic, as a branch of Afro-Asiatic,
> represents either a group that originated somewhere along the Red Sea or a
> migration from the Arabian Peninsula.  A-A probably is NE African in origin.
> All of these represent time depths of rather less than 40k:  N-C and A-A in
> 10k-15k range, and Nilo-Saharan and older.  At these time depths, it's hard
> to make a case that extra-continent vs. intra-continental orign makes much of
> a difference.

McLaughlin then responded as follows.
My comments follow about why McLaughlin's are not to the point.

[JM]
>You're missing the point.  You're describing a mixing and matching WITHIN
>the confines of native Africa.  But still within Africa.  You haven't
>described a single event here of an EXTERNAL group coming into Africa and
>affecting the mix of languages.  In the Americas, we're talking about just
>the opposite.  We're discussing groups from northeast Asia coming INTO
>America from outside a number of times overland during the life of the
>Bering bridge and by sea afterwards.  These immigrants would be bringing
>languages from OUTSIDE the Americas, not just moving around within the same
>group of languages as you're describing for Africa (and as also happened
>within the American continents).  This could have happened many, many times,
>although G's "Amerind" implies ONE migration by land at least 12k (but more
>likely much earlier) ago, one migration (possibly by sea) for Na-Dene, and
>one migration by sea for Eskimo-Aleut.

>Africa and the Americas are apples and oranges as far as linguistic history
>and population history is concerned.

***

Therefore it seems to be implied that we should not study the application
of Multilateral Comparison to the American context?

Why not?

McLaughlin's comments only imply that the Multilateral Comparison technique
may very possibly be unable to handle the relations of all of the languages
of the Americas, presumably on the grounds (I am attempting to fill out
what I think is McLaughlin's intent here, common sense with which I agree)
that there may be many migrations and the time depth between back to a common
origin in Asia, if there were such, would be so great as to be beyond the
reach of the technique, in general.

But that in no way implies that Multilateral Comparison technique
is not useful.  It may turn out (from future hindsight) to have been useful
only within certain subgroups of Amerind languages.
These might reflect the groups about which Greenberg felt more secure,
but not his highest-level classifications within Amerind.
After all, the results of Multilateral Comparison may equally be taken
to indicate the greatest probability of non-relation among those groups
linked only at the highest level of classification.  This statement,
while true, is often surprising to both supporters and detractors of
the technique.  They simply had not thought of it from that perspective.
Or there might be surprises, of other kinds.

[For a general explanation of Multilateral Comparison,
please see my earlier message, slightly revised, which
courtesy of Pat Ryan is now posted at his web site,
accessible from the bottom of his main page
<http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/index.html>
or more specifically from
<http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/comment-MultilateralComparison.htm
>
Please suggest any further revisions or improvements to
that explanation, I want it to be objective and balanced.
In agreeing with Pat Ryan to place it there, I insisted that it not
be taken as comment pro or con any other positions, and that
its scope not be exaggerated.  It is not about Greenberg,
it is about the technique of Multilateral Comparison.]

McLaughlin I think also misses the point of Stahlke's commentary.
That is that the time depths may be just as great in Africa,
when we consider the groupings which cannot be linked,
and the substrates, etc.  Why should it matter that for the Americas
we think in terms of migrations, whether across the Bering land
bridge or along older seacoasts, whereas for Africa the physical
distances and barriers are less.  Should that make ANY technique
applicable or not applicable?  Or should each technique merely give
slightly different results in different types of context?

The point of studying the application of the technique of Multilateral
Comparison to both Africa and the Americas is precisely to get a
better idea of what the differences might be.  The results should be
empirical findings, not a priori judgements in advance.
Saying the two are "apples and oranges" is to say
we should not and cannot consider them at the same time.
That is to block an entire domain of science, and to deny the use of
one of the most potent tools of science, the use of a variable or variables
(here Africa vs. the Americas, refined into more detailed variables)
to discover the effect of those variables on some outcomes
(here the results of using the technique of Multilateral Comparison).

I believe an underlying psychological reason for not treating the
African and the American applications of Multilateral Comparison
together is simply the great discomfort most comparative-historical
linguists have with techniques which are used to discover plausible
hypotheses for future work.  They are simply not comfortable at
the edges of new knowledge, because it cannot have the certainty
of the most exacting techniques applied in long-established fields.
There is obviously no criticism here of those more detailed techniques,
it is simply inappropriate to insist on them at the edges of new knowledge.
It manifests an inflexibility to be unable to adapt one's choice of
techniques
to the differences between long-established fields and the edges of
significantly new knowledge not limited to filling in details.
No one person may be comfortable working in both kinds of domains,
but that does not entitle either personality for criticising those
who prefer the other type of domain.
And, fortunately, there is a continuum of intermediate types of work,
at neither of the two extremes.

Each of us should work where we are most comfortable,
because we will do better work there.
Each of us should be supportive of those who work in
a domain requiring different sets of techniques
from those in our own preferred domain,
and should keep the channels open for
flow of significant information between domains of different kinds.

That means those who prefer to work in domains where the
more detailed comparative-historical method is applicable should make the
results of our studies available in forms which those working
in other domains can use without having to be specialists in our own
particular domain.  (And of course should not make claims to greater
certainty than we have a good basis for doing.)
[This is currently sometimes the case, often not.]

It also means those who prefer to work in domains where
Multilateral Comparison is applicable should make the
results of our studies available in forms which those working
in other domains can use without having to be specialists in our own
particular domain.    (And of course should not make claims to greater
certainty than we have a good basis for doing.)
[This is currently sometimes the case, often not.]

No one set of techniques has an exclusive right to all fields
of linguistics.

For a more succesful future for historical linguistics in general,
as for any other field,
it is essential that we use issues which generate public excitement
and channel that interest in productive ways.
Historical linguists shouldbe at the forefront of actively
exploring correlations between language, ethnicity, blood groups,
dentition types, DNA studies, and all other sources of information
which can give clues to the history of humanity.
That can give a better financial foundation to linguistics,
than can a narrow focus exclusively on filling in details within
accepted frameworks.

Paradoxically, public interest is also a very good way,
perhaps the best way, to get more respect and support precisely for
the most advanced and highly precise techniques of
Comparative-Historical techniques.
An attitude of generously providing the results of
the best Comparative-Historical techniques to all comers,
even to those exploring hypotheses which are not favored by
those more narrowly focused, is the best way of spreading
education in the value of those precise techniques.

The reaction to Greenberg's book on languages of the Americas
SHOULD HAVE BEEN from the very beginning
"I am a specialist in X, and can correct some of his data.
Let's see what differnence that would make in his conclusions."
Instead it was mostly "there are errors, so the work is worthless".

To those who have said Greenberg's judgements are purely personal and
not replicable, I can only reply, I had no difficulty selecting from
his data that which I considered more closely vs. less closely similar,
even if I might not have done it exactly the way he would have,
and exploring whether using only the more highly similar data had
any significant impact on his results.
I had no difficulty taking some of the lists of corrections (after they
were published much later by various specialists), and examining
some of Greenberg's results to estimate whether particular corrections
would make any significant difference.
(In neither case did I think the changed data would dictate
significantly different results, though now many years later,
with many more corrections available, I would like to have the time
to examine this again.)

I think the objection that Greenberg's work is not objectively replicable
is really less what the objectors think it is, and mostly simply their
discomfort with exploring a field where they cannot use their most
favored techniques, and where results have a much lower
level of security of being right than they are accustomed to.
But I have also learned from later exchanges that trained linguists
do have different judgments of what constitutes closer similarity,
and therefore now strongly advocate explicit studies of the technique
of judging similarity.

Personally, I am comfortable working both in filling in details
in given and accepted frameworks, and in exploring data sets which
may suggest changing frameworks, or in which we cannot have
an exact and detailed answer.  Not everyone is comfortable
across such divides.  That's OK.  But those of different preferences
should not be critizing each other, they should be cooperating
productively.

Sincerely,
Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics


From ECOLING at aol.com  Wed Oct  6 17:51:32 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 13:51:32 EDT
Subject: Azkue's dictionary
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.135132.EDT.>

Thanks to Larry Trask for the very informative review
of two Basque dictionaries.  I am printing a copy to keep on
permanent file.

I would only have one caveat, which is that the paragraph
quoted below is listed as a "major drawback" of Azkue's dictionary.
Many dictionary users who are interested in the vocabulary of
the language might consider it an advantage,
that one can find a word under whatever dialect variant
the dictionary maker had evidence for.

(The lack of cross-references to eymologically related items
is a drawback for anyone interested in etymologies, it is true.
Perhaps a list of cross-references and
dates of attestation could be prepared by someone
as a supplement to Azkue's dictionary,
since it is in Spanish and French and otherwise provides
the best information on dialectal provenience?)

Rather this quoted paragraph should be part of indications
on how one uses Azkue's dictionary,
not under a list of supposed drawbacks of Azkue's dictionary.

Lloyd Anderson

>Third, when -- as so often -- a word exists in several regional
>variants, Azkue enters each variant separately in its own alphabetical
>place, and he hardly ever provides cross-references.  Consequently, any
>attempt at using his dictionary without heavy editing will lead to
>multiple entries for single words.  This is potentially a serious
>problem: for example, the Basque word for `strawberry' exhibits at least
>twenty regional variants.  This is admittedly an exceptional case, but
>very many words exhibit two to six regional variant forms, and accepting
>Azkue's headwords without suitable editing will produce badly skewed
>results.

Of course one would edit these, and any linguist would recognize
many or most etymologically related words with the same meanings.
On the whole, it seems from Larry Trask's review of it that Jon Patrick is
on very solid ground in using Azkue's dictionary as a basis for
analytical studies.


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Wed Oct  6 18:24:01 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 13:24:01 -0500
Subject: re pre-greek language
In-Reply-To: <37F787C4.533E0C55@Compuserve.com>
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.132401.0500.>

There were attempts to link Linear scripts to earlier Anatolian scripts
especially what's sometimes called "Hittite Hieroglyphic" [actually Palaic,
I think]

[ Moderator's note:
  Luwian, rather than Palaic.
  --rma ]

There have also attempts to read Linear A as one or another Anatolian language

>There is many problems about the pre-greek languages of the Aegean, and
>Linear A is only one of them.
>Linear A is autochtonous and cannot be derived from cuneifor or
>hieroglyph, so it must have evolved from local pictograms and thus
>reflects the language it was first designed for (even if it was not
>perfect). But that is not the main reason for thinking that the
>indigenous language of Crete was not Greek.
[snip]

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Wed Oct  6 18:20:22 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 14:20:22 EDT
Subject: Contributions by Steve Long
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.142022.EDT.>

>colkitto at sprint.ca writes:

>Actually, there is a linguistic consideration.  Scots used to have a large
>number of distinctive lexical items, differentiating it from "English". Many
>of these are now rare in everyday speech, thus reducing the amount of
>differentation.>>

-- upper-class Scots began conforming to southern English useage long before
the Act of Union of 1707.


From s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca  Wed Oct  6 19:37:24 1999
From: s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca (Stephane Goyette)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 15:37:24 -0400
Subject: Basque 'sei'
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9910040843370.6056-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.153724.0400.>

On Mon, 4 Oct 1999, Larry Trask wrote:

> Perhaps, but how old is the Gascon phonology?  As I've pointed out
> elsewhere, place names appear to show Gascon /s/ corresponding to Basque
> laminal <z>, not to apical <s>.

I'm not sure I follow. In the case of these place names, one is dealing
with Basque (or 'Aquitanian') names borrowed into Late Latin/Early
Romance, which only had one sibilant: laminal and apical /s/ would both be
borrowed as Latin/Romance /s/, whatever its exact point of articulation
was.

> Recall that Latin /s/ was almost
> invariably borrowed as Basque <z>, and so it appears that the apical /s/
> of Ibero-Romance and Gascon is at least a post-Roman development.

Agreed. However, it is almost certainly not recent: Gascon is basically a
highly Ibero-Romance-like language which, since the earliest Middle Ages,
has been increasingly influenced by Provencal, meaning that
Gascon/Ibero-Romance isoglosses are as a rule ancient (as opposed to
Gascon/Provencal isoglosses). Considering that apical /s/ is universal in
the more isolated mountain dialects of Gascon, and becomes increasingly
rare as one moves North and East, my impression is of an older feature
which has been receding in the face of Provencal influence.

> But just how late could a Gascon word for `six' be borrowed into Basque?
> After all, the Basque names for `7, 8, 9, 10' and so on are decidedly
> non-Romance.

If there is no known case of a word for "six" alone being borrowed,
leaving the rest of the numeral system intact, then of course /sei/ must
be assumed to be a native Basque word.

> With respect, I don't think the facts of modern Gascon are necessarily
> relevant, since the Basque word is certainly not borrowed from modern
> Gascon.  Is there any possibility of dating any of the relevant Gascon
> phonological developments?

Regarding apical /s/, see above. Regarding final /s/ to /j/:
Unfortunately, Gascons used Provencal (and Latin, of course) as their
written language for most of the Middle Ages; Old Provencal was itself a
highly standardized language, which was later replaced by another highly
standardized written language, French, meaning that dating this change
with any precision is well-nigh impossible.

HOWEVER...the fact that this change, far from being confined to Gascony,
is widespread in Southern France (where, by the way, it often applies
across the board, i.e. final /s/ shifts to /j/ whatever the position of
the word) does suggest it could go back to Medieval times: this is plainly
not a recent, strictly local change in Gascon.

Stephane Goyette
University of Ottawa
stephane at Goyette.com


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Wed Oct  6 19:48:03 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 15:48:03 EDT
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.154803.EDT.>

Dear IEists:
I'm not always quite sure how interested members of the list are in the
historical and archaeological evidence.  And I'm not always sure about how it
even impacts linguistic conclusions.

IF it is in any way important to any of the members, perhaps this quick note
is worthwhile.

At this point in time, THERE IS NO MATERIAL EVIDENCE AT ALL AS TO WHEN
GREEK-SPEAKERS APPEARED IN GREECE.  THE ONLY EVIDENCE OF A SIGNIFICANT
MIGRATION DURING THIS PERIOD (3000BC-1650BC) IS FROM ANATOLIA.

ALTHOUGH THIS MIGRATION MAY HAVE INTRODUCED GREEK INTO GREECE, THERE IS NO
REAL EVIDENCE TO JUSTIFY EVEN THIS CONCLUSION.  I give a fairly current
summary of the evidence below.

List members may want to be aware that the following statement by Mr. Crist
may not be particularly accurate with regard to the current knowledge
regarding Greek prehistory.

On10/6/99 12:48:29 AM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu wrote: << perhaps you
mean that the Greek-speaking presence in what is now Greece goes back further
than e.g. 2100-1900 BCE.  The most widely accepted view is that the
destruction of sites which we find in that period represent the invasion of
speakers of an early form of Greek.  The preceding cultural tradition in
Greece is substantially different.>>

I'm not sure what sites or culture are being spoken of above.  But there is
no special break in "cultural tradition" - except one - that occurs during
this time.  More importantly, there is a continuity in many aspects of the
early Greek material culture that remain consistent right from the end of the
Neolithic (about 3500BC) through to the end of the Middle Helladic (about
1500BC).

Currently (1990's), the generally accepted stratigraphics of cultures in
Greece from this period runs sometime like:

Late Neolithic (ending about 3500BC)
   - Early Helladic -
Eutresis (ending about 2650BC)
Korakau (about 2650 - 2150BC)
Lefkandi (2400 - 2150BC ) (co-existing)
Tyrins (2150BC-2000BC)
   - Middle Helladic (2000-1650BC)
(all of these might be dated somewhat later based on new evidence gathered
from the Santonini/Thera eruption sites.)

There is clear CONTINUITY between all of these cultures EXCEPT for Lefkandi
I.  (Tyrins is described as "the result of a process of "cultural fusion"
between the Korakou and "Lefkandi I" cultures,... Significantly, this process
of fusion did NOT extend all over Mainland Greece. In Messenia, Laconia, and
the interior of west-central Greece (Aetolia, Acarnania), the Korakou culture
may have continued while the Tiryns culture flourished elsewhere." )  (Caps
theirs.)

The main attributes of Middle Helladic (starting about 2000BC) e.g. Gray
Minyan pottery and longhouses/megarons, are now viewed as CONTINUATIONS of
Korakou or Tyrins  (which itself was a "fusion" culture.)  In the bad old
days, Gray Minyon was associated with "the arrival of the Greeks" from the
north, but it is now quite clear that the pottery style is a continuance that
never appears father north than the Pelopenese.

By far, the single striking example of an abject change in material culture
on the Greek mainland before the Mycenaean period is associated with the
appearance of "Lefkandi" culture.

What is very apparent about Lefkandi however is that it DOES NOT represent
any invasion or migration from the north, but rather the sudden appearance of
a well-established culture from Anatolia.

"The Lafkandi culture of the late EH II central Greek Mainland is probably
best viewed as the result of a trans-Aegean population movement from Western
Anatolia through the northern Cyclades (attested there by the EC IIB or EC
IIIA "Kastri Group" of Naxos, Delos, Syros, and Keos) and Sporades (at the
site of Palamari on Skyros) to the eastern seaboard of central Greece
(Euboea, Raphina, Pefkakia).

"Although the "Lefkandi I" culture penetrates westward into the interior of
Boeotia..., it does not appear to have extended southwards into the
Peloponnese,... This westward movement across the Aegean in NOT marked by
violence at any known site. Indeed, there is considerable continuity from the
EH/EC IIA to IIB periods at sites such as Chalandriani (Syros), Ayia Irini
(Keos), Raphina (Attica), and Thebes and Eutresis (Boeotia). [Caps theirs.]

"Although it is at first difficult to imagine such a dramatic change in
ceramics, and in some cases seemingly in architecture [megara] as well,
having taken place without the introduction of new people(s), some
authorities (e.g. Davis) have suggested trade rather than migration as a
preferable interpretative scenario."

(I'm traveling but I did have this info on my hard drive.
Most of the info above can be found on the Dartmouth webite
-http://tenaya.cs.dartmouth.edu/history/bronze_age - or in works cited in the
exhaustive bibliography that can found there.)

To sum up:  THE ONLY EVIDENCE OF A SIGNIFICANT MIGRATION INTO GREECE BETWEEN
NEOLITHIC AND MYCENAEAN TIMES IS FROM ANATOLIA.  THERE IS NOTHING TO CLEARLY
IDENTIFY THE FIRST APPEARANCE OF GREEK WITH THIS MIGRATION.

Sean Crist also wrote:
<<Given that the latest date of PIE unity is around 4000 BCE (again, pace
Renfrew), there's only so much of a time range to play with; you might manage
to make a case that the Greeks were in Greece a little earlier, but not
massively earlier.>>

Based on the evidence above, there is nothing to preclude the conjecture that
"Greeks were in Greece" during or even before the Neolithic.  If one connects
PIE with the first appearance of agriculture (a la Renfrew), then that could
move the date of "proto-Greek" or its ancestors being in mainland Greece back
towards 7000BC.

Regards,
Steve Long


From edsel at glo.be  Wed Oct  6 21:17:48 1999
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 23:17:48 +0200
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.231748.0200.>

-----Original Message-----
From: Roslyn M. Frank <roz-frank at uiowa.edu>
Date: Wednesday, October 06, 1999 8:02 PM

[snip]
>>Basque <maite>, in its definite form <maitea>, is of course a common way
>>of addressing a sweetheart of either sex.  It is literally `(my)
>>beloved', even though it is functionally roughly equivalent to English
>>`love' here.

>Let us agree to disagree about which form is the common used as a form of
>address, one with a "definite article" or one without. Clearly we have have
>different views about this situation as was demonstrated in the case of our
>earlier discussion on whether <beltz> was a proper nickname for a bear,
>rather than <beltza>. From your previous comments, you do not wish to
>concede that in such circumstance the <mugagabe> unsuffixed form is often
>used.

[ moderator snip ]

>If, on the other hand, one writes a letter, there is clearly the option of
>using the "definite article" along with their "nickname" when "addressing"
>the person.

>Then there are many examples of the numens who populate Basque folklore and
>mythology. The (nick)names of many of these beings, e.g., Praka Gorri "Red
>Pants", appear without the definite article. However, I might refer to this
>same character, when writing in Euskera, in a given sentence as Praka
>Gorria. But when I do, I've changed the status of his (nick)name to
>something like "The One with Red Pants." It can be done, the "definite
>article" can be added, but when it is the name takes on a different nuance
>of meaning.

[ moderator snip ]

[Ed Selleslagh]

Note that similar, but not always identical, usages exist in various European
languages like regional colloquial Peninsular Spanish ('la Maruja'), regional
colloquial Dutch ('de Jan'), German ('der Otto') etc. The definite article is
only used when speaking ABOUT the person, not TO him/her.

Ed.


From s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca  Wed Oct  6 23:07:04 1999
From: s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca (Stephane Goyette)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 19:07:04 -0400
Subject: "six" and "seven" Mediterranean
In-Reply-To: <703a9400.252babe1@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.190704.0400.>

On Tue, 5 Oct 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote:

>> but surely there's more
>> than just chance resemblance between the numeral names for "6"
>> and "7" as found all over the Mediterranean:

>> Egyptian:       sjsw (*sds-)            sfxw (*sp'3-)
>> Berber:         sd.is                   sa (*sab-)
>> Akkadian:       s^is^s^et (*s^id_s^-)   sebet (*sab3-)
>> Indo-European:  swek^s ~ s^wek^s        sep(h3)tm
>> Georgian:       ekwsi                   s^vidi
>> Etruscan:       s^a                     semph
>> Basque:         sei (*s^ei)             zazpi (*sasbi)

> These are language families which for the most part are
> thought to be unrelated or unrelatable, except for the first
> three which are parts of Afro-Asiatic.

It is perhaps pertinent to note, in connection to the Indo-European forms,
that Andre Martinet (DES STEPPES AUX OCEANS, p.20) pointed out that the
total absence, in the Indo-European numerals, of any aspirate consonant
was extremely odd, considering how frequent such consonants otherwise
were, and suggested this might indicate that the Indo-European numerals
had been borrowed from some language without aspirate consonants.

Stephane Goyette,
University of Ottawa.
stephane at Goyette.com


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Oct  7 00:36:49 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 20:36:49 EDT
Subject: Linear A to Linear B
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.203649.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/6/99 1:03:09 PM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu wrote:

<<OK, then, why can't we read it if it's Greek?  Linear A and Linear B have
many of the same characters.  If both are Greek, the only way this could
have happened would be if the scribes at some point decided to keep the
same characters,...>>

I'd like to address the statement here: <<the ONLY way this could have
happened...>> (caps mine)

AND this from the same post: <<I don't know where you keep
getting this 'certainty' business; you're attributing a certainty to me
which I don't hold...>>

But in the case quoted above you apparently do.  To say this is the ONLY way
this could have happened is to assume a fair measure of certainty.

Let's look at some alternatives.

1. LINEAR A and LINEAR B DEVELOPED INDEPENDENTLY FROM THE SAME PICTOGRAPHIC
SYSTEM.   When sounds were eventually assigned to the same pictograms, that
occurred in entirely different contexts, traditions or languages.  (The word
for house, for example, might have corresponded to two different sets of
sounds in two different languages.  The common pictogram for house would
become associated with a different sets of sounds in each language.  When the
pictogram was later permanently assigned to a sound or sounds derived from
"house", the resulting character would have represented two distinct sets of
sounds in those two different languages.)  Such symbols would appear to be
common, but the sounds they represent would not the same.  Greek might have
followed one character-to-sound system in A.  And a different one in B.

2. LINEAR A IS ONLY PARTIALLY PHONETIC.  Like early hieroglyhics, the script
may be partly pictogram and partly sound-referenced.  E.g., the letter /a/ in
early script might refer to a sound or it might refer to what it is, a
picture of an ox.  The transition to Linear B may have involved the re-use of
former pictographic symbols to stand for sounds instead.  This might have
mandated a revamping of the former partial character-to-sound correspondence
that existed in Linear A.  So these characters would reappear, but would in
Lin B refer to sounds instead of the objects represented, taking the place of
other characters that dropped out of use.

3. A LANGUAGE INTERVENED DESTROYING THE SOUND EQUIVALENCE BETWEEN LIN A AND
B.  Already noted in an earlier post, apparently a transitional script
between A and B has been found at "Canaanite" sites in Isreal.   If a
language with many non-equivalent sounds - or one used to representing only
consonants or syllables - intervened, the Greek scribes using Linear B would
have been working with a different sound/character system than scribes who
would had written Greek using Linear A.  The transition from Linear A to an
intervening syllabic script, for example, might have resulted in
sound/character sets that would be unusable by scribes attempting to write
Greek in Linear B, mandating a realignment of character-sound correspondence.

4.  LINEAR A IS GREEK WRITTEN BY MINOAN SPEAKERS.  LINEAR B IS GREEK WRITTEN
BY GREEK SPEAKERS.  Or some other such circumstance that would cause a severe
difference in the way words were heard, understood and translated into script.

There are of course other scenarios.  Two of the above were borrowed from
others who've commented on the situation.  Another one worth mentioning is
the circumstances that created the similarities in characters (but not
necessarily sound equivalencies) in the current modern Russian and English
alphabets.  And finally it may be important to note that we have no evidence
that scribes writing Linear B ever saw Linear A or vice versa.

Given all the above, is it proper to say <<Linear A and Linear B have
many of the same characters.  If both are Greek, the ONLY way this could have
happened would be if the scribes at some point decided to keep the
same characters,...>>?

Note that I'm not advocating any of these, but merely pointing out that
saying ONLY one explanation will work is overstating the case.

I wrote:
<<As you note this is evidence but not conclusive.  A shift in vowel sounds
(e.g., from -u to -i or -oi) that might have prompted the change from A to B
would actually work the other way.>>

Mr. Crist replied:
<<But we know that no such change happened in pre-Greek.  Attested Greek
[oi] generally represents PIE *oy, etc.; _not_ earlier *-u.>>

Again, in terms of certainty - <<...we KNOW that no such change happened in
pre-Greek>>.

Actually all we "know" is that if such a sound change did occur in some
dialect of pre-Greek, it was not preserved in Greek - unless Lin A/B
preserved it.

But what I actually had in mind was a sound shift in the unknown language
that may have occurred between the time the Greeks borrowed Linear A and when
they borrowed Linear B.  That characters would have stood for one thing in
Linear A, but later stood for another when Linear B was borrowed.

Sean Crist also wrote:
<<you're attributing a certainty to me which I don't hold and which I never
voiced. I'm simply correctly reporting that based on our current state of
knowledge, Linear A does not appear to be Greek.>>

But this is not what was first "reported:"
<<Actually, we can say with pretty fair CERTAINTY that Linear A is not Greek

nor any other Indo-European language.>> (Caps are mine)
(Message dated 9/30/99 8:49:01AM)

There is a different level of confidence expressed in "...does not appear to
be Greek" and "pretty fair certainty... is not Greek."

I was addressing the latter.  I'm fine with the former.

Sean Crist wrote:
<<there's no shame in the fact that the field was once wrong on this
question.>>

And you're 100% right. (Or perhaps 99.99%)  No shame should be found in the
Ventris/Lin B situation at all.  I would never suggest such a thing.  The
history of the physical sciences is actually pretty much one "wrong" theory
after another.  And that's what taught physicists and astronomers and
geologists to recognize their uncertainties and wherever possible to quantify
them.  And even to make it a principle in physics and math, without which
further analysis would have been impossible.

Many of our arguments have been about what we can be sure of and how much we
are sure of.   You look well on your way to a brilliant career.  In the
course of that career, you "know" that some things that seem pretty certain
now will turn out to be not quite the case.  Might as well anticipate them by
qualifying how you describe them now.

Stephen Jay Gould is absolutely brilliant at (among other things) showing how
"bad" theories advanced our knowledge.  And showing how, e.g., Lamarck and
the creationist who named first named dinosaurs (forgot his name) already
could foresee the problems with their theories but didn't have the tools to
solve them.  The thing that often got them in trouble was simply that they
overstated the strenght of their case and therefore didn't allow a window for
what came afterwards.

Most theories are not 100% right.  There's always allowance for a little
uncertainty.

Regards,
Steve Long


From Odegard at means.net  Wed Oct  6 22:33:15 1999
From: Odegard at means.net (Mark Odegard <Odegard@means.net>)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 22:27:15 -6
Subject: PIE and the Black Sea Flood.
Message-ID: <WED.6.OCT.1999.222715.6.>

This link has some junk I wrote after re-reading Ryan and Pitman. I
also started comparisons to Mallory.This are rough, personal use
notes and personal speculations. Take them just for that. These pages
are unicode compliant, tho they work fine with extended latin (they
just load funny).

http://homepages.msn.com/LibraryLawn/mark_odegard/Indo-European.html

Besides links to 'religious' sites that make use of Ryan and Pitman,
the only web pages that refer to their findings seem to be the
original press reports of their book as well as a reference
someplace to the _Science_ article that reported their work
originally. Ryan and Pitman are impeccably-credentialed Earth
Scientists. They are not archaeologists, linguists or ethnographers.
This book was meant to be popular, but the hard science is obscured
by the speculative stuff. And they are the only person I've ever
read that's referred to Kathleen Kenyon as Kay Kenyon (which
suggests they are way out of their field).

Anyway. The Med indeed burst thru the Bosporus ca 5500 BCE, in a huge
event that raised the Black Sea 350 feet in two years.

The implications for the coalescence of PIE are unavoidable. It's in
the right part of the world at something like the right time. It
also lets you put agriculture in the Pontine region well before
archaeology proves it. And domestic animals too, I think. It lets
you think of the larger grouping PIE belonged to, and of it's
breakup (not Nostratic, but something under that).
--
Mark Odegard   mailto:odegard at means.net


From mclasutt at brigham.net  Thu Oct  7 06:06:37 1999
From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 00:06:37 -0600
Subject: Change and What Remains
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9910040952000.6056-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.000637.0600.>

Larry Trask wrote:

> The English that I speak is, in a reasonable sense, a daughter of the
> English my parents spoke.  And the English the young people are speaking
> back home, which is already noticeably different from my own, can be
> regarded as a daughter of the English I speak.  In that sense, I
> suppose, a language can co-exist with its own daughter.  Is that what
> you mean?

> My 22-year-old niece has acquired some of the vowel changes collectively
> known as the Northern Cities Shift.  As a result, her vowel system is
> conspicuously different from mine, and I occasionally have trouble
> understanding her.  Her parents (my generation) have no trouble
> understanding her, because they're exposed to the youngsters' speech all
> the time, but they don't talk like her.  But I don't get home very
> often, and, when I do get home, I'm startled by the young people's
> English.

> All of the several generations can talk to one another, just as I could
> talk to my grandparents when they were alive.  But my grandparents
> didn't sound exactly like my parents, either.  And my Aunt Catherine,
> who's now pushing 100, sounds remarkably different from the youngsters,
> and even from me.

> As I said, ceaseless change.  The incomprehensible English of King Alfred
> is separated from us by scarcely more than forty generations.
> Chaucer's speech, separated from us by no more than 25 generations,
> would also be utterly incomprehensible to us.  Even Shakespeare, only
> about 16 generations ago, would probably be largely incomprehensible to
> us if we could hear him speak -- and some specialists believe we would
> not be able to understand him at all.  What will our descendants, 20 or
> 25 generations from now, make of the sound recordings we'll be leaving
> them?

> So, apart from the trivial case of me and my niece, how can a language
> co-exist with its own descendant?

Normally, I agree completely with you, Larry, but this time I've got to
disagree, if only in pointing out that your definition of "language" in this
discussion is not standard usage.  In the sense that you've described,
namely, that any change makes a different language, then you and your niece
are speaking different languages, you and your Aunt Catherine are speaking
different languages, indeed, you and I are speaking different languages, as
I imagine you and your wife are both bilingual in each other's non-English
and different tongues.  According to this definition, language is strictly a
one-generation, one-location event, to be changed to the language of the
next generation in the same location or to be changed whenever one crosses
the county line.

In one sense, you are indeed correct--when using the definition that a
language comprises a particular set of generative, transformational, and
phonological rules on a nearly identical lexicon with an identical phonemic
and phonetic inventory.  One generation slightly fronts a vowel over the
previous generation.  The next generation might raise that vowel a touch.
The following generation might switch the alveolar fricative in one word to
a postalveolar affricate to make it rhyme with another word.  In this sense,
using the constant change definition of language, you would have to admit
(as you did) that several parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents can
coexist with multiple daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters.

But if you use the standard definition of "language", that is, two speech
varieties which do not exceed X% of mutual comprehensibility, then your
familial examples don't work anymore.  You must look at rates of change in
different communities and particular linguistic features that develop in one
community that drastically affect mutual intelligibility versus other
changes that do not have as radical an effect.  In this definition of
language, a community that has experienced a slower rate of change, where
the changes are such that mutual comprehensibility is not radically
affected, can be compared to a sister community where the rate of change has
been faster and has included changes that tend to always affect mutual
comprehensibility.  In this case, community A can be said to still speak the
mother language and community B is speaking a daughter language.  Actually,
this scenario with a standard definition of language is simply the same
situation as described using your tighter definition of language--only at a
longer time scale.

Let me reiterate and give more details about Shoshoni and Comanche.  The
phonological, morphological, and syntactic rules of Eastern Shoshoni are
very similar to the rules that must be reconstructed for Common Shoshoni.
The differences between modern Eastern Shoshoni and modern Western Shoshoni
(now completely separated by the states of Utah and Idaho where other
dialects are spoken) are minimal and mostly optional variants.  There is
only a small percentage of different vocabulary (at least 90%
lexicostatistical similarity between the most extreme examples from western
Nevada and central Wyoming).  Speakers from Fallon, Nevada have reported
virtually no problems in communicating with speakers from Wind River,
Wyoming.  About 1720 or so, some groups of Eastern Shoshoni speakers
separated from the main group and headed south into the Texas Panhandle.  A
treaty with the Spanish in 1786 lists the names of the treaty signatories
with Spanish translations.  The list is easily analyzed into Common Shoshoni
(predating certain vocabulary that has changed in both modern Eastern
Shoshoni and Modern Comanche).  Some examples from 1786, 1828, and 1865 will
illustrate some features of the languages (Cm = Comanche; Sh = Shoshoni; in
Modern forms: y = barred i, j = y; NR = not recorded):

                    1786               1828               1865
                    (Spanish source)   (French source)    (Spanish source)
'crane, heron' (Cm) ...condata         NR                 different word
Modern Cm--different word
Modern Sh--koonty
'shoe, foot' (Cm)   ...nampat          naap               nap?
Modern Cm--napy
Modern Sh--nampe
'sit on mtn' (Cm)   toyamancare        NR                 NR
Modern Cm--tojamakary
Modern Sh--tojamankary
'red' (Cm)          enca...            eica..., eca...    eca...
Modern Cm--eka
Modern Sh--enka

Notice how the loss of preconsonantal /n/ was completed in Old Comanche
between 1786 and 1828.  Yet this one change was the major breaking point
between mutual intelligibility with Shoshoni and mutual unintelligibility.
Before that, the tribes of west Texas spoke a dialect of Shoshoni (as the
near identity of 1786 forms and Modern Shoshoni forms attests).  After 1828,
the bands spoke Comanche.  Their self-identification didn't change (Shoshoni
nymy, Comanche nymy), but their speech did.  All other changes between
Shoshoni and Comanche are found elsewhere as dialectal variants in Shoshoni,
but losing the preconsonantal /n/ on top of several minor changes that had
already occurred was too much phonetic (and according to my preferred
analysis, phonemic) difference to make up for.

This seems to me to be a clear case of a parent co-existing with a child,
using a standard definition of "language".  Even when using a more
restrictive definition of "language", this shows how quickly a single
radical change can affect an entire community, breaking off communicative
ability with the parent community in about 40 years.

John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
mclasutt at brigham.net

Program Director
Utah State University On-Line Linguistics
http://english.usu.edu/lingnet

English Department
3200 Old Main Hill
Utah State University
Logan, UT  84322-3200

(435) 797-2738 (voice)
(435) 797-3797 (fax)


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Oct  7 07:50:48 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 08:50:48 +0100
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19991004180310.00988640@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.085048.0100.>

On Mon, 4 Oct 1999, Roslyn M. Frank wrote:

[on Basque <maite(a)>] `(my) beloved']

> Let us agree to disagree about which form is the common used as a
> form of address, one with a "definite article" or one without.
> Clearly we have have different views about this situation as was
> demonstrated in the case of our earlier discussion on whether
> <beltz> was a proper nickname for a bear, rather than <beltza>. From
> your previous comments, you do not wish to concede that in such
> circumstance the <mugagabe> unsuffixed form is often used.

Aw, c'mon, Roz.  Not only have I never said any such thing, I said
precisely the opposite in a posting a couple of weeks ago.

As I've pointed out before, the use or non-use of the Basque article
with names and in vocatives is subject to complex rules which I don't
pretend to understand.  However, in the case of <maite> as a vocative,
the use of the suffixed form <maitea> is, in my experience, *far*
commoner than the use of <maite> alone.  As it happens, <maitea> is the
form I hear constantly in the Basque Country, among Basques in England,
and even in recorded songs.

> Contrarily, there is no question, as I believe I've said before,
> that when translating from French of Spanish Basque speakers will
> add the "definite article" to what is the unsuffixed form of the
> word in the Romance languages. But that is a different case. In the
> case of nicknames there are circumstances in which the suffixed form
> is common and there are also many cases where both forms can be
> encountered.

Yes; I agree with this entirely, though I don't pretend to know what the
rules are.

> I think part of our disagreement might be caused by the existence of
> two slightly different definitions of what is meant by the words
> "the common way of addressing someone." If one calls out to another
> and addresses the person with a nickname, that word will not
> necessarily take what is called the "definite article." I think you
> may have cited a couple examples of this yourself. The problem is
> complicated further by the fact that the "distal demonstrative" in
> Euskera has been appropriated as a "definite article" but that role
> is still not identical to that of a "definite article" in a language
> such as Spanish or English where, conceptually, there *are* definite
> and indefinite articles.

Largely agreed.  The Basque article derives historically from the distal
demonstrative, but is no longer identical with it, especially since, in
most varieties, the old distal demonstrative *<(h)ar> has been displaced
by the innovating absolutive <(h)ura>, leaving <-a> somewhat isolated as
the article.  (Bizkaian is an exception here, of course.)

And I agree that the label `definite article' is not really appropriate
for the Basque article, since its functions are wider than this name
suggests.  I've occasionally tried to promote another name, `ordinary
article', but my colleagues seem to have little enthusiasm for this.

> If, on the other hand, one writes a letter, there is clearly the
> option of using the "definite article" along with their "nickname"
> when "addressing" the person.

> Then there are many examples of the numens who populate Basque
> folklore and mythology. The (nick)names of many of these beings,
> e.g., Praka Gorri "Red Pants", appear without the definite article.
> However, I might refer to this same character, when writing in
> Euskera, in a given sentence as Praka Gorria. But when I do, I've
> changed the status of his (nick)name to something like "The One with
> Red Pants." It can be done, the "definite article" can be added, but
> when it is the name takes on a different nuance of meaning.

Agreed.

> In summary, I don't think one can come up with a hard and fast rule that
> covers all the individual cases.

I certainly agree.

> And when one turns to the so-called proper names the waters become
> even muddier. So, let's just agree to disagree on this particular
> point.

Sure, Roz -- but what exactly are we disagreeing about?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Oct  7 08:41:24 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 09:41:24 +0100
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19991004185840.009a51f0@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.094124.0100.>

On Mon, 4 Oct 1999, Roslyn M. Frank wrote:

> Phonologically speaking in other circumstances I don't think that
> Euskera regularly looses the intervocalic /r/. That's my impression.

That's correct.  The intervocalic tapped /r/ is not normally lost in
lexical items, except in the Zuberoan dialect, where it is lost.
But it is often lost in inflections and in grammatical words.  For
example, the dative singular ending <-ari> is frequently heard in speech
as <-ai>, and the progressive marker <ari> is frequently pronounced as
<ai>.

> I also don't know what the relationship would be between the set of
> (unconscious) phonological rules used to produce such nicknames and
> the set used for the rest of the language.

I don't think anybody knows.  Some eager philology student at Gasteiz
might usefully look into this.

> Nor do I know if this is a topic that has been subjected to serious
> study.

I'm pretty sure it hasn't.

> Without having looked into the literature, I would suggest that what
> we may be looking at is the question of whether there are different
> sets of rules that are brought into play by speakers of a given
> language to produce items belonging to different parts of the
> lexicon, e.g., phonoestetic expressions (is that the right term?)
> versus "regular" words. Or stated differently, do speakers have
> access to two different (although perhaps largely overlapping)
> phonological repertoires that are then drawn into play by them
> depending on the circumstances?

Bingo, Roz!  This is *certainly* true of Basque.  Putting aside names,
Basque has a set of templates for creating expressive formations, and
the phonological rules governing these formations are quite different
from the rules governing ordinary lexical items.  This is a topic close
to my heart, and one day I hope to produce a serious piece of work on
it.

But names are clearly subject to different rules again.

> Has anyone done a cross-linguistic study of such forms? How similar
> are these patterns cross-linguistically and/or what conclusions can
> be drawn concerning the relationship holding between them and the
> standard phonotactic rules of the same language?

There have been a few studies, yes, though I can't immediately cite any
references.

> For example in Euskera, as Larry has pointed out, emphasis is often
> expressed not by just repeating the same word. For example, we find
> <gorrigorri> "very red" (lit. "red, red"), but also there are many
> instances in which the first letter of the second word/expression is
> turned into an <m>, to produce compounds, e.g., <hikamika> "a
> falling out, tiff, verbal fight," an expression that I've always
> assumed came from <hi-ka>, from repeatedly accusing the other person
> by saying "You (did this...).. You (did that)."

Yes.  I call this `m-reduplication', and it's a common pattern for
creating expressive formations: <aiko-maiko> `pretext, excuse',
<ikusi-mikusi> (or <ikusi-makusi>) `a children's game resembling "I
spy"', <zirimiri> `drizzle', <zurrumurru> `whisper, murmur, gossip', and
so on.

Something similar occurs in a number of other languages with expressive
functions.

> In this interpretation <hi> would be the second person pronoun.
> Actually <hika> is often used to refer to the notion of "addressing
> the other in <hi>, in the allocutive forms of the verb that that
> form of address requires.

> A form like <esa-mesa-ka> based on the verbal stem of <esan> "to
> speak, to say" refers to "gossip". Here the iterative suffix <-ka>
> with its often gerundive force, is added to the compound <esamesa>
> to form a word in its own right, a (de)verbal noun (?).

Yes.  The suffix <-ka> is strictly adverb-forming, as in <zaldi>
`horse', <zaldika> `on horseback', and <harri> `stone', <harrika> `while
throwing stones'.  But derivatives in <-ka> not infrequently get
reinterpreted as nouns.  For example, the use of the intimate pronoun
<hi> is <hiketa>, with the suffix <-keta> forming nouns of activity, but
the adverbial derivative <hika> `while/by speaking with <hi>' is now
commonly used as a noun.

> This last example,I believe, shows the way that a rule governing an
> expressive formation (I refer merely to the addition of the <m> to
> the second <esa>) in a given language can end up producing a "real"
> compound. Obviously this creation is based on a real verbal stem in
> Euskera, i.e., <esa->, not on a purely phonoestetic or onomatopeic
> form. But the rule that governs the insertion of the <m> comes from
> the "other" set of rules.

Absolutely.  An m-reduplication in Basque can be based either upon an
existing lexical item or on an expressive stem of no other existence.

> In this case the question would be, does this formation bring into
> play the regular rules or are there subrules to these rules that can
> be accessed which allow for expressive formations?

If and when I get my planned research done, I'll be better able to
answer this question.  Meanwhile, all I can say with confidence is that
there exist clear templates.

Here's a sample of one template, using items taken from a variety of
regional dialects:

	<mozkor> `short and fat', `five by five'
	<moxkor> `drunk'
	<margul> `faded, washed out, colorless'
	<muker> `arrogant, pompous'
	<malkor> `sterile'
	<maltzur> `cunning, malevolent'
	<malkar> `rugged, barren' (of terrain)
	<makur> `twisted, bent, curved'
	<makal> `feeble'
	<mukur> `coarse, clumsy'
	<motel> `insipid, dull'
	<mutur> `put out, pissed off'
	<mutxer> `withered, faded'
	<muskil> `insignificant'
	<muskur> `fat, gross, bulky'
	<mukul> `spineless, pusillanimous'
	<matxar> `vile'
	<matzer> `deformed, defective'
	<maker> `counterfeit, fake'
	<moker> `hard' (of land, bread or people)
	<mokol> `flabby, slack'
	<motzor> `crude, rough'

And so on.  I will leave it to the interested reader to figure out
what's going on here.

> In short, are the two systems really as separate as they are
> sometimes portrayed to be? A topic that has been brought up before
> on this list.

They are not absolutely separate, but they are clearly partly distinct.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Oct  7 10:59:53 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 11:59:53 +0100
Subject: Excluding Basque data
In-Reply-To: <31073401.252babf2@aol.com>
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.115953.0100.>

On Tue, 5 Oct 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote:

> Sound-symbolic words are
> BOTH different in canonical forms
> AND underrepresented in vocabularies etc.
> and the coincidence of these two properties
> means it is dangerous to exclude them.

An interesting point, but I'll be taking issue with it below.

> As to sound-symbolic words,
> Larry says he does NOT insist on their having the same canonical
> forms as other vocabulary, does not exclude them on that basis.

That's right.

> (I surely thought he was using canonical forms as one of his
> criteria for setting up his initial lists?  Was that not true?

Certainly not.  As I have made clear repeatedly, my primary criteria are
early attestation, widespread distribution, and absence from neighboring
languages.  Nothing remotely phonological there.

I have also explained that, in addition, I would prefer to exclude
obvious nursery words and obvious imitative words at the outset, for
excellent reasons.  But I don't mind if others prefer not to do this.
It isn't going to make much difference anyway, since very few of these
words will satisfy my primary criteria.

> In any case, another criterion is explicit or implicit in the
> following:

[LT]

>> But, in fact, the vast majority of sound-symbolic items in Basque do
>> *not* satisfy my other criteria.  Hence my approach will immediately set
>> them apart from the words which are the best candidates for native and
>> ancient status.  Once that's established, *then* these distinctive words
>> can be investigated to determine their own phonological characteristics.

> Notice in the way the middle sentence follows the first sentence
> that Larry treats his approach (his criteria) as if his criteria
> were pretty much the same thing as selection for "the best
> candidates for native and ancient status".  Others of us believe
> that must always be kept on the surface of awareness as an empirical
> question, not taken for granted;  it is precisely a core question!

Something crucial has been omitted here.

However, for about the fifth time: if you think my criteria are
imperfect, then *what other criteria* do you propose for the task of
identifying the best candidates for native and ancient status in Basque?
How about an answer to this question, at last?

> If what Larry says above about Basque is true of other languages
> to a simlar degree, then should we conclude that sound-symbolic
> items are NOT good candidates for native and ancient status,
> in general?  That would seem to be implied by the paragraph
> just quoted.  Yet to me that shows there must be something wrong
> with the argument.

My criteria are devised with Basque in mind.  Other cases may call for a
different approach, notably in respect of my third criterion.

Whether sound-symbolic words are generally not ancient, I don't know,
but I have no particular interest in this question anyway.  I'm only
interested in the Basque case.

> That is not to say we treat sound-symbolic
> words exactly the same way as other words.
> Just as the English "pavilion" from French "pavillon"
> is the normal French development by the sound laws, and "papillon"
> is a sound-symbolic form which has resisted a sound change,
> so we might suspect Basque <pinpirin> may have not undergone all of the
> sound changes which most of the vocabulary did in the history of
> Basque, independent of the question whether it is a recent loan
> or some primaeval vocabulary item inherited from 10,000 years ago.
> So even the supposedly air-tight logic of sound laws cannot be
> used unequivocally to include or exclude vocabulary from native
> vs. borrowed categories.

In Basque, borrowed words develop phonologically just like native words,
modulo date of entry into the language.

But the point is not whether <pinpirin> is borrowed or not (I'm pretty
sure it's not), but whether it's *ancient* or not.

Now, I consider it most unlikely that the severely localized word
<pinpirin> has been in the language for millennia, all that time
violating the ordinary phonological structure of the language and
refusing to participate in otherwise categorical phonological changes.
But that's not the point.

The point, yet again, is that it is a waste of time to try to focus, at
the outset, on sweeping up everything that *might* be native and ancient
in Basque -- even highly implausible cases like <pinpirin>.  The point
is to identify those words which have the *strongest* claim to being
native and ancient -- hence my criteria.

> A shocker, and not a wild card we want to use without severe limits
> or controls, or else the entire enterprise falls.

OK.  And just what "severe limits and controls" would those be?
*How about an answer to this?*

I've already proposed my severe limits and controls.
What are yours?

> But a shocker we cannot escape by waving magic wands
> or waving words.

And just what "magic wand" do you think I'm waving?

> It's a fact of reality.
> (English "tiny", which went through the great vowel shift,
> and "teeny", which did not go through the great vowel shift,
> was retained or regenerated or reborrowed from a dialect,
> would be a similar case,
> unless the dialect-borrowing solution is adopted.)

No.  The earlier `tine' went through the GVS normally and produced
`tiny', as expected.  The form `teeny', in all likelihodd, is a later
re-formation, derived from sound-symbolic factors.  The OED tells me
that `teeny' is nowhere recorded before 1825 -- long after the GVS --
and suggests that it probably originated in nursery language.

> Among Larry Trask's other criteria were the distribution across all
> of the dialects, not the occurrence in only a few. As I took pains
> to point out in previous messages, that criterion is biasing.
> However reasonable, even obvious, it may appear to a historical
> linguist (including seeming obvious to me too, I may add) it may
> still disproportionately bias against sound-symbolic words, because
> of the spotty record of those who record vocabularies in not
> collecting such words, thereby reducing the number of dialects in
> which they are attested, quite independently of whether they
> actually were used in those dialects. The entire class of such words
> may not be recorded, or very few of them, it is not simply that
> their recording is randomly slightly less full.

> And this enormous underrepresentation can then indirectly lead to
> initial conclusions on canonical forms which are too simple and
> neat, too consistent, including canonical forms which are
> underrepresentative of sound-symbolic forms.

At last a point of substance!  I thought I was never going to see one.
OK.  Let's assume this point is valid.  What are the consequences?

Well, either sound-symbolic forms conform to the canonical forms of
ordinary lexical items, or they do not.  If they do, there is no
problem.  If they don't, then, assuming that many of them get into my
list in the first place, I'm going to have two sharply distinct groups
of words obeying different rules.  Also no problem.

Perhaps I haven't made it clear that I am also very interested in
characterizing the expressive formations.  But I first want to
characterize the forms of ordinary lexical items, before I turn my
attention to the expressive formations -- for one thing, because it's
easier to see what's special about expressive formations if I already
know what ordinary words look like.

So: apply my primary criteria; get a list of candidate ancient words;
determine their phonological properties; then look at expressive
formations (mostly excluded from my list by my primary criteria) and
identify the differences.  Now: what exactly is wrong with this?
And what *different* procedure could give better results?

> Such initial conclusions on canonical forms can then have
> cascading secondary effects on inclusion or exclusion of additional
> vocabulary in the lists.  Even if /bat/ (from the recent discussion of
> /bade/ /bedere/ etc.) were the only form included with a final
> stop consonant, being exceptional would not prove it is not part of
> pre-Basque.

I agree with this.  But, remember: I am not excluding this word, because
it satisfies my primary criteria.

> All (?) languages have more common and rarer forms,
> and have peripheral forms,

Sure.  But how can I tell that a particular form is rare unless I first
determine what the common forms are?

> especially when the ambiguities of
> fast speech and slow speech borderlines are considered,

Not of central importance here, I'd say.

> and when a few short high-frequency items are considered.

Yep, but note particularly that wording: "a few".

> Yet we must also pay attention to differences of canonical forms,
> as they sometimes DO clue us in to different strata of vocabulary
> which may be relevant in historical-comparative studies.

No doubt.  But what I'm trying to do is precisely to identify the damn
strata in the first place.

That's enough for now.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Oct  7 11:19:24 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 12:19:24 +0100
Subject: Excluding Basque data (2)
In-Reply-To: <31073401.252babf2@aol.com>
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.121924.0100.>

On Tue, 5 Oct 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote:

[LT]

>> I have proposed that obvious and recognizable sound-symbolic items, like
>> <tu> `spit', might reasonably be excluded at the outset.  But I'm not
>> wedded to this, and I don't mind if others want to include them when
>> they satisfy the other criteria.

> How about if they do not satisfy the other criteria, or some of
> them,

Then they don't go into the list.  That's what the criteria are for.

> and if the inclusion of such exceptional forms then enters
> into the determination of what are true canonical forms, and even
> what those other criteria should be, and cycles back to affect
> judgements of what forms are exceptional or not, or to what degree
> (frequency or structural), and EVEN to affect which forms are
> included in the analysis? It is indeed circular not in a bad sense,
> but should be recognized as circular.

Sorry, but I see no circularity at all.
What criteria do you propose instead of mine?

> Larry says his criteria do not have any biases (I think he believes
> they cannot, as he thinks he has formulated them), yet here he himself
> says he is excluding a form, mentioning in this paragraph only that it
> is sound-symbolic (as if that were a sufficient reason?
> I do not want to assume that, but at least here no more was given).
> I do not remember whether he gave any other reasons for
> excluding <tu>?

First, if you listen to a Basque pronouncing <tu>, you will surely
understand at once that it constitutes an imitation of the sound of
spitting, just as Basque <mu> `moo' is an imitation of a cow mooing,
<miau> is an imitation of a cat meowing, and so on.

Second, imitative words for `spit' of the general form /tu-/ are
commonplace in languages.  Note, for example, Burushaski <thu:> `spit',
and North Caucasian words of the general form /tuk'/ `spit'.

Otherwise, well, Basque <tu> is abundantly attested before 1600, so it
satisfies my date criterion.  I'm not aware that such a word exists in
Romance, but maybe somebody can tell me different.  As for distribution,
that's tricky.  The word is attested widely, but not universally.  It
will take a search -- which I haven't yet performed -- to determine just
how widely the word is recorded, and its inclusion or exclusion may
depend crucially on exactly what criteria I adopt for distribution.
It's going to be close.

> Trask refers to this:
>> ...criticizing me for selecting criteria appropriate only
>> to the task I have in mind, and not to other conceivable tasks that
>> someone else might like to pursue.

> Trask clearly believes his criteria are obviously
> appropriate to the task he has in mind.
> Others are not quite so certain that that is all his criteria do,
> believe they may do some other things as well.

Lloyd, I'm afraid I'm getting a little tired of this constant innuendo.
*What alternative criteria do you propose?*  *And how will they give
better results?*

Are you ever going to answer these questions?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Oct  7 11:35:36 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 12:35:36 +0100
Subject: Respect goes both ways!
In-Reply-To: <23066e8a.252be098@aol.com>
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.123536.0100.>

On Tue, 5 Oct 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote:

> Steve Long this morning sent me a reference to p.177 of Larry
> Trask's "Historical Linguistics" where he claims to be quoting Trask
> to the effect that 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."

> Here it appears that Trask is indeed using just the criterion he says
> he does not use, at least as a part of his definition which in this
> case is a determining part.

> Even if the quotation Long sent me is within a context of a
> criticism of the technical "mutually intelligible" definition, it
> still demonstrates that Trask CAN think logically using this
> definition, and come to the exact same conclusion as I believe
> anyone else.  Simply common sense. If so, why does he refuse to do
> so in the present discussion on our email list?

> Is the reference Steve Long sent me correct, anyone?

Yes; it's correct.  I wrote this, and I see nothing wrong with it.

But let's consider the context.  I wrote this in an elementary textbook
of historical linguistics for beginning students.  Now, beginning
students often do not understand what we mean by the term `genetic
relationship', and they often do not understand that a language can give
rise to a family of diverse daughters.  Since this point is fundamental,
I try hard in my textbook to get it scross.  In the process, I silently
overlook any number of complicating factors.  This is necessary.
If I simply present all known complications from page one, my readers
will be lost: they won't be able to see the wood for the trees.
Students have to learn the basic concepts before they can get to grips
with the complications.

Does a clarinet teacher try to teach all known techniques on day one?
No?

But what I say to beginning students is one thing.  And what I say to
professional colleagues is another.

> Even before receiving this reference, I wrote the following
> paragraph: If the correspondent really believes there is NO
> acceptable technical definition of "same language" vs, "different
> language", then perhaps the correspondent should simply have said
> that and declined to participate in this discussion.

I think I *have* said this.

To repeat: there is no principled and watertight definition of what
constitutes a single language.  That is a fact known to all linguists,
I think -- though sometimes I wonder about the Chomskyans. ;-)

Nevertheless, it is often convenient, and even necessary, to proceed as
though individual languages exist and can be identified -- so long as we
never forget that we are making simplifying assumptions.  However, as I
have pointed out, if we forget that we are making these simplifying
assumptions, and start reifying languages into discrete and individual
entities, comparable to the individual seagulls that wander about
outside my window, then we're in deep trouble.  And it's this last point
that I was emphasizing.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Thu Oct  7 15:24:16 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 08:24:16 -0700
Subject: PIE vs. Proto-Language
In-Reply-To: <004a01bf0d95$f8231480$879f113f@oemcomputer>
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.082416.0700.>

At 11:53 AM 10/3/99 +0000, Patrick C. Ryan wrote:
>[PR]
>I am convinced by the genetic evidence that modern humans are, at least,
>principally descended from a single ancient (pre-)human stock, whether out
>of Africa, which I think likeliest, or from another place.

> ...
>If you believe that a scenario of 'language' developing in separated human
>groups (hence unrelated except indirectly by the biological potential to
>develop it) is preferable,  then tell me, if the original stock (presuming
>you buy the genetic argument) was capable potentially of language, what
>prevented that potential from being realized?

The basic answer would be: they had not yet invented it.
Consider: the original modern humans were also potentially capable of doing
calculus, so one could ask why they didn't.  In this case the answer is
obvious.  But is language really any less complex than calculus?

Now, I, *personally* find this situation unlikely, but it is at least
coherent, and thus cannot be ruled out a priori.

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


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Thu Oct  7 15:31:39 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 08:31:39 -0700
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.991003224432.20156B-100000@unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.083139.0700.>

At 11:13 PM 10/3/99 -0400, Sean Crist wrote:
>On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
>I know; that's why I said 'mostly', and also why I picked the example of
>Japanese, which does have a limited set of syllable codas.

Which, interestingly, are often written using a kana containing the vowel
'u', at least in the Tokyo dialect.  Could this be where the high frequency
of final 'u's comes from in Linear A?

[The most common syllabic coda in Japanese, 'n', has its own kana].

>That's assuming that any of these systems had an effect on the development
>of Linear A.  I don't think we know this; as far as we know, it developed
>in isolation

I would say "isolation" is a bit too strong, given the extent of sea trade
at the time.  Independently is certainly indicated, but some influence, at
least to the extent of planting the *idea* of writing in their heads, is
very probable.

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


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Thu Oct  7 15:37:33 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 08:37:33 -0700
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.991003231722.20156C-100000@unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.083733.0700.>

At 11:44 PM 10/3/99 -0400, Sean Crist wrote:
>It depends on what you mean by that.  In a sense, all of the currently
>living Indo-European languages are of the same 'age', in that they all
>develop from the same prehistoric language which had its final unity at
>some prehistoric date (i.e., before the split of Anatolian from what
>became the other IE languages).

I question the assumption that the Anatolian languages necessarily split
off earlier than the others.  Given the linguistic and archaeological
facts, I suspect that the northern European languages, and probably
Proto-Tocharian, split off at least as early as Anatolian.  Thus I see an
original three or four-way split, not a simple bidding off of Anatolian

[The northern group would be ancestral to Germanic, Celtic, and Italic, at
least, and perhaps Balto-Slavis as well],

>Or perhaps you mean that the Greek-speaking presence in what is now Greece
>goes back further than e.g. 2100-1900 BCE.  The most widely accepted view
>is that the destruction of sites which we find in that period represent
>the invasion of speakers of an early form of Greek.  The preceding
>cultural tradition in Greece is substantially different.  Given that the
>latest date of PIE unity is around 4000 BCE (again, pace Renfrew), there's
>only so much of a time range to play with; you might manage to make a case
>that the Greeks were in Greece a little earlier, but not massively
>earlier.

And given that, again pace Renfrew, Anatolian almost certainly had to move
through the Balkans prior to Greek arrival *there*, let alone their arrival
in Greece proper, and that there is some evidence for a non-Greek IE
language in Greece in place names, the time scale is further constrained.

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


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Thu Oct  7 15:50:18 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 08:50:18 -0700
Subject: Change and What Remains
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9910040952000.6056-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.085018.0700.>

At 10:16 AM 10/4/99 +0100, Larry Trask wrote:
>I don't see how.  A living language never remains identical from one
>generation to the next.  See below.

On the other hand, the minor changes that occur often are evanescent, and
short-lived.  Fashion has a great deal to do with this.

>The English that I speak is, in a reasonable sense, a daughter of the
>English my parents spoke.  And the English the young people are speaking
>back home, which is already noticeably different from my own, can be
>regarded as a daughter of the English I speak.

I am not sure this is a reasonable interpretation: see below.

>My 22-year-old niece has acquired some of the vowel changes collectively
>known as the Northern Cities Shift.  As a result, her vowel system is
>conspicuously different from mine, and I occasionally have trouble
>understanding her.

I suspect that this is because her *peers* at school speak that way.
Certainly I doubt that this is really such a new development that it could
reasonably be called a "daughter" dialect of your dialect.  Northern cities
have had a distinct dialect of English for as long as I can remember, even
if it is now becoming somewhat more distinct.  In short, her change in
speech pattern is not due to simple inter-generational change, but rather
to local dialect differences.

Take the case of *my* niece.  When she was about two or three her parent
moved with her to Melbourne, Australia.  She quickly picked up a Melbourne
"accent", while her parents did not.  A few years ago they moved back to
the States, to Chicago.  Within about six months after school started my
niece had *lost* her Melbourne accent.  I suspect the case of your niece is
similar.

>All of the several generations can talk to one another, just as I could
>talk to my grandparents when they were alive.  But my grandparents
>didn't sound exactly like my parents, either.  And my Aunt Catherine,
>who's now pushing 100, sounds remarkably different from the youngsters,
>and even from me.

And how much of that is due to regional dialect differences?  My parents
and myself speak in very similar manners, as do most of my nieces and
nephews.  Almost no differences are discernable among us.

[My grandparent spoke somewhat differently, but then they learned English
as a second language, and still had a slight Low German accent all their
lives].

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


From edsel at glo.be  Thu Oct  7 16:01:38 1999
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 18:01:38 +0200
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.180138.0200.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

-----Original Message-----
From: Sean Crist <kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
Date: Wednesday, October 06, 1999 9:44 PM

>On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

>> I like the comparison (BTW, is Kirisuto such a transcription of Crist?).

>My login is kurisuto, which is the katakana-ized version of my family
>name Crist.  "Kirisuto" is the katakana-ization of "Christ".

[Ed Selleslagh]

Sorry for the typo.  One side remark: the katakana-ization of Christ seems to
indicate that the name was not taken from English speaking peoples/wouldbe
colonizers.  From the Portuguese or the Dutch maybe?

>If I understand your post correctly, you're speculating (and I appreciate
>the cautious terms in which you do so!) that there could be a connection
>between Iberian and Linear A.  I can't rule this out, but of course such a
>connection hasn't been shown, as you acknowledge.

[Ed]

Exactly.  When dealing with such difficult cases, I think no possibility should
be ruled out unless there is a compelling reason to do so. Especially on the
coasts of the Mediterranean Basin (as you noted further on), where a lot of
exchanges took place at very early dates, cf. the export of obsidian from
around Sicily. We know about a few East to West migrations (not necessarily
conquests!), and may safely presume there have been many more: the spread of
various technologies and genes point into that direction.

>I think this is probably a good place to make the following observation.
>It is probably the case that during most of the long period of human
>existence, the norm has been extreme linguistic diversity.  The phenomenon
>of a language being spoken over a wide area is probably a fairly recent
>one; I don't know that it ever happens except as the product of
>empire-building.  When we go into places where there hasn't been a long
>history of empires (e.g. New Guinea), what we find is that every little
>village has its own language.  It wouldn't be surprising if every local
>clan in prehistoric Europe similarly had its own language.

[Ed]

That may be carrying it a bit too far: it depends on things like geography,
which enhance or inhibit frequent contacts. In e.g. flat open agricultural
regions, you will find differing dialects from village to village (in Flanders
(less than 15 000 km2) this was still the case until 30 or 40 years ago, but
after that it began to break down pretty fast), but still belonging to the same
'language' (interpreted as a fuzzy set of pretty related dialects). Another
case is the Amerindian languages in vast N. American regions.

In rough mountainous regions like the Caucasus, with a - at least previously -
very sedentary population, much greater differences can develop and become
stabilized for long periods.

So, I would rather guess that more or less separated subregions had their own
languages, each divided into a large number of very local dialects, until major
migratory movements/infiltrations changed the picture.  This would then settle
down and diversify internally till the next movement.

>When the Indo-Europeans, Semites, etc. spread over a wide area, they
>probably erased an enormous number of local languages in the process.  At
>the beginning of the historical period, we can still catch glimpses of the
>earlier diversity: Hattic, Hurrian, Etruscan, etc. don't appear to be
>related to each other or to any other language we know.  Basque probably
>represents the sole outcropping remaining from the earlier old European
>diversity.

[Ed]

We can reasonably accept that Etruscan has the same grandmother as PIE, and is
a first cousin of Anatolian and PIE, but closer to Anatolian.  I don't think
anybody doubts the close link between Etruscan and Lemnian nowadays.

The case of Hatti, Hurri and Sumerian is indeed still problematic, but we
shouldn't lose hope: after all, Elamite - which was in the same situation - was
finally recognized as Dravidian [rather strangely late, if you ask me, because
the word Elaam still exists in Tamil, I was told].  And Basque and Iberian seem
to share a number of roots and affixes, even though a genetic relationship
doesn't look probable for now. Some substrate traces (BTW, also found in
Castilian) in Sardinian seem to indicate that a similar language - or one
representative of the same substrate - has been spoken there at an early date.

>When we find these tantalizing bits of older languages just barely peeking
>into the historical record, it's tempting to try to connect them with each
>other. If we can actually establish a connection, that's great (and in the
>Mediterranean basin, such connections might be somewhat more likely, since
>transportation has always been relatively easier).  It's certainly not
>wrong to make the attempt.  We should bear in mind, tho, that we should
>expect to find cases of languages which can't be connected with anything.

[Ed]

I wholeheartedly agree with you, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't continue
the search.  If monogenesis is vaguely true (at least by major regions of the
world), there must be links, but it is equally possible that the
signal-to-noise ratio is so low that we don't see them any longer. Entropy
knows no pity. Information does get lost over time.

Ed.

Dr. Ir. Eduard Selleslagh edsel at glo.be
B-9120 Haasdonk
Belgium


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Oct  7 18:09:29 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 18:09:29 +0000
Subject: Respect goes both ways!
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.180929.0000.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

ECOLING at aol.com writes:

>  [LA]

>>> I use here the definition of distinctness of "languages" preferred by
>>> most linguists, including the experts on this list, that is, fuzzily,
>>> "forms of speech which are mutually unintelligible".

[LT]

>> Sorry, but I don't think this is the definition of `languages' used by
>> most linguists.  If anything, it's closer to the man-in-the-street's
>> perception.  Linguists are aware that mutual intelligibility or the lack
>> of it is only one of many factors which may help to determine whether
>> varieties are best regarded as two languages or as a single language.
>> I could cite examples for hours -- Chinese, Italian, Dyirbal -- but I'll
>> leave that now.

> The above seems to be EXACTLY THE REVERSE of the bulk of the
> recent discussion which said that political and cultural reasons may lead
> people to call very different languages by the same name,
> as if they were the same language.  (Note the counterfactual.)
> Folks-in-the-street are perhaps even MORE aware than linguists
> of many of the other factors other than mutual intelligibility,
> which they normally do not think of at all.

This is astonishing.  Folks in the street, in my experience, tend to believe
that there must be language called 'Belgian', because there's a country called
Belgium.

Anyway, the point just made is not "exactly the reverse" of my point, but
merely another facet of it.  For their own historical, cultural and political
reasons, the Chinese refer to the seven or so Chinese languages as "dialects"
of Chinese.  Most linguists dissent, on the ground that the purely linguistic
differences are too great, and the boundaries between the varieties sometimes
too sharp, to allow us to regard the varieties as a single language.

And the assertion that linguists do not normally think at all of any factors
beyond mutual intelligibility is beyond belief.  This is not remotely true.
I'm a linguist, and I've just given our first-years a lecture on the numerous
factors involved in deciding where language boundaries should be placed.
Nor am I in any way unusual here.

> Unless of course the writer literally means as he writes
> that mutual intelligibility is "one of many factors which may help to
> determine whether varieties are best regarded as two languages
> or as a single language".  Note the "one of", in which case the
> response should have been not "NO, WRONG", but
> "YES, WITH ADDITIONAL SPECIFICATIONS".

Eh?  I say it's one of many factors, and you complain that I am overlooking
other factors?  What does this mean?

> I was not discussing other possible definitions,
> I was discussing a common highly technical definition,
> mutual intelligibility, about which I was completely explicit.

With respect, I do not regard mutual intelligibility as a "highly technical
definition".  It's a single very rough criterion, no more.

Whether two related varieties are, or are not, mutually comprehensible is not
an absolute yes/no question.  Mutual intelligibility can take any value from
zero to 100%.  It is perfectly possible for two varieties to be, say, 70%
mutually comprehensible, and such estimates are often reported in the
literature.

It is also possible for comprehensibility to be strongly one-way.  In my
experience, the Portuguese understand the Spaniards a lot more readily than the
Spaniards understand the Portuguese.  The Danes understand the Swedes a lot
better than the Swedes understand the Danes.  And I've met plenty of
English-speakers who understood me a hell of a lot better than I understood
them.

Mutual comprehensibility is also not independent of time.  The first time I met
an English-speaker from Newcastle, I could not understand *a single word* he
was saying -- even though he could understand me perfectly well.  However,
after a few days of exposure, my ear got attuned, and I could understand almost
everything he said.  This sort of thing happens all the time.

Almost anything you can think of can happen.  At the street level, Hindi and
Urdu are the same language, and speakers of the two can chatter happily about
everyday matters.  But, as soon as the conversation turns to elevated or
technical topics, they can't understand each other any more, because their
abstract and technical words are different.

So, let me ask this: are Hindi and Urdu "the same language" or not?
And on what basis should the question be answered?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From ECOLING at aol.com  Thu Oct  7 17:13:53 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 13:13:53 EDT
Subject: Campbell's def. of "language"
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.131353.EDT.>

Yesterday I received the latest issue of the Journal "Language",
in which there is a review by Doris Bartholomew of
Lyle Campbell's book
*American Indian Languages: The historical linguistics of Native America*
Oxford University Press 1997

Campbell defines these terms (and reviewer Bartholomew
     does not comment, so presumably regards these definitions
     as quite normal, unremarkable):

'dialect' is a variety (regional or social) of a language,
     mutually intelligible with other dialects

'language' is a distinct linguistic entity that is
     mutually unintelligible with other languages

I simply do not believe that Larry Trask is unaware that this is
     standard linguistic usage.  He is not forced to use it himself,
     but he is obligated to treat this usage with respect,
     not to evade discussions based upon it by ridiculing it.

*****

Both the book and the review are of interest to those interested
in the classification of languages and their genetic groupings
and in the logic of using data and evidence in these domains.

Bartholomew is a specialist in the Otomanguean family of
Mesoamerica, and she finds quite a number of details to criticize
in that area.  She is very polite in her criticisms, expressing her
appreciation for Terrence Kaufman's work, in areas where there
are not yet enough scholars and where basic descriptions are
still being assembled, even as she gives reasons to
not accept Kaufmann's overall results in her area of special knowledge.

Of most interest for the logic of demonstration,
Bartholomew points out that Kaufman commits some of the errors
that Campbell warns about in his discussion of logic and
method, using lookalikes which are not supportable as reconstructions
in component families.

My comment on the immediately preceding:
Should this legitimize use of lookalikes?  No.
Should this delegitimize use of lookalikes?  No.
Arguments on such issues are much more complex.

No single criterion by itself is overriding,
languages of different structures permit different
kinds of evidence to be available for use in reconstruction
of common ancestry.

It is also of course appropriate and expected that a specialist
in one language family will have more to comment on with
regards to that language family, and may detect more errors
in a non-specialist's treatment of that family, than they will
for other language families.

Bartholomew is responsible and gracious in making the
criticisms she has, while recognizing that her finding what
she considers errors of logic, or at least inadequate evidence,
DOES NOT undermine the entire work under review,
does not even necessarily disprove the conclusions that
Kaufman drew from the material
(Campbell to a great extent followed Kaufman
for Mesoamerica and for South America).

***

My own familiarity with Campbell's earlier work makes me
very wary, because in his eagerness to defeat Greenberg's
final conclusions, he has previously made what I consider
serious logical errors, and in parts of his "Language" review of
Greenberg's *Language in the Americas*, he even wrote
in a very seriously misleading fashion, as if Greenberg's
chapter on methodological analysis did not exist.

That does not meet my standards of civic obligation, at least.

Nevertheless, Campbell is an extremely competent scholar.
For several proposed distant genetic groupings,
he provides probability estimates that the groupings
will ultimately prove valid, and separately from that,
a confidence level (based on how adequate he feels the data is
on which he bases his estimate of ultimate relationship).
For example, for Maya - Huave - Mixe/Zoquean,
he estimates the probability of ultimate relationship at 30%,
and gives a 25% confidence level for that estimate.

This book should be of great usefulness both to anyone
interested in what is generally established knowledge
of genetic relationships, and to anyone interested
in methods of establishing new genetic relationships for
languages of the world.

Doris Bartholomew's review covers quite a bit of the content
and conclusions, beyond her specialty in Otomanguean.
She notes Campbell's position that he does not believe
studies of dentition or other non-linguistic matters
will correlate strongly with genetic groupings which linguists
can establish.  (Personally I think that is too negative a
position.)

I have looked at some portions of it in the past,
but am not familiar enough with it at this point
to review it independently.

The price of the book is $75 at
<http://www.amazon.com>

***

Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics


From ECOLING at aol.com  Thu Oct  7 17:45:29 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 13:45:29 EDT
Subject: No such assertion
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.134529.EDT.>

Larry Trask writes:

>And the assertion that linguists do not normally think at all of any factors
>beyond mutual intelligibility is beyond belief.

No such assertion was made by me.

That does not change the fact that definitions of "distinct language"
often refer only to mutual intelligibility as the core distinguisher.

Nor does it change the argument that even adding additional factors
to a definition may leave the original paradox intact.

Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Thu Oct  7 21:54:03 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 17:54:03 -0400
Subject: Answers regarding IE tree
In-Reply-To: <199910042008.NAA01234@netcom2.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.175403.0400.>

On Mon, 4 Oct 1999, Richard M. Alderson III wrote:

> I've now read the technical report in which the early results were published.
> As it appears from Mr. Crist's comments on the UPenn tree, further work has
> continued to refine the original results.

> Is the list of characters published anywhere electronically accessible?
> I'd be curious to see what the definitions for the Hittite vs. the world
> codings were --it may very well be that a different view of laryngeals,
> for example, would change the outcome greatly.

Just for you, I asked Don Ringe these questions when I met with him today.
The set of characters is not yet available online.  It's one of the things
they plan to do, tho.  The first order of business for the team is to get
their monograph on this subject out the door, and they're trying to get it
done before Don leaves for sabbatical this coming spring.

As a side point (and this is me talking now, not Don), I don't think that
any of the characters relates directly to the presence of laryngeals.  The
standard view, which almost everybody accepts, is that there were three
laryngeals in PIE.  It wouldn't really help us to set up a character which
codes for the retention of laryngeals, since the _loss_ of laryngeals
could have been an independent innovation in every branch, and has to be
coded as such; hence, such a character would be of no probative value.

> I have a larger problem with the tree as a whole, now that I know more
> of the details:  Only one language from each sub-family was used to
> provide input, and I believe that *this* choice may very well have
> biased some results.  I would be much happier if the Italic and Celtic
> languages were not from the respective "Q" branches thereof.  Does any
> of the papers provide information on how long a run of the program to
> interpret the characters actually runs (rather than the theoretical
> O(<mumble>) specification)?  How much time would be added by data from
> other languages?

Using a very fast, expensive, state-of-the-art machine donated by Intel, a
single run of the algorithm over the current character set takes about
eight days. How long the run takes depends on how messy the data are
(i.e., how badly they deviate from a perfect phylogeny). If you take
Germanic out, the remaining tree is close enough to a perfect phylogeny
that the algorithm only takes about three days to run.

As I mentioned before, the algorithm is guaranteed to give you a perfect
phylogeny if there is one; but if there is no perfect phylogeny, the
algorithm will not provably give you the phylogeny with the best fit.
However, if the number of characters not conforming to the resulting tree
is small, you can do an exhaustive search on the relatively small
remaining space of possible optimal trees, and then you can be certain you
have the optimal tree. If the number of non-conforming characters is
large, however (as is the case if you include Germanic), searching this
space becomes intractable, because the search runs in exponential time.

Regarding your concern that the results might have been biased by
selecting only one language per major branch: this necessity is partly
forced upon us by the slowness of the algorithm (and mind you, the
algorithm in question is at the very cutting edge of the field in computer
science, so the required processor time not something which can be readily
improved upon at our current state of knowledge).

A further consideration is that you have to have a pretty substantial
corpus to be able to code for a language in any useful way. I remember Don
Ringe saying in a talk that the team chose Old English over Gothic to
represent Germanic, for example, for this very reason.  He added that the
character encoding for Germanic would have been no different (other than
less complete) if they had used Gothic instead.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From anna-karin.strobel at swipnet.se  Thu Oct  7 23:57:10 1999
From: anna-karin.strobel at swipnet.se (anna-karin.strobel)
Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1999 01:57:10 +0200
Subject: Help to find article
Message-ID: <FRI.8.OCT.1999.015710.0200.>

Hello,

I wonder if anyone could be so kind to inform me where I could
locate this article

Gabrovec, S. "Das problem des nordwestillyrischen Gebietes", in
'Simpozijum Sarajevo', 1964 pp. 230-252.

Do anyone now any libraries that got this?

Thanks in advance,
Anna-Karin Strobel,

You might direct Your kindly answer to
anna-karin.strobel at swipnet.se


From roz-frank at uiowa.edu  Thu Oct  7 23:57:55 1999
From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 18:57:55 -0500
Subject: Basque 'sei'
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9910031701210.6056-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <THU.7.OCT.1999.185755.0500.>

>On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:

>[LT]

>>> Second, there's the problem of the sibilant.  Basque has two contrasting
>>> voiceless alveolar sibilants: a laminal, notated <z>, and an apical,
>>> notated <s>.  Now, in early loans from Latin, Latin /s/ is almost always
>>> rendered as the laminal <z>.  The same is true at all periods of loans
>>> from Gallo-Romance: the laminal /s/ of Occitan and French is rather
>>> consistently rendered by the Basque laminal <z>, not by the apical <s>.
>>> In contrast, the apical /s/ of Ibero-Romance is equally consistently
>>> rendered by the Basque apical <s>.

>> But Gascon-Be'arnais is Ibero-Romance in many ways, including
>> it's apical <s>.

Miguel, does that mean that Gascon-Be?rnais also had a laminal /s/ or just
the apical one?

And if so, were the two respesented as <z> (laminal) and <s> (apical) as is
the convention in Euskera?

Ondo izan,
Roz


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Oct  8 13:30:37 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1999 14:30:37 +0100
Subject: Respect goes both ways!
Message-ID: <FRI.8.OCT.1999.143037.0100.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

> From: ECOLING at aol.com
> Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 19:15:36 EDT

[LT]

>> So: is the English of 1998 "the same language" as the English of 1997?
>> If you answered "yes" the first time, you must answer "yes" now.

> No, that does not follow.  The relation is not transitive.

> I am sure the correspondent knows perfectly well it is not transitive.
> So why bring up this kind of an example and act as if the persons
> being criticized believed the relation is transitive?

I am completely mystified.  The relation "is the same as" is unquestionably
transitive.  That is, if it is true that X is the same as Y, and also true that
Y is the same as Z, then it must be true that X is the same as Z.  There is no
way round this, and I cannot understand why anyone should dispute it.

However, the point under discussion has nothing to do with transitivity.
Obviously, if it is true that X is the same as Y, then it does not follow, by
transitivity or by anything else, that Y is the same as Z.  This is not a valid
conclusion.

But my point is otherwise.  I'm talking about the following two propositions:

(a) English 1999 = English 1998
(b) English 1998 = English 1997

Now, if you agree that (a) is true, it does not *logically* follow that (b)
must be true.  However, given the nature of these statements, I can see no
rational basis for accepting the truth of (a) while rejecting the truth of (b).
Anyone who accepts (a) but rejects (b) must apparently agree that there was
some kind of dramatic discontinuity in English at the end of 1997, but not at
the end of 1998.  And this position I can't fathom at all.

[LT]

>> But you can see where this leading.  If the answer is "yes", then, by
>> transitivity, the English of 1999 is "the same language" as the English
>> of King Alfred the Great 1000 years ago.  Are you happy with this?  The
>> two varieties are not at all mutually comprehensible, since the changes
>> in 1000 years have been dramatic.

> And therefore,
> since the correspondent knows I would not want to answer yes
> (it is the most elementarily obvious conclusion from what I have written
> previously) it is obvious that the relation I used the definition of
> is not transitive, the correspondent has proven that.
> Isn't that interesting!

Well, I don't know if it's interesting or not, but I certainly can't regard it
as coherent.  As far as I am concerned, "is the same language as" is beyond
question a transitive relation, and there is nothing to discuss.

> The definition I made explicit was not a transitive definition
> (which goes unremarked by the correspondent).
> What an odd coincidence!
> Surely I could not have been careful
> enough to think this through in advance?
> Nor knowledgeable enough to know this in advance?
> Must be a coincidence.

Perhaps you could just explain how, in your view, "is the same language as" can
be other than transitive?

> The correspondent here is using a different definition,

A different definition of what?

> and just incidentally, it seems to be a definition of "language"
> more used by the man-on-the-street (i.e. a political-cultural definition).
> I believe earlier discussions were explicit that this was more
> the man-on-the-street's definition.

And I disagree absolutely.  I can only suggest that you stop a few people in
the street, ask them what they understand by 'language', and then report back
to us.

In my experience, the man in the street believes that there's a language called
'Indian' spoken by native Americans, that there's a language called 'Belgian'
in Belgium, that there's a language called 'Chinese' spoken by everybody in
China, that everybody speaks English with an accent except him and his friends,
and very often that they speak Latin in Latin America.

> I have not previously accused the correpondent of being an ignorant
> layman, though that is apparently what the correspondent is accusing
> me and Steve Long of being (in more than one way).

Hardly.  I merely fail to agree with the statements made above, and with other
statements made in other postings.

By the way, I do have a name, and I don't mind when people use it. ;-)

> The correspondent seems simply unwilling to face the fact that
> one particular technical definition of
> what makes two dialects distinct languages,
> a definition used by some professional linguists
> (and part of the definition used by almost all),
> carries with it a paradoxical answer that yes,
> what Steve Long said is in principle possible,
> a language and a descendant distinct language can co-exist.

Lloyd has already mailed me privately about this, and I have replied privately.
If anyone is interested, I can post the relevant part to this list.

> Inconvenient, perhaps, but a consequence of that technical definition.
> Not my technical definition,
> rather one used by many professional linguists
> when using "same language" in an ideal sense,
> not colored by political or cultural preferences of users.

Sorry, but I don't think this is a reasonable description of the approach of
linguists.  Among other things, I don't think linguists recognize an "ideal
sense" of the terms 'language' or 'same language', and I don't think we
commonly ignore the political and cultural preferences of users.

> And, just perhaps, co-operativeness would dictate that one should
> propose another more easily operationalized definition.

But my point was that there *is* and *can be* no "easily operationalized
definition".  Languages are simply not discrete entities, and that is that.

[LT]

>> I think that Steve
>> and Lloyd are both gravely wrong on certain fundamental points.

> Notice the magisterial tone, "fundamental points",
> unspecified even in what follows, like the Joe McCarthy hit list,
> very much like the words "fundamentally flawed"
> which have become a code among academics in reviewing books
> for "worthless, unprofessional, do not read that author".

Lloyd, this is absolutely unreasonable.  I have spelled out at some length the
fundamental points on which I was taking issue.

> I think the correspondent knows perfectly well
> I have not made that error.
> In which case I believe what he said is slanderous or libelous
> (take your pick, email is a strange being).

Well, under the draconian British libel laws, it would surely be libel.
See Geoff Pullum's essay on the subject in NLLT in 1985 and reprinted in his
book The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.

However, I don't plead guilty to either libel or slander, but only to
disagreeing with you on a number of fundamental issues.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Oct  8 16:07:06 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1999 17:07:06 +0100
Subject: Excluding data
Message-ID: <FRI.8.OCT.1999.170706.0100.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Jon Patrick writes:

>>> I've never asserted that you did. However I do think that your
>>> criteria are designed to create an analysis that is more strongly
>>> consistent with the generalisations you "think you have a pretty
>>> good idea" about.

[LT]

>> I flatly deny this, and I challenge you to back up your assertion.

> Ok tell us what all your "pretty good ideas are" and we will see how much of
> it you revise in your future presentations.

Sigh.  OK.  Here's a summary of what I expect to find, at least in the main
lines, based on what I've found so far.  Bear in mind that the following
account is necessarily slightly simplified: I've ignored a couple of small
complications.  And, of course, this is the current state of play, not the
final word.

I am talking about native and ancient Basque lexical items which are
monomorphemic.  I exclude verbs, which are constructed according to different
rules.  All other parts of speech are included.

The Pre-Basque phoneme inventory is this, as per Michelena (symbols as usual in
Basque historical linguistics; don't take them seriously as phonetic values):

	*/p  t  k  tz  ts  R  L  N/
	*/b  d  g   z   s  r  l  n/

	*/i  e  a  o  u/

The following vowel-sequences (probably) can form diphthongs:

	*/ai  ei  oi  ui  au  eu/

Now, a lexical item is normally two syllables long.  Its canonical form is as
follows:

	(C1)-V1-(C2)-(C3)-V2-(C4)

All the consonants are optional, and C2 is present only if C3 is.  If C3 is
empty, then its place is occupied by a phonetic [h].  If C3 is filled, but C1
is empty, then C1 can be optionally filled by a phonetic [h], according to
rules which are not clear.

V1 and V2 may each be any vowel or diphthong, except that no more than one of
them can be a diphthong.

C1 can only be one of the following:

	*/b g z s l n/

C3 can be any consonant at all.

C4 can only be one of the following:

	*/tz ts N R L/

If C3 is a plosive, then C2 can be any of these:

	*/n r l z s/

(Only */p t k/ can follow */z/ or */s/: neutralization.)

If C3 is an affricate, then C2 can be any of */r l n/.

If C3 is anything else, then C2 cannot be present.

So, legal bisyllables include the following:

	*/a[h]o/ 'mouth'
	*/ate/ 'door'
	*/uRe/ 'gold'
	*/atzo/ 'yesterday'
	*/na[h]i/ 'desire'
	*/a[h]uL/ 'weak'
	*/zati/ 'piece'
	*/zozo/ 'blackbird'
	*/be[h]aR/ 'need'
	*/initz/ 'dew'
	*/gizoN/ 'man'
	*/banats/ 'grapes'
	*/arte/ 'interval'
	*/alte/ 'side'
	*/zaldi/ 'horse'
	*/gazte/ 'young'
	*/[h]andi/ 'big'
	*/antza/ 'likeness'
	*/[h]aitzuR/ 'mattock'
	*/bazteR/ 'edge, corner'

A complication.  In a word of the form C1-V-C3-V(-), it is unusual for both Cs
to be plosives.  If they are, then both are taken from */b d g/.  (Recall that
*/d/ cannot be initial.)  Legal examples:

	*/bide/ 'road'
	*/begi/ 'eye'
	*/gabe/ 'without'
	*/bade/ 'one'
	*/biga/ 'two'
	*/gogo/ 'mind, memory'

Trisyllables are possible, though not numerous.  A trisyllable looks just like
a bisyllable with a third V attached at the end, except that C4 can now be any
consonant except a plosive.  It also appears that C1 and C3 cannot both be
plosives.  Legal trisyllables:

	*/ardano/ 'wine'
	*/itsaso/ 'sea'
	*/buztaRi/ 'yoke'
	*/aRaNo/ 'eagle'
	*/andere/ 'lady'

Monosyllables are possible, though not numerous.  The canonical form is this:

	(C1)-V-(C4)

Both consonants are optional.  If C1 is empty, then its place may be optionally
occupied by a phonetic [h].  C1 and C4 have the same values as above. V can be
any vowel or diphthong.  Legal examples:

	*/[h]i/ 'you' (singular)
	*/[h]itz/ 'word'
	*/su/ 'fire'
	*/gatz/ 'salt'
	*/gaitz/ 'bad'
	*/uR/ 'water'
	*/sats/ 'ordure'
	*/laN/ 'work'
	*/gai/ 'material'
	*/beL/ 'dark'

That's about it.  Longer monomorphemic words are not possible, probably.
I don't expect this picture to change much, though I'm hoping to find some
further constraints on possible sequences.

I also have to decide what to conclude about a handful of modern words with
exceptional clusters, such as /arlo/ 'field', /erle/ 'bee' and /ernai/ 'awake,
alert'.  There aren't many of these.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From roz-frank at uiowa.edu  Sat Oct  9 01:08:20 1999
From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank)
Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1999 20:08:20 -0500
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
Message-ID: <FRI.8.OCT.1999.200820.0500.>

To: Indo-European at xkl.com
From: "Roslyn M. Frank" <roz-frank at uiowa.edu>
Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To:
    <Pine.GSO.4.03.9910031404180.6056-100000 at rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
References: <4.1.19990929211028.009a0970 at blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>

At 02:21 PM 10/3/99 +0100, Larry Trask wrote:
>On Wed, 29 Sep 1999, Roslyn M. Frank wrote:

>>> [LT]
>>>>> And <bat> `one' is pretty clearly derived from earlier *<bade>.

[RF]
>> Larry, is this theory on *<bade> yours or did you glean it from some
>> other souce? And if it isn't yours, could you share with us who
>> first came up with it and when? Did that person use the same
>> explanation?

[LT]
>The comparison of <bat> with <bederatzi> `nine', and the consequent
>suggestion that <bat> must derive from something of the form *<bad->,
>was first made by Henri Gavel early in this century.  The further
>comparisons with <bedera> `one apiece'

[RF]
In other words, for you the meaning of <bedera> is "one apiece"? I think
you defined it this way in an earlier mailing, also.

[LT]
> and other items, and the proposed
>reconstruction *<bade>, were put forward by Michelena, in his book
>Fonetica Historica Vasca, p. 134 and p. 235.

[RF]
 Hence, the data set under analysis consists solely of <bedera> and
<bederatzi> since these are the only two examples mentioned by Michelena,
right?

[LT]
>I can claim no credit here, but I do endorse Gavel's and Michelena's
>suggestions.  But note that, for lack of compelling evidence, Michelena
>did not regard the reconstruction *<bade> as secure, but only as a
>plausible suggestion.

[RF]
You have shared with us two statements concerning the etymology of <bat>:
First your own which you phrased as follows:

1). that <bat> "is pretty clearly derived from earlier *<bade>."

Then you provided us with a paraphrase or synopsis of Michelena's
statements on the topic:

2). that in Michelena's opinion the etymology from *<bade> "lacked
compelling evidence" and hence
"was not secure." It should be considered, therefore, "only a plausible
suggestion."

Having read over Michelena's comments, I believe your summary of them,
provided above, is quite accurate and appropriate. It expands on
Michelena's representation of *<bade> as "*<bade>?". He clearly didn't feel
fully confident about it. Also, above you state that you "endorse Gavel's
and Michelena's suggestions," once again emphasizing the tentative nature
of the reconstruction and once again a very measured statement on your part.

However, there is a third instance in which you have spoken about this same
problem although in rather different terms. Specifically on that occasion
you stated the following:

"It is most unusual for a native Basque word to end in a plosive, and <bat>
is clearly from earlier *<bade> or *<bada>  suggested by  the morph <bede->
in derivatives as (northern) <bedera> 'one apiece' and <bederatzi> 'nine'."

To my knowledge Michelena did not list the second etymon *<bada>, although
perhaps he did so on some other occasion, i.e., not in his work _Fonetica
Historica Vasca_.

As you will recall, the above quote is found on page 273 of your book _The
History of Basque_. Your statement, therefore, seems to contradict what you
have shared with us on the IE list or at least to be far less cautious.
Furthermore, I note that in your book you list <bede-> as a morph, not as
*<bede->. Earlier on this list you also affirmed that <bedere(n> contains
the same morph, if my memory serves me right.

Before you wrote your book, did you discover additional evidence -beyond
that presented by Gavel and Michelena- which strengthened your conviction
concerning this version of events? And if you did find additional proof for
this position, could you share it with us?

Furthermore, based on your statements in the email on this topic cited
above ("I can claim no credit."), you seem to be saying that all you have
done is repeat the positions of Gavel and Michelena, nothing more. Yet in
this section of your book you do not cite or otherwise overtly refer to the
specific works of Gavel nor Michelena where they discuss this problem.
Indeed, your statement "<bat> is clearly from earlier *<bade> or *<bada>"
leaves the impression that there is no other possibility: that yours is a
summary of the consensus opinion.

In that respect I would mention that Ribary in his _Ensayo sobre la lengua
vasca_, translated by Julian Vinson (Paris, 1877) argued that the first
element in <bederatzi> was <bat>, i.e., that the word should be broken down
into <bed-era-tzi>) and where <bat> had taken on the shape of *<bed>.  In
other words, he doesn't question the original shape of the root-stem. (As
an aside I should mention that I don't agree with Ribary's etymology of the
ending on <bederatzi>).

For anyone working in comparative linguistics it is important to be able to
build on the works of those who have gone before. However, there is always
the possibility that somewhere in the chain of transmissions -like in the
proverbial game of telephone- the message gets garbled. The danger is that
others can start using that version of linguistic realities as a basis for
further descriptions of the phenomena under study, i.e., utilizing
paraphrases of others' works rather than testing the data themselves.

At least in the case of Euskera, it has been my experience that sometimes
it can be a risky business unless each aspect of the data sets used in
reconstructing the phonology of the language is well researched, checked
and double-checked for accuracy. This is obviously a monumental task in the
case of (P)IE comparative linguistics (given the massive volume of earlier
research), but perhaps it is still possible in the case of Euskera given
the much more restricted number of detailed investigations on these aspects
of the language and the circumscribed nature of the data themselves.

Comments anyone?

Ondo ibili,
Roz

************************************************************************
Roslyn M. Frank
Professor
************************************************************************
Department of Spanish & Portuguese
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242
email: <roz-frank at uiowa.edu>
fax: (319)-335-2990


From colkitto at sprint.ca  Tue Oct 12 05:25:15 1999
From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 01:25:15 -0400
Subject: Change and What Remains
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.012515.0400.>

I had a cousin by marriage who moved to  Canada as a young girl.

My father met her for the first time when she was a very old lady and said:
"I heard this lovely 1920's voice".

My mother had an aunt, from the "Inverness area" who spent her life in
Paris.

My father spent several years of his boyhood in Inverness.  Around 1950 my
father met htis aunt for the first time, and he said that she had the same
voice as much older people he remmembered in the Inverness area.

Does this constitute  "parent and daughter co-existing" at all?

[ moderator snip ]

>So, apart from the trivial case of me and my niece, how can a language
>co-exist with its own descendant?

I actually do know a couple of cases

>Larry Trask


From MF1107 at mclink.it  Mon Oct 11 21:23:23 1999
From: MF1107 at mclink.it (Massimo Forconi)
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 23:23:23 +0200
Subject: Nors Josephson's Theory about a linguistic and cultural influence
 of Ancient Greek on East-Polynesia
Message-ID: <MON.11.OCT.1999.232323.0200.>

I should like to know some scholarly opinion about N. Josephson's theories
concerning a presumptive linguistic Greek influence on Pacific area (ex. gr.
cf. N. Josephson, Greek Linguistic Elements in the Polynesian Languages,
Universitaetsverlag C. Winter, Heidelberg, 1987; or Idem, Eine
archaisch-griechische Kultur auf der Osterinsel, Universitaetsverlag C. Winter,
Heidelberg, 1999 ).


From Georg at home.ivm.de  Tue Oct 12 07:38:22 1999
From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 09:38:22 +0200
Subject: accusative and ergative languages
In-Reply-To: <003601bf0d7d$863d4a60$879f113f@oemcomputer>
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.093822.0200.>

>[PR interjects]
>Ralf-Stefan, ease up. Do I have to put in a 'funny-face' whenever I attempt
>to say something funny?

OK, eased up. I certainly overreacted. The Hun knows no fun ...

>[PR]
>All good points. I am wondering how you would react to the proposition that
>'passive' in ACC languages fulfills a roughly analogous role to 'splits' in
>predominantly ERG languages? 'Splitting', AFAICS, seems to be a method of
>fine-tuning the indication of directness (and intentionality) of the
>agentivity, and I am wondering if other mechanisms in ACC languages are not
>really functionally if not formally equivalent.

This is worth some thought. Nevertheless, passive is a techique I can
deliberately (within certain boundaries of course) employ to do something
with it, where this is possible (namely to downplay the agent), whereas the
splits in predominantly ERG languages are grammaticaly hard-wired and
compulsory. E.g. it is "wrong" in Georgian to use the ERG construction in
the present tense. Antipassives, in languages that do have them, are more
"equivalent" to passives there (they also "downplay", in this case the
patient), hence the name.

St.G.

Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
+49-228-69-13-32


From Georg at home.ivm.de  Tue Oct 12 08:07:45 1999
From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 10:07:45 +0200
Subject: PIE vs. Proto-Language
In-Reply-To: <004a01bf0d95$f8231480$879f113f@oemcomputer>
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.100745.0200.>

SG:
>> Again: homo sapiens is a biological species endowed with certain
>> intellectual abilities, among which the ability to develop, learn and
>> handle such a complicated thing as language is possibly the most remarkable
>> one. The next step, from homo sapiens to, say, homo loquens is not I
>> biological one, but a cultural one. Nothing prevents us from assuming that
>> it could have happened more than once, maybe even often, or, in short:
>> language is a tool.

>[PR]
>I am afraid that we will not be able to settle this question to the
>satisfaction of either of us.

We should not give up so early ...

>So much hinges on at what point we begin to regard the noises that early man
>was making as 'language'. As another thread on this list attests, that does
>not seem to be a question that all can answer with consensus.

The point is: we have not heard these noises. If we could, we could decide
whether those people were making use of anything worthy of the name "lg" or
not. The thread you mention is, if I'm not mistaken, about the notion of a
*given* language as opposed to others, i.e. about discreteness in
"language-space". For distinguishing between human language and other
systems of communication, say, of animals, there are rather good and
straightforeward criteria (openness, double articulation aso.).

>I am convinced by the genetic evidence that modern humans are, at least,
>principally descended from a single ancient (pre-)human stock, whether out
>of Africa, which I think likeliest, or from another place.

I don't take issue with the generally held position that biologically
modern humans descend from a single ancestior.

>Was this ancient group capable of 'language'? I think so but I would not
>unequivocally assert it. It justs seems to be the simplest scenario, hence,
>possibly, the most probable.

Capable, yes.

>If you believe that a scenario of 'language' developing in separated human
>groups (hence unrelated except indirectly by the biological potential to
>develop it) is preferable,  then tell me, if the original stock (presuming
>you buy the genetic argument) was capable potentially of language, what
>prevented that potential from being realized?

The fact that they had to find out about this ability first. They were also
capable of inventing the wheel and eventually the moderated e-mail list ...

>Would you go so far as to
>assert that 100(-150) ya there was *NO* language?

I simply don't have any opinion about this, as long as precise dates are
involved. Biologically modern humans may have begun to exploit their unique
mental capacities fairly quickly; it may also have taken them some time
(millennia ??). I dunno. The only thing I find fairly easy to imagine and
accept is *biologically* modern man existing without language for some
time, thus *culturally* not being significantly more advanced than the
brightest primates. Why not ?
Once those mental capacities started to be used, we may well reckon with a
kind of cultural explosion, leaving all early human groups not able to
catch up with it quickly behind and dooming their fate.
For this, it is not necessary to assume that the actual material make-up
of the "first language", or its form-meaning-clusters,  were imitated by
others. Finding out the usefulness of such a thing as language, together
with finding out that one is actually capably to manage it is enough to
develop one.

The question when language arose is one I simply cannot claim to be able to
judge competently about, but it is clear to me that the two notion of
*biologically* and *culturally* modern man are not necessarily the same
thing. Palaeontologists a/o archaeologists should be looking for signs of
early culture, i.e. social organisation, sophisticated artefact use,
tradition, art, emergent religion etc. to approach the time where it would
simply be necessary to assume that people who did this and that or used
this and that, or cooperated in this and that way could not well have none
so without considerably elaborate communication skills. Having the brains
is only a prerequesite for this.

St.G.

Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
+49-228-69-13-32


From lmfosse at online.no  Tue Oct 12 09:46:11 1999
From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 10:46:11 +0100
Subject: SV: Pre-Basque Phonology
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.104611.0100.>

Stanley Friesen [SMTP:sarima at ix.netcom.com] skrev 06. oktober 1999 03:51:
> This may certainly have been part of it.  However, a large part of the
> modern Marian treatment in Catholic Christianity goes back to the
> assimilation of the Romano-Egyptian worship of Isis.  (Of course, if it
> happened once it could happen more often, and we could have a major
> composite here).

And not only Isis. The Roman world knew a number of mother goddesses (e.g.
Cybele), as well as some chaste virgin goddesses (e.g. Athena, Artemis). In the
religious conscience of Mediterranean antiquity, there must have been a "niche"
for a mother goddess as well as a chaste goddess. The church combined these two
concepts in the Virgin Mary. I am not certain that Christianity would have been
as successful without this elegant sleight-of-hand.

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 larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Oct 12 10:20:47 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 11:20:47 +0100
Subject: Africa vs. Americas, Multilateral Comparison
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.112047.0100.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Lloyd Anderson writes:

>  I believe an underlying psychological reason for not treating the
>  African and the American applications of Multilateral Comparison
>  together is simply the great discomfort most comparative-historical
>  linguists have with techniques which are used to discover plausible
>  hypotheses for future work.  They are simply not comfortable at
>  the edges of new knowledge, because it cannot have the certainty
>  of the most exacting techniques applied in long-established fields.
>  There is obviously no criticism here of those more detailed techniques,
>  it is simply inappropriate to insist on them at the edges of new knowledge.
>  It manifests an inflexibility to be unable to adapt one's choice of
>  techniques to the differences between long-established fields and the edges
>  of significantly new knowledge not limited to filling in details.

Well, I query this view of my field.

To begin with, as Lloyd himself emphasizes, MC is not a new technique but a
very old one.  It is also a technique which has been largely supplanted by
newer and better techniques.

More generally, though, I take issue with the suggestion that today's
historical and comparative linguists are generally inflexible old
stick-in-the-muds who can't cope with new ideas.  In fact, I would say that we
are living in one of the liveliest and most interesting periods that the
subject has ever seen.

These days the literature is full of masses of fascinating new data and of
constant new ideas.  The importance of contact and convergence phenomena is
being ever more steadily recognized.  We are learning more and more about the
complex and messy ways in which languages change and about the social factors
which are important in promoting change.  New models of linguistic descent are
being put forward almost in a breathless rush, and these new models are being
applied both to long-standing problems and to new ones.  A number of groups are
trying very hard to develop useful mathematical and computational approaches to
such problems as long-range comparison and tree-drawing.  We have Johanna
Nichols's population typology, Malcolm Ross on social networks, Thurston and
others on esoterogeny and exoterogeny, Roger Lass on parallels with
evolutionary biology, Daniel Nettles on computational models of rate of change
and population size, Jim Matisoff and others unraveling the huge and complex
mess that is Sino-Tibetan, Peter Bakker and others showing us undeniable mixed
languages, the Pennsylvania and Cambridge groups with their best-tree
approaches...I could go on in this vein for some time.

Indeed, the field is in such ferment that I almost get dizzy trying to keep up
with the flow of news ideas.  Just to cite one example, Bob Dixon's recent book
promoting the punk-eek model has already spawned a sizeable number of papers
debating its applicability to many areas of the world.

Inflexible stick-in-the-muds?  I don't think so.  We may not be all that keen
on MC, but nobody can say we're not interested in new ideas.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From adahyl at cphling.dk  Tue Oct 12 10:36:59 1999
From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 12:36:59 +0200
Subject: Moldavian (was: Contributions by Steve Long)
In-Reply-To: <l03102801b41cdb6a92b2@[195.247.226.87]>
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.123659.0200.>

On Sun, 3 Oct 1999, Ralf-Stefan Georg wrote:

> witness the overnight extinction
> of language with 2 1/2 Mio. speakers recently. Cannot happen ? Has
> happened: Moldavian;

In the case of Moldavian, we're dealing with a language that was also
CONSTRUCTED overnight, and those languages are probably more likely to
face extinction. In fact, the Soviet language planners could have done
their job much better; they never took advantage of the actual
phonological differences between standard Romanian and the dialects of
Moldavian Socialist Soviet Republic. The cyrillic alphabet introduced
for Moldavian in 1940 was actually a grapheme-to-grapheme correspondence
to the roman alphabet used for standard Romanian, very much like the
relationship Croatian vs. Serbian during the Yugoslav era. And only a few
loanwords from Russian and Ukrainian, most of them already used in the
area, replaced standard Romanian words in the official Moldavian
vocabulary. Examples are Mold. <hulub> 'pigeon' (from Ukr.) vs. Rom.
<porumbel>, Mold. <drujba`> 'friendship' (from Russ.) vs. Rom.
<prietenie>.

After Moldova's independence in 1991, the question of whether the official
language should be called ROMANIAN or MOLDOVIAN rocked its political
cradle. In Moldova's present constitution, the official language is called
MOLDOVIAN, but it is acknowledged as a variety of Romanian, and Moldovian
has even followed the recent Romanian spelling reform.

Best regards,
Adam Hyllested


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Oct 12 10:47:03 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 11:47:03 +0100
Subject: Azkue's dictionary
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.114703.0100.>

Lloyd Anderson writes:

>  Thanks to Larry Trask for the very informative review
>  of two Basque dictionaries.  I am printing a copy to keep on
>  permanent file.

>  I would only have one caveat, which is that the paragraph
>  quoted below is listed as a "major drawback" of Azkue's dictionary.
>  Many dictionary users who are interested in the vocabulary of
>  the language might consider it an advantage,
>  that one can find a word under whatever dialect variant
>  the dictionary maker had evidence for.

This is convenient for practical everyday use, certainly, but it's far less
convenient for scholarly work, since Azkue does not, in general, provide
cross-references.

>  (The lack of cross-references to eymologically related items
>  is a drawback for anyone interested in etymologies, it is true.
>  Perhaps a list of cross-references and
>  dates of attestation could be prepared by someone
>  as a supplement to Azkue's dictionary,
>  since it is in Spanish and French and otherwise provides
>  the best information on dialectal provenience?)

This work is being done, though not all in one place.

Agud and Tovar's etymological dictionary (still incomplete) gathers all
regional variants under a single headword, but provides no dates.  Sarasola's
(monoglot Basque) dictionary provides dates of first attestation, but is not
comprehensive.  The Academy's new dictionary, which is meant to be
comprehensive, also provides dates, but is far from complete.

Some day -- probably after I retire -- I plan to compile an etymological
dictionary which will incorporate all of the useful information in one place.

>  Rather this quoted paragraph should be part of indications
>  on how one uses Azkue's dictionary,
>  not under a list of supposed drawbacks of Azkue's dictionary.

The difficulty here is that knowing Azkue's policy does not help the reader
in locating the attested variant forms.  Given any one variant form of the
Basque word for, say, 'wine' or 'strawberry', there is no way of locating the
others except by guessing possible forms and then trawling through the
dictionary.  Even putting the dictionary on line, as Jon Patrick has done,
will not help if you cannot guess the possible forms to be examined --
unless, of course, you simply search for all the entries with a given gloss,
which will work in the simplest cases but not in the cases in which the
variant forms also have somewhat different meanings.

[on the problem of duplicating entries]

>  Of course one would edit these, and any linguist would recognize
>  many or most etymologically related words with the same meanings.

Well, I wish I could share this optimism, but I can't.

I get to read a whole lot of hopeful long-range comparative work involving
Basque.  And I'm afraid it is commonplace for comparativists to cite variant
forms of a Basque word as though they were unrelated and to compare them
separately with words in the other language(s) which they happen to resemble.
Only a couple of weeks ago, I chided one such comparativist for citing
eastern <hertsi> 'narrow' and its western variant <estu> 'narrow' as two
unrelated items and comparing each with a different item in the language
being compared.

A related issue is identifying transparent derivatives.  For example, Basque
<egun> 'day' has a transparent derivative <eguzki> 'sun', which in turn has a
localized eastern variant <ekhi>.  I have been astonished to see one
comparativist cite *all three* of these on the same page as though they were
unrelated and to compare each of them with a *different* word in the other
language under discussion.

>  On the whole, it seems from Larry Trask's review of it that Jon Patrick is
>  on very solid ground in using Azkue's dictionary as a basis for
>  analytical studies.

But only, I think, if a detailed knowledge of Basque linguistics is first
superimposed on the raw data.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Oct 12 14:33:45 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 15:33:45 +0100
Subject: Contributions by Steve Long
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.153345.0100.>

Stanley Friesen writes:

[on my Yugoslav example]

> This actually accords with what one book on linguistic change suggested is
> the *main* cause of language change: a social desire to differentiate one's
> group from some other group.  (Unfortunately I cannot locate the book right
> now).

I don't know of any book or article which makes such a strong claim as this,
and I must confess I find it implausible.  But there *has* been some recent
work showing that this desire for linguistic distance has been a major factor
in certain cases.

[on the contunuity-plus-change in English]

> There is another way out of this dilemma.  At least in many cases
> substantial language change occurs in a *single* generation.  In the
> history of English, one such case occurred during the Wars of Roses, and
> separates Middle English from Modern English.

Perhaps, but I find it very hard to believe that *most* linguistic change
occurs over a single generation.  The evidence seems to be clearly against
this.

By the way, what was there that was so dramatic during the Wars of the Roses?

> And it is occurring right now for the Blackfoot language, with older tribe
> members speaking Old Blackfoot, and the younger ones speaking New
> Blackfoot.  The changes are quite substantial, and include replacement of
> vowel+glottal stop with a long/creaky vowel.

I have encountered comparable cases elsewhere.  But, again, it seems doubtful
that language change mostly occurs in sudden and dramatic jumps, or
saltations, to borrow a term from evolutionary biology.

[LT]

>> Take a real case in this vein.  Is modern Greek "the same language" as
>> ancient Greek?  If not, where's the cutoff point?

> One of two places:
> 1. at some historical point where there was a major break between
> successive generations.

At what point?

Standard histories of Greek, in my experience, present a history of constant
change, with few if any dramatic discontinuities.  The conventional division
into historical periods (Mycenaean, Homeric, classical, Hellenistic, New
Testament, Byzantine, and what not) is presented as a convenience, not as an
objective fact.  The only observable discontinuities lie in those periods
during which Greek is not attested.

> 2. at the point where any older dialects are not easily comprehensible to
> someone knowing the modern literary standard language.  (Choosing the
> literary standard here  deals with the issue of the subtle changes over
> time in modern Greek).

Well, to be honest, I think it's out of order to appeal to a written literary
language, which need bear little or no relation to speech -- and it's speech
we're interested in.

Anyway, I think it's improper to pick a contemporary speaker as the judge.
Everybody at every stage can normally understand the speech of the two or
three immediately preceding or following generations.  My grandparents would
probably have understood their own grandparents better than I could have, had
I ever been able to meet them.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Tue Oct 12 14:39:10 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 10:39:10 -0400
Subject: Possessives
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9910061722430.9615-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.103910.0400.>

On Wed, 6 Oct 1999, Larry Trask wrote:

> On Sun, 3 Oct 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote:

>> 'Black dog' can be represented logically as a small circle ('black')
>> within a larger circle ('dog').  [...] [Snip, and reordering -SC]

[...]
> For example, consider `Susie is a mere child.'  Here the adjective
> `mere' does not define a subclass of the class of children: children are
> not divided into mere and non-mere varieties.  Or consider this one:
> `Lisa is a heavy smoker'.  This time the adjective `heavy' does not
> perform any subclassification of the set of smokers.  In fact, it
> doesn't even apply semantically to smokers, or to Lisa: instead, it
> applies to Lisa's habit.

Just to amplify on this point, consider "a counterfeit dollar".  The whole
point here is that the item in question is _not_ a dollar; it doesn't
belong to some subset of dollars in the way that a black dog belongs to a
subset of the dogs.  Likewise with "a fake moustache", "an imposter
policeman", etc.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From mclasutt at brigham.net  Tue Oct 12 14:58:37 1999
From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 08:58:37 -0600
Subject: Africa vs. Americas, Multilateral Comparison
In-Reply-To: <3c28b702.252ce240@aol.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.085837.0600.>

Lloyd's recent response to my thoughts on using Greenberg's multilateral
comparison in Africa and America was quite thoughtful and implies that I'm
not willing to accept ANY use of multilateral comparison in the proper
context.  This isn't the case, but Greenberg's misuse of the results of his
multilateral comparison often clouds the issue and I am guilty of not being
absolutely precise.

Let me summarize, if I may, the similarities and differences between Lloyd's
and my positions vis a vis Multilateral Comparison and Greenberg.

Multilateral Comparison:

Multilateral Comparison is a useful tool in the initial stages of linguistic
investigation of a large area.  It has been used since the beginning of the
historical/comparative method as one tool among many.  It is not a
conclusive proof of anything in and of itself because it ignores factors of
chance, fails to properly identify borrowing, fails to take into account
historical and other nonlinguistic factors, and is dependent on the quality
and quantity of available materials for the languages involved.  It can be
suggestive of potential areas for further research.  Misused, it can give
the appearance of a final proof of genetic relationship that may or may not
actually be there.  Any results must be validated or invalidated with
further research using comparative methodology.  Lloyd and I agree on this.
(I'm going to infer some of this from your posts, Lloyd, so if I'm not
correct about your opinions, I apologize in advance.)

Greenberg's use of multilateral comparison:

1.  Greenberg makes the error of using multilateral comparison to prove
genetic relationship in the Americas instead of merely suggesting further
avenues of research.  His arguments in "Language in the Americas" are clear
that he does not consider his results to be merely suggestive, but
conclusive.  Greenberg, and his principal disciple, Merritt Ruhlen, have
spread this "proof" throughout the nonlinguistic world as accomplished
demonstration.  I think that Lloyd may not completely agree with this, but I
do.

2.  Native American language specialists have generally rejected Greenberg's
claims due to lack of evidence, following well-established practice that
multilateral comparison merely suggests, it does not prove.  However, in our
zeal to undo the false perception of final proof that Greenberg has placed
in the public's mind, we often overdo our criticism of Greenberg's misuse of
multilateral comparison and appear to be condemning the act of multilateral
comparison itself.  Of this I am guilty.  Multilateral comparison is a
preliminary tool, but Greenberg has used it as proof--that's the main issue
among Americanists.  It is this overzealousness on my part to which Lloyd
takes issue.  I'll be more accurate in my wording in the future.

John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
mclasutt at brigham.net

Program Director
Utah State University On-Line Linguistics
http://english.usu.edu/lingnet

English Department
3200 Old Main Hill
Utah State University
Logan, UT  84322-3200

(435) 797-2738 (voice)
(435) 797-3797 (fax)


From ECOLING at aol.com  Tue Oct 12 17:18:35 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 13:18:35 EDT
Subject: Refining early Basque criteria
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.131835.EDT.>

Concerning Larry Trask's list of criteria for potential candidates
for early Basque vocabulary lists:

>1. Early attestation

>The word should be recorded early.  I have proposed a cut-off date of
>1600, since the first substantial literature appears in the 16th
>century.  Someone else (Jon Patrick?) suggested 1700 instead.  This is
>reasonable: the 16th-century texts are not numerous; they are all
>written by clerics; and they are overwhelmingly religious, with many of
>them being translations.  The 17th-century literature, in contrast, is
>much more voluminous, and it includes the first lay writers, notably the
>important Oihenart.  I'm happy with 1700, though I suspect it won't make
>a great deal of difference.  But nothing later.

The details in the paragraph above suggest to me OBVIOUSLY
if you want early Basque, you use 1700 in preference to 1600,
because the 16th-century materials are so limited in content.
It is always possible to study any differences between 16th and 17th-century
equivalent grammatical morphemes, forms of the same words, etc.,
where those are attested in both centuries, but obviously much
non-religious vocabulary will be systematically disfavored by the earlier
cutoff date.

>2. Widespread distribution.
<snip>
>Now, I suggest counting a word as widespread if it is securely attested
>in at least four of these five groupings.
<snip>

As explained in a long and detailed message sent many days ago,
focused on sound-symbolic vocabulary ...
given the limited recording of sound-symbolic vocabulary,
an insistence on very wide distribution will have the effect of biasing
against this type of vocabulary,
and in this case will certainly bias against a variety of canonical forms,
in favor of canonical forms more uniform and more limited than they
actually were in very early Basque.
A systematic distortion, in other words,
in this case not merely a lack of particular lexical items, but even
a systemic distortion by changing the hypotheses of canonical forms.

Thinking of subject matters attested or not, we have the following,
which ties this issue back to the specifics of subject matter noted
by Larry Trask for 16th vs. 17th centuries:
If only two dialect areas have documents in certain subject matters,
then vocabulary specific to those subject matters will be systematically
excluded by requiring their attestation from more than two dialect areas.
This is obviously undesirable.  It suggests that a moderate position might
be to categorize documentary attestations by subject matter,
and vary the number of dialect areas required according to the number
of areas attesting documents in each subject matter.
Of course in practice, this can be done in another way.
Record ALL vocabulary items for a particular concept,
and study the UNIFORMITY of etyma for that concept,
without much regard AT FIRST for whether it comes from two or from five areas.
If variants for a particular concept cannot be established as loans from
neighboring languages, then remaining variety of non-cognate terms
argues against immediately positing any of the conflicting forms
as candidates for very early Basque (even though one or more
of them MIGHT be a direct descendant of very early Basque).
Additional argumentation would then be necessary, either way.
Of course things are not this simple,
but Larry Trask is an expert at using all of these varied sorts of
information.
More dialect areas of course gives additional security,
and perhaps additional phonological information.

>3. Absence from neighboring languages
<snip>
> I suggest that, if
>Agud and Tovar's etymological dictionary shows a widespread belief or
>suspicion among specialists that a word is borrowed, then it should be
>excluded -- even if the loan origin is not certain.  Caution is vital
>here, in my view.

Some would use "caution" in not throwing out things for which loanword
origin is merely suspected, for which the argument is not a strong one.
"Strong" is not the same as "certain".
Moderation in all criteria, as in all things.

>A decision must be made about the very few shared words which are
>thought to be of Basque origin.  For example, everybody believes that
>the Castilian and Portuguese words for `left (hand)' are borrowed from
>Basque <ezker>.  A policy must be adopted here, but such words are
>vanishingly few anyway, and the decision is most unlikely to have any
>significant consequences.

Would such examples be those in which the Castilian and Portuguese words
have no cognates in other Romance languages?  In such a case,
would not the identical sort of criteria dictate that they be excluded from
studies of early Castilian and Portuguese?  Of course, there is no necessary
contradiction here, because items of this sort could in principle be
excluded from BOTH sides of any puzzling sharing, in the approach
Larry Trask is taking.  Or they can be included on BOTH sides.
My own position would be simply to include them on both sides,
but with a note that they might be from either side, and if they are
from the Romance side, but limited to Iberian Romance, then we
must have an additional hypothesis that there was some innovation within
Iberian Romance, or else a borrowing from some third language family
related neither to Romance nor to early Basque.  Is there some gap in
that reasoning?  Because it seems to me to suggest that words limited
to Basque and to Iberian Romance (not found in other Romance languages),
are better assigned to early Basque than to early Romance,
since by definition of the situation they are not reconstructible to early
Romance.  But this is not certain, Occam's razor can suggest a route
to follow, but it cannot absolutely exclude the more complex case that
there was an extinct third language family from which a word was
borrowed both into Basque and into Iberian Romance.

***

>...it is well known that words like <ama>
>`mother' and <tu> `spit' occur in languages all over the planet.

That does not argue either for or against such words actually being
inherited from Proto-Basque.

It DOES make it difficult to use such words in trying to prove
a deep genetic relation between languages, because one must then
have sufficient knowledge of sound-symbolic forces to argue
something more specific is shared between particular languages,
not merely a vague resemblance.
That is quite a separate issue.

***

<snip>

>When -- as so often -- a word exists in
>several regional variant forms, what form should go into the list?
>My answer is that we should simply appeal to the known phonological
>prehistory of Basque, and use the form which can be reconstructed as the
>common ancestor.

I have great confidence that Larry Trask will almost always draw the
correct conclusions in such cases, given his knowledge of the
phonological history of Basque.  But it nevertheless should be clear
that there is a potential circularity, of exactly the kind pointed out by
Steve Long, that a theory of the historical development of a language
is used to select which forms are considered to have been in a proto-
language.  That virtually guarantees that a different theory of
historical development of the language cannot easily be developed
from data thus selected.  Elementary common sense.

That does not make this procedure wrong.
Because it is the totality of the COMBINATION of the attested data
and the hypothesized sound changes (etc.) which we evaluate,
in the long run.  But it does make this procedure less than absolutely
certain to give the correct results.  (Using terminology from other
fields, it is often possible to find a "local minimum" or solution
which is better than any nearby points (closely similar solutions),
yet which is not an absolute minimum, not the absolute best solution.
In our field,
changing BOTH some of the hypotheses about sound changes and
other historical developments AND some of the hypothesized proto-forms,
changing both together, in a co-ordinated fashion, may
yield a better solution.  Such shifts of paradigm do occur.

>Finally ... if anybody out there still believes that my primary criteria are
>somehow likely to skew the results in some phonological way, or if
>anybody thinks that there exist better criteria for the purpose of
>identifying the best candidates for native and ancient status in the
>language, let's hear about it.

I don't understand the word "still" here,
it should be evident that I do and have previously explained the
concrete reasons why.  There is no need to repeat the details here.
As far as I know, Larry Trask has not
argued against the reasons I gave.

I have repeatedly pointed to the problem of selection against
sound-symbolic vocabulary through accidents of limited recording,
having the effect of biasing our notions of canonical forms.
Using Larry's mention of the difference of subject matters
between 16th-century and 17th-century documentations,
it is easy to explain why using too early a cutoff in time,
or requiring too many or the wrong dialect attestations,
can systematically bias against vocabulary in certain semantic
fields, because these, like sound-symbolic items more generally,
were not within the subject matter favored by the documents.

***

Additionally, criteria for what are likely to be descendants of early
Basque forms are NOT THE SAME THING as criteria for
what are good items to use in any consideration of potential
external relationships of Basque.  I say this latter NOT because I hold
out any hopes for finding distant relatives of Basque in my lifetime,
but simply because mixing these two goals can distort the picture
of proto-Basque by excluding many items which were in fact
part of proto-Basque.

***

In addition to all of the criteria Larry Trask mentions, I think there
should be another criterion:  For each item on the basic 100-word
or 200-word Swadesh list, be sure to INCLUDE SOME vocabulary item
whose meaning matches that item.
Simply on the grounds that every language will have vocabulary
for such meanings, so reconstructing an early Basque without any
term for such a meaning is contra-indicated.
This is not a criterion for evaluating any particular proposed vocabulary
item in Proto-Basque, it is rather a global criterion which can be
used to evaluate the sum total of the judgments on individual candidates
for inclusion.  It can tell us that we have excluded too much,
and in what semantic ranges we should probably seek additional
candidates for inclusion.

I would bet there are many other criteria which might be added,
and balancing them all together to make decisions will yield
better results than using a simpler set of criteria and allowing
any one otherwise reasonable criterion to dictate inclusion or exclusion.
Larry Trask has shown his ability to use many criteria beyond the
simple set in discussing particular vocabulary items
(such as /sei/ or any other).

***

Best wishes,
Lloyd Anderson


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Tue Oct 12 17:50:58 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 12:50:58 -0500
Subject: Updates regarding UPenn tree
In-Reply-To: <LPBBJHPIGJGDEKDCLOBFOELCCEAA.mclasutt@brigham.net>
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.125058.0500.>

	I've only read about in general books but it seems regular. I
remember the example [something like] "Fair is the fite fulpie?" for "Where
is the white whelpie?"
	I don't know if it has anything to do with influence from Gaelic or
not, in that some dialects of Gaelic have a type of alternation of f/wh;
e.g. fuisce vs. uisge, last name Phelan vs. Whelan [< ? Ui Faolain sp?]
--where /hw/ may possibly be a local pronciation of <fh> and where /hw/ may
possibly have been perceived as a form of /f/
	But, on the other hand, I seem to remember that the dialect in
question was from NE Scotland, and more likely not in contact with Gaelic

>John McLaughlin wrote:

[ moderator snip ]

>What are the details of this /hw/ > /f/ change?  Is it due to mishearing as
>Crist suggests for PIE *penkwe > *PGmc *finf?  Is it a regular change or
>conditioned?

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Tue Oct 12 17:54:44 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 12:54:44 -0500
Subject: Updates regarding UPenn tree
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.4.10a.9910061049230.18272-100000@orange.csi.cam.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.125444.0500.>

Can you elaborate on the origin of this and how far back it goes?

>Yes; just to expand, hw > f is common in Aberdeenshire (North-Eastern)
>Scots, in words like 'what', 'which' - and I think it can show up as a
>bilabial fricative as well as the more common labiodental.

>		April McMahon

[ moderator snip ]

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Wed Oct 13 01:51:38 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 21:51:38 EDT
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
Message-ID: <TUE.12.OCT.1999.215138.EDT.>

In the absense of written records, you can never "prove" an
invasion/migration.

There are plenty of historically attested migrations, which resulted in
linguistic replacement, which have left little or no archaeological evidence
-- the invasion of the Scotii which brought Gaelic to Scotland, for instance.

So it's a matter of the archaeologists fitting their data into the linguistic
evidence, not vice versa.  The stones and bones are silent; they have no
language.


From mrr at astor.urv.es  Wed Oct 13 11:59:19 1999
From: mrr at astor.urv.es (Macia Riutort Riutort)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 13:59:19 +0200
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.135919.0200.>

Liebe Freunde,
ich kann Euch sagen, dass niemand, sowohl hier (Katalonien) wie auf den
Balearen, auf die Idee kommen w?rde, Maite als baskischen Frauennamen zu
betrachten. F?r uns ist Maite einfach die normale Koseform zu Maria Teresa
(Mari-Tere klingt ?brigens ziemlich "schicki-micki", weswegen diese Form
hier kaum verwendet wird). In unserer Abteilung haben wir sogar zwei Maria
Teresas, die aber von uns Maite genannt wurden...
Mit freundlichen Gr??en

Macia

[ moderator's transcription for 8-bit-unfriendly mail systems:

Liebe Freunde,
ich kann Euch sagen, dass niemand, sowohl hier (Katalonien) wie auf den
Balearen, auf die Idee kommen w{\"u}rde, Maite als baskischen Frauennamen zu
betrachten. F{\"u}r uns ist Maite einfach die normale Koseform zu Maria Teresa
(Mari-Tere klingt {\"u}brigens ziemlich "schicki-micki", weswegen diese Form
hier kaum verwendet wird). In unserer Abteilung haben wir sogar zwei Maria
Teresas, die aber von uns Maite genannt wurden...
Mit freundlichen Gr{\"uss}en

  -rma ]


From ECOLING at aol.com  Wed Oct 13 14:16:46 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 10:16:46 EDT
Subject: Excluding Basque data
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.101646.EDT.>

We may be getting closer to some agreement on issues of fact
(as distinct from preferences).

Trask writes:

>On Tue, 5 Oct 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote:

>> Sound-symbolic words are
>> BOTH different in canonical forms
>> AND underrepresented in vocabularies etc.
>> and the coincidence of these two properties
>> means it is dangerous to exclude them.

>An interesting point, but I'll be taking issue with it below.

As far as I understand the rest of his message,
Trask does NOT take issue with it in what follows.
He does say it doesn't matter whether the sound-symbolic
words have different canonical forms from other vocabulary
or not.  I here quote from a later part of his message.

>> In any case, another criterion is explicit or implicit in the
>> following:

>[LT]
>>> But, in fact, the vast majority of sound-symbolic items in Basque do
>>> *not* satisfy my other criteria.  Hence my approach will immediately
>>> set
>>> them apart from the words which are the best candidates for native and
>>> ancient status.  Once that's established, *then* these distinctive words
>>> can be investigated to determine their own phonological characteristics.

>> Notice in the way the middle sentence follows the first sentence
>> that Larry treats his approach (his criteria) as if his criteria
>> were pretty much the same thing as selection for "the best
>> candidates for native and ancient status".  Others of us believe
>> that must always be kept on the surface of awareness as an empirical
>> question, not taken for granted;  it is precisely a core question!

>Something crucial has been omitted here.

I am not sure I can figure out what has been omitted.
My point remains.  Trask appears to be equating his criteria
with "best candidates for native and ancient status".

>> If what Larry says above about Basque is true of other languages
>> to a simlar degree, then should we conclude that sound-symbolic
>> items are NOT good candidates for native and ancient status,
>> in general?  That would seem to be implied by the paragraph
>> just quoted.  Yet to me that shows there must be something wrong
>> with the argument.

>My criteria are devised with Basque in mind.  Other cases may call for
>a different approach, notably in respect of my third criterion.
>Whether sound-symbolic words are generally not ancient, I don't know,
>but I have no particular interest in this question anyway.  I'm only
>interested in the Basque case.

This does not respond to my point.  My point was that this appears to
be a reductio ad absurdum of the approach, because it seems to be
implied that sound-symbolic items are not good candidates for native
and ancient status.  That conclusion must I think be false,
UNLESS one means by it circularly that words which undergo
reformations not in accordance with the sound laws applicable to
the bulk of the vocabulary, reformations entirely internal to the
language in question, or even words which persist unchanged despite
sound changes which apply to other vocabulary, are not native or ancient.
To me, it is simply that these words are subject to a different set of
sound changes (or lack thereof), they are no less native for sure,
and arguably no less ancient since their antecedents in direct line of
descent existed in an earlier form of the language.

To doubt that last part seems to be to doubt that earlier forms of
various languages had sound-symbolic words, or if they did,
to doubt that those words are in any reasonable sense cognate
(parent) to any of the current sound-symbolic words, that is,
that sound-symbolic words are so unstable as to prevent any
reasonable sense of inherited vocabulary from being applicable.
I think most linguists would reject that conclusion.  Perhaps
there is some way of avoiding it, but it seems to me to follow
logically.

>But the point is not whether <pinpirin> is borrowed or not (I'm pretty
>sure it's not), but whether it's *ancient* or not.

>Now, I consider it most unlikely that the severely localized word
><pinpirin> has been in the language for millennia, all that time
>violating the ordinary phonological structure of the language and
>refusing to participate in otherwise categorical phonological changes.

I don't so quickly come to that judgment.
It appears to be rather common for sound-symbolic words.

The example of French "papillon" giving rise by regular sound
change to "pavillon" when in the meaning of English pavillion,
not sound-symbolic, but being retained unchanged as "papillon"
in its sound-symbolic (extended sense, movement-symbolic?)
sense of "butterfly"

[Trask asked for the limits on when words are resistant to
sound changes which apply to other vocabulary, because
I had explicitly noted that we don't want that to be applied
loosely so as to reduce our rigor.  My reply is partly
that using the term "sound-symbolic" in its most general sense
does give the limits.  The other part is that we have to empirically
determine what those limits are, by discovering examples.
Therefore, the difference between "pavillion" and "butterfly"
seems to be a difference between two meanings, one not
in the sound-symbolic domain, the other in that domain.
As an aside, I will add that I have been interested in this
problem for a very long time, and have discovered it also in
the historical changes of deaf communities' "signed languages",
where sometimes in a pair of etymologically related signs,
the sign with the more concrete meaning retains its form, while the
sign with the more abstract meaning undergoes changes
of execution, what we would refer to as reductions and simplifications.]

>> It's a fact of reality.

The fact that this makes our task harder does not argue for or against
the validity of the statement that inherited "sound-symbolic" words
sometimes do not undergo sound changes.  They are nevertheless
inherited.

Trask suggests that the following example is wrong.
I should have said that I took it on the authority of
Dwight Bolinger, a linguist specializing in English linguistics
who was a president of the Linguistic Society of America,
who believed that "teeny" was regenerated (I think that was
his word).
(He was also labeled a "premature anti-fascist" for his volunteer
participation in the war against Franco in Spain -- that doesn't
prove he was right about "teeny" and "tiny", of course,
but I thought people might like to know that.)

[LA]
>> (English "tiny", which went through the great vowel shift,
>> and "teeny", which did not go through the great vowel shift,
>> was retained or regenerated or reborrowed from a dialect,
>> would be a similar case,
>> unless the dialect-borrowing solution is adopted.)

[LT]
>No.  The earlier `tine' went through the GVS normally and produced
>`tiny', as expected.  The form `teeny', in all likelihodd, is a later
>re-formation, derived from sound-symbolic factors.  The OED tells me
>that `teeny' is nowhere recorded before 1825 -- long after the GVS --
>and suggests that it probably originated in nursery language.

We are not too far apart here, except that Trask should have said
"Yes" to the first sentence, which he was actually agreeing with.
In this next sentence he could have said "No" or "But not" or whatever.
His "in all likelihood" should be emphasized,
that is, we really don't know for sure.
I gave three possible scenarios.
But the outcome of each of them is the same.
What is now SPELLED "teeny"
is pronounced rather similarly to what was earlier SPELLED "tine",
when the final "e" was still pronounced and the "i" was pronounced
as in "machine".
So was it retained or re-formed much later?
We know that spelling changes lag behind speech.
And we know that first attestations which we happen to have evidence
for may be later than first usages, often by a large time span.
So the conclusion is not obviously the one Trask prefers.

Trask does not mention the case of French "pavillon / papillon".
Does he believe that "papillon" was lost and then regenerated,
and thus "not ancient" or even "not native"?
I assume he would not want to claim either of the latter two.
If not, then use that example instead of "tiny / teeny".

[LA]
>> Among Larry Trask's other criteria were the distribution across all
>> of the dialects, not the occurrence in only a few. As I took pains
>> to point out in previous messages, that criterion is biasing.
>> However reasonable, even obvious, it may appear to a historical
>> linguist (including seeming obvious to me too, I may add) it may
>> still disproportionately bias against sound-symbolic words, because
>> of the spotty record of those who record vocabularies in not
>> collecting such words, thereby reducing the number of dialects in
>> which they are attested, quite independently of whether they
>> actually were used in those dialects. The entire class of such words
>> may not be recorded, or very few of them, it is not simply that
>> their recording is randomly slightly less full.

>> And this enormous underrepresentation can then indirectly lead to
>> initial conclusions on canonical forms which are too simple and
>> neat, too consistent, including canonical forms which are
>> underrepresentative of sound-symbolic forms.

[LT]
>At last a point of substance!  I thought I was never going to see one.
>OK.

I thought I had made exactly this consequence clear many times,
even if not in so many words.
I had at least stated the conclusions of it.
But I'm glad if we are now understanding each other.

[LT]
>Let's assume this point is valid.  What are the consequences?

>Well, either sound-symbolic forms conform to the canonical forms of
>ordinary lexical items, or they do not.  If they do, there is no
>problem.

But  Trask has said previously that the
expressive vocabulary in Basque DOES differ in canonical forms
from other vocabulary, so he believes the first alternative does not
apply.  Here is his second alternative:

>If they don't, then, assuming that many of them get into my
>list in the first place, I'm going to have two sharply distinct groups
>of words obeying different rules.  Also no problem.

But Trask himself argues AGAINST the latter case occurring.
He actively wants to prevent it "in the first place",
and only to include them later. He says that his preference is
to exclude nursery words etc.
He really does want  to prevent the inclusion of nursery and expressive
forms.  He believes these forms do not follow what he regards as the
normal sound laws and that they violate
the normal canonical forms (his comments on "pinpirin").
Since lack of attestation may correlate with this, use of the criterion
of lack of sufficiently wide attestation DOES tend to exclude forms
of certain formal types.
He says that he wanted to exclude by an explicit criterion,
but that he is not too unhappy if others don't want that particular
exclusionary criterion, (? because he believes that ?)
his other criteria will exclude most nursery words anyhow.

The assumption that "many" of them will get into Trask's list in
the first place is exactly what much of this discussion has been about,
namely,
his criteria will tend to prevent many of them from getting into his list.
Notice again his strong antipathy towards the word "pinpirin":

>Now, I consider it most unlikely that the severely localized word
><pinpirin> has been in the language for millennia, all that time
>violating the ordinary phonological structure of the language and
>refusing to participate in otherwise categorical phonological changes.

(even aside from the fact that "millennia" is not required to reach
the level of the early Basque of the 16th century which Trask
otherwise prefers as his starting point for data, to project
further backwards)

>Perhaps I haven't made it clear that I am also very interested in
>characterizing the expressive formations.  But I first want to
>characterize the forms of ordinary lexical items, before I turn my
>attention to the expressive formations -- for one thing, because it's
>easier to see what's special about expressive formations if I already
>know what ordinary words look like.

In that case, the best possible way is to include expressive formations
in the data set from the very beginning, mark the ones we are
reasonably sure are "expressives" because of their semantics,
and notice what may be different about them,
eventually perhaps slightly revising our notions of which
items should be considered "expressives" (hopefully not in
a circular way, simply because they resist sound changes,
but even simply listing those which do resist sound changes
would be useful, if we can do that).

>So: apply my primary criteria; get a list of candidate ancient words;
>determine their phonological properties; then look at expressive
>formations (mostly excluded from my list by my primary criteria) and
>identify the differences.  Now: what exactly is wrong with this?
>And what *different* procedure could give better results?

This explicitly states that the expressives would be mostly
excluded from his list by his primary criteria.  That comes very
close to contradicting the possibility that "many" of them could
be included "in the first place".  We can't have it both ways.

What is wrong with that, he asks?
Answered in my preceding paragraphs.
The human mind is known to be better at marginally distinguishing
similar items put before it in comparison,
than it is in properly categorizing
similar items put before it without overt contrast.

[LA]
>> All (?) languages have more common and rarer forms,
>> and have peripheral forms,

[LT]
>Sure.  But how can I tell that a particular form is rare unless I first
>determine what the common forms are?

By contrasting them explicitly, as just pointed out.

[LT]
>But what I'm trying to do is precisely to identify the damn
>strata in the first place.

Again, best done by including them in the data set,
and learning how to mark them as belonging to different strata,
gradually with increasing accuracy.

Larry Trask should use whatever sequence of investigations
he is most comfortable with.  But he should also be careful
that he does not allow the order of his investigating various
strata, an order of his own choosing, not a property inherent
to the language itself, to bias his conclusions.
That is, in part, what we have been discussing.

Trask wants to draw firm conclusions from his initial steps
with his initially selected strata of the vocabulary,
and it appears he would not be eager to change those conclusions
from the later results of investigating other strata.

>I have also explained that, in addition, I would prefer to exclude
>obvious nursery words and obvious imitative words at the outset, for
>excellent reasons.  But I don't mind if others prefer not to do this.
>It isn't going to make much difference anyway, since very few of these
>words will satisfy my primary criteria.

Why should the "primary" criteria be systematically selective of
one stratum of NATIVE vocabulary against another stratum of NATIVE
vocabulary.  Should that not be considered a defect in criteria
which are claimed to be ideal for identifying the best candidates
for native and ancient vocabulary?

Rather, the criteria should be advertised for what they then are,
criteria for identifying ONE stratum WITHIN the native and ancient
vocabulary, a stratum excluding nursery and expressive words
(and excluding vocabulary in those semantic domains and
in those subject matters not dealt with in earliest documents,
as discussed in another message).

If the criteria are stated fully explicitly for what they are,
then the conclusions drawn from them will have their
inherent limitations made more explicit.
That will be a courteous service to those who might want
to use the results.  It of course means the results are less
sweeping or definitive.  Such are the good consequences
of being clear and open about what one is doing.

I will be very glad if it turns out that we are getting somewhat closer.

Sincerely,
Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Wed Oct 13 14:21:51 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 15:21:51 +0100
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.152151.0100.>

Given the amount of recent discussion of the Aegean problem on this list
recently, perhaps I might draw attention to a fairly recent article which has
been mentioned by no one and which may not be widely known.

The article is this:

	Colin Renfrew. 'Word of Minos: the Minoan contribution to Mycenaean
	Greek and the linguistic geography of the Bronze Age Aegean'.
	Cambridge Archaeological Journal 8(2): 239-264. 1998.

Renfrew begins in a familiar place:

Ancient Greek contains a sizeable number of words which cannot be native Greek
and which must have been taken from some other language.

The conventional position is that these words are pre-Greek, and that they
were taken into Greek from an earlier substrate language, already in Greece,
after the Greek-speakers entered Greece.

Renfrew queries this.  He notes that a number of these words appear to pertain
to a sophisticated urban civilization of a kind that is not known to have
existed anywhere in the Aegean before the second millennium BC.  He therefore
proposes the following scenario.

1. Crete had been inhabited since 7000 BC by the speakers of what eventually
became the Minoan language.  (No human settlement is attested in Crete before
7000 BC, and there is no evidence for a change in population before the second
millennium BC, when the Greek-speakers arrived.)

2. Minoan was neither Greek nor closely related to Greek.  It may or may not
have been an IE language, but Renfrew endorses the idea that Pre-Minoan was
introduced to Crete from Anatolia, and that it may well have been not only an
early IE language but even a member of the Anatolian branch.  (Recall that
Renfrew embraces a time-depth for PIE much earlier than most linguists do, and
that he places the IE homeland in Anatolia.)

3. Many of the problematic words in Greek (though not all of them) must have
been borrowed into Greek, *not* during the first Greek settlement of Greece,
but much later, during the Bronze Age, when the Greeks came into contact wih
the advanced Minoan civilization.  These words are thus not ancient substrate
words in Greek, but late adstrate (or even superstrate) borrowings.

4. There is consequently no early limit on the introduction of Greek into
Greece.  Renfrew leans toward the idea that there never was a "coming of the
Greeks".  Instead, he suggests, Greek itself evolved within Greece at a very
early period, out of a more-or-less vanilla variety of PIE which had already
occupied the territory.

Renfrew acknowledges some difficulties with this scenario, pointed out by John
Chadwick and others.  In particular, the problematic words which are names for
flora and fauna indigenous to Greece cannot readily be explained as late
borrowings from Minoan, and are more likely to be substrate words of some
kind.  But Renfrew does not see this as a serious obstacle to his scenario.

This position may provide some food for thought.  But let me stress that I
neither endorse nor oppose any of these suggestions: I am merely reporting
them.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From ECOLING at aol.com  Wed Oct 13 14:47:45 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 10:47:45 EDT
Subject: Misrepresenting others' views
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.104745.EDT.>

Larry Trask continues to avoid the basic statement of the paradox,
to muddy the waters with red herrings.

And he continues to knowingly misrepresent others' views.

>And the assertion that linguists do not normally think at all of any factors
>beyond mutual intelligibility is beyond belief.  This is not remotely true.
>I'm a linguist, and I've just given our first-years a lecture on the numerous
>factors involved in deciding where language boundaries should be placed.
>Nor am I in any way unusual here.

No one has said that linguists do not normally think at all of any factors
beyond mutual intelligibility.  So attributing it to one's opponents in a
discussion is a serious misrepresentation.  (Nor has anyone said they
do not normally think of other factors when creating a serious definition.
They may choose a definition which does not incorporate every detail
of which they are fully aware.)
This misrepresentation is however consistent with
what Larry Trask repeatedly does.  (See further below.)

Saying that many linguists commonly use a definition of distinct
languages referring in some way to "mutual intelligibility"
in no way implies that they are in any sense unaware of other factors
which would enter into a refined definition.

Nor do they or we need to be lectured about mutual intelligibility
being a gradient phenomenon (70% or etc.) as Larry Trask does.
We are all quite aware of that, thank you very much.

NOR does it imply that such a simple definition is used only for children
nor that it is "not a serious definition", as Trask has attempted to argue.
Lyle Campbell (whom Larry Trask professes to admire) uses exactly
that definition in his book *American Indian Languages*
which many consider a definitive reference work on the current
status of knowledge of genetic relations in this field.

These are all red herrings.  Trask simply refuses to deal with
the paradox raised.  He clearly does not like the obvious conclusion.
As pointed out previously, the conclusion almost certainly stands
EVEN IF one changes the definition to suit him, AS LONG AS
the definition of "same" vs. "different" language does not preclude
that some dialects of a language can change substantially so that
(under one's favorite definition) they count as a distinct language,
while other dialects can in the same time span change so little that
one is more comfortable treating them as still the same language.
The only way to avoid this appears (so far) to be a definition which
circularly prevents the paradox by  defining ANY CHANGE HOWEVER
SMALL as meaning we no longer have the "same language".
This certainly does violence to any normal definition of
same vs. different language (see also the next paragraph).

(Of course, saying there is no such thing as same vs. different
language also evades it.  But that is a perversion of the English
language, and a denial of normal usage among both linguists
and lay people.  In a most recent message, Trask affirms this is his
position, but then fails to admit that he should not have pretended
to be answering the paradox with his many other red herrings,
which appear relevant to the statement of the paradox only if one DOES
admit that the notions of same vs. different language mean something.
Because without that, the statement of the paradox means nothing
and so should not be under discussion at all.)

On Trask's continued attmempts to discredit others:

>> Unless of course the writer literally means as he writes
>> that mutual intelligibility is "one of many factors which may help to
>> determine whether varieties are best regarded as two languages
>> or as a single language".  Note the "one of", in which case the
>> response should have been not "NO, WRONG", but
>> "YES, WITH ADDITIONAL SPECIFICATIONS".

>Eh?  I say it's one of many factors, and you complain that I am overlooking
>other factors?  What does this mean?

Mr. Trask should have asked first, if he did not know what it means.
As I have pointed out to him elsewhere, it means that he should not always
try to find fault with the expressions of others' views, by saying they are
wrong, then giving his own version which includes their views as part.
That is both rude and not entirely honest (at least I would consider myself
dishonest if I did that).  Rather he should agree with his interlocutors as
far as he can, and say he accepts their views as a PART of his own when
he in fact does (as in this case he clearly did), and say that he needs to add
some refinements or modifications before he can agree fully.
It's an attitude and politeness problem, and also one of misrepresentation.

As to other misrepresentations, Trask in the list paraphrased here
implies he disagrees with others of us on a long list of items.

Trask says he does *not* believe that mutual intelligibility is *the*
criterion
     for setting up language boundaries.
He says he does *not* believe that it is the primary or sole criterion
     used by linguists in general.
He says he does *not* believe that it constitutes a "serious technical
definition".

He says he does *not* believe that it can be applied in a principled way.

He says he does *not* believe that the man in the street has a better
     conception of language boundaries than professional linguists do.
He says he does  *not* believe that individual languages just exist
     as discrete entities "out there".
He says he does *not* believe that the question "Are A and B the
     same language or different languages?" is generally meaningful
     or capable of being answered in a principled way.
He says he does *not* believe that a language can remain unchanged over time.

And Trask says he is afraid that this cumulation of disagreements
     doesn't seem to leave him many points of contact with me.

As has been apparent from his many communications, Mr. Trask
     repeatedly tries to paint others as having the views listed above,
     and similar ones.

Every one of these is a misrepresentation, and Mr. Trask has been
repeatedly informed of this fact.  So it is a deliberate misrepresentation.

Other than one item dealt with in more detail shortly below,
I agree with Mr. Trask on every single item in the list above.
Trask has been told that, on most of them repeatedly,
in one way or another.
Yet he insists on repeating various of these claims,
or versions of them, in a context in which he is attempting
to denigrate his conversation partners,
and adds to that the appearance (only) of great erudition.
Those are features which make these assertions libelous or slanderous.

(On one item, Mr. Trask regards
Lyle Campbell as a serious linguist, and his book as a serious book,
therefore it necessarily follows, though I suspect Trask will try to
evade this, that Campbell's use of "mutual intelligibility" as his
working definition for that book is a serious definition.
Doris Bartholomew, reviewing it in the prestigious journal Language,
quoted that definition without critical remarks.  Politeness to one's
fellow professional linguists should then require that it be treated
seriously, and that one should be able to explore the consequences
of using that definition.  Mr. Trask is clearly very intelligent,
and quite capable of doing so.  However he refuses to do so.)

>*What alternative criteria do you propose?*  *And how will they give
>better results?*

>Are you ever going to answer these questions?

Larry has repeatedly made the statement above.
It is a red herring, avoiding dealing with the poins which WERE raised.

I have repeatedly answered these questions.
I have done so here yet again.
Partly the answer is fewer exclusions, this will give better results
because of earlier awareness of the full range of native and
ancient vocabulary.
Anything more specific has to refer to specifics which
have been given elsewhere, some of them here yet again.

Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Wed Oct 13 15:28:29 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 11:28:29 -0400
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE)
In-Reply-To: <b2c475ab.252d0173@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.112829.0400.>

In an earlier post, I suggested that the speakers of Greek entered Greece
around 2100-1900 BCE.  Steven Long suggested that the speakers of Greek
could have been in Greece as early as 7000 BCE, and cites Renfrew as a
source.

This issue is going to take some discussion.  Let me say up front that I'm
not an archaeologist.  I minored in archaeology as an undergrad and went
on several fairly boring digs as summer jobs, so I know something about
it; but I'm not a specialist in the field.

Anyway, let me start by giving some background.  When archaeology was
first getting off the ground a little over a century ago, it was
fashionable to explain everything in terms grand, prehistoric mass
migrations.  Lecturers describing the history of the field of archaeology
usually spread their arms wide and make the appropriate facial expression
at this point to indicate the grandiosity of this sort of explanation.

Today, most archaeologists would reject this general approach.  The major
contribution by Renfrew (and others) has been the approach known as
"process archaeology", wherein observed changes within a culture are
attributed to pressures within that culture.  For example, suppose we find
that in a particular area, there is a change in the archaeological record
from a fairly egalitarian society to one with marked differences in
wealth. Earlier archaeologists might take this as a sign of an invasion by
some prestige-oriented culture.  A process-type explanation, on the other
hand, might involve the rise in a culture's internal population density,
changes in the climate, etc., without positing any migration or other
influence from another culture.

This is a major advance in our understanding of prehistoric cultural
change.  Unfortunately, the pendulum swung too far in the opposite
direction; it came to be the case that positing _any_ prehistoric
migration _whatever_ was viewed with disdain.  Some archaeologists have
begun to argue that the rejection of prehistoric migrations has gone too
far. Around ten years ago, David Anthony wrote an article called "The Baby
and the Bathwater" in which he criticized this wholesale rejection of
prehistoric migrations.  He gave a reasonable and formal model for
predicting and explaining migrations in terms of push-pull pressures.
Mallory also argued against categorically rejecting prehistoric migrations
in "In Search of the Indo-Europeans".

With all of this background in mind, we can see the general ideological
framework which is leading Renfrew to seek the kind of solution which he
has done.  Renfrew wants to keep to an absolute minimum the number of
prehistoric migrations which we have to posit.  He'd probably prefer that
we not need to posit _any_ prehistoric migrations, but even Renfrew would
surely concede that the spread of a language over a large area implies a
population movement.  Technology in agriculture, pottery, metallurgy, etc.
can plausibly spread by diffusion without a large-scale movement of
populations; but language (other than loan words) does not diffuse this
way.  Verb conjugations, etc. only spread when speakers move.

So what Renfrew is trying to do is kill two birds with one stone.  Suppose
we assume that the introduction of the agricultural cultural complex thru
Europe is the result of a population movement from Anatolia to the Balkans
during the 7th millenium BCE (which Renfrew accepts).  We're also forced
to say that the spread of the Indo-European languages implies a population
movement.  Renfrew's response is to try to collapse these two migrations
into one, thus keeping the number of migrations to a minimum.  If you're
assuming that it's a bad thing to posit prehistoric migrations, this is
the sort of solution you'd like to try for.

Unfortunately, this solution cannot be made to work without ignoring a
huge amount of evidence.  An archaeologist here at Penn told me that he
was very "annoyed" at Renfrew for having put forward this view, and said
that if anyone with less than Renfrew's prestige had put it forward, it
simply would have been ignored as not worthy of consideration.  But
Renfrew's earlier contributions (i.e. to the notion of process
archaeology, to C-14 recalibrations, etc.) are so well respected that he
has to be answered.  He has been answered indeed.

Mallory (p. 164 ff.) discusses the whole issue at some length, and makes
the following arguments:

-Renfrew proposes that Anatolia is the homeland of the Indo-Europeans.  If
so, it is very odd the Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic existed in the midst of
languages (Hattic and Hurrian) which are not only not Indo-European but
which bear no typological resemblance to Indo-European. If there were any
language family which we might guess to be a sister of Indo-European, it
would be Finno-Ugric, which would argue for a Ukrainian homeland, not an
Anatolian one.

-There is clearly a substantial non-Indo-European substrate in Greek, both
in place names and in loan words.  This would be a bit surprising if
Indo-European speakers had been in the area since the beginning of the
Neolithic.

-Most importantly, placing the initial dispersion of the Indo-Europeans at
the beginning of the Neolithic around 6500 BCE in entirely incompatible
with the reconstructed Indo-European vocabulary.  Words such as yoke,
wheel, etc. are reconstructed for PIE, but this technology is not attested
until much, much later- namely, not much after 4000-3500 BCE, which is the
date which Mallory and others put forward as the final date of IE
linguistic unity.

So let's return now to Steve Long's post, which I will take the liberty of
reordering:

On Wed, 6 Oct 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> Based on the evidence above, there is nothing to preclude the conjecture
> that "Greeks were in Greece" during or even before the Neolithic.  If
> one connects PIE with the first appearance of agriculture (a la
> Renfrew), then that could move the date of "proto-Greek" or its
> ancestors being in mainland Greece back towards 7000BC.

I hope you see now why I find this entirely untenable.

> At this point in time, THERE IS NO MATERIAL EVIDENCE AT ALL AS TO WHEN
> GREEK-SPEAKERS APPEARED IN GREECE.  THE ONLY EVIDENCE OF A SIGNIFICANT
> MIGRATION DURING THIS PERIOD (3000BC-1650BC) IS FROM ANATOLIA.

[...]
> On10/6/99 12:48:29 AM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu wrote: << perhaps you
> mean that the Greek-speaking presence in what is now Greece goes back further
> than e.g. 2100-1900 BCE.  The most widely accepted view is that the
> destruction of sites which we find in that period represent the invasion of
> speakers of an early form of Greek.  The preceding cultural tradition in
> Greece is substantially different.>>
>
> I'm not sure what sites or culture are being spoken of above.  But there is
> no special break in "cultural tradition" - except one - that occurs during
> this time.  More importantly, there is a continuity in many aspects of the
> early Greek material culture that remain consistent right from the end of the
> Neolithic (about 3500BC) through to the end of the Middle Helladic (about
> 1500BC).

This is appears to be incorrect.  Between the Early Helladic II and Early
Helladic III phases (c. 2200 BCE), we find the following:

-Destruction and abandonment of Early Helladic II sites
-Changes in architecture, including appearance of houses with apsidal ends
-Changes in burial practice
-Appearance of stone "battle-axes" and clay "anchors"
-Appearance of a new pottery style, i.e. the Minyan ware
-Major change in economy to a much simpler agricultural society
(Mallory, p. 70)

You're correct that the culture in this area otherwise appears to have
been uninterrupted over a long period.  Giving the dates 2200-1900 BCE as
the date for "the coming of the Greeks" is certainly not without
ongoing controversy, but it seems to be the best candidate given what we
know now, and given the larger view of when and how the Indo-Europeans
dispersed.

[Much deleted]

> The main attributes of Middle Helladic (starting about 2000BC) e.g. Gray
> Minyan pottery and longhouses/megarons, are now viewed as CONTINUATIONS of
> Korakou or Tyrins  (which itself was a "fusion" culture.)  In the bad old
> days, Gray Minyon was associated with "the arrival of the Greeks" from the
> north, but it is now quite clear that the pottery style is a continuance that
> never appears father north than the Pelopenese.

This is a matter of controversy; Mallory described the Minyan ware as
being "incessantly discussed".  I don't know all the details regarding
that pottery style, but I'm pretty confident in stating that you're
misrepresenting the field if you say that it was "quite clear" that the
Minyan pottery represents a continuation of an earlier style.

I accept the view of Mallory and many others that the latest unity of PIE
was in the area of the Ukraine around 4000-3500 BCE.  If this is true,
then the "coming of the Greeks" must have occurred at some time between
3500 and 1500, at which point Linear B kicks in.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Wed Oct 13 16:31:06 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 17:31:06 +0100
Subject: Linear A to Linear B
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.173106.0100.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

We've been seeing quite a bit of speculation on this list about possible
stories for Linear A and Linear B.  Well, look.  The conventional position, as
I understand it, is this.

Linear A was used to write the unknown language we call Minoan.  In all
likelihood, it was invented for the purpose of writing that language.  Minoan
was not Greek, was not closely related to Greek, was very likely (though not
certainly) not even IE, and was very possibly a language of which we have no
other knowledge.

Linear B was used to write an archaic form of Greek.  It seems highly likely,
perhaps even close to certain, that Linear B is derived in some way from Linear
A, most likely that it simply represents a modification or adaptation of Linear
A for the purpose of writing an entirely different language.

Now, as far as I can see, this scenario is not only the simplest possible one
but the most obvious interpretation of the evidence at our disposal, such as
that evidence is.  The scenario seems to be entirely consistent with the
evidence.  I know of no single piece of substantial evidence that conflicts
with the standard interpretation.  Does anybody?  If not, then what reason can
there be for constructing ever more complex, ever more implausible and ever
more outlandish alternatives?  What can we possibly gain from this? How does
any given alternative story account for the known facts better than the
standard story?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Wed Oct 13 16:37:19 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 11:37:19 -0500
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
In-Reply-To: <b2c475ab.252d0173@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.113719.0500.>

[snip]
>At this point in time, THERE IS NO MATERIAL EVIDENCE AT ALL AS TO WHEN
>GREEK-SPEAKERS APPEARED IN GREECE.  THE ONLY EVIDENCE OF A SIGNIFICANT
>MIGRATION DURING THIS PERIOD (3000BC-1650BC) IS FROM ANATOLIA.
[snip]

	But I imagine there is a postulated date for the breakup of
Indo-Iranian-Hellenic-Armenian.
	And I'd wonder about postulated dates for loanwords from languages
in the Balkans and the Aegean
	The arrival of the Greeks may not have disrupted the local culture
in any great way
	e.g. it could well have been an example of elite dominance
	or on the contrary a continuous arrival of technologically less
advanced people whose language was adopted by the elite

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Wed Oct 13 16:45:20 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 17:45:20 +0100
Subject: language origins
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.174520.0100.>

Stanley Friesen writes:

[PCR]

>> If you believe that a scenario of 'language' developing in separated human
>> groups (hence unrelated except indirectly by the biological potential to
>> develop it) is preferable,  then tell me, if the original stock (presuming
>> you buy the genetic argument) was capable potentially of language, what
>> prevented that potential from being realized?

> The basic answer would be: they had not yet invented it.
> Consider: the original modern humans were also potentially capable of doing
> calculus, so one could ask why they didn't.  In this case the answer is
> obvious.  But is language really any less complex than calculus?

> Now, I, *personally* find this situation unlikely, but it is at least
> coherent, and thus cannot be ruled out a priori.

Well, maybe it can.

Language, I'd say, is a lot *more* complex than calculus.  But I don't think
degree of complexity is the issue.

The point is that our language faculty appears to be part of our biological
inheritance in a way that the ability to construct or use calculus is not.

All physically normal human infants in passably normal surroundings learn a
language.  Even in highly abnormal surroundings, they will do their best to
learn a language, and they will succeed if there's any significant
reinforcement at all.  They do this at an age when they can hardly do anything
else, and they go about it in a highly orderly and consistent way.

Inventing (or using) calculus is an achievement, comparable to inventing (or
using) ice skates, or boomerangs, or cars, or oboes.  Zillions of perfectly
healthy people go through their lives without ever achieving any of these
things.  I myself can drive a car, but I can't ice skate, throw a boomerang,
or play the oboe.  I learned to do calculus at university, but have since
forgotten how to do it.  And I doubt that I would have been capable of
inventing any of these things.  But I learned English normally in my infancy.

I think we learn a first language because our ancestors, at some point,
evolved a very specific biological proclivity to learn and use language.
I don't believe we have a specific and dedicated calculus faculty, or
ice-skating faculty, but I do believe we possess a dedicated language faculty.
And I believe language is a biological part of us in a way that calculus and
ice skating are not.  We didn't "invent"language in the way that we invented
my other examples: we evolved it.  It's just something that happened to us.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Wed Oct 13 16:50:54 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 17:50:54 +0100
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.175054.0100.>

Stanley Friesen writes:

> And given that, again pace Renfrew, Anatolian almost certainly had to move
> through the Balkans prior to Greek arrival *there*, let alone their arrival
> in Greece proper, and that there is some evidence for a non-Greek IE
> language in Greece in place names, the time scale is further constrained.

Why?

Why did Anatolian have to move through the Balkans?

Even if you don't buy Anatolia as the PIE homeland, why couldn't Anatolian
have entered Anatolia across the Caucasus or from east of the Caspian Sea,
through Iran?

And why did Greek have to move through the Balkans?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Wed Oct 13 16:57:24 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 11:57:24 -0500
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <004201bf1043$1be048c0$a103703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.115724.0500.>

[snip ]

>[Ed Selleslagh]

>Note that similar, but not always identical, usages exist in various European
>languages like regional colloquial Peninsular Spanish ('la Maruja'), regional
>colloquial Dutch ('de Jan'), German ('der Otto') etc. The definite article is
>only used when speaking ABOUT the person, not TO him/her.

>Ed.

	It's also used in colloquial Latin American Spanish but, in
general, to imply familarity --whether affection or contempt, or perhaps to
emphasize the sugject.It's sort of like "our Ed" or "that Ed". In some
forms of rural or popular Latin American Spanish, it seems pretty universal
and a lot of college educated Latin Americans, particularly women, avoid it
as a vulgarism. And "inappropriate" usage of the article before proper
names can mark people as hillbillies or uneducated. I've come across it
among Mexicans, Central Americans, Colombians, Peruvians and Chileans.
	The article before titles in the 3rd person is standard in Spanish.
	In Portuguese, of course, the article before proper names used in
the 3rd person is standard.
	It seems to work like a "non-vocative" case marker.

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Wed Oct 13 17:09:32 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 12:09:32 -0500
Subject: Linear A to Linear B
In-Reply-To: <0.4f531c68.252d4521@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.120932.0500.>

	I seem to remember that Linear B may be [at least] partially based
on ideograms in that there are symbols represent the first syllable of
certain words.
	If I remember correctly [and correct me if I haven't], the symbols
for LI and SA seem to be based on LINO [sp?] "flax/linen" and SASAMA [sp?]
"sesame" and that they may represent those plants.
	If this is so, one could expect the possibility of some symbols
being calqued as distinct syllables if Linear A & B represent different
languages.

[snip]
>2. LINEAR A IS ONLY PARTIALLY PHONETIC.  Like early hieroglyhics, the script
>may be partly pictogram and partly sound-referenced.  E.g., the letter /a/ in
>early script might refer to a sound or it might refer to what it is, a
>picture of an ox.  The transition to Linear B may have involved the re-use of
>former pictographic symbols to stand for sounds instead.  This might have
>mandated a revamping of the former partial character-to-sound correspondence
>that existed in Linear A.  So these characters would reappear, but would in
>Lin B refer to sounds instead of the objects represented, taking the place of
>other characters that dropped out of use.
[snip]

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu  Wed Oct 13 18:58:26 1999
From: HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu (Herb Stahlke)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 13:58:26 -0500
Subject: Campbell's def. of "language"
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.135826.0500.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

I too found Bartholomew's review engaging and fair.  One can, however, be a bit
more critical about some of Campbell's statements on the probability of distant
genetic groupings proving valid.  Such estimates are guesses that depend on
one's confidence in the guesser.  While I regard Campbell's scholarship in
Meso-American and related languages highly, I find he has a way of putting
forth his opinion on untestable matters with more authority than is
appropriate.  In his Historical Linguistics (MIT 1999), p. 163, for example, he
says in a table that Africa has "c. 20+ families.  I've been in African
linguistics since the mid-60s, and I've never confronted this number, but he
provides no justification for it.  On pp. 164-5, his table 6.2 lists "Some of
the better-known language families" of the world and rates the present state of
comparative studies in each.  Of the 29 families listed, he rates present
knowledge as good or better for 13, of which 8 are Western Hemisphere groups.
No African group, including Bantu, is rated better than "moderate," and he
leaves out groups like Jukunoid, Akan, Chari, Gbe, Central Khoisan, etc., where
the state of work is quite high.  He also rates Sino-Tibetan as "much needed"
without noting the extensive work going on both on the larger family and on
some of its subgroups.  A significant number of those he rates as good or
better are groups he himself has worked on.  I suspect the table reflects his
own knowledge and experience as much as it reflects scholarly reality.

By the way, unlike Larry, I think it was, I've found Campbell's intro very well
done, in spite of, perhaps also because of, matters where I differ strongly
with him.  I'm planning on using it next semester in an intro course for
graduate students who have had a phonetics course and a first phonology course
as prerequisites.  I expect them to be able to handle Campbell's challenges
well.

Herb Stahlke

Lloyd Anderson writes:
>>> <ECOLING at aol.com> 10/07 12:13 PM >>>

Nevertheless, Campbell is an extremely competent scholar.
For several proposed distant genetic groupings,
he provides probability estimates that the groupings
will ultimately prove valid, and separately from that,
a confidence level (based on how adequate he feels the data is
on which he bases his estimate of ultimate relationship).
For example, for Maya - Huave - Mixe/Zoquean,
he estimates the probability of ultimate relationship at 30%,
and gives a 25% confidence level for that estimate.


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Wed Oct 13 18:58:19 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 14:58:19 EDT
Subject: The Parent/Daughter Question (was Contributions)
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.145819.EDT.>

I'm sending this with a little reluctance, but mainly to clarify the question
being addressed, which was a bit narrower than where it has ended up.

In a message dated 10/3/99 02:00:55 AM, Larry Trask wrote:

<<I guess I might respond to a few of his points -- especially since I think
that Steve and Lloyd are both gravely wrong on certain fundamental points.  I
think both have fallen badly into the reification fallacy.  The
reification fallacy lies in inventing a name, and then concluding that,
since we have a name, there must exist something "out there" for the
name to refer to.>>

Just for the record: neither Lloyd nor myself "invented" the word 'language.'
 I cannot speak for Lloyd, but I do not recall "inventing" "English" or
"Basque" or the name of any other language that I know of.

Apparently someone else "out there" either was making up names for imaginary
entities or actually thought they heard or saw something that they called a
"language."  We didn't reificate.  Someone else did.

LT also wrote:
<<But this is wrong, all wrong. Names like `English', `German' and `Italian'
designate real-world entities only to the extent that enough people want this
to be so -- for whatever reasons.  Those reasons are just as likely to be
historical, cultural and political as they are linguistic.... And all
discussions predicated upon the belief that this is a linguistically
meaningful question with a LINGUISTICALLY MEANINGFUL ANSWER are badly
MISGUIDED.>> [Caps mine.]

ACTUALLY, Larry Trask STARTED these discussions.  It was Larry who first
acted as if this was a "linguistically meaningful question."  And if I was
misguided it was partly by his guidance.  This thread and all recent related
threads had their start right here, in the following post:

I wrote:
<<                         PIE
                                      /   \
                                    /   Anatolian
Does this mean that PIE co-exists with Anatolian?  It would have to, wouldn't
it?>>

Specifically to which Larry Trask replied (8/24/99 03:04:58 AM):
<<No.  An ancestral LANGUAGE cannot co-exist with its own descendant.>>
[Caps mine]

At this particular point, Larry Trask seemed to have NO PROBLEM using the
term "language" in a linguistic sense as if it were the real thing.  Was
Larry reificating?  And is it disingenuous to raise a question by declaring a
"language" cannot exist with its own descendant AND THEN announce that the
question is meaningless - after good counterarguments have been raised?  Can
one actually first pronounce without qualification that a parent language
CANNOT CO-EXIST with its daughter and then argue afterwards that that
language DOES NOT ACTUALLY EXIST after all?

LT went on to explain in the same post what is happening at the top of the
UPenn tree that I illustrated above:
<<It is concluded by the Penn group... that Anatolian was the first branch of
IE to split off from the rest. So, that top node, with its two daughters,
represents an initial split of the single LANGUAGE PIE, with one daughter
being the ancestor of Anatolian, and the other daughter being the single
common ancestor of everything else.  We now often speak of `broad PIE' -- the
ancestor of the whole family -- and `narrow PIE' -- the ancestor of
everything except Anatolian.  Narrow PIE is a sister LANGUAGE of
Proto-Anatolian...>> [Caps are mine]

[Larry Trask writes: "I firmly believe that the question `Are related
varieties A and B the same language or different languages?' is one devoid of
linguistic content."  So that Larry should find his own description of "the
single language PIE" and "narrow PIE" as "sister language" to Proto-Anatolian
equally "devoid of linguistic content."  Note also that either the two PIEs
are two different "languages" OR PIE co-existed with its daughter, by the
terms of Larry Trask's own statement about co-existence.]

Given Larry Trask's current stand, I would say that his argument is now with
the "Penn group" for "concluding that, since we have a name" (e.g., PIE)
"there must exist something 'out there' for the name to refer to."  Either wit
h the Penn group or - of course -  with his former self.

You see, I was just using THEIR terminology.  Look at the papers posted on
the UPenn tree website and you will see they are dripping with the term
'language' and "linguistic distinctions" between "related languages" and all
almost exclusively in a "linguistic" sense.  If anyone is guilty of
"reification", it is not myself (nor Lloyd, for that matter) who was merely
trying to get at the premise behind the tree and used the terms being used by
the authors.

Even going back to the first appearance of the UPenn tree as the source of
this whole question, it was asked: <<Is Phrygian still considered as a
possible ancestor or close relative of Armenian?  Is Macedonian considered
closer to Greek or Thracian?>>

To which Sean Crist replied:
<<Here is a partial answer; ...  In the last few years, Don Ringe, Tandy
Warnow, and Ann Taylor collaborated to produce a phylogeny of the
Indo-European LANGUAGES.... What was new in their approach was to use this
methodology to produce a phylogeny of a family of LANGUAGES...>> [Caps mine.]
 Crist showed a tree with Anatolian branching off from PIE to one side, and
nothing but a dotted line going off from PIE to the other.

I could only assume that Anatolian was one of those "languages" he referred
to.  And PIE was another.  And address my question in those terms.

If Larry Trask is saying that (to quote Larry) "an ancestor language cannot
co-exist with its own descendent" BECAUSE the issue is NOT "a linguistically
meaningful question" - then he should start his argument where the
terminology was first used - in the description of the UPenn tree and the
procedure it follows.  (I.e., first, "array the languages", then assign
characteristics, then build some trees.)  The Penn group has none of Larry's
problems with defining a language - to say the least.

Finally, Larry Trask wrote:
<<Is modern English "the same language" as Proto-Germanic?  As PIE?  If not,
then at what stage do we have a cutoff point between one language and the
next, and why?>>

I'm sure that Larry Trask's apparent position here - that Proto-Germanic and
modern English can't be linguistically distinguishable as separate
"languages" - deserves a much more formidable counterpoint than this
non-specialist correspondent can offer.  And perhaps the authors of the UPenn
tree (or perhaps Mr. Crist) would be just the ticket - especially since they
are the original reason that the term "language" was used in these
discussions.  And because they use the term "language" in just the way Larry
seems to object to.  And because their uses and definition of the term
"language" is why Larry announced with authority that "an ancestor LANGUAGE
cannot co-exist with its own descendent" in the first place.

Regards,
Steve Long


From Georg at home.ivm.de  Wed Oct 13 19:40:10 1999
From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 21:40:10 +0200
Subject: Campbell's def. of "language"
In-Reply-To: <0.1e85ef15.252e2ed1@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.214010.0200.>

>Campbell defines these terms (and reviewer Bartholomew
>     does not comment, so presumably regards these definitions
>     as quite normal, unremarkable):

>'dialect' is a variety (regional or social) of a language,
>     mutually intelligible with other dialects

>'language' is a distinct linguistic entity that is
>     mutually unintelligible with other languages

>I simply do not believe that Larry Trask is unaware that this is
>     standard linguistic usage.  He is not forced to use it himself,
>     but he is obligated to treat this usage with respect,
>     not to evade discussions based upon it by ridiculing it.

That something is "standard linguistic usage" does of course not mean that
there is nothing to comment or think about. We all have to use undefined
terms sometimes, but for some purposes definitions are important and a
matter which should be looked into every now and then. What Campbell does
is to *define* the terms "l." and "d." *for the purposes of his book*. This
is a recommendable practise. The very fact that C. *introduced explicitly*
these terms, accompanied by an explit purpose-focussed definition is
responsible for the reviewer not commenting about it. If he hadn't done
this, this or that reviewer might find reasons to ask what he means by
these terms. In a work of this kind, overflowing with names for linguistic
varieties, this is inevitable. On the other hand, if there were such a
thing as a "standard linguistic usage" of these terms, C. would hardly have
bothered to present a definition. Since there isn't, he had to and did.

Further, if this definition - well-suited for C.'s purposes and entirely
unobjectionable as long as the definition is maintained - were "standard"
in "linguistics", a lot of "languages" would, much to the surprise of their
speakers, fall under the rubrum "dialect". There simply *cannot* be such a
thing as "standard" use of these terms (only a *casual* use) in
linguistics, since it makes a great difference to classify lects according
to "purely" linguistic criteria (as, inter alia, mutual intelligibility),
or according to political, sociological and a host of other reasons, which
go normally into people's linguistic self-awareness.

There are other terms in linguistics and elsewhere which evade a
once-and-for-all definition (like /word/, /sentence/ and others). The
reason for this is that they, like /language/ have been around *before* any
meaningful science appeared which found itself in the position to say
something about the "things" people refer to by these terms. Any science
needs its own well-defined terminology, and terms from every-day language
are all too often laden with connotations of all sorts, which make them
unsuitable for precise definitions. Two ways out: introduce new, most often
latinate, terms, or use the old ones but *say what you mean with them*.
Campbell did this, others fail to. Thus, there is no reason not to respect
C.'s usage, whereas the practice of others, who don't care, is less worthy
of respect.

St.G.

Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
+49-228-69-13-32


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Wed Oct 13 22:26:49 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 18:26:49 -0400
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19991007083203.00983d30@popd.netcruiser>
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.182649.0400.>

On Thu, 7 Oct 1999, Stanley Friesen wrote:

> I question the assumption that the Anatolian languages necessarily split
> off earlier than the others.  Given the linguistic and archaeological
> facts, I suspect that the northern European languages, and probably
> Proto-Tocharian, split off at least as early as Anatolian.  Thus I see an
> original three or four-way split, not a simple bidding off of Anatolian

> [The northern group would be ancestral to Germanic, Celtic, and Italic, at
> least, and perhaps Balto-Slavis as well],

You must be new on this list; during August and September, the question of
the phylogeny of the IE languages was hashed over in great detail.  I'm
curious as to what linguistic and archaeological evidence you have in
mind; your claim is at odds with the work of Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor
which I have been discussing.  If you like, I can forward you some of the
emails which I sent out as a part of this dialog.

> And given that, again pace Renfrew, Anatolian almost certainly had to move
> through the Balkans prior to Greek arrival *there*, let alone their arrival
> in Greece proper, and that there is some evidence for a non-Greek IE
> language in Greece in place names, the time scale is further constrained.

If the speakers of prehistoric Anatolian travelled south along the west
coast of the Black Sea to the Bosporus, they need not have entered any
part of what is now Greece on their way into Anatolia.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From Georg at home.ivm.de  Wed Oct 13 23:27:02 1999
From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 01:27:02 +0200
Subject: Nors Josephson's Theory about a linguistic and cultural
 influence of Ancient Greek on East-Polynesia
In-Reply-To: <001b01bf142e$da46fe00$0100007f@i1g7v2>
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.012702.0200.>

>I should like to know some scholarly opinion about N. Josephson's theories
>concerning a presumptive linguistic Greek influence on Pacific area (ex. gr.
>cf. N. Josephson, Greek Linguistic Elements in the Polynesian Languages,
>Universitaetsverlag C. Winter, Heidelberg, 1987; or Idem, Eine
>archaisch-griechische Kultur auf der Osterinsel, Universitaetsverlag C.
>Winter,
>Heidelberg, 1999 ).

The Universitaetsverlag C. Winter, once well-reputed, got bankrupt a few
years after the publication of the first of the abovementioned titles (only
the name is continued by the new possessors).
I see a connection.

(Another nail in that publishing house's coffin was Mufti: Die
Sprachwissenschaft des Tscherkessischen, also from the 80s, championing the
theory of Adyghe *as* Indo-European)

St.G.

PS: This is of course only my personal opinion, and very likely to be not
more than my usual reluctance against scholarly breakthroughs paired with
bad manners, but there are reviews of this work, such as B. Nothofer: Die
historisch-vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft und die Hypothese einer
Verwandtschaft des Griechischen mit den polynesischen Sprachen, in: Die
deutsche Malaiologie: Festschrift I. Hilgers-Hesse (edd.: K.-H. Pampus et
al.) Heidelberg: Groos 1988, 77-89.
I vaguely remember a review in Die Sprache/Indogermanische Chronik,
uncertain date or number (1992 at the latest, I'd say) by M. Peeters, I
think, maybe someone knows better. It was very laconic and, as one might
expect, devastating.

Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
+49-228-69-13-32


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Oct 14 02:29:07 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 22:29:07 EDT
Subject: PIE vs. Proto-Language
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.222907.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/13/99 6:16:18 PM, Georg at home.ivm.de wrote:

<<Palaeontologists a/o archaeologists should be looking for signs of
early culture,...to approach the time where it would simply be necessary to
assume that people who did this and that or used this and that, or cooperated
in this and that way could not well have none so without considerably
elaborate communication skills. Having the brains is only a prerequesite for
this.>>

Let me just posit a slightly different scenario.  That the first change that
happened that moved early primates towards homo was the ability to make
complex sounds.  One of the core understandings of evolutionary theory is
that all adaptation is local and limited in time.
So this adaption would have had a very local and limited advantage - say, in
the ability to hunt communally or to signal with precision where food or
danger was on an ad hoc basis.

But with the ability to make more complex sounds would have come a number of
additional features that became more long term.  The most critical of these
would have been the ability to pass on acquired traits and knowledge from
generation to generation in an efficient form - verbally.  Human communalism
would have immediately become a more powerful tool for survival with the
addition of language.  Dogs and Japanese monkeys pass on non-genetic
knowledge from generation to generation - but they must do it by
demonstration.  Language permits the passing on of information without
demonstration - symbolically.  I can describe to you a hand-axe and how it
works without ever showing you one.  And you might be able to make one from
description alone.

Language therefore creates a cultural knowledge storage system that is
cumulative.  It keeps expanding.  Which would make a culture favor
individuals (among others) who could retain more of that accumulated
knowledge - it would favor larger harddrives, so to speak.  (There is an
analogy between the old 10meg harddrives and the 8gig drives becoming
standard today.)  And this would favor the development of bigger, if not more
specialized brains to store that accumulated information.

The pattern would be:
- communal action favors more complex signaling capability (speech)
- speech favors multi-generational communal information accrual
- continuing communal information accrual favors larger brains
- larger brains favor larger pools of communal knowledge (cultural
complexity) and so forth

In this view, early language becomes the enhanced vehicle for preserving
knowledge from one generation to another - human culture -(so that it does
not have to be relearned each new generation) and even accumulated.  And
EVENTUALLY accounts for increased brain size.  Language > human culture >
bigger brain.

Where would this date human language (in the big broad sense, not as a
language system)?  I received a post awhile back that pointed out that
handaxes date as far back possibly as 700,000 years ago.  And that the
quality and refinement of those handaxes steadily increase over time.  And
that there is no case in the animal kingdom where that kind of
generation-to-generation improvement has ever been evidenced.  Could those
handaxes have been improved by generation-to-generation demonstration?
Possibly.  But there are just no examples of demonstration alone being able
to keep information passing on for very long, much less while improvements
are also being made.  And so there is at least an argument that such steady,
cumulative technical improvement could not have been accomplished without
language.  A similar case can be made for the communal use of fire.

That would date the earliest forms of human language as early as 700,000
years ago.  Really not that long ago, when you consider how much knowledge
one would personally have to accumulate to say travel to the moon, make an
atom bomb or write new National Enquirer cover headlines every week.

Not arguing for this point of view.  Just offering it as a different POV.
One that connects our evolution intricately with language.  Not suddenly big
or specialized brains.  Not some extraordinary cerebral event.

But just the ability to make sounds complex enough so that information  could
be stored in those sounds (or written words) and passed on in that form from
generation to generation in the cumulative way that is so singularly
characteristic of human culture.

PS - Just saw who A&E's Biography picked as the number one (out of 100) most
influential person of the last Millennium, over Copernicus, Newton, Adam
Smith, Shakespeare, Pasteur, DaVinci, etc.

Gutenberg.

Regards,
Steve Long


From ECOLING at aol.com  Thu Oct 14 04:02:26 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 00:02:26 EDT
Subject: Agree on Multilateral Comparison (w John McLaughlin)
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.000226.EDT.>

I thank John McLaughlin for his very balanced statement.

I agree probably with even a bit more of it than he thinks.

I would only change SLIGHTLY the wording of a couple
of statements following:

> [Multilateral Comparison] is not a
>conclusive proof of anything in and of itself because it ignores factors
>of chance, fails to properly identify borrowing, fails to take into account
>historical and other nonlinguistic factors, and is dependent on the quality
>and quantity of available materials for the languages involved.  It can
>be suggestive of potential areas for further research.

I agree that MC does not provide proof, but it does not "ignore" chance,
rather, it aims to gain useful results despite the vagaries of chance
and noise in the data.  This difference in phrasing is important,
because it removes the imputation of incompetence among those
who know perfectly well what its uses are, and that it cannot do
what the Comparative Method can do when sufficient information
is available and when the languages are close enough (approximate
conditions, I'm not concerned about excessive exactness just at
this point).

WHEN USED properly as a heuristic,
I am most concerned about a weakness of Multilateral Comparison
in being influenced too much by massive borrowing.
Given the limited goals for which Multilateral Comparison is appropriate,
perhaps we should then think in terms of the wisdom
that when borrowing is massive enough,
it is hard to say which is the "true" ancestor language.
The biases of most of us linguists in favor of grammar as carrying
the "true" genetic line can be considered as just that, biases,
in some points of view, even though there is also truth in that
point of view.

>Misused, it can give
>the appearance of a final proof of genetic relationship that may or may
>not actually be there.

It is not Multilateral Comparison which can give the appearance
of final proof.  It is improper claims made by some practitioners.
That is little different from any other method,
which can equally be abused by claiming more for it than it can do.
I do not consider Multilateral Comparison to be more subject to this
than any other method.  (And I do not consider this a variant of
the view that we should not blame the guns for the murder rate,
it is human beings that fire them.)  The availability of Multilateral
Comparison in the tool kit does NOT itself contribute
to misuse of Multilateral Comparison.  Rather, clear teaching
in our introductory and graduate linguistics departments of what
the technique of Multilateral Comparison really is, independent
of whatever claims may have been made for it at one time or another,
is the best antidote.  Celebrate its successes, point out that it can
be used to suggest
ultimate non-relationship (the less close resemblances)
just as much as ultimate relationship (the closer resemblances).
Provide inoculation against misuse that does not go overboard
by globally condemning its use and disregarding how useful
it has in fact been in the history of work on both preliminary
classifications globally and preliminary classifications within
many language families.  Teaching of historical linguistics
should not ignore heuristics, they are just as important,
even if less "final" (in mature fields), as are the methods used
to refine details when languages are known to be related.
It is the LACK of teaching of the proper use of Multilateral
Comparison which is most likely to give rise to abuses of it.

I even agree that Greenberg has most often overstated his case.
I think this is because he is attempting to use
Multilateral Comparison at a presumed depth of separation
much greater than that in most of its demonstrated
successful uses.
Some of the deepest of the successful cases
probably include the internal classifications within the
major highest-level families of African languages.

However, I was a direct witness to early conversations by
Greenberg in which he admitted that all the method could do
was show which languages or families were relatively
closer or more distant.  I wish he had maintained that
approach more generally.  I also wish his critics had used
their knowledge to correct his errors AND THEN to evaluate
whether their corrected data caused his way of applying
Multilateral Comparison to yield different results,
rather than (illogically) arguing that the existence of error
made all aspects of what he did worthless.  There is error
in virtually everything human beings do.  Even massive
error needs to be evaluated for its effect on the outcome,
simply calling it massive does not remove the need to deal
with the actual facts.

I still believe that the subtle study of both
similarities and differences between the African and
American contexts may effectively teach us what can and
cannot be accomplished by Multilateral Comparison,
and may permit us to refine various versions of that method.

Sincrerely,
Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics


From mclasutt at brigham.net  Thu Oct 14 05:24:46 1999
From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 23:24:46 -0600
Subject: Campbell's def. of "language"
In-Reply-To: <0.1e85ef15.252e2ed1@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.232446.0600.>

Lloyd Anderson wrote

> Yesterday I received the latest issue of the Journal "Language",
> in which there is a review by Doris Bartholomew of
> Lyle Campbell's book
> *American Indian Languages: The historical linguistics of Native America*
> Oxford University Press 1997

...

> My own familiarity with Campbell's earlier work makes me
> very wary, because in his eagerness to defeat Greenberg's
> final conclusions, he has previously made what I consider
> serious logical errors, and in parts of his "Language" review of
> Greenberg's *Language in the Americas*, he even wrote
> in a very seriously misleading fashion, as if Greenberg's
> chapter on methodological analysis did not exist.

> That does not meet my standards of civic obligation, at least.

I think that Greenberg is mistaken in his conclusions, but I also agree that
many Americanists seemed to jump on the anti-Greenberg bandwagon.  However,
Greenberg's views on the languages of Native America were not a surprise
when they were published in 1987 and Americanists had been lining up for and
against for about a decade prior to their publication.  Greenberg had first
published in 1960 on the classification of the languages of Central and
South America, but at that time so little was known about those areas that
anyone could have said just about anything and not caused a ripple.  But I
was in the audience at Norman, Oklahoma in 1978 at the Mid-America
Linguistics Conference when he first presented his views on North America.
(He actually sat in on the paper that I read and asked me a couple of
questions at this my first professional meeting as a grad student, so I'll
always have a "warm fuzzy" memory of him despite my disagreements with his
conclusions.)  Mary Haas and several other legends of the Native American
linguistic pantheon were sitting in the front row as he spoke (he was the
keynote speaker).  You could have heard a pin drop and most of us were
stunned at his presentation and the conclusions he reached without using
careful comparative methodology.  That was the beginning of the division
among Americanists and the source of Lyle Campbell's vitriol.

> This book should be of great usefulness both to anyone
> interested in what is generally established knowledge
> of genetic relationships, and to anyone interested
> in methods of establishing new genetic relationships for
> languages of the world.

I completely agree.  The methodology chapters actually occupy a very large
portion of the book.

> I have looked at some portions of it in the past,
> but am not familiar enough with it at this point
> to review it independently.

I've owned my copy for about a year now and have read it a couple of times
already.  The methodology sections are very sound and represent the
classical comparative methodology.  There are also carefully argued sections
devoted to a variety of iconoclasms including Greenberg's.  He is thoughtful
and very careful in his discussions and he approaches the apostates with
much more care and respect than his Language review would indicate.  I saw a
draft of this book in Wick Miller's library when I helped clean out his
office after his untimely passing in 1994.  I'm not sure how long Wick had
it before his death, but Wick's copy was dog-eared, so Campbell had worked
on this for a long time.  It shows.

John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
mclasutt at brigham.net

Program Director
Utah State University On-Line Linguistics
http://english.usu.edu/lingnet

English Department
3200 Old Main Hill
Utah State University
Logan, UT  84322-3200

(435) 797-2738 (voice)
(435) 797-3797 (fax)


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Thu Oct 14 05:30:07 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 22:30:07 -0700
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
In-Reply-To: <b2c475ab.252d0173@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.223007.0700.>

At 03:48 PM 10/6/99 -0400, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:
>I'm not sure what sites or culture are being spoken of above.  But there is
>no special break in "cultural tradition" - except one - that occurs during
>this time.  More importantly, there is a continuity in many aspects of the
>early Greek material culture that remain consistent right from the end of the
>Neolithic (about 3500BC) through to the end of the Middle Helladic (about
>1500BC).

I sometimes think the critics of linguistic archaeology make too much of
this sort of continuity.  In a mixing of cultures in which one language
eventually displaces another, *naturally* many aspects of the culture of
the "losing" language will persist afterwards.

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 ...".

>Based on the evidence above, there is nothing to preclude the conjecture that
>"Greeks were in Greece" during or even before the Neolithic.  If one connects
>PIE with the first appearance of agriculture (a la Renfrew), then that could
>move the date of "proto-Greek" or its ancestors being in mainland Greece back
>towards 7000BC.

Except that Renfrew can only reach this "conclusion" by ignoring many facts
about PIE that are quite secure (e.g. the universality of *ekwos, and the
original distinction between wlkwos and kuoon) and which are inconsistent
with what is known about early Neolithic culture (no domesticated equids
and no domesticated dog).

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


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Oct 14 05:35:05 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 01:35:05 EDT
Subject: Change and What Remains
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.013505.EDT.>

I wrote:
<< And with regard to that, let me write again that bringing up "ceaseless
change" tells us nothing about whether enough "remained" of the ancestor so
that it could co-exist with the daughter.>>

In a message dated 10/6/99 9:35:22 AM, Larry Trask wrote:

<<Sorry, but, with the best will in the world, I can't understand this.
What is the force here of `enough'?>>

With "enough" of "the best will in the world" I'm sure you can figure out
exactly what I mean.

You know full well what you yourself wrote in your textbook.  You can't with
"the best will in the world" forget that you yourself drew a line at which
point a language is no longer the same language: 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.)

You can say that that quote was not meant for specialists, only for students.
 But you really CAN'T say you don't understand what it meant.  It meant that
MUTUAL COMPREHENSIBILITY was the measure of when a language is no longer the
same language.  If you find that an inadequate definition for
"professionals", that's fine.  But please don't pretend that a language
"changing enough" to be become a different language - ancestor or otherwise -
is something you don't understand.  It is precisely how you described Latin
changing into other languages: "Within another couple of centuries, speakers
of Latin in Spain, France, Italy... could no longer understand each
other,...it no longer made much sense to apply a single name to this babel of
regional varieties...."

I wrote:
<<The coexistence of ancestor with daughter language is obviously a separate
question.>>

Larry Trask replied:
<<I don't see how.  A living language never remains identical from one
generation to the next.>>

With the help of "the best will in the world" I'm sure you can "see how":

There is no need for the ancestor to remain IDENTICAL in order for it to be
the same language, by mutual comprehensibility standards.  You drew the line
between former dialects and new languages in your textbook at the point where
the dialects "cease to be mutually comprehensible at all."  That is far, far
from the point where a language is no longer IDENTICAL to its former self.

And please don't bring up my non-innovative language hypothetical.  It had
nothing to do with your statement "an ancestor language cannot co-exist with
its own descendent."  That hypothetical was posted long after you made that
statement.  And never had anything to do with the truth of your statement.

As far as requiring that an ancestor must be IDENTICAL to its former self
when a descendent shows up, why would you set such a standard?  When is such
a standard ever applied in any science that observes identity over time?

You are not identical in shape or size to the person you were when you were
two years old.  Morphologically, even down to the cells you once were made up
of, you are not IDENTICAL to "Larry Trask" at that age.  However, any
biologist would be willing to say you were the same organism.  Members of
biological species are hardly identical among themselves or over time.  But a
specialist can easily identify the bones of a domestic cat or a human from
200 years ago and confidently distinguish the two species.

It is totally inconsistent to require that the ancestor stay IDENTICAL to
itself in order to be called the same language.  If you want to find a way to
make it a different language,  the obvious thing any scientific methodology
would do is point to an ESSENTIAL change, one that alters the DEFINING
CHARACTERISTICS of the language.  E.g., the point where the biologist or
biochemist or doctor would say that the organism being viewed is no longer
"Larry Trask."

<<The English that I speak is, in a reasonable sense, a daughter of the
English my parents spoke.  And the English the young people are speaking
back home, which is already noticeably different from my own, can be
regarded as a daughter of the English I speak.  In that sense, I
suppose, a language can co-exist with its own daughter.  Is that what
you mean?>>

With "the best will in the world", I cannot believe you are asking this.
This all started with my asking if the peak on the UPenn tree meant that PIE
co-existed with Anatolian.  And you think I meant that your parents are
speaking an ancestor language of modern English?

No, you don't think that.  You were quite confident in describing the
relationship between an ancestor language and a daughter and even a sister.
You wrote: <<So, that top node, with its two DAUGHTERS, represents an initial
split of the single language PIE, with one DAUGHTHER being the ANCESTOR of
Anatolian, and the other DAUGHTER being the single common ANCESTOR of
everything else.  We now often speak of `broad PIE' -- the ANCESTOR of the
whole family -- and `narrow PIE' -- the ANCESTOR of everything except
Anatolian.  Narrow PIE is a SISTER language of Proto-Anatolian...>> [Caps are
mine]

Did you mean that there were some parents who were speaking "wide PIE" at the
same time that the young people were speaking "narrow PIE?"  Is that what you
meant by an ancestor?  I don't think so.  So why would you think that's what
I meant?

And BTW did you mean that "wide PIE" was not "identical" to "narrow PIE"?  Or
did you mean that "wide PIE" was totally incomprehensible to speakers of
"narrow PIE"?  Which was it?  Apparently the only distinction you make
between "wide PIE" and "narrow PIE" is by their descendents - you don't even
seem to consider whether they were identical or mutually comprehensible or
not.

I will tell you what I meant and I think that if you use anything close to
"the best will in the world," you will have no problem understanding it.  I
will not assume that you are cynically pretending to misunderstand me.

In your textbook, you wrote about dialects fragmenting and forming different
languages:  "And it is clear that such fragmentation of single languages into
several different languages has happened countless times..."

Up to that point, a dialect is still just a variety of the original language.
(See your Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology where you define "dialect" as
"a regionally or socially distinctive variety of a language, differing from
other varieties in its grammar and/or lexicon.")

This is all that is required for "an ancestor language to coexist with its
descendent" - by your own terms above :
Given ten co-existing, changing dialects "of a language" - say, Latin as an
example - one dialect is the first to become "mutually incomprehensible."
The other nine are all still mutually comprehensible.  The nine are still
"varieties" of Latin.  The nine are dialects of the "ancestor language."  The
new language is a descendent.  They co-exist.

I think with enough of the best will in the world, you can understand why
this is a serious, good faith counterargument to your statement - in terms
drawn from statements that you yourself have published.  If you have
rethought those terms, that's fine and understandable.  But I do hope that
you will not take the position that what I wrote above is something
particularly difficult for you to understand.

Regards,
Steve Long


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Thu Oct 14 06:13:38 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 23:13:38 -0700
Subject: Contributions by Steve Long
In-Reply-To: <E11b2wk-0005YF-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <WED.13.OCT.1999.231338.0700.>

At 03:33 PM 10/12/99 +0100, Larry Trask wrote:
>Stanley Friesen writes:

>[on my Yugoslav example]

>> This actually accords with what one book on linguistic change suggested is
>> the *main* cause of language change: a social desire to differentiate one's
>> group from some other group.  ...

>I don't know of any book or article which makes such a strong claim as this,
>and I must confess I find it implausible.  But there *has* been some recent
>work showing that this desire for linguistic distance has been a major factor
>in certain cases.

I may have slightly overstated (without the actual book, I cannot get a
quote: all I know is the source of this is certainly NOT Hock's book).

But I am fairly certain that the book at least cast doubt on the importance
of "mis-hearing" by children in language change.  So, I think saying the
author asserts that it is the most important cause of change is reasonable.

>> There is another way out of this dilemma.  At least in many cases
>> substantial language change occurs in a *single* generation.  In the
>> history of English, one such case occurred during the Wars of Roses, and
>> separates Middle English from Modern English.

>Perhaps, but I find it very hard to believe that *most* linguistic change
>occurs over a single generation.  The evidence seems to be clearly against
>this.

It is hard to be certain.  In so many cases we just lack evidence.  The
Latin to separate Romance languages transition is hidden behind the
persistent tradition of writing in classical Latin.  I suspect that the Old
English to Middle English transition is actually equally hidden by a
persistence of an older literary tradition (with OE spellings and case
forms continuing in use well after they have changed or disappeared in speech).

>By the way, what was there that was so dramatic during the Wars of the Roses?

The wars themselves.  They were bloody, and disruptive of the stability of
government.  Most noble families were killed off during those wars, leaving
few indeed of the old Norman families alive afterwards (and Henry VII
eliminated many of those).

But that in itself is not sufficient to explain language change.  I suspect
there was also an matter of some sort of profound "generation gap" as well.

>> And it is occurring right now for the Blackfoot language, with older tribe
>> members speaking Old Blackfoot, and the younger ones speaking New
>> Blackfoot.  The changes are quite substantial, and include replacement of
>> vowel+glottal stop with a long/creaky vowel.

>I have encountered comparable cases elsewhere.  But, again, it seems doubtful
>that language change mostly occurs in sudden and dramatic jumps, or
>saltations, to borrow a term from evolutionary biology.

>> One of two places:
>> 1. at some historical point where there was a major break between
>> successive generations.

>At what point?

I don't know, as I haven't studied the issue.

>Anyway, I think it's improper to pick a contemporary speaker as the judge.
>Everybody at every stage can normally understand the speech of the two or
>three immediately preceding or following generations.  My grandparents would
>probably have understood their own grandparents better than I could have, had
>I ever been able to meet them.

Actually, I am not so sure about that.  Language fashions, like clothing
fashions, often go in circles.  I suspect you might have been able to
understand your great great grandparents better than you think.   Certainly
I have no trouble understanding Mark Twain, even though he was about the
same age as my great great grandparents!  Indeed, I find him more
accessible and readable than the more recent F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was
my grandfather's contemporary.

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


From lmfosse at online.no  Thu Oct 14 08:41:33 1999
From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 09:41:33 +0100
Subject: SV: Change and What Remains
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.094133.0100.>

Robert Orr [SMTP:colkitto at sprint.ca] skrev 12. oktober 1999 06:25:

> I had a cousin by marriage who moved to  Canada as a young girl.

> My father met her for the first time when she was a very old lady and said:
> "I heard this lovely 1920's voice".

> My mother had an aunt, from the "Inverness area" who spent her life in
> Paris.

> My father spent several years of his boyhood in Inverness.  Around 1950 my
> father met htis aunt for the first time, and he said that she had the same
> voice as much older people he remmembered in the Inverness area.

> Does this constitute  "parent and daughter co-existing" at all?

For what it is worth, I can back up this experience with emigrant Norwegians. I
have met old emigrants to the US who still spoke their childhood dialect in a
manner that is not  used today. And there are still Norwegians using the dative
in their dialects who coexist with younger dialect speakers who have dropped
the dative. So two sligthly different versions of the same language or dialect
may apparently exist side by side.

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 Georg at home.ivm.de  Thu Oct 14 09:05:40 1999
From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 11:05:40 +0200
Subject: Moldavian (was: Contributions by Steve Long)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.10.9910121131550.24676-100000@rask>
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.110540.0200.>

>After Moldova's independence in 1991, the question of whether the official
>language should be called ROMANIAN or MOLDOVIAN rocked its political
>cradle. In Moldova's present constitution, the official language is called
>MOLDOVIAN, but it is acknowledged as a variety of Romanian, and Moldovian
>has even followed the recent Romanian spelling reform.

Thanks for these useful additions, of course the fact that this language
was created overnight is instrumental in its overnight "extinction"; what
always struck me most about Soviet attutudes towards this language was the
fact that even the most authoritative accounts of M. (e.g. Jazyki Narodov
SSSR) always (correctly ;-) included M. in the Romance family of lgs., but
that any statement to the effect that it might, within this family, be
particularly close to Romanian, was carefully avoided. This bordered on
hysteria. A useful account of all this is to be found in Donald L. Dryer:
Moldavian Linguistic Realities on pp. 234-253 in the proc. of the 4th conf.
on Non-Slavic Languages of the USSR, Columbus/O: Slavica 1994. The status
of Moldavian has been the subject of other interesting papers in earlier
conference volumes, one of which was entitled: "How non-Romanian is
Moldavian ?", closing with the dictum: "Barely." No, sorry, I forgot the
author and publishing-date of this one.

St.G.

Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
+49-228-69-13-32


From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Oct 14 10:00:57 1999
From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max Wheeler)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 11:00:57 +0100
Subject: Basque 'sei'
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.110057.0100.>

-- Begin original message --

> From: "Roslyn M. Frank" <roz-frank at uiowa.edu>

>>> But Gascon-Be'arnais is Ibero-Romance in many ways, including
>>> it's apical <s>.

> Miguel, does that mean that Gascon-Be?rnais also had a laminal /s/ or just
> the apical one?

> And if so, were the two respesented as <z> (laminal) and <s> (apical) as is
> the convention in Euskera?

-- End original message --

Gascon-Bearnais, like all Romance languages as far as I know, has only one
/s/, i.e. only one sibilant place of articulation. Whether this was always so
is another matter. In French, Occitan, Catalan, Portuguese, and Andalusian
Spanish modern /s/ is a merger of inherited /s/ and the reflex of, among other
things, /k/ before non-low front vowels, which almost certainly went through a
stage /ts/ (affricate), which may have been laminal, given that in
non-Andalusian European Spanish it resulted in /<theta>/ (dental fricative).
It is conceivable that /ts/ went through a stage [laminal dental/alveolar
fricative] before merger with /s/, but I don't know of evidence on the matter.

We shouldn't assume, without looking at the evidence, that the current
distribution of laminal versus apical /s/ phonemes in Europe can be projected
way back into the past.

Max
______________________________________________________________
Max W. Wheeler
School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer
BRIGHTON BN1 9QH, G.B.

Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975 Fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 Email: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk
______________________________________________________________


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Oct 14 11:34:40 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 12:34:40 +0100
Subject: Campbell's def. of "language"
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.123440.0100.>

Lloyd Anderson writes:

>  Yesterday I received the latest issue of the Journal "Language",
>  in which there is a review by Doris Bartholomew of
>  Lyle Campbell's book
>  *American Indian Languages: The historical linguistics of Native America*
>  Oxford University Press 1997

>  Campbell defines these terms (and reviewer Bartholomew
>       does not comment, so presumably regards these definitions
>       as quite normal, unremarkable):

>  'dialect' is a variety (regional or social) of a language,
>       mutually intelligible with other dialects

>  'language' is a distinct linguistic entity that is
>       mutually unintelligible with other languages

>  I simply do not believe that Larry Trask is unaware that this is
>       standard linguistic usage.  He is not forced to use it himself,
>       but he is obligated to treat this usage with respect,
>       not to evade discussions based upon it by ridiculing it.

OK; let's talk about this.

First, Lyle Campbell is a friend of mine.  I have the greatest respect for
his work.  I have read his book on American languages from cover to cover,
and I enjoyed it greatly.  It's the perfect work for a non-specialist who
wants an overview of the state of play in American historical and
comparative linguistics.

Now, in his first chapter, Campbell points out a number of the difficulties
he faced in compiling his book.  Like other parts of the world, the Americas
contain many instances of related but distinct language varieties, some of
them closely related, others more distantly related.  Mutual
comprehensibility between related varieties may range, as usual, from 100%
to zero.  Also as usual, specialists have often arrived at very different
classifications of the resulting position.  Just to cite one example, the
large and messy Zapotecan complex has variously been counted at anything
between six and 55 distinct languages (p. 158).  Campbell reports (pp. 3-4)
that specialists have counted the American languages at anything from a
minimum of 400 to a maximum of over 2500.

Now, for his purposes in writing this book, he needs to adopt a policy, and
his policy is spelled out on pp. 7-8.  These are the definitions quoted
above.

Now, it is *perfectly clear* from the context that Campbell is spelling out
a particular policy devised for a particular purpose.  Nowhere does he give
the slightest hint that his definitions are intended to be universal ones.
Nowhere does he suggest that other definitions, other criteria or other
classifications are inappropriate, misguided or wrong.  And *nowhere* does
he assert or imply that his choices are "standard linguistic usage".
Quite the contrary, in fact.  On p. 7, he tells us this: "It is important to
clarify this terminology and to specify how such terms are used in this book
at the outset."

Note the wording: "in this book".

It is simply that Campbell has to do *something* in order to get on with his
book.  And, quite properly, he is explaining his choices.

Also on p. 7, Campbell confesses that mutual intelligibility may be
"difficult...to define or apply in practice".  He says no more about this,
and we are left to conclude that Campbell is relying on his own or his
colleagues' judgements of mutual comprehensibility.

All of this is, or should be, perfectly obvious to any reader of the book.
But Lloyd Anderson -- who apparently has not read the book -- is extracting
bits and pieces badly out of context, declaring Campbell's policies here to
be "standard linguistic usage", and accusing me of "ridiculing" it.

Not guilty.  I've read the book.  Lloyd apparently hasn't, and he should not
be quoting bits of it out of context in such a way.  Nor have I ever
ridiculed the kind of policy adopted here by Campbell.

There's more.  Linguists commonly invoke a number of criteria in deciding
how many languages to recognize and where to put the boundaries.  Only when
no other criteria are available -- written traditions, standard forms,
political boundaries, or whatever -- do we fall back on mutual
intelligibility as the last gasp.  And mutual intelligibility is not such a
great criterion, because it varies along a continuum, and there is no
principled way of drawing language boundaries when we find -- as we often do
-- that mutual intelligibility among a group of related varieties varies
between, say, 20% and 80%.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From mcv at wxs.nl  Thu Oct 14 19:42:00 1999
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 19:42:00 GMT
Subject: Perfective-Imperfective (2) - Habitual
In-Reply-To: <003d01bf0d80$325e9ea0$879f113f@oemcomputer>
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.194200.GMT.>

"Patrick C. Ryan" <proto-language at email.msn.com> wrote:

>Is it therefore appropriate to say that:

>'Lisa suele fumar'

>can be interpreted as: 'Lisa is accustomed to smoking'?

>And if 'Lisa is used to smoking' is equivalent to 'Lisa is accustomed to
>smoke', is it possible, in some contexts, for 'Lisa suele fumar' to be
>interpreted as virtually equivalent to 'Lisa esta' acostumbrada a fumar'?

If you consider English "Lisa used to smoke" to be in some
contexts virtually equivalent to "Lisa was used to smoking".

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Thu Oct 14 00:03:48 1999
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 00:03:48 -0000
Subject: Possessives
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.000348.0000.>

Dear Larry and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 1999 5:12 PM

[PR previously]

<snip>

>> One of the principal benefits of terming this class of words
>> "possessive pronouns" is that it enables us to identify comparable
>> classes of words in IE, English, and Basque --- even though the
>> details of their employment may differ.

[LT]
> Well, this reminds me of Abe Lincoln's little joke.  "How many legs does
> a sheep have if you call the tail a leg?"  "Five?"  "No, four: calling
> the tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."

> Possessive items, in general, are "comparable" among languages only
> insofar as they are translation equivalents.  Syntactically, they can
> and do exhibit many different kinds of behavior, requiring them to be
> assigned to various parts of speech, or sometimes to no part of speech.

> The English possessives like `my' are determiners because they behave
> like determiners.  They do not behave like pronouns, and so they are not
> pronouns.  And they certainly don't behave like adjectives.

[PR]
It seems to be the rationale of the approach Larry espouses to assign words
to classes based on their ability to occur in certain positions within
grammatically well-formed sentences --- what I would call the slot-theory.

That is certainly one method of analysis; and, in certain cases, I would
admit it may be useful.

But, it is not the only useful rationale that may be used, a broad-minded
position that I have not seen Larry espouse in any context.

His preference is a direct outgrowth of the school to which he subscribes,
and the definitions that school generates.

His definition of 'pronoun' (as contained in his dictionary) is: "The
lexical category, or a member of this category, whose members typically
function as noun phrases in isolation, not normally requiring or permitting
the presence of determiners or other adnominals, and whose members typically
have little or no intrinsic meaning or reference."

[ moderator snip ]

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 meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er
mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)


From swheeler at richmond.edu  Thu Oct 14 23:51:46 1999
From: swheeler at richmond.edu (Stuart Wheeler)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 19:51:46 -0400
Subject: Greater Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite Language Family
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.195146.0400.>

On March 17-19 of 2000 a colloquium entitled "Greater Anatolia and the
Indo-Hittite Language Family" will be held at the University of Richmond in
Richmond, Virginia.  The conference will be hosted by Robert Drews,
Professor of Classics and History at Vanderbilt University and visiting
Professor of Classics at the University of Richmond.

Assuming the Indo-Hittite theory as a point of departure, the organizers
hope that the colloquium will explore but also narrow the possibilities for
the relationship of Greater Anatolia (everything from the Aegean to the
Caspian, and from the Caucasus to the Jazirah) to both the Anatolian and
the "traditional" Indo-European branches of Indo-Hittite.  The colloquium
will begin on Friday evening with a public lecture by Professor Lord Colin
Renfrew, followed by a reception for participants and registrants.  The
title of Professor Renfrew's address is, "The Hittites and Indo-European:
Some Historical Questions."  On Saturday and on Sunday morning invited
speakers will present eight papers, approaching the topic from a wide
variety of disciplines and perspectives, and the papers will be followed by
two critical responses.  It is hoped that all papers and responses will be
intelligible to scholars outside the presenter's own specialty.

Papers will be presented by Elizabeth Wayland Barber, William Darden,
Margalit Finkelberg, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Peter Kuniholm, Alexander Lehrman,
Colin Renfrew, and Paul Zimansky.   Craig Melchert and Jeremy Rutter have
agreed to present critical responses.  Funding for the colloquium will be
provided by a matching grant made to the University of Richmond by the
National Endowment for the Humanities.

All conference details can be accessed at
<http://hermes.richmond.edu/anatolia>.


From roz-frank at uiowa.edu  Fri Oct 15 00:22:16 1999
From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 19:22:16 -0500
Subject: Basque 'sei'
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.192216.0500.>

Four items.

1) Larry Trask has brought into play  what appears to be compelling toponymic
evidence in order to refute the claim that <sei> might have been copied into
Euskera from Gascon. Yet Seguy (1951) whose research is discussed in Ruffie and
Bernard (1976)  indicates that the final element of such the place names was
rendered variously as <-os>, <-osse>, <-ons> <-ost> and <-oz>. If one assumes
that the original suffixing element was in all cases <-otz> "cold" (which is
not entirely clear),  there seems to be a certain ambivalence concerning which
sibilant was chosen to represent the original Basque suffix in Gascon. The
relevant map with the isoglosses is reproduced in Trask 1996: 41). It also
indicates attestations of corresponding Aragonese endings in <ues> and <ueste>.


2) Larry Trask hasn't mentioned (with respect to this item) that in Euskera,
/z/ regularly undergoes palatalization, e.g., in the case of the pronoun <zu>
"you" which commonly becomes <xu> (palatalized) in northern dialects, and that
Azkue and others write or represent that sound as <s> with a "tilde."
Furthermore, palatalization of sibilants in Basque creates a situation in which
both the letter <z> and the letter <s> can become conflated and represented by
the same letter, e.g., as <s> although at times with a "tilde" (cf. the dozens
of examples of this in Azkue's dictionary).

Among the commonplace palatalizations in northern dialects we have the case of
<sei> (Azkue II: 247).  This permutation is so common in other dialects of
Euskera that when I learned Basque, primarily through contacts with native
speakers of the language from Goierri in Gipuzkoa (a southern dialect), I
thought that it always had a palatalized sibilant. Interestingly, this
palatalization was commented upon recently by Max Wheeler with respect to
Gascon:

[snip]
<Luchaire (1879) on Pyrenean Gascon has abundant cases of
<final /-s/ maintained, in dialect transcriptions. The only item I can <see
with s-vocalization in any of his transcribed dialect texts is <mais> 'more' in
proclitic contexts before /j/ or /dZ/. Nothing similar in the documents he
cites. And <seis>, he notes, is often pronounced with an initial pal.-alv
fricative.

3) Furthermore, in reference to whether <sei> was copied at some time in the
past from some non-Basque language, one could construct the following argument.
In the case of the numbers 5, 7, 8 and 9, if one were to assume that they were
all indigenous to Euskera (that none of them are "loans" not even ancient ones,
(cf. Miguel C.'s contribution suggesting the contrary) we would find that we
could argue that earlier all of them ended in a consonant cluster that had /z/
as an element: <bortz> (*<bortzi> 5, <zazpi> (*<zatzi> or *<zaptzi>) 7,
<zortzi> 8, and <bederatzi> 9. Such a reconstruction would make <sei> an
anomaly in the series and, hence, suggest that it was copied from some
non-Basque language, e.g., perhaps an IE language, which was in contact with it
at some time in the past. The past 2500 years would have brought it into close
contact with Celtic, Latin/Romance, Germanic (Visogoths) speaking peoples. As a
result, there would have been a number of  opportunities for this IE item to
have entered the language.

4) I believe that Larry Trast argued that in the case of words copied (early?)
from Latin and ending in <x> (sorry I can't find the exact email), the Basque
word never drops the final sibilant complex, i.e., it is copied into Euskera as
/tz/ (again forgive me if I"m misquoting). However, there would seem to be a
few words that don't follow this rule, e.g., Basque <trebe> which I was once
told comes from Latin <trebax>. Are there others?

Conclusion: things are somewhat more complicated than they might appear to be
at first glance. Although I don't believe we are any closer to a definitive
solution to the problem, there does seem to be evidence that could be mustered
for several different scenarios. The four points above are meant only to
provide a bit of additional data for the analysis, not necessarily to suppport
one position or another.  I leave it to the experts to figure out whether any
of the above information helps one cause over the other.

Izan untsa,
Roz


From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu  Thu Oct 14 13:37:15 1999
From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 09:37:15 -0400
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.093715.0400.>

Eduard Selleslagh <edsel at glo.be> wrote:
> after all, Elamite - which was in the same situation - was
> finally recognized as Dravidian

Actually, Dravidianologists profess agnosticism or reservations: The most
sympathetic view seems to be that a connection is believable but not
proven. Kamil Zvelebil, in his original review of McAlpin, pointed out
several problems; his more recent books seem to indicate guarded
acceptance, but still he leaves himself some escape hatches.

>[rather strangely late, if you ask me, because
> the word Elaam still exists in Tamil, I was told]

I don't know what Elamites called themselves and how they pronounced it.
In Modern Tamil it is i:zham, where the `zh' stands for the same sound as
in `tamilzh'. In some dialects, it comes out a retroflex l, but the older
pronunciation (and still the standard pronunciation) is not quite an l.
People have claimed success in teaching it to Americans starting from some
American varieties of r. Some attempt to connect retroflex s of Sanskrit
to it (and the transliteration as zh or z-underdot seems to come from
Cyrilic which makes sound like a shibilant). It seems to me that the
difficulty is describing it due to ignoring the most important bit: the
tongue moves along the roof of the mouth >while< the sound is being made.

Anyway, i:zham nowadays refers to Sri Lanka or rather the northern parts
of it. I am not sure why anyone should have rushed to connect this to
Elam.


From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu  Thu Oct 14 13:50:46 1999
From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 09:50:46 -0400
Subject: Respect goes both ways!
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.095046.0400.>

Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk> wrote:

> I am completely mystified.  The relation "is the same as" is
> unquestionably transitive. [Rest of the argument deleted]

As philosophers have been aware for two or more thounsands of years, this
argument leads to conclusions which make all science questionable [for one
extreme example, read Nagarjuna].

Am I the same person I was when I wrote the previous sentence? After all,
merely by breathing, the set of atoms that make up me (whatever that
means) has changed. But if you say yes, by a long chain of equivalences,
it must follow that I am the same person that I was when I was conceived.
But was I even a person at that point?


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Fri Oct 15 01:39:50 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 21:39:50 EDT
Subject: Nors Josephson's Theory about a linguistic and cultural
 influence of Ancient Greek on East-Polynesia
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.213950.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/13/99 5:33:08 PM, MF1107 at mclink.it wrote:

<<I should like to know some scholarly opinion about N. Josephson's theories
concerning a presumptive linguistic Greek influence on Pacific area (ex. gr.
cf. N. Josephson, Greek Linguistic Elements in the Polynesian Languages,
Universitaetsverlag C. Winter, Heidelberg, 1987; or Idem, Eine
archaisch-griechische Kultur auf der Osterinsel, Universitaetsverlag C. Winter,
Heidelberg, 1999 ).>>

For those interested, there's a brief page on Josephson's '87 piece with word
comparisons at:
http://www.ancientgr.com/Unknown_Hellenic_History/Eng/Words_in_Hawai.htm
(the url may wrap around in e-mail and have to be deleted back to one line)

S. Long


From colkitto at sprint.ca  Sat Oct 16 04:24:37 1999
From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr)
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 00:24:37 -0400
Subject: Updates regarding UPenn tree
Message-ID: <SAT.16.OCT.1999.002437.0400.>

Gaelic has an f/zero alternation (f/fh orthographically), and also what
looks like an  s/f alternation (Lenited IE *sw develops to Goidelic f
(non-lenited sw becomes s) and Welsh chw (there are not many examples, and
these are often obscured by subsequent sound chnages and levellings).

Gaelic f is actually a development of Indo-European *w in non-lenited
position (lenited *w develops to zero).  cf. fear/fhear (< IE wir-);
Brythonic  develops IE *w to g(w) in non-lenited position, cf. Welsh gwr (<
IE *wir-).

These would completely independent of the hw > f sound change in Buchan,
Banff, etc., discussed earlier.  (by the way, "where" in North-East Scots
would be "far" or "faur"; Scottish Gaelic "far" - "where" is not related, it
is a development of "de bharr (barr)"

Robert Orr


From Odegard at means.net  Fri Oct 15 01:51:26 1999
From: Odegard at means.net (Mark Odegard <Odegard@means.net>)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 01:45:26 -6
Subject: Mutual Intelligibility. [was Re: Misrepresenting others' views]
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.014526.6.>

On 13 Oct 99 at 10:47, ECOLING at aol.com wrote:

> Saying that many linguists commonly use a definition of
> distinct languages referring in some way to "mutual
> intelligibility" in no way implies that they are in any sense
> unaware of other factors which would enter into a refined
> definition.

I going to use this snippet to turn the subject onto the more general
question of 'mutual intelligibility' and the uselessness of the term.
Let's face it: Geordie (the dialect found in Newcastle on Tyne) is
unintelligible to most other native-speakers of English --
particularly if the particular Geordie being listened to is suffused
with ethnic pride and wants to exclude some flapping ears.
Nonetheless, if you taped a pub conversation, then had it
transcribed word-for-word, and accounting for Tyneside slang, it
comes out as informal low-register Standard English. Beyond 'slang'
and the peculiariaties of the 'accent', it's my understanding
there are no grammatical or lexical differences that make it in any
way extraordinary, when compared to other English 'dialects'.

The issue is rather modern. In times past, in times when the mass
of humanity was illiterate, if one group shifted its 'accent' too
far away from the 'standard', it was de facto a separate language.
But if you, the modern linguist, did a word-for-word
phonemo-grammatico-lexical analysis, you'd see it was the *same*
language.

One wonders if the ancient reporters were hearing an extravagantly
sound-shifted 'dialect' of Greek when they mention the Pelasgian
language. The question becomes pointed when you also ask if the
language of the Makedones was really 'Greek'. Was Philip of
Macedon's mother tongue an Illyrian 'dialect'? I vaguely remember
reading once that Alexander had to learn proper Greek at Aristotles' knee.

I've posited a grammatico-lexical definition of 'language', but this
has its problems too. What happens when there are major grammatical
innovations, but of a such transparent nature that the next-door
cognate has no problems understanding it (e.g., collapsing locative
ablative and instrumental into dative+preposition)? My answer is they
are separate languages, inasmuch as both speakers will regard the
other's speech as 'ungrammatical'.

The third possibility is complete lexical replacement, possibly with
some phonological changes, but nothing in terms of grammar. I don't think
such a thing is possible but would like to be proved wrong. English
comes closest to this, but no one is going to say English is anything
other than Germanic, notwithstanding all the French we've devoured.

My point is that 'mutual intelligibility' is not a proper test for
'separate-languageness' or of 'same-languageness'. Not for known
written languages where we can all consult the big OED-style
historical dictionaries.

Someone needs to come up with a few new words that everyone can agree
on. The word 'lect' is useful, but limited.
--
Mark Odegard   mailto:odegard at means.net


From Odegard at means.net  Fri Oct 15 04:52:54 1999
From: Odegard at means.net (Mark Odegard <Odegard@means.net>)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 04:46:54 -6
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.044654.6.>

On 13 Oct 99 at 17:50, Larry Trask wrote:

> Why did Anatolian have to move through the Balkans?

> Even if you don't buy Anatolia as the PIE homeland, why
> couldn't Anatolian have entered Anatolia across the Caucasus or
> from east of the Caspian Sea, through Iran?

> And why did Greek have to move through the Balkans?

I think most of us here are ignorant of geography, i.e, the easy way
to get where they got.

My own current view is that Anatolian moved from what is now SE
Bulgaria into Anatolia via the Black Sea (yeah, boats). I can't
provide a citation, but there are scholarly mutterings about a
sea-level rise ca. 3100 BCE or somewhat before that pushed Sumer and
Egypt upwards from the then-seashore into history with the clear
conclusion that their beginnings as well as the archaeological
evidence that goes with it is now inundated.

What you have are 'civilized' IEs, Tripolye culture acculturated IEs,
down by the sea. Presumably, it's a gradual sea-level rise, but a
definite one. Every year, a few inches, maybe a few feet -- a whole
meter -- of seashore disappears. The did not go over the mountains
into Thessaly and thence into nothern or central Greece. They went to
Troy! An easier route when you have boats.

So. As a seat-of-the pants theory that cannot be proved, the
Anatolians were, oh, 3100, 3200 BCE while the other group of
IE-speakers, the group that was ancestral to all the other IE
languages, were still hopelessly land-lubbers up where the steppe
merged into forest. Anatolian can be seen as a happenstance offshoot
that got lucky and left us written records 2500 years later. The rest
of us, of course, were still chasing aurochesen somewhere rather
north of the Black Sea.
--
Mark Odegard   mailto:odegard at means.net


From edsel at glo.be  Fri Oct 15 10:59:55 1999
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 12:59:55 +0200
Subject: Campbell's def. of "language"
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.125955.0200.>

-----Original Message-----
From: ECOLING at aol.com <ECOLING at aol.com>
Date: Wednesday, October 13, 1999 7:28 PM

>Yesterday I received the latest issue of the Journal "Language",
>in which there is a review by Doris Bartholomew of
>Lyle Campbell's book
>*American Indian Languages: The historical linguistics of Native America*
>Oxford University Press 1997

>Campbell defines these terms (and reviewer Bartholomew
>     does not comment, so presumably regards these definitions
>     as quite normal, unremarkable):

>'dialect' is a variety (regional or social) of a language,
>     mutually intelligible with other dialects

>'language' is a distinct linguistic entity that is
>     mutually unintelligible with other languages

>I simply do not believe that Larry Trask is unaware that this is
>     standard linguistic usage.  He is not forced to use it himself,
>     but he is obligated to treat this usage with respect,
>     not to evade discussions based upon it by ridiculing it.

[snip]
>Lloyd Anderson

[Ed Selleslagh]

Sorry for responding late, but I have spent two days in hospital and I am still
recovering.

My impression is that Campbell is envisaging languages with low-variance
dialects (like Spanish or even English).  Here in Flanders, the most extreme
(both geographically and linguistically) dialects of Dutch, in their lowest
registers, are mutually unintelligible.  Even 'softer' registers are, at times,
very hard to understand (Flemish TV provides Dutch subtitles (only) in these
cases, like interviewing a peasant, Dutch TV always does).

On the other hand, my Spanish speaking (Peruvian) wife understands most of an
Italian newscast, and she has no Italian friends, never learned Italian or
whatever. But she has a lot of trouble with Catalan, especially the Barcelona
(not Valencia) variety. Another example: The Portuguese understand most of what
Spaniards say (if correctly articulated), but Spaniards hardly understand
anything of what the Portuguese SAY (but do understand most of what they
WRITE). Most Flemings that never learned German can easily understand 70-80% of
German speech and writing.

So, according to Campbell: Spanish = Italian, and West-Flemish or Limburgish do
not belong to the same language as Holland Dutch.

And 'mutual intelligibility' is a multi-faceted concept.

I guess C. intended something else, or was limiting the study to some aspects
where the definitions used make sense.  I wonder if a general definition is
possible at all. At least, we should first have a look at the existing
'variance' within the language as commonly accepted.

Ed.

Dr. Ir. Eduard Selleslagh edsel at glo.be
B-9120 Haasdonk
Belgium


From edsel at glo.be  Fri Oct 15 11:20:56 1999
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 13:20:56 +0200
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.132056.0200.>

-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Mc Callister <rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu>
Date: Friday, October 15, 1999 9:37 AM

>>[Ed Selleslagh]

>>Note that similar, but not always identical, usages exist in various European
>>languages like regional colloquial Peninsular Spanish ('la Maruja'), regional
>>colloquial Dutch ('de Jan'), German ('der Otto') etc. The definite article is
>>only used when speaking ABOUT the person, not TO him/her.

>>Ed.

> It's also used in colloquial Latin American Spanish but, in
>general, to imply familiarity  --whether affection or contempt, or perhaps to
>emphasize the subject.It's sort of like "our Ed" or "that Ed". In some
>forms of rural or popular Latin American Spanish, it seems pretty universal
>and a lot of college educated Latin Americans, particularly women, avoid it
>as a vulgarism. And "inappropriate" usage of the article before proper
>names can mark people as hillbillies or uneducated. I've come across it
>among Mexicans, Central Americans, Colombians, Peruvians and Chileans.
> The article before titles in the 3rd person is standard in Spanish.
> In Portuguese, of course, the article before proper names used in
>the 3rd person is standard.
> It seems to work like a "non-vocative" case marker.

>Rick Mc Callister

[Ed Selleslagh]

I forgot to mention that in Modern Greek (NeoEllinik?) the use of the
definite article before proper names is standard practice, e.g. O Yorghos ("the
George", written Ho Gio:rgos). And of course also with titles, like in Spanish:
o k?rios ("el se?or", written Ho Kyrios) XYZ, i kir?a ("la se?ora",
written He: Kyr?a) XYZ. I know of no special connotation.

[Ed]

Dr. Ir. Eduard Selleslagh edsel at glo.be
B-9120 Haasdonk
Belgium

[ Moderator's transcription for 8-bit-unfriendly mail systems:

I forgot to mention that in Modern Greek (NeoEllinik{\'o}) the use of the
definite article before proper names is standard practice, e.g. O Yorghos ("the
George", written Ho Gio:rgos). And of course also with titles, like in Spanish:
o k{\'i}rios ("el se{\~n}or", written Ho Kyrios) XYZ, i kir{\'i}a ("la
se{\~n}ora", written He: Kyr{\'i}a) XYZ. I know of no special connotation.

  --rma ]


From jrader at m-w.com  Fri Oct 15 09:20:55 1999
From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 09:20:55 +0000
Subject: Nors Josephson's Theory about a linguistic and cultural
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.092055.0000.>

Sad news about Winter.  The number of core references in I-E and
older I-E language studies published by C. Winter is very high.  Just
glancing at the shelf across from me I note Streitberg's _Gotisches
Elementarbuch_, published in 1910 by Carl Winter's
Universitaetsbuchhandlung, as well as Jespersen's _A Modern English
Grammar_, v. 1, published in 1909--both in the "Germanische
Bibliothek" series.

Jim Rader

[ moderator snip ]

> The Universitaetsverlag C. Winter, once well-reputed, got bankrupt a few
> years after the publication of the first of the abovementioned titles (only
> the name is continued by the new possessors).
> I see a connection.

> (Another nail in that publishing house's coffin was Mufti: Die
> Sprachwissenschaft des Tscherkessischen, also from the 80s, championing the
> theory of Adyghe *as* Indo-European)


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Fri Oct 15 14:06:38 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 10:06:38 -0400
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <E11bPEk-0005He-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.100638.0400.>

On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, Larry Trask wrote:

> 3. Many of the problematic words in Greek (though not all of them) must have
> been borrowed into Greek, *not* during the first Greek settlement of Greece,
> but much later, during the Bronze Age, when the Greeks came into contact wih
> the advanced Minoan civilization.  These words are thus not ancient substrate
> words in Greek, but late adstrate (or even superstrate) borrowings.

How does Renfrew claim to know this?  If we assume that the speakers of
Greek were somewhere in what is now Greece from a date as early as Renfrew
would like to claim, it would be very surprising if they didn't borrow
words for trade items, etc. from their neighbors to the south.  Cf. the
Latin loan words in Germanic (wine, cheese, street, etc.)

> Renfrew acknowledges some difficulties with this scenario, pointed out by
> John Chadwick and others.  In particular, the problematic words which are
> names for flora and fauna indigenous to Greece cannot readily be explained as
> late borrowings from Minoan, and are more likely to be substrate words of
> some kind.  But Renfrew does not see this as a serious obstacle to his
> scenario.

Not only that, but many of the place names in Greece (Corinth, Salamis,
Larisa, Samos, Olympus, Mycenae) are not of Greek origin, which is not
what we would expect if the speakers of Greek had been in the area for a
long time.

I ought to pull that article and take a look at it.  I had heard that
Renfrew had backed off from some of his claims, but if he published this
as late as 1998, it sounds like it is not so.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Fri Oct 15 14:13:29 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 10:13:29 -0400
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
In-Reply-To: <l0313030fb42a62d8dde5@[209.147.211.53]>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.101329.0400.>

On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote:

>> At this point in time, THERE IS NO MATERIAL EVIDENCE AT ALL AS TO WHEN
>> GREEK-SPEAKERS APPEARED IN GREECE.  THE ONLY EVIDENCE OF A SIGNIFICANT
>> MIGRATION DURING THIS PERIOD (3000BC-1650BC) IS FROM ANATOLIA.
> [snip]

> 	But I imagine there is a postulated date for the breakup of
> Indo-Iranian-Hellenic-Armenian.

Well, no; we believe we know the _relative chronology_ of this breakup
(i.e., we know what _order_ the things happened in), but we don't know
exactly when the particular splits happened.  If, as I've said, the latest
date of PIE unity is in the Ukraine around 4000-3500 BCE, and given that
both Greek and Sanskrit are attested in the second millenium BCE, we can
say that the breakup happened somewhere in that range.  At our current
state of knowledge, we can't fix it much better than that.

> 	And I'd wonder about postulated dates for loanwords from languages
> in the Balkans and the Aegean

Same problem.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Fri Oct 15 14:23:07 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 10:23:07 -0400
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19991013221251.0098c100@popd.netcruiser>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.102307.0400.>

On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, Stanley Friesen wrote:

> Except that Renfrew can only reach this "conclusion" by ignoring many facts
> about PIE that are quite secure (e.g. the universality of *ekwos, and the
> original distinction between wlkwos and kuoon) and which are inconsistent
> with what is known about early Neolithic culture (no domesticated equids
> and no domesticated dog).

In fairness to Renfrew, *ekwos is not probative.  It's true that the horse
had not been domesticated at the early date for PIE unity which Renfrew
postulates; but you need not have domesticated the horse to have a word
for it.  The PIE speakers could have been hunting wild horses for their
meat, for example.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Oct 15 15:04:48 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 16:04:48 +0100
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.160448.0100.>

Roz Frank writes:

[on Basque <bat> 'one' from *<bade>]

>  In other words, for you the meaning of <bedera> is "one apiece"? I think
>  you defined it this way in an earlier mailing, also.

Yes.  The word has other meanings, but 'one apiece' is the most widespread,
and, more importantly, it's the earliest sense recorded -- in Leizarraga, in
1571.

>   Hence, the data set under analysis consists solely of <bedera> and
>  <bederatzi> since these are the only two examples mentioned by Michelena,
>  right?

Primarily, yes.  There are one or two other words which may also be connected,
but these are less clear.

>  You have shared with us two statements concerning the etymology of <bat>:
>  First your own which you phrased as follows:

>  1). that <bat> "is pretty clearly derived from earlier *<bade>."

>  Then you provided us with a paraphrase or synopsis of Michelena's
>  statements on the topic:

>  2). that in Michelena's opinion the etymology from *<bade> "lacked
>  compelling evidence" and hence
>  "was not secure." It should be considered, therefore, "only a plausible
>  suggestion."

>  Having read over Michelena's comments, I believe your summary of them,
>  provided above, is quite accurate and appropriate. It expands on
>  Michelena's representation of *<bade> as "*<bade>?". He clearly didn't feel
>  fully confident about it. Also, above you state that you "endorse Gavel's
>  and Michelena's suggestions," once again emphasizing the tentative nature
>  of the reconstruction and once again a very measured statement on your part.

Correct.

>  However, there is a third instance in which you have spoken about this same
>  problem although in rather different terms. Specifically on that occasion
>  you stated the following:

>  "It is most unusual for a native Basque word to end in a plosive, and <bat>
>  is clearly from earlier *<bade> or *<bada>  suggested by  the morph <bede->
>  in derivatives as (northern) <bedera> 'one apiece' and <bederatzi> 'nine'."

>  To my knowledge Michelena did not list the second etymon *<bada>, although
>  perhaps he did so on some other occasion, i.e., not in his work _Fonetica
>  Historica Vasca_.

The variant proposal *<bada>, which I do not endorse, was not made by
Michelena, but by somebody else more recently.  Sorry; I've forgotten who it
was.

>  As you will recall, the above quote is found on page 273 of your book _The
>  History of Basque_. Your statement, therefore, seems to contradict what you
>  have shared with us on the IE list or at least to be far less cautious.
>  Furthermore, I note that in your book you list <bede-> as a morph, not as
>  *<bede->. Earlier on this list you also affirmed that <bedere(n> contains
>  the same morph, if my memory serves me right.

No; I didn't affirm any such thing.  I merely noted that it was possible.

As for <bede->, this is an attested morph, and so it gets no asterisk.

>  Before you wrote your book, did you discover additional evidence -beyond
>  that presented by Gavel and Michelena- which strengthened your conviction
>  concerning this version of events? And if you did find additional proof for
>  this position, could you share it with us?

>  Furthermore, based on your statements in the email on this topic cited
>  above ("I can claim no credit."), you seem to be saying that all you have
>  done is repeat the positions of Gavel and Michelena, nothing more. Yet in
>  this section of your book you do not cite or otherwise overtly refer to the
>  specific works of Gavel nor Michelena where they discuss this problem.
>  Indeed, your statement "<bat> is clearly from earlier *<bade> or *<bada>"
>  leaves the impression that there is no other possibility: that yours is a
>  summary of the consensus opinion.

I am more enthusiastic about *<bade> than Michelena was, that's all.

I don't know if there exists a consensus.  But I know of nobody who has
criticized Michelena's proposal of *<bade>.

>  In that respect I would mention that Ribary in his _Ensayo sobre la lengua
>  vasca_, translated by Julian Vinson (Paris, 1877) argued that the first
>  element in <bederatzi> was <bat>, i.e., that the word should be broken down
>  into <bed-era-tzi>) and where <bat> had taken on the shape of *<bed>.  In
>  other words, he doesn't question the original shape of the root-stem. (As
>  an aside I should mention that I don't agree with Ribary's etymology of the
>  ending on <bederatzi>).

Ah, tremendous!  Thanks, Roz -- I didn't know about this early suggestion, and
apparently neither did Agud and Tovar.  But I agree that the rest of Ribary's
analysis looks indefensible.

>  For anyone working in comparative linguistics it is important to be able to
>  build on the works of those who have gone before. However, there is always
>  the possibility that somewhere in the chain of transmissions -like in the
>  proverbial game of telephone- the message gets garbled. The danger is that
>  others can start using that version of linguistic realities as a basis for
>  further descriptions of the phenomena under study, i.e., utilizing
>  paraphrases of others' works rather than testing the data themselves.

Sure, but I am trying to be careful here, and to consult the raw data as far as
I can.

>  At least in the case of Euskera, it has been my experience that sometimes
>  it can be a risky business unless each aspect of the data sets used in
>  reconstructing the phonology of the language is well researched, checked
>  and double-checked for accuracy. This is obviously a monumental task in the
>  case of (P)IE comparative linguistics (given the massive volume of earlier
>  research), but perhaps it is still possible in the case of Euskera given
>  the much more restricted number of detailed investigations on these aspects
>  of the language and the circumscribed nature of the data themselves.

Yes, but this is precisely what I'm trying to do.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Oct 15 15:07:58 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 16:07:58 +0100
Subject: Change and What Remains
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.160758.0100.>

Robert Orr writes:

[on generational differences in speech]

>  Does this constitute  "parent and daughter co-existing" at all?

This is what I asked in an earlier posting.  I haven't seen a reply yet, but
I'm vastly behind with my e-mail.

It clearly does, I think, in a sense, but I'm not sure that this is the sense
that Lloyd Anderson had in mind.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Oct 15 16:09:17 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 17:09:17 +0100
Subject: Refining early Basque criteria
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.170917.0100.>

ECOLING at aol.com writes:

> Concerning Larry Trask's list of criteria for potential candidates
> for early Basque vocabulary lists:

[on the choice of cut-off date]

> The details in the paragraph above suggest to me OBVIOUSLY
> if you want early Basque, you use 1700 in preference to 1600,
> because the 16th-century materials are so limited in content.
> It is always possible to study any differences between 16th and 17th-century
> equivalent grammatical morphemes, forms of the same words, etc.,
> where those are attested in both centuries, but obviously much
> non-religious vocabulary will be systematically disfavored by the earlier
> cutoff date.

Well, I've already explained that I am prepared to consider 1700 rather than
1600.  But I don't think the choice is obvious.  My impression at this stage --
which might prove to be wrong, of course -- is that most of the words that meet
my other criteria are already attested by 1600, and so, if possible, I'd prefer
to use the more restrictive early date.

For example, <uko> 'forearm', is nowhere attested before the 17th-century
writer Oihenart, but then it appears to be attested *only* in Oihenart, so it
will fail to be included anyway.

But this example raises another interesting point.  Though <uko> itself is not
found outside of Oihenart, its transparent compound <ukondo> (and variants>
'elbow' (from <uko> plus <ondo> 'bottom') is close to universal in the
language, and recorded from 1596.  Now <ukondo> must be excluded as obviously
polymorphemic, but I will have to decide whether its existence should or should
not license the listing of <uko>, which itself does not meet my criteria.  At
the moment, I have not yet decided, though I lean toward the negative.

[on my criterion of very widespread distribution]

> As explained in a long and detailed message sent many days ago,
> focused on sound-symbolic vocabulary ...
> given the limited recording of sound-symbolic vocabulary,
> an insistence on very wide distribution will have the effect of biasing
> against this type of vocabulary,
> and in this case will certainly bias against a variety of canonical forms,
> in favor of canonical forms more uniform and more limited than they
> actually were in very early Basque.
> A systematic distortion, in other words,
> in this case not merely a lack of particular lexical items, but even
> a systemic distortion by changing the hypotheses of canonical forms.

But consider the alternative.

If I admit words found, say, only in one of the recognized dialects, then I'm
inevitably going to be admitting a vast number of words whose native and
ancient status is at best deeply questionable and at worst certainly zero.  And
this would be catastrophic for my purposes.

I can't afford to sweep up huge numbers of non-ancient words in order to avoid
overlooking a much smaller number of genuinely ancient words.

> Thinking of subject matters attested or not, we have the following,
> which ties this issue back to the specifics of subject matter noted
> by Larry Trask for 16th vs. 17th centuries:
> If only two dialect areas have documents in certain subject matters,
> then vocabulary specific to those subject matters will be systematically
> excluded by requiring their attestation from more than two dialect areas.
> This is obviously undesirable.  It suggests that a moderate position might
> be to categorize documentary attestations by subject matter,
> and vary the number of dialect areas required according to the number
> of areas attesting documents in each subject matter.
> Of course in practice, this can be done in another way.
> Record ALL vocabulary items for a particular concept,
> and study the UNIFORMITY of etyma for that concept,
> without much regard AT FIRST for whether it comes from two or from five
> areas.
> If variants for a particular concept cannot be established as loans from
> neighboring languages, then remaining variety of non-cognate terms
> argues against immediately positing any of the conflicting forms
> as candidates for very early Basque (even though one or more
> of them MIGHT be a direct descendant of very early Basque).
> Additional argumentation would then be necessary, either way.
> Of course things are not this simple,
> but Larry Trask is an expert at using all of these varied sorts of
> information.

Well, much of this is very reasonable, but only for a different task from the
one I have in mind.

In written texts, the great bulk of the Basque vocabulary pertaining to
specific areas is clearly neither native nor ancient -- as we might expect.
Religion, law, government, seafaring, even agriculture -- most of the words are
either obvious compounds or derivatives, or obvious borrowings.  Hence I can
see little point at this stage in worrying about them.  First things first.

> More dialect areas of course gives additional security,
> and perhaps additional phonological information.

Not sure what this means.

Requiring a given word to be attested in a large number of dialects certainly
does give additional security, and that's why I require this.

[on my suspicion of possible borrowings]

> Some would use "caution" in not throwing out things for which loanword
> origin is merely suspected, for which the argument is not a strong one.
> "Strong" is not the same as "certain".
> Moderation in all criteria, as in all things.

Sure, but I have to make a decision here.

Given the vast impact of Latin and Romance on the Basque vocabulary, and the
near-total absence of traffic in the other direction, I think it's wise to
exclude words for which a loan origin looks even moderately plausible.

After all, it is hardly conceivable that genuinely native and ancient Basque
words for which a loan origin has been seriously (but wrongly) suggested are
likely to be systematically different in form from other native and ancient
words -- now is it?

[on the rare Basque loans into Romance]

> Would such examples be those in which the Castilian and Portuguese words
> have no cognates in other Romance languages?

Not necessarily, but such cases are so few anyway that no generalizations can
be made.

> In such a case,
> would not the identical sort of criteria dictate that they be excluded from
> studies of early Castilian and Portuguese?

Students of early Romance must draw up their own criteria, which need not be
the same as mine -- especially since the Romanists have not only a whole bunch
of languages to look at, but also Latin.  My criteria are designed only for the
particular task I have in mind.  I claim no universal validity.

> Of course, there is no necessary
> contradiction here, because items of this sort could in principle be
> excluded from BOTH sides of any puzzling sharing, in the approach
> Larry Trask is taking.  Or they can be included on BOTH sides.
> My own position would be simply to include them on both sides,
> but with a note that they might be from either side,

Why?  There are thousands of Latino-Romance loans into Basque, while there
exists just one apparently clear case of a Basque loan into Romance with any
great currency.

> and if they are
> from the Romance side, but limited to Iberian Romance, then we
> must have an additional hypothesis that there was some innovation within
> Iberian Romance, or else a borrowing from some third language family
> related neither to Romance nor to early Basque.  Is there some gap in
> that reasoning?

Yes; I think so.  See below.

> Because it seems to me to suggest that words limited
> to Basque and to Iberian Romance (not found in other Romance languages),
> are better assigned to early Basque than to early Romance,
> since by definition of the situation they are not reconstructible to early
> Romance.

No; I can't agree.  Given the established paucity of Basque loans into Romance,
it is out of order to impute a Basque origin to any Romance word not derivable
from Latin, even if it does occur in Basque.

> But this is not certain, Occam's razor can suggest a route
> to follow, but it cannot absolutely exclude the more complex case that
> there was an extinct third language family from which a word was
> borrowed both into Basque and into Iberian Romance.

It is widely suspected by specialists that such words exist.  But clearly I do
not want to sweep up such words if I can help it.

[on words like Basque <ama> 'mother' and <tu> 'spit']

> That does not argue either for or against such words actually being
> inherited from Proto-Basque.

Of course, but not the point.

The point is this: is there any good reason to suppose that a given word was
not present in Pre-Basque, and native there?  If the answer to this question is
"yes", for any reason at all, then I prefer to exclude the word.

Remember: I'm looking for the *best* candidates, not for *all possible*
candidates.

> It DOES make it difficult to use such words in trying to prove
> a deep genetic relation between languages, because one must then
> have sufficient knowledge of sound-symbolic forces to argue
> something more specific is shared between particular languages,
> not merely a vague resemblance.
> That is quite a separate issue.

Yes, but I don't think that <ama> 'mother' is "only vaguely" a nursery word, or
that <tu> 'spit' is "only vaguely" an imitative word.

[LT]

>> When -- as so often -- a word exists in
>> several regional variant forms, what form should go into the list?
>> My answer is that we should simply appeal to the known phonological
>> prehistory of Basque, and use the form which can be reconstructed as the
>> common ancestor.

> I have great confidence that Larry Trask will almost always draw the
> correct conclusions in such cases, given his knowledge of the
> phonological history of Basque.  But it nevertheless should be clear
> that there is a potential circularity, of exactly the kind pointed out by
> Steve Long, that a theory of the historical development of a language
> is used to select which forms are considered to have been in a proto-
> language.  That virtually guarantees that a different theory of
> historical development of the language cannot easily be developed
> from data thus selected.  Elementary common sense.

But there exists *only one* theory of the phonological prehistory of Basque,
and that theory is massively and meticulously documented.  It has never been
seriously challenged by anyone, and no alternative of substance has ever been
put forward.  Hence vague invocations of "alternative theories" are without
foundation.

> That does not make this procedure wrong.
> Because it is the totality of the COMBINATION of the attested data
> and the hypothesized sound changes (etc.) which we evaluate,
> in the long run.  But it does make this procedure less than absolutely
> certain to give the correct results.  (Using terminology from other
> fields, it is often possible to find a "local minimum" or solution
> which is better than any nearby points (closely similar solutions),
> yet which is not an absolute minimum, not the absolute best solution.
> In our field,
> changing BOTH some of the hypotheses about sound changes and
> other historical developments AND some of the hypothesized proto-forms,
> changing both together, in a co-ordinated fashion, may
> yield a better solution.  Such shifts of paradigm do occur.

This is becoming extremely abstract.

If Lloyd, or anybody else, wants to propose an alternative theory of the
prehistory of Basque, let's hear about it.  Meanwhile, I am entirely
comfortable working with the conclusions we have already reached.

[LT]

>> Finally ... if anybody out there still believes that my primary criteria are
>> somehow likely to skew the results in some phonological way, or if
>> anybody thinks that there exist better criteria for the purpose of
>> identifying the best candidates for native and ancient status in the
>> language, let's hear about it.

> I don't understand the word "still" here,
> it should be evident that I do and have previously explained the
> concrete reasons why.  There is no need to repeat the details here.
> As far as I know, Larry Trask has not
> argued against the reasons I gave.

Yes, I have.  I have addressed every single comment of substance I have seen on
this list -- and there haven't been many.

> I have repeatedly pointed to the problem of selection against
> sound-symbolic vocabulary through accidents of limited recording,
> having the effect of biasing our notions of canonical forms.
> Using Larry's mention of the difference of subject matters
> between 16th-century and 17th-century documentations,
> it is easy to explain why using too early a cutoff in time,
> or requiring too many or the wrong dialect attestations,
> can systematically bias against vocabulary in certain semantic
> fields, because these, like sound-symbolic items more generally,
> were not within the subject matter favored by the documents.

Possibly, but not a problem for me.

If there is no persuasive evidence for particular sound-symbolic forms in
Pre-Basque, then there is no such evidence.  That's all there is to it.

> Additionally, criteria for what are likely to be descendants of early
> Basque forms are NOT THE SAME THING as criteria for
> what are good items to use in any consideration of potential
> external relationships of Basque.

Sorry; I don't follow.

I myself have only one immediate goal: identifying the best candidates for
Pre-Basque words.  My other goals can only follow on later.

> I say this latter NOT because I hold
> out any hopes for finding distant relatives of Basque in my lifetime,
> but simply because mixing these two goals can distort the picture
> of proto-Basque by excluding many items which were in fact
> part of proto-Basque.

It is inevitable that I will not succeed in listing every single attested word
which was in fact present in Pre-Basque.  But there is no way around this fact,
and it doesn't worry me in the slightest.

Remember what I'm doing.  I'm trying to find the best candidates for Pre-Basque
status, so that I can then determine their phonological characteristics.
*After* that, I can hope to examine further words, and try to judge whether
they too might be plausible candidates for Pre-Basque status, even if they fail
my initial criteria.

> In addition to all of the criteria Larry Trask mentions, I think there
> should be another criterion:  For each item on the basic 100-word
> or 200-word Swadesh list, be sure to INCLUDE SOME vocabulary item
> whose meaning matches that item.
> Simply on the grounds that every language will have vocabulary
> for such meanings, so reconstructing an early Basque without any
> term for such a meaning is contra-indicated.

Absolutely not.

One of Swadesh's words is 'mountain'.  If we applied this criterion to English,
then we'd have to include 'mountain' as the only English representative -- but
it's a shrieking loan word.

Likewise, there are three Basque words which might be glossed as 'animal':
<animalia>, <piztia>, and <abere>.  All three are transparent borrowings from
Romance.  So what on earth could be the point of including them?
This is perverse.  We cannot decide *in advance* which Basque words must be
native.

> This is not a criterion for evaluating any particular proposed vocabulary
> item in Proto-Basque, it is rather a global criterion which can be
> used to evaluate the sum total of the judgments on individual candidates
> for inclusion.  It can tell us that we have excluded too much,
> and in what semantic ranges we should probably seek additional
> candidates for inclusion.

I am not concerned at this stage about excluding too much.  I am far more
concerned about including things that shouldn't be there.

> I would bet there are many other criteria which might be added,

Let's see these, then.

> and balancing them all together to make decisions will yield
> better results than using a simpler set of criteria and allowing
> any one otherwise reasonable criterion to dictate inclusion or exclusion.
> Larry Trask has shown his ability to use many criteria beyond the
> simple set in discussing particular vocabulary items
> (such as /sei/ or any other).

Thank you.  But the criteria I invoke depend upon the problem in hand.
Not all problems require the same criteria.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Oct 15 16:55:20 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 17:55:20 +0100
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.175520.0100.>

Macia Riutort Riutort writes:

>  Liebe Freunde,
>  ich kann Euch sagen, dass niemand, sowohl hier (Katalonien) wie auf den
>  Balearen, auf die Idee kommen w?rde, Maite als baskischen Frauennamen zu
>  betrachten. F?r uns ist Maite einfach die normale Koseform zu Maria Teresa
>  (Mari-Tere klingt ?brigens ziemlich "schicki-micki", weswegen diese Form
>  hier kaum verwendet wird). In unserer Abteilung haben wir sogar zwei Maria
>  Teresas, die aber von uns Maite genannt wurden...

Well, the only way I can think of to decide whether <Maite> originated in the
Basque Country is to check the historical records, if there are any.

But <maite> happens to be an ordinary Basque word, and moreover a most
appropriate one for naming a woman: it means 'beloved' in Basque, and is hence
a translation equivalent of Romance female names like French <Aimee> and
Castilian <Amada> -- and perhaps of something in Catalan?

I'd be interested to hear what the Spaniards or the Catalans think of the
female name <Arantxa>.  This is unquestionably of Basque origin -- it's a
Marian name, from the Basque word for 'thorn' -- yet it is now far from rare in
Spain: there's famous tennis player with this name, and she claims no Basque
ancestry that I know of.  Is the name perceived as Basque in the Peninsula
generally?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From edsel at glo.be  Fri Oct 15 17:14:24 1999
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 19:14:24 +0200
Subject: Perfective-Imperfective (2) - Habitual
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.191424.0200.>

-----Original Message-----
From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv at wxs.nl>
Date: Friday, October 15, 1999 6:05 PM

>"Patrick C. Ryan" <proto-language at email.msn.com> wrote:

>>Is it therefore appropriate to say that:

>>'Lisa suele fumar'

>>can be interpreted as: 'Lisa is accustomed to smoking'?

>>And if 'Lisa is used to smoking' is equivalent to 'Lisa is accustomed to
>>smoke', is it possible, in some contexts, for 'Lisa suele fumar' to be
>>interpreted as virtually equivalent to 'Lisa esta' acostumbrada a fumar'?

>If you consider English "Lisa used to smoke" to be in some
>contexts virtually equivalent to "Lisa was used to smoking".

>Miguel Carrasquer Vidal

[Ed Selleslagh]

I think the problem here is one of lacking proper equivalents ('traduttore
traditore'), at least in some tenses.

Couldn't we just say that the Spanish verb 'soler' indicates having a habit, in
casu Lisa being a habitual smoker? IMHO (as a plurilingual but native Dutch
speaker que suele hablar Castellano en casa) 'being accustomed to' is not
exactly the same thing: doesn't it imply an adaptation to some external
(habitually occurring) circumstances?

I guess that's roughly what you meant with your 'if-sentence', Miguel?

P.S. I have often wondered whether 'soler' is a late re-introduction of a Latin
verb (i.e. bypassing the Latin-Romance-Castilian evolution), namely the
semi-deponent 'solere' ('soleo, solitus sum', which seems to indicate a remnant
of an earlier medio-passive status, vel sim.), or a true Spanish verb that went
through the natural evolution. The trend to diphtongation of the accentuated o
is so strong in Spanish that diphtongation is no guarantee of antiquity. (In S.
America some people even diphtongate where it shouldn't be done, like 'toser,
tueso' [= to cough]).

Ed

Dr. Ir. Eduard Selleslagh edsel at glo.be
B-9120 Haasdonk
Belgium


From petegray at btinternet.com  Thu Oct 14 19:40:35 1999
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 20:40:35 +0100
Subject: Contributions by Steve Long
Message-ID: <THU.14.OCT.1999.204035.0100.>

> Standard histories of Greek, ... present a history of constant change, ...
> The ... historical periods (Mycenaean, Homeric, classical, Hellenistic, New
> Testament, Byzantine, and what not) [are] ... a convenience,

True.  The convenience is also inconvenient in that it hides shifts in
register or social context, which may give a distorted view if we think the
language actually developed linearly through these periods.   We know, for
example, that New Testament Greek is very different from literary Greek of
the same period (e.g. Philo), which is different again from the language of
contemporary papyri.   NT Greek had substantial influence from both Hebrew
(Old Testament - LXX) and Aramaic, which other forms of Greek at that time
did not.

The fact that one type of language is most readily available and attested
for a particular time should not blind us to the idea that other forms of
the language existed alongside it - even if these forms are unattested!

Despite its enormous subsequent influence, classical Greek has many forms
which are a dead end, a linguistic blind alley.   Some Attic forms or
constructions were so out of step with most other dialects, that they did
not survive into Koine, but were replaced either with a form from another
dialect, or with a hybrid.   Thus, although it is convenient, and at some
levels necessary, to talk of Greek developing linearly through the stages
mentioned, we should recognise that this is an over-simplification of the
actual complexity.

Peter


From mcv at wxs.nl  Fri Oct 15 18:46:27 1999
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 18:46:27 GMT
Subject: Basque 'sei'
In-Reply-To: <E11bhdp-0004po-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.184627.GMT.>

maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max Wheeler) wrote:

>Gascon-Bearnais, like all Romance languages as far as I know, has only one
>/s/, i.e. only one sibilant place of articulation. Whether this was always so
>is another matter. In French, Occitan, Catalan, Portuguese, and Andalusian
>Spanish modern /s/ is a merger of inherited /s/ and the reflex of, among other
>things, /k/ before non-low front vowels, which almost certainly went through a
>stage /ts/ (affricate), which may have been laminal, given that in
>non-Andalusian European Spanish it resulted in /<theta>/ (dental fricative).
>It is conceivable that /ts/ went through a stage [laminal dental/alveolar
>fricative] before merger with /s/, but I don't know of evidence on the matter.

>We shouldn't assume, without looking at the evidence, that the current
>distribution of laminal versus apical /s/ phonemes in Europe can be projected
>way back into the past.

One problem with apical vs. laminal /s/ is the lack of data.
Because of the fact that the two *are* distinguished
phonologically in Basque [I'm not aware of any other language
where this is the case], and this fact linked with the
observation that the default /s/ in Castillian is apical, has led
to a decent amount of data being available for the areas
surrounding Basque and Castilian.  We know that apical /s/ is
also the norm in Galician and northern Portugal, in Catalan, in
Gascon and in Languedocien Occitan.  On the other hand, laminal
/s/ dominates in southern Portugal and Spain, and in the rest of
the langue d'oc and langue d'oeil areas.  I would expect a
transition to laminal /s/ also in Valencian Catalan, but I don't
know.  As to the rest of Europe, or the world, data are almost
entirely lacking.  I believe Old/Middle High German <z,z,> is
believed to have been an apical sibilant, opposed to laminal
<ss>, and I've read somewhere that apical pronunciations of /s/
are not unknown in individual varieties of English.  But I don't
think I've ever seen a mention of the apical/laminal opposition
for /s/ in the description of the phonological systems of most
languages.  I mean, Abkhaz and Zulu have the phoneme /s/, but is
it apical or laminal?  Or doesn't it matter?
As to myself, were it not for the fact that I've studied a bit
phonetics, I would have spoken Dutch with apical /s/ my whole
life without even knowing it (now I do so knowing it: too late to
change now).  Nobody ever told me, or probably even noticed...
In that sense, it's not unlikely that the current distribution of
apical and laminal /s/ *can* be projected "way back into the
past".  Unlike other phoneme substitutions, this is one that
might have gone completely unnoticed, in say the Roman era,
without any purist pressure whatsoever to replace it with "real",
laminal, Latin /s/.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri Oct 15 19:16:55 1999
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 20:16:55 +0100
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.201655.0100.>

Thank you, Larry, for the summary of Renfrew's article.  I am continually
amazed how poorly stocked the great libraries of England are on PIE!

I'm responding to the idea that
> ... Greek itself evolved within Greece ... out of a more-or-less vanilla
> variety of PIE which had already
> occupied the territory.

You mention that Renfrew "acknowledges some difficulties" and it may be that
he answers my question in the article.    I would like to know how he
maintains this position in the light of a fairly probable Greek -
Indo-Iranian - Armenian Sprachbund, which on some views is innovative, not
merely retentive or conserving.   Does he suggest that somehow the I-I-ans
also originated within Greece?  Or that the vanilla ur-pre-Greek had already
acquired the characteristics it shares with II and Armenian before its
speakers occupied the terrritory - which would make it much more raspberry
ripple than vanilla?   Or does he believe that the shared characteristics
are mere retentions?   Any of these positions is open to serious question.

By the way, no one ever did tell me if the plural of Sprachbund
was -unds, -|nde, or -unde.   I guess I go for the middle one, making it a
language-association, rather than a language-collection.

Peter


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri Oct 15 19:32:31 1999
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 20:32:31 +0100
Subject: Linear A to Linear B
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.203231.0100.>

Larry asks for responses in a posting where he says:
> Linear A was used to write the unknown language we call Minoan.  In all
> likelihood, it was invented for the purpose of writing that language.

Much of Larry's posting appears to me reasonable and common sense, except
that here I wish to add a quibble.   It seems to me more likely that the
idea that a language could be written down did not develop in isolation in
Crete, but was imported from somewhere.    We know that when this happened
elsewhere, it was very common for the inspiring script to be adapted to the
new language, rather than for a totally new script to be developed ex nihilo
(although I grant there are one or two exceptions).    This adaptation often
meant inadequacies or infelicities in the resultant script.   I would
therefore be very cautious in using the argument that the script of Linear A
must reflect the language well, since it was "invented" for linear A.

Peter


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri Oct 15 19:43:41 1999
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 20:43:41 +0100
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.204341.0100.>

A mild rebuke to Sean Crist (along with an apology for misspelling his name
earlier!)

He says to Stanley Friesen:
> You must be new on this list; during August and September, the question of
> the phylogeny of the IE languages was hashed over in great detail.

Is this perhaps a little patronising, and a little premature?
I didn't post very much in that discussion myself, because I didn't think it
was worthwhile, but myy guess is that I am not alone in being both (a)
relatively silent about it and (b) totally convinced that the discussion has
not yet proved anything.

Stanley Friesen may be in good company in maintaining that the NW IE
languages separate early - this is the position taken by Lehmann among
others.

Peter


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri Oct 15 19:52:12 1999
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 20:52:12 +0100
Subject: Change and What Remains
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.205212.0100.>

Lars said:
>two sligthly different versions of the same language or dialect
> may apparently exist side by side.

This is not a surprise to English speakers in the West Midlands.   Some of
us use subjunctives ("If I were king...) and others do not, some of us
distinguish witch and which and others do not, and on a bus you can hear
"you am", "you are", "you be" and even "you bist".   I am sure there are
other variations as well.   Some of this variety is due to importations of
speakers of foreign dialects (e.g. Jamaicans or New Zealanders), but
certainly not all.   It used to be claimed that the dialect changed every
two or three miles in this area.

Peter


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Fri Oct 15 22:31:54 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 18:31:54 EDT
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY (THE EVIDENCE)
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.183154.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/12/99 7:47:34 PM, I wrote:

<<At this point in time, THERE IS NO MATERIAL EVIDENCE AT ALL AS TO WHEN
GREEK-SPEAKERS APPEARED IN GREECE.  THE ONLY EVIDENCE OF A SIGNIFICANT
MIGRATION DURING THIS PERIOD (3000BC-1650BC) IS FROM ANATOLIA.>>

There's been a little confusion here.  I wrote the above for a limited
reason.  I'm not saying there was no northern migration.  I'm just saying
that THERE IS NO ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE of any such thing during that
period.  I am also saying there is however STRONG EVIDENCE of a significant
migration from Anatolia that is the ONLY clear connection to any serious
material discontinuity in Greece during that period.

With regard to the "coming of the Greeks" from the north during that period,
as John Collis has said generally, "such theories... may be supported by
other means, but the archaeological evidence can lend in good conscience
absolutely no support.... and should not be used by others as an endorsement
of those theories... "

My statement IS the current state of the EVIDENCE based on the best
information I have.  I have excellent access to the literature in this field,
I've worked in it and I have regular correspondence with archaeologists who
are or have been active in this very area.  One of them highly recommended
the website I quoted from as an accurate and up-to-date summary of the latest
findings.

If anyone on the list is interested, I STRONGLY urge them to consult that web
site.  It's by Jeremy Rutter and it's on the Darmouth site but has been
reproduced any number of times on the web as support material for courses
given at least six other schools, including UCLA.  It is CURRENT and is a
thorough summary and bibliography of where I understand things now stand.

PLEASE NOTE that I was only reporting the evidence as I been able to gather
it.  I could be wrong.  If there are more recent archaeological reports
coming from the area that say something different, I'D LOVE TO SEE THEM.  If
Mr Crist or anyone else has access to such reports, PLEASE POST THEM.  I
stand ready to be corrected.

AND once again I must caution members of the list to consult the website or
any other legitimate current material on this subject before accepting what
Mr. Crist's might have said about there being ANY serious archaeological
evidence for when "Greeks entered Greece."  This really isn't the case.

[Mr Crist wrote of "process archaeology" (message dated 10/15/99 12:23:37
AM).   This is only part of a greater movement by archaeologists and related
historical scientists towards keeping their evidence objective  and free of
the conclusions that pet theories want to attach to them.  Following Mr.
Crist in the name-dropping mode, I had the opportunity to attend and report
on a good number of lectures by John Collis, probably the preeminent scholar
in bronze and iron age European archaeology.  What he has made clear over and
over again is that archaeological evidence WILL NOT SUPPORT the conclusions
that many like Mr Crist would like it to.  This is a big issue in Celtic prehi
story, but as Prof. Collis has said on a number of occasions, it applies
equally to Greek prehistory.]

So I wrote:
<<At this point in time, THERE IS NO MATERIAL EVIDENCE AT ALL AS TO WHEN
GREEK-SPEAKERS APPEARED IN GREECE.  THE ONLY EVIDENCE OF A SIGNIFICANT
MIGRATION DURING THIS PERIOD (3000BC-1650BC) IS FROM ANATOLIA.>>

To which Mr. Crist replied:
<<This is appears to be incorrect.  Between the Early Helladic II and Early
Helladic III phases (c. 2200 BCE), we find the following:
-Destruction and abandonment of Early Helladic II sites
-Changes in architecture, including appearance of houses with apsidal
-Changes in burial practice
-Appearance of stone "battle-axes" and clay "anchors"
-Appearance of a new pottery style, i.e. the Minyan ware
-Major change in economy to a much simpler agricultural society
(Mallory, p. 70)>>

There's a number of things seriously wrong with all this.

First of all, there is NOTHING in the list Mr. Crist gave that contradicts
the evidence of a singular migration from Anatolia.  In fact most of these
points are directly connected BY EARLIER FINDS in and on the way from
Anatolia.  Practically everything he cites can be and is explained by THE
STRONG EVIDENCE OF A MIGRATION FROM ANATOLIA OR WHAT HAPPENED WITHIN GREECE
AFTERWARDS BECAUSE OF THAT MIGRATION.

The destruction of sites in Greece is NOT now attributed to outsiders but to
the Tiryns culture (2150BC-2000BC).  As I reported, Tyrins is described as
"the result of a process of 'cultural fusion'" between two PRE-EXISTING
cultures already in Greece.  One culture is contiguous from the Neolithic
(Korakau.)   The other culture represents the aftermath of the Anatolian
"migration." (Lefkandi I).  By the time of the destructions, both of these
two elements had been the Greek mainland together for as long as 400 years.
There is no serious material evidence of "outsiders from the north" being
involved.

It's important to mention that there is NO evidence of violence in connection
with the original Anatolian migration.  And also important that evidence of
Lefkandi or Tiryns does not extend throughout mainland Greece, being
restricted to the east.  Neither are evidenced in e.g. Laconia or the western
Peloppenese, where the continuity appears to have persisted into the middle
Hellenic.

And there is not much evidence of anything "northern" in any of this.   The
long houses, both rectangular and with apses, as well as the pottery can be
traced very confidently in their manufacture, forms and even often the source
of the material through the Cylades right back to Anatolia. (All of this I
either quoted already or can be found on the web site mentioned.)

As to Gray Minyan Ware, I'll cover that in the next post.  Suffice it to say
that whatever evidence we have of the origins of Gray Minyan also comes from
the direction of Anatolia.

So how is that Sean Crist can say something different?  Well, one reason is
that his single source is out-of-date.  I checked and THERE IS NOT ONE PAPER
CITED IN MALLORY'S BIBLIOGRAPHY DATED AFTER 1986.  This is a problem in a
field where an awful lot has been learned in the past15 years.  A
preponderance of papers cited in the Dartmouth web bibliography are, for
example, dated after 1994.   There are volumes of new scientific findings
that support the current status of the evidence which I described above.

Once again I may be misinformed. I kind of doubt it, but I am ready to be
contradicted by any recent archaeological evidence that has escaped my
attention.  And again I am not saying there was no northern migration into
Greek between 3500 and 1650BC or even when Greek came into Greece.  What I am
saying is that list members should be very wary of any assertion that
archaeological evidence supports any such conclusions.

And once again check out the web site
-http://tenaya.cs.dartmouth.edu/history/bronze_age -
- if you don't have access I'll try to download a text copy for you and maybe
even copies of the more recent papers if I can.

PS - I just saw the announcement on the list for the "Greater Anatolia and the
Indo-Hittite Language Family" colloquium at the URichmond and along with
Renfrew, Ivanov, etc., Jeremy Rutter - the author of the web site I've
referred to - will be there to give critical response.  Sounds fascinating.

Regards,
Steve Long


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Fri Oct 15 19:46:20 1999
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 19:46:20 -0000
Subject: language origins
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.194620.0000.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Dear Larry and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Sent: Wednesday, October 13, 1999 4:45 PM

<snip>

[LT]

> I think we learn a first language because our ancestors, at some point,
> evolved a very specific biological proclivity to learn and use language.  I
> don't believe we have a specific and dedicated calculus faculty, or
> ice-skating faculty, but I do believe we possess a dedicated language
> faculty.  And I believe language is a biological part of us in a way that
> calculus and ice skating are not.  We didn't "invent"language in the way that
> we invented my other examples: we evolved it.  It's just something that
> happened to us.

[PR]
I say sincerely that it gives me great pleasure to agree with Larry when our
agreement is normally such a rare occurrence.

I think the idea of 'inventing language' is dubious for another reason. It
implies that, at some point, language was consciously conceptualized and
implemented. Though we may never learn his name (if he had one), should we
postulate an Edison of language who explained to his speechless fellows (how
would he explain it?) that, from then on, /iiiii/ would not be merely a
squeal (of delight?) but would mean 'mastodon marrow'?

And /uggggg/ would mean 'mastodon . . .', well, you know.

I think it greatly more likely that a constant association of something like
/iiiii/, a purely instinctual sound associated with delight, acquired for a
substantial portion of the group, an association with something in which the
group generally delighted, and that a pars pro toto type of development
occurred, in which some slight phonological modification of /iiiii/ made it
specific to 'mastodon marrow', or 'hive honey', or 'accidentally fermented
grapes'.

This, I believe, could well have occurred before ancestral human beings
parted ways, so that the question then becomes really how far had this
process proceeded before our wandering ancestors wandered into Neandertalia?

I think that I am familiar with Larry's ideas that, though a proto-language
*might* have existed at this early date, through temporal processes, it has
become unrecoverable. I apologize in advance if I have unwittingly
misrepresented Larry's previously expressed sentiments on this subject.
That, of course, has no bearing on the general proposition of whether
monogenesis or polygenesis is likelier on general principles (lacking
agreeable data).

But, I still believe strongly that this is the likeliest scenario.

Opposing it, we have a group squealing but with no 'words', which splits up;
and mirabile dictu, all at the same time (approximately) in different
places, under different environmental challenges, presuming also
substantially similar genetic modifications, former members of the group
'invent' languages that all have so many common traits that we have no
problem comparing them structurally and functionally. We might call this the
'multiple Edison' theory; or just assume that God set up Gardens of Eden in
many now lost locations.

I think this scenario, which is possible, is so unlikely compared to the
first scenario that unless strong evidence compels it, it should be shelved.

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 meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er
mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Sat Oct 16 01:24:36 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 18:24:36 -0700
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.991013094133.15064A-100000@unagi.cis.upenn.e du>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.182436.0700.>

At 11:28 AM 10/13/99 -0400, Sean Crist wrote:
>-Renfrew proposes that Anatolia is the homeland of the Indo-Europeans.  If
>so, it is very odd the Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic existed in the midst of
>languages (Hattic and Hurrian) which are not only not Indo-European but
>which bear no typological resemblance to Indo-European.

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

>This is a matter of controversy; Mallory described the Minyan ware as
>being "incessantly discussed".  I don't know all the details regarding
>that pottery style, but I'm pretty confident in stating that you're
>misrepresenting the field if you say that it was "quite clear" that the
>Minyan pottery represents a continuation of an earlier style.

Actually, even if it is in large part a continuation of earlier styles,
this does not rule out external influences in generating the change in
fashion.  It is not as if pottery styles are wholistic things that must
either be taken entire or not at all.  Mixed influences are both possible
and reasonable.

>I accept the view of Mallory and many others that the latest unity of PIE
>was in the area of the Ukraine around 4000-3500 BCE.  ...

The appearance of horse-bits (for riding) in the Sredny-Stog culture is
quit telling here.  (Mallory does not actually mention this, as it was not
yet known when he wrote his book).

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


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Sat Oct 16 01:30:23 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 18:30:23 -0700
Subject: language origins
In-Reply-To: <E11bRTe-0000pY-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.183023.0700.>

At 05:45 PM 10/13/99 +0100, Larry Trask wrote:
>Stanley Friesen writes:
>> Now, I, *personally* find this situation unlikely, but it is at least
>> coherent, and thus cannot be ruled out a priori.

>Well, maybe it can.

>Language, I'd say, is a lot *more* complex than calculus.  But I don't think
>degree of complexity is the issue.

>The point is that our language faculty appears to be part of our biological
>inheritance in a way that the ability to construct or use calculus is not.

This is a large part of why I find an origin of spoken language after the
origin of the *capability* to be unlikely.  Unfortunately, preadaptation
(or as it is more commonly called nowadays, exaption) can produce just this
appearance of special adaptation.  Thus it is *possible* (though unlikely)
that the human "language capability" actually evolved for to perform some
*other* function, and turned out to accidentally allow what we call human
language.

I do not believe this is what happened, but it is hard to entirely
eliminate this possibility.

>I think we learn a first language because our ancestors, at some point,
>evolved a very specific biological proclivity to learn and use language.
>I don't believe we have a specific and dedicated calculus faculty, or
>ice-skating faculty, but I do believe we possess a dedicated language faculty.

I agree, I just do not think the whole of this model is yet completely
established.

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


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Sat Oct 16 01:40:53 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 18:40:53 -0700
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <E11bRZ2-0000uT-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.184053.0700.>

At 05:50 PM 10/13/99 +0100, Larry Trask wrote:
>Stanley Friesen writes:

>> And given that, again pace Renfrew, Anatolian almost certainly had to move
>> through the Balkans prior to Greek arrival *there*, let alone their arrival
>> in Greece proper, and that there is some evidence for a non-Greek IE
>> language in Greece in place names, the time scale is further constrained.

>Why?

>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.
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.  (They do indicate an early appearance of proto-Iranian
peoples to the east of Mesopotamia)

>Even if you don't buy Anatolia as the PIE homeland, why couldn't Anatolian
>have entered Anatolia across the Caucasus or from east of the Caspian Sea,
>through Iran?

The first is made unlikely by the lack of IE-related cultural artifacts in
the Caucusus and the *total* lack of any pre-Armenian IE substratal
influences in any of the non-IE languages of the Caucasus.

For the second you have to explain why the Sumerians, Old Bablyonians and
Assyians make NO mention of any possible pre-Anatolian peoples, while they
*do* give indications of the existence of proto-Iranian peoples in Iran
(look at the Mitanni words for charioteering).

>And why did Greek have to move through the Balkans?

Ditto.

Plus:

C) the closest relative of Greek seems to be Old Macedonian
D) there were peripheral populations of Greeks to the northeast of Greece
proper, whence came the Dorians after the collapse of the Mykenean
civilization.
[Note, I do *not* say the Dorians *caused* said collapse, but they *did*
come from the area of modern day Albania and/or the former Yugoslavia].

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


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Sat Oct 16 03:39:58 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 20:39:58 -0700
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.991013180929.19455C-100000@unagi.cis.upenn.e du>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.203958.0700.>

At 06:26 PM 10/13/99 -0400, Sean Crist wrote:
>On Thu, 7 Oct 1999, Stanley Friesen wrote:

>> [The northern group would be ancestral to Germanic, Celtic, and Italic, at
>> least, and perhaps Balto-Slavis as well],

>You must be new on this list; during August and September, the question of
>the phylogeny of the IE languages was hashed over in great detail.  I'm
>curious as to what linguistic and archaeological evidence you have in
>mind; your claim is at odds with the work of Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor
>which I have been discussing.  If you like, I can forward you some of the
>emails which I sent out as a part of this dialog.

That would help.

However, I have some issues with accepting such a result.  The biggest
blocker to my mind is the very early date for the beginning of the Corded
Ware cultures in northern Europe.  This complex seems, to me, to be very
strongly IE in character.  And it is too far from the Ukraine for the
possibility of it remaining the same language.  So, unless it represents a
now extinct branch of the IE family, this puts the split between at least
some of the northern European IE languages subfamilies back to about 3500
BC or so.  Given that PIE unity is dated at not much earlier than that,
this leaves precious little time for Anatolian to have already split off.
Indeed the beginning of the Cernavoda-Ezero complex of the Balkans actually
seems to date a couple of centuries later, and this seems, to me, to be the
most likely pre-Anatolian culture, given its association with the lower
layers of Troy.

On the linguistic side, Hittite itself seems to be somewhat abberrant even
*within* Anatolian, so any phylogenetic analysis probably needs to
cross-check any features encoded for Anatolian with the other languages in
the group.  (I ran across an indication the other day that the other
Anatolian languages had a more typical IE verbal system, for instance).
Overall, I think this makes Anatolian somewhat less deviant within the
family than it seems at first glance.

>> And given that, again pace Renfrew, Anatolian almost certainly had to move
>> through the Balkans prior to Greek arrival *there*, let alone their arrival
>> in Greece proper, and that there is some evidence for a non-Greek IE
>> language in Greece in place names, the time scale is further constrained.

>If the speakers of prehistoric Anatolian travelled south along the west
>coast of the Black Sea to the Bosporus, they need not have entered any
>part of what is now Greece on their way into Anatolia.

True, but the Greeks would have had to pass through somewhere close there
as well.  (Though they seem to have gone rather further west, at least
based on the NW dialects).  On the other hand, the Cernavoda-Ezero complex
does extend west into the area the Greeks probably had to pass through.

The key point is that there appear to be some IE place names in Greecce
that cannot be interpreted as Greek.  This means that *some* IE group had
to precede the Greeks there, even if it wasn't the Anatolians.

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


From Odegard at means.net  Fri Oct 15 23:16:02 1999
From: Odegard at means.net (Mark Odegard <Odegard@means.net>)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 23:10:02 -6
Subject: Wheeled Vehicles.
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.231002.6.>

This post considers the position that the date of (non-Anatolian) PIE
unity is rather late, ca. 2500 BCE. My discussion will center on
wheeled vehicles, and the question how, when and where.

The following quotes are from J.P. Mallory's chapter in _The
Indo-Europeanization of Northern Europe_, edited by Karlene Jones-Bley
and Martin E. Huld (Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph No. 17,
Institute for the Study of Man, 1996).

--start quotes--
[...] Stefan Zimmer has argued what we may call the "strict
constructualist" case. He argues that since a reconstructed
proto-language is essentially an abstraction and thereare no
independent ways of dating it, the only date we can meaningfully
employ is immediately before our earliest textual evidence about 2000
BC....

Now I think that both linguists and archaeologists should realize the
consequences of this "strict constructualist" date. By 2500 BC there
is hardly an archaeological solution to Indo-European origins that
does not propose that the Indo-Europeans spanned most of the breadth
of Eurasia and other than Robert Drews's recent attempt ... I am
unaware of any serious archaeological solution that envisages
expansions beginning ca. 2500 BC or later. If one follows Marija
Gimburtas' Kurgan theory, for example, then we would have
Proto-Indo-Europeans occupying the entire area from the Corded Ware
culture in Holland ... to the Afanasievo culture on the Yenisei [...]
and the Sherratt's scenario would have them at least from Denmark to
the Aral Sea [....] [p. 6]

[...] David Anthony defends the notion that the Proto-Indo-European
community must have been relatively unified up to ca. 3300 BC because
it shared a vocabular for wheeled vehicles which only began to appear
in Eurasia about this time. Against the suggestion that the words
forvehicles may have spread among the various Indo-Europeanlanguages
later, Anthony argues that the "five Indo-European roots forming the
wheeled-vehicle semantic field exhibit no internal evidence of having
been derived from any one Indo-European daughter language" and had
they come from an already differentiated language "then the linguistic
signature of that parent group should be evidence in the disseminated
vocabulary". [p.11]

The striking thing here is that the northwest languages are generally
seen to emerge as daughter branches sometime between 1500 and 500 BC
(and Tocharian would perhaps offer a similar date), Greek and
Indo-Aryan sometime between 2100-1500 BC. In a sense then the purely
linguistic picture of Indo-European might be said to fit disturbingly
well with Stefan Zimmer's proposal that Proto-Indo-European should not
date prior to 2500 BC. [p. 14]

The Neolithic argument proposes that ca. 4500-4000 BC, populations in
west and northern Europe spoke Indo-European and that it later evolved
into Celtic and Germanic. These languages contains words for wheeled
vehicles which are widely shared by other Indo-European groups.
Archaeological evidence suggests that these words could not have
entered their vocabulary at any time, no matter where they were
situated, before the fourth millennium BC. According to many of the
traditional arguments adduced for the date of linguistic divergence in
this region, the terms for wheeled vehicles could have been adopted by
either or both of these populations at anytime between ca. 3500 and
1000 BC and not be detected as a loan word. From this we can see that
while the shared wheeled vehicle terminology cannot be explained as
loan words between individual Indo-European languages, they also need
not be explained as the fourth millennium BC terms either -- they
could have diffused later. [pp. 15-16]
--end quotes--

So. When did wheeled vehicle technology become a part of the
Indo-Europeans' industrial repetoire? And where? And how?

There are some practical requirements if you are to have sturdy,
steppe-worthy wagons and carts. The first of them, of course, is a
source of wood. While there were trees the river valleys of the
steppe, the real source for lumber would have been the southern edge
of the North European forest -- the forest which is essentially
co-extensive in area as is the 'incessantly discussed' Corded Ware
horizon.

The second is tools, at least copper tools, and for a really good cart
that makes judicious use of hardwood, probably bronze tools. How early
can one reasonably impute the regular use of bronze at the
forest-steppe boundary? In his 1989 book, Mallory mentions the Ezero
culture of modern central Bulgaria (= Karanovo VII), starting 3200 BCE
as one bright point of early Bronze Age culture. We might have the
proto-Anatolians down here at this time, and who knows, they might
have even been the go-betweens for moving the knowledge of making
bronze northwards.

Mallory reminds us of the need to keep the PIE homeland within
reasonable bounds: Poland- or Germany-sized. Having an essentially
mutually intelligible continuum ranging from the Yenisey to the North
Sea is improbable, as is Denmark to the Aral Sea, or even Hungary to
the Caspian. The north Pontic area is reasonable.

Is it necessary that the steppe be monolithically IE-speaking? This
goes against the historic pattern for the area. Is it necessary that
every person who was part of the Yamnaya culture be IE-speaking? Is
it necessary for the French and Germans to speak a single language if
they are to share a single material culture? Mallory, in the closing
pages of his 89 book seems suspicious of the reputed IE-ness of the
Corded Ware horizon.

The PIEs were highly mobile. At least no one really denies that. But
what was the basis of their mobility *as a people* (and not a bunch
of bravos riding off to wreck havoc someplace). Pregnant women and
small children cannot ride bareback on horses. They had carts and
wagons. When was it possible for them to have the tools to make these
sturdy steppe-worthy vehicles, as well as the associated skills in
handling and yoking animals to pull them?

A 'disturbingly' late date seems attractive.
--
Mark Odegard   mailto:odegard at means.net


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Oct 16 05:58:44 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 01:58:44 EDT
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY (GRAY MINYAN)
Message-ID: <SAT.16.OCT.1999.015844.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/15/99 12:23:37 AM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu wrote:
<<I don't know all the details regarding that pottery style, but I'm pretty
confident in stating that you're MISREPRESENTING the field if you say that it
was "quite clear" that the Minyan pottery REPRESENTS A CONTINUATION of an
earlier style.>> (caps are mine)

We'll be getting to misrepresentations later.  But at this point it's
probably important that those on the list who are interested rely on more
than your confidence, which may be a bit misleading.  Below I quote sources
that say that Gray Minyan is both a continuation and has no established
connection with a northern migration, but rather probably has its roots in
Anatolia.

Once again, I am NOT saying that the appearance of Gray Minyan proves
anything specifically.  But its seems that these days Gray Minyan lends NO
SERIOUS SUPPORT for a northern invasion or migration by Greek speakers during
this period.

I wrote:
<<In the bad old days, Gray Minyon was associated with "the arrival of the
Greeks" from the north, but it is now quite clear that the pottery style is a
continuance....>>

Here are some descriptions of a current understanding of Grey Minyan pottery.
 If there are any recent documented findings that contradict what's written
below, it would be great to see them.

<<Until about 1960, Gray Minyan was often identified as the pottery of
northern invaders who destroyed EH civilization ca. 1900 B.C. and introduced
MH material culture into the Greek peninsula.   However, Caskey's excavations
at Lerna as well as more recently excavated sequences at several other sites
have MADE IT ABUNDANTLY CLEAR that Gray Minyan, rather than being new in the
MH period, is the DIRECT DESCENDANT of the fine gray burnished pottery of the
EH III Tiryns culture. Moreover, it seems likely that the Black/Argive
variety of Minyan is nothing other than an evolved version of the EH III
"Dark slipped and burnished" class....>> (caps are mine)

<<...Furthermore, there is nothing particularly "northern" about the ancestry
 of the EH III progenitors of MH Minyan except that they almost certainly
came to the northeastern Peloponnese from central Greece (i.e. from the north
with respect to the Peloponnese).>> (This corrects my statement about Minyan
not being found north of the Peloponnese.)

<<The term "Minyan" was originally coined by Schliemann very early in the
history of Aegean prehistoric archaeology ... The monochrome burnished
pottery manufactured from moderately to extremely fine clays which is
presently described as "Minyan ware" can occur in Gray, Black (or Argive),
Red, and Yellow varieties. The most common shapes in all varieties of Minyan
are open forms, for the most part goblets and kantharoi which are clearly
recognizable as EVOLVED FORMS of the Bass bowl and kantharos of the EH III
Tiryns culture.>> (caps are mine)

[With regard to the Bass bowl]: <<Virtually all these new shapes [Lefkandi I]
are derived from Western Anatolian prototypes of late Troy II or Troy III
date, as is presumably also the use of the fast wheel....the Bass bowl
[however] has a long local history going back to the EH I period, while the
other two appear to be local developments in this phase which may have been
at least partially inspired by the Anatolian influence evident in much of the
"Lefkandi I" ceramic assemblage.>>

<<One other distinctive ceramic class of [Tiryns] culture consists of fine
gray burnished vases, almost invariably kantharoi, Bass bowls, and tankards.
This gray ware is the EH III ANCESTOR of the characteristic Middle Helladic
ware known as "Gray Minyan". At Lerna, Lefkandi, and Tsoungiza/Nemea, a good
deal of this EH III fine gray burnished pottery is wheelmade, whereas almost
all of the rest of the pottery of this period is handmade.>> (caps are mine)

<<The angular profiles of Gray Minyan vases are in fact probably due simply
to the common utilization of the fast wheel in their production.... the
development of Minyan ware is probably best associated with the arrival of
the fast wheel from Anatolia...>>

The above are excerpted from J Rutter's Prehistoric Archaeology of the Aegean
on the web at
(http://tenaya.cs.dartmouth.edu/history/bronze_age/lessons/3.html) and
(http://tenaya.cs.dartmouth.edu/history/bronze_age/lessons/9.html) and
Nordquist, "The Pottery of the Early Helladic III and Middle Helladic
Periods," in Runnels, Pullen, & Langdon, Artifact and Assemblage: The Finds
from a Regional Survey of the Southern Argolid (Stanford1995) 43ff.

I hope this gives interested list members a sense of how unsatisfactory the
Gray Minyan evidence is as a support for a northern migration.  Of course, I
may be wrong.  There may be newer documented archaeological evidence that
contradicts this.  I'd love to hear about it.

Regards,
Steve Long


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Sat Oct 16 01:04:15 1999
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan)
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 01:04:15 -0000
Subject: Possessives
Message-ID: <SAT.16.OCT.1999.010415.0000.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Dear Larry and IEists:

My apoligies to the moderator and the list for the accidental posting of a
partial draft of this response to Larry.

----- Original Message -----
From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 1999 5:12 PM

[PR previously]

<snip>

>> One of the principal benefits of terming this class of words
>> "possessive pronouns" is that it enables us to identify comparable
>> classes of words in IE, English, and Basque --- even though the
>> details of their employment may differ.

[LT]

> Well, this reminds me of Abe Lincoln's little joke.  "How many legs does
> a sheep have if you call the tail a leg?"  "Five?"  "No, four: calling
> the tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."

> Possessive items, in general, are "comparable" among languages only
> insofar as they are translation equivalents.  Syntactically, they can
> and do exhibit many different kinds of behavior, requiring them to be
> assigned to various parts of speech, or sometimes to no part of speech.

> The English possessives like `my' are determiners because they behave
> like determiners.  They do not behave like pronouns, and so they are not
> pronouns.  And they certainly don't behave like adjectives.

[PR]
It seems to be the rationale of the approach Larry espouses to assign words
to classes based on their ability to occur in certain positions within
grammatically well-formed sentences --- what I would call the slot-theory.

That is certainly one method of analysis; and, in certain cases, I would even
be glad to admit that it may be useful although Larry has, so far, steadfastly
refused to respond to my criticisms of it except with two logically fallacious
arguments:

1) argumentum ad populum: (paraphrased) "all linguists are using it".

I have specifically documented that there are eminent linguists like Beekes
who, apparently, are not using Larry's system of word classification;
strangely, we heard no further comment from Larry when I demonstrated a prima
facie case for Beekes classifying words as 'possessive pronouns'.

But even if Beekes did prefer Larry's method of classification, in fact if God
himself preferred it, it is still, depending on one's beliefs, a fallacy: ad
populum, based on the democratic popular prejudice that the majority's will has
some intrinsic value; ad verecundiam, if one should be awed that "all"
linguists agree with Larry (oops! all but one, of course).

I would have much preferred to know "why" slots are the only game in town
rather than the identity of the slot-fillers.

But, "slots" is not the only useful rationale that may be used, a broad-minded
position that I would hope Larry might espouse in any context.

His preference is a direct outgrowth of the school to which he subscribes, and
the definitions that school generates. Larry, there are other schools, no
matter who underrepresented they may be in your Weltanschauung.

Larry's definition of 'pronoun' (as contained in his dictionary) is: "The
lexical category, or a member of this category, whose members typically
function as noun phrases in isolation, not normally requiring or permitting
the presence of determiners or other adnominals, and whose members typically
have little or no intrinsic meaning or reference."

I guess I may be one of the *few* aspiring-to-be linguists who was surprised to
learn that this definition made *no* reference whatsoever to what I always
thought was *one* characteristic of pronouns: that they "function as
substitutes for nouns or noun phrases", quoting the now worthless (:-))) AHD.

Now, I can entertain the possibility that Larry's definition may be superior,
so let us see if it is.

Now Larry says 'pronouns' "typically have little or no intrinsic meaning or
reference". I consider this totally inaccurate and misguided. The 1st p. sing.
pronoun, "I", means 'the speaker'; the 2nd p. sing. pronoun, "you", means 'the
listener'. Now I know Larry is familiar with enough languages to know that
there are a number of languages where this can be etymologically shown. Now,
maybe Larry will want to regard those terms in those languages as 'nouns'
rather than 'pronouns'. I will fear for the state of his soul if he argues that
((:--:). And let us please not worry about things like German 'Sie' or 'His
Majesty'. There have been enough red herrings on the list already; and most of
us prefer ours, referring to red herrings, white with vinegar and onions.

Now Larry says 'pronouns' are words "not normally requiring or permitting the
the presence of determiners or other adnominals".

I, who would dispute this, think that adnominals ("An adnominal constituent may
be variously . . . a relative clause") are fairly uncommon in the 1st and 2nd
persons but not at all rare in the 3rd person, it being typically less
well-defined than the 1st or 2nd person. Are there they who doubt this?

Am I, who am maintaining this, alone in the non-linguist night?

[LT continued]
> The Basque possessives like <nere> `my' exhibit none of the properties
> of the Basque determiners and they cannot be classified as determiners.
> They are also certainly not adjectives, since they behave nothing like
> adjectives.  They are probably best regarded as case-inflected forms of
> pronouns.

> The Latin possessives like <meus> `my', on the whole, are probably best
> regarded as adjectives, since they behave like adjectives in that
> language.  They are certainly not determiners, and they don't look much
> like pronouns, either.

[PR]
This method of analysis makes no sense to me at all. If I say 'horse hockey',
then 'horse' "behave(s)" like an adjective but, unless I missed something, even
Larrry's dictionary would call it a noun, wouldn't it?

So what if Latin <meus> behaves like an adjective? It is a pronoun, because it
stands for 'the speaker's'. Is there anyone on this list besides Larry who
thinks it means anything different? <meus> is a pronoun in a form designed for
its adjectival employment.

[LT continued]
> Other languages use other strategies.  Some have no distinct possessive
> forms at all, but simply adpose the free forms of pronouns to head
> nouns.  Some use a particle to link a free pronoun to its head.  Some
> use bound markers attached to head nouns, often markers bearing no
> resemblance to free pronouns.  And some languages employ mixed
> strategies with two or more of these in various combinations; examples
> are Turkish and Jacaltec.

> Classing all of these are "possessive pronouns" *tout court* is, at the
> very least, unhelpful.

[PR]
Why, specifically, is it "unhelpful"?  In the first case, we *could* say that
"pronouns form their adjectival forms by direct adposition"; in the second,
"pronouns form their adjectival forms by linking through a particle with the
noun'; or, thrirdly, "pronouns, with a different form from free pronouns, are
employed adjectivally by attachment to head nouns".

Whatever the mechanism, the equivalent to "my" means "the speaker's".

[PR previously]
>> The essential quality of any adjective is that it designates a
>> subcategory of a catgeory of objects.

[LT responded]
> No, not at all.

> This is a prototypical semantic property of adjectives in languages that
> have them, but `adjective' is a syntactic category, not a semantic
> category, and not all adjectives, even in English, have this property.

[PR]
Can Larry name me a "syntactic category" that has *NO* meaning?

[LT continued]
> For example, consider `Susie is a mere child.'  Here the adjective
> `mere' does not define a subclass of the class of children: children are
> not divided into mere and non-mere varieties.

[PR]
Since AHD and OD both are so notoriously "unlinguist"ic, I really have no
certain way to know what Larry understands by <mere>.

I shall stick my neck in the noose and try to explain what I, as a native
speaker of English, understand by it.

I believe the sentence can be re-phrased as 'Susie is nothing more than a
child'. One interpretation might be that, contrary to someone's assertion that
Susie is old (or mature, or trusted, etc) enough to stay out all night long,
the speaker considers her so young that heavy dates are not advised. We might
also say: 'Susie is no non-child', with all the restrictions or privileges that
we put on or accord our offspring of tender years. Perhaps it is a little more
difficult to see 'mere' as an adjective because of its semantics but, as I am
sure the debater Larry knows, we can use the logical circles on this one very
easily.

Therefore, j'accuse! It seems to me that almost everyone will be able to accept
'mere' as an adjective modifying 'child'. Am I wrong, or merely misguided?

[LT continued]
> Or consider this one:
> `Lisa is a heavy smoker'.  This time the adjective `heavy' does not
> perform any subclassification of the set of smokers.  In fact, it
> doesn't even apply semantically to smokers, or to Lisa: instead, it
> applies to Lisa's habit.

[PR]
Well, if there are "heavy smokers" and "non-heavy smokers" ("light smokers"),
it is difficult for me to see that no process of classification has been at
work. Perhaps you could explain that in greater detail, Larry. To me, the set
has been subclassified. I think it is you, who, this time, is confusing the
semantics with the syntax. Is it so strange really that with an agentive
deverbal noun the adjective should have a connection adverbially with the
underlying verb, or does that not occur in Basque (:--/).

[PR previously]
>> 'Black dog' can be represented logically as a small circle ('black')
>> within a larger circle ('dog'). Possessive pronouns can be
>> represented logically in exactly the same way.

[LT]
> For certain purposes, perhaps.  But this is not an argument that `my' is
> a pronoun: rather, it appears to be a (feeble) argument that `my' is an
> adjective -- which it is not.

[PR]
The "certain purposes" are communication. And yes, when 'my' is shorthand for
'the speaker's', it is a pro-noun. In that circle called X, there are smaller
circles containing 'my', 'your', 'Larry's', 'Pat's', 'etc.'s'.

[PR previously]
>> Of course, this is exactly the same situation as when nouns are used
>> attributively: "newspaper account".

[LT]
> Indeed.  It begins to become clear that semantic tests are not very
> useful for identifying syntactic categories.  But we linguists knew
> that.

[PR]
It has become very clear to me that "semantic tests" are not your forte ({:-o).
And, generally, what synatctic category is it that you think has not "semantic
content"; and, if it has none, whatever would it mean?

[PR previously]
>> I think your basic problem is that you need to take a serious look
>> at your definition of 'adjective'.

[LT]
> Well, *one* of us certainly does. ;-)

<snip>

[PR previously]
>> Perhaps not when you're playing the 'slots' but that is not the only
>> game in town by a long shot!

>> I sincerely feel sorry for you if you cannot see that.

[LT]
> You mean there's an Arkansas analysis in which `arrival' is a verb?
> Most interesting.

> [on the slot-and-filler approach]

[PR]
>> I remember the first manifestations of the 'slot system' as opposed
>> to teaching grammar in the training I received as an aspirant
>> foreign language instructor.

>> This 'grammarless' method of teaching language was then extended to
>> English instruction in the US,

[LT]
> I would hardly describe the slot-and-filler approach as "grammarless".
> It is in fact a thoroughly grammatical approach.  Not so traditional, of
> course, but certainly grammatical in nature.  Far more so than the
> semantic approach which I dismissed above.

[PR]

Yes, you were dismissive but your dismissal does not dismiss it. And how does
your characterization of the slot-and-filler approach (the original inspiration
for Macs, no doubt), square with your definition of "grammar": "The system by
which the words and morphemes of a language are organized into larger units,
particularly into sentences . . ."?

When we were first presented with the "slots", we were informed that the whole
purpose of the technique was to circumvent "difficult grammar" for less
talented students.

[PR previously]
>> and the terrible language skills of today's youth are
>> directly attributable to this method of instruction, IMHO.

[LT]
> Dear me.  The linguistic shortcomings of our young people are to be laid
> at the door of slot-and-filler grammar?

> That's a new one on me.

[PR]
The relativistic non-prescriptive ideology hepped Mommy too.

[LT]
>I'm
> afraid my baleful influence is getting out of hand.

[PR]
To judge by the threads in progress on this list, you may put your fears to
rest.

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 proto-language at email.msn.com  Sat Oct 16 01:12:35 1999
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan)
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 01:12:35 -0000
Subject: Possessives
Message-ID: <SAT.16.OCT.1999.011235.0000.>

Dear Sean and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: Sean Crist <kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 1999 2:39 PM

> On Wed, 6 Oct 1999, Larry Trask wrote:

>> On Sun, 3 Oct 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote:

>>> 'Black dog' can be represented logically as a small circle ('black')
>>> within a larger circle ('dog').  [...] [Snip, and reordering -SC]

> [...]
>> For example, consider `Susie is a mere child.'  Here the adjective
>> `mere' does not define a subclass of the class of children: children are
>> not divided into mere and non-mere varieties.  Or consider this one:
>> `Lisa is a heavy smoker'.  This time the adjective `heavy' does not
>> perform any subclassification of the set of smokers.  In fact, it
>> doesn't even apply semantically to smokers, or to Lisa: instead, it
>> applies to Lisa's habit.

[SC]
> Just to amplify on this point, consider "a counterfeit dollar".  The whole
> point here is that the item in question is _not_ a dollar; it doesn't
> belong to some subset of dollars in the way that a black dog belongs to a
> subset of the dogs.  Likewise with "a fake moustache", "an imposter
> policeman", etc.

[PR]
One of the most challenging things about interpretation of any language is
that words, spelled and pronounced the same, do not always mean the same
things.

In the phrase, "a counterfeit dollar", the "dollar" cannot mean a 'real
dollar', obviously that would be self-contradictory. It means, in this
phrase, rather 'something that looks, feels, etc.  like a dollar'. In that
category, there are the 'real' ones and, another circle for the
'counterfeit' ones.

But, for the sake of discussion, let us pretend to assume that it means
'real, genuine dollar'. Then what part of speech is 'counterfeit', and how
would you say it is used syntactically?

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 meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er
mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri Oct 15 20:07:22 1999
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 21:07:22 +0100
Subject: Phylogeny
Message-ID: <FRI.15.OCT.1999.210722.0100.>

By the way, in all the discussion of the UPenn tree, no one has referred to
the book:
"An Indo-european classification, a lexicostatistical experiment" by Joseph
B Kruskal et al (Transactions of the American Philological Society, vol. 82,
part 5).

This may also show some strengths and limitations of a purely
computer-generated model.

Peter


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sat Oct 16 15:46:21 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 16:46:21 +0100
Subject: Excluding Basque data
Message-ID: <SAT.16.OCT.1999.164621.0100.>

ECOLING at aol.com writes:

> We may be getting closer to some agreement on issues of fact
> (as distinct from preferences).

[on my comments]

> As far as I understand the rest of his message,
> Trask does NOT take issue with it in what follows.
> He does say it doesn't matter whether the sound-symbolic
> words have different canonical forms from other vocabulary
> or not.

For my purposes now, it doesn't matter.  Correct.

> Trask appears to be equating his criteria
> with "best candidates for native and ancient status".

Not "equating".  I am *proposing* my criteria as the most appropriate ones for
my purposes.  And so far nobody has proposed any other criteria for the
purpose.

[LT]

>> My criteria are devised with Basque in mind.  Other cases may call for
>> a different approach, notably in respect of my third criterion.
>> Whether sound-symbolic words are generally not ancient, I don't know,
>> but I have no particular interest in this question anyway.  I'm only
>> interested in the Basque case.

> This does not respond to my point.  My point was that this appears to
> be a reductio ad absurdum of the approach, because it seems to be
> implied that sound-symbolic items are not good candidates for native
> and ancient status.

In Basque, this appears to be true.  But I make no universal claims.

> That conclusion must I think be false,
> UNLESS one means by it circularly that words which undergo
> reformations not in accordance with the sound laws applicable to
> the bulk of the vocabulary, reformations entirely internal to the
> language in question,

An interesting point.  Amusingly, my most recent paper, to be published early
next year, draws attention to the difficulties posed by certain types of
re-formations for reconstruction -- though not reformations of expressive
words.

By the way, re-formations are not exceptions to sound laws: they are merely
events which obscure the histories of the affected items.

> or even words which persist unchanged despite
> sound changes which apply to other vocabulary, are not native or ancient.

There is no reason to suppose that any significant numbers of such words exist
in Basque.

> To me, it is simply that these words are subject to a different set of
> sound changes (or lack thereof), they are no less native for sure,
> and arguably no less ancient since their antecedents in direct line of
> descent existed in an earlier form of the language.

But still missing the point.  I exclude words from my initial list if they are
not attested early, if they are not widespread in Basque, or if they are shared
with neighboring languages.  I do this regardless of whether I do or do not
suspect the words to be expressive formations.  If most expressive formations
get excluded as a result -- as indeed they do -- that's just tough bananas.

> To doubt that last part seems to be to doubt that earlier forms of
> various languages had sound-symbolic words,

Certainly not.  I do not for a moment suppose that Pre-Basque must have lacked
expressive formations.  But it is a bad mistake to assume that any *particular*
expressive formations in the modern language must be ancient, in the absence of
any evidence for such a conclusion.

> or if they did,
> to doubt that those words are in any reasonable sense cognate
> (parent) to any of the current sound-symbolic words, that is,
> that sound-symbolic words are so unstable as to prevent any
> reasonable sense of inherited vocabulary from being applicable.

I make no such assumption, and I can't imagine why anybody thinks I do.
But we have to have criteria for judging which words are most likely ancient.
We can't ignore those criteria just because of dark suspicions.

> I think most linguists would reject that conclusion.  Perhaps
> there is some way of avoiding it, but it seems to me to follow
> logically.

What "follows logically" is neither here nor there in this case.
The only point being made is that some native and ancient Basque words still
exist today or existed long enough to be recorded, even though they fail to
satisfy my criteria.  I have no doubt this is true.  But it is utterly
irrelevant.

For the seventeenth time, I am *not* trying to sweep up every Basque word that
*might* be ancient.  I am only trying to identify the best candidates for
native and ancient status.  Why is that so hard to understand?

[on the severely localized Basque <pinpirin> (and variants) 'butterfly']

[LT]

>> Now, I consider it most unlikely that the severely localized word
>> <pinpirin> has been in the language for millennia, all that time
>> violating the ordinary phonological structure of the language and
>> refusing to participate in otherwise categorical phonological changes.

> I don't so quickly come to that judgment.
> It appears to be rather common for sound-symbolic words.

I do not come to that judgement "quickly".  I come to it after more than 25
years of studying the history and prehistory of Basque.  If anyone were
interested, I could write a modest essay on the numerous Basque words for
'butterfly', all of which appear to be expressive formations of no great
antiquity.  These words further appear to have been exceptionally unstable.

> As an aside, I will add that I have been interested in this
> problem for a very long time, and have discovered it also in
> the historical changes of deaf communities' "signed languages",
> where sometimes in a pair of etymologically related signs,
> the sign with the more concrete meaning retains its form, while the
> sign with the more abstract meaning undergoes changes
> of execution, what we would refer to as reductions and simplifications.]

Excellent!  I am delighted to see data cited from sign languages, which are
still badly under-represented in our linguistic database.

> The fact that this makes our task harder does not argue for or against
> the validity of the statement that inherited "sound-symbolic" words
> sometimes do not undergo sound changes.  They are nevertheless
> inherited.

Yes: inherited words are inherited.  No quarrel there.

But it does not follow that any particular expressive formations are ancient --
now does it?

Basque <pinpirin> is not ancient because some other sound-symbolic words in
some other languages are ancient -- and I'm pretty sure it's not very ancient
at all.

> Trask suggests that the following example is wrong.
> I should have said that I took it on the authority of
> Dwight Bolinger, a linguist specializing in English linguistics
> who was a president of the Linguistic Society of America,
> who believed that "teeny" was regenerated (I think that was
> his word).

>>> (English "tiny", which went through the great vowel shift,
>>> and "teeny", which did not go through the great vowel shift,
>>> was retained or regenerated or reborrowed from a dialect,
>>> would be a similar case,
>>> unless the dialect-borrowing solution is adopted.)

> [LT]

>> No.  The earlier `tine' went through the GVS normally and produced
>> `tiny', as expected.  The form `teeny', in all likelihodd, is a later
>> re-formation, derived from sound-symbolic factors.  The OED tells me
>> that `teeny' is nowhere recorded before 1825 -- long after the GVS --
>> and suggests that it probably originated in nursery language.

> We are not too far apart here, except that Trask should have said
> "Yes" to the first sentence, which he was actually agreeing with.
> In this next sentence he could have said "No" or "But not" or whatever.
> His "in all likelihood" should be emphasized,
> that is, we really don't know for sure.
> I gave three possible scenarios.
> But the outcome of each of them is the same.
> What is now SPELLED "teeny"
> is pronounced rather similarly to what was earlier SPELLED "tine",
> when the final "e" was still pronounced and the "i" was pronounced
> as in "machine".
> So was it retained or re-formed much later?
> We know that spelling changes lag behind speech.
> And we know that first attestations which we happen to have evidence
> for may be later than first usages, often by a large time span.
> So the conclusion is not obviously the one Trask prefers.

The conclusion of a re-formation is indeed not intrinsically obvious.
But it *is* the conclusion supported by most of the sources I have ever
consulted.  It is also the conclusion best supported by the evidence.

> Trask does not mention the case of French "pavillon / papillon".
> Does he believe that "papillon" was lost and then regenerated,
> and thus "not ancient" or even "not native"?
> I assume he would not want to claim either of the latter two.
> If not, then use that example instead of "tiny / teeny".

I did not comment on this example because I am not familiar with the facts,
that's all.

> [LT]

>> Let's assume this point is valid.  What are the consequences?

>> Well, either sound-symbolic forms conform to the canonical forms of
>> ordinary lexical items, or they do not.  If they do, there is no
>> problem.

> But  Trask has said previously that the
> expressive vocabulary in Basque DOES differ in canonical forms
> from other vocabulary, so he believes the first alternative does not
> apply.

Indeed, but it would cause me no difficulty if it were otherwise.

> Here is his second alternative:

>> If they don't, then, assuming that many of them get into my
>> list in the first place, I'm going to have two sharply distinct groups
>> of words obeying different rules.  Also no problem.

> But Trask himself argues AGAINST the latter case occurring.
> He actively wants to prevent it "in the first place",
> and only to include them later. He says that his preference is
> to exclude nursery words etc.
> He really does want  to prevent the inclusion of nursery and expressive
> forms.  He believes these forms do not follow what he regards as the
> normal sound laws and that they violate
> the normal canonical forms (his comments on "pinpirin").
> Since lack of attestation may correlate with this, use of the criterion
> of lack of sufficiently wide attestation DOES tend to exclude forms
> of certain formal types.
> He says that he wanted to exclude by an explicit criterion,
> but that he is not too unhappy if others don't want that particular
> exclusionary criterion, (? because he believes that ?)
> his other criteria will exclude most nursery words anyhow.

Yes.  I do not exclude <pinpirin>, because its expressive origin is not
blindingly obvious to non-specialists.  But <tu> 'spit' is different: probably
any comparative linguist would at once spot that one as an imitative formation.

> The assumption that "many" of them will get into Trask's list in
> the first place is exactly what much of this discussion has been about,

By my criteria, few words will make it into my list that I personally consider
expressive, true.  That's just the way it is.

If this bothers you -- and it certainly doesn't bother me -- then *what other
criteria* do you endorse for my task?

I've lost track of how many times I've asked this fundamental question.
But I still hear nothing but silence.

May I now safely conclude that Lloyd Anderson has no other explicit criteria to
offer?

If so, why is he continuing to post at such length?

> namely,
> his criteria will tend to prevent many of them from getting into his list.
> Notice again his strong antipathy towards the word "pinpirin":

>> Now, I consider it most unlikely that the severely localized word
>> <pinpirin> has been in the language for millennia, all that time
>> violating the ordinary phonological structure of the language and
>> refusing to participate in otherwise categorical phonological changes.

> (even aside from the fact that "millennia" is not required to reach
> the level of the early Basque of the 16th century which Trask
> otherwise prefers as his starting point for data, to project
> further backwards)

Eh?  I'm interested in finding out something about the Pre-Basque of about 2000
years ago.  Now, by my reckoning, 2000 years is two millennia.

Any hypothetical case of the sort invoked by Lloyd must therefore have remained
in the language for *at least* two millennia, all the while serenely violating
the ordinary phonological constraints of the language and refusing to undergo
the ordinary phonological changes.

The 16th century has nothing to do with it.  This is merely the period of the
first substantial Basque texts.

[LT]

>> Perhaps I haven't made it clear that I am also very interested in
>> characterizing the expressive formations.  But I first want to
>> characterize the forms of ordinary lexical items, before I turn my
>> attention to the expressive formations -- for one thing, because it's
>> easier to see what's special about expressive formations if I already
>> know what ordinary words look like.

> In that case, the best possible way is to include expressive formations
> in the data set from the very beginning, mark the ones we are
> reasonably sure are "expressives" because of their semantics,
> and notice what may be different about them,

Finally a proposal!

Let's see if I understand this.  You are proposing that I should decide *in
advance* which Basque words are of expressive origin, and include these in my
initial list even though they grossly fail my otherwise categorical criteria.

Questions, Lloyd:

1. How do I know in advance which words are of ultimate expressive origin
unless I *first* make up my mind what expressive words look like?

2. I first pick the expressive words and put them into my list, whereupon I
find that the expressive words I have deliberately put into the list because of
their distinctive forms and/or meanings do indeed have distinctive forms and/or
meanings.  Is this not totally circular?  What can I possibly hope to find
other than what I put in to start with?

3. If the deliberately selected words are put into my list even though there
exists no evidence that they are ancient, how can I possibly have any
confidence that my list consists largely of ancient words?

How about some answers?

[on my criteria]

> This explicitly states that the expressives would be mostly
> excluded from his list by his primary criteria.

Yes; I believe this to be correct.

> That comes very
> close to contradicting the possibility that "many" of them could
> be included "in the first place".  We can't have it both ways.

And who has suggested otherwise?

I don't give a damn whether many, few or none of them get in.  I personally
believe that few of them will, that's all.  But the words that go in are the
words that satisfy my criteria.

> [LT]

>> Sure.  But how can I tell that a particular form is rare unless I first
>> determine what the common forms are?

> By contrasting them explicitly, as just pointed out.

Contrasting them *with what*?

> [LT]

>> But what I'm trying to do is precisely to identify the damn
>> strata in the first place.

> Again, best done by including them in the data set,
> and learning how to mark them as belonging to different strata,
> gradually with increasing accuracy.

Poppycock, I'm afraid.  Lloyd, I am afraid you have suggested no procedure at
all for distinguishing strata.  Go ahead: put in all the words you like.
Put in every word in a large Basque dictionary, if you like.

Then what?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

> Larry Trask should use whatever sequence of investigations
> he is most comfortable with.  But he should also be careful
> that he does not allow the order of his investigating various
> strata, an order of his own choosing, not a property inherent
> to the language itself, to bias his conclusions.
> That is, in part, what we have been discussing.

> Trask wants to draw firm conclusions from his initial steps
> with his initially selected strata of the vocabulary,
> and it appears he would not be eager to change those conclusions
> from the later results of investigating other strata.

>> I have also explained that, in addition, I would prefer to exclude
>> obvious nursery words and obvious imitative words at the outset, for
>> excellent reasons.  But I don't mind if others prefer not to do this.
>> It isn't going to make much difference anyway, since very few of these
>> words will satisfy my primary criteria.

> Why should the "primary" criteria be systematically selective of
> one stratum of NATIVE vocabulary against another stratum of NATIVE
> vocabulary.  Should that not be considered a defect in criteria
> which are claimed to be ideal for identifying the best candidates
> for native and ancient vocabulary?

> Rather, the criteria should be advertised for what they then are,
> criteria for identifying ONE stratum WITHIN the native and ancient
> vocabulary, a stratum excluding nursery and expressive words
> (and excluding vocabulary in those semantic domains and
> in those subject matters not dealt with in earliest documents,
> as discussed in another message).

> If the criteria are stated fully explicitly for what they are,
> then the conclusions drawn from them will have their
> inherent limitations made more explicit.
> That will be a courteous service to those who might want
> to use the results.  It of course means the results are less
> sweeping or definitive.  Such are the good consequences
> of being clear and open about what one is doing.

> I will be very glad if it turns out that we are getting somewhat closer.

> Sincerely,
> Lloyd Anderson
> Ecological Linguistics

-- End original message --


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sat Oct 16 16:32:26 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 17:32:26 +0100
Subject: Misrepresenting others' views
Message-ID: <SAT.16.OCT.1999.173226.0100.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

ECOLING at aol.com writes:

> Larry Trask continues to avoid the basic statement of the paradox,
> to muddy the waters with red herrings.
>
> And he continues to knowingly misrepresent others' views.

No; I do not.

Lloyd, I take very considerable offense at being accused of deliberate
misrepresentation.  This, to my mind, is just about the gravest charge that can
be laid against any scholar.

When taking issue with you or anybody else, I take the greatest care to present
your case as accurately as I can.  In your case, that has proved difficult,
because not infrequently I find that your words make little or no sense to me.
But I have never knowingly misrepresented you, and I think you should be
ashamed of yourself for asserting such a thing.

> No one has said that linguists do not normally think at all of any factors
> beyond mutual intelligibility.  So attributing it to one's opponents in a
> discussion is a serious misrepresentation.  (Nor has anyone said they
> do not normally think of other factors when creating a serious definition.
> They may choose a definition which does not incorporate every detail
> of which they are fully aware.)
> This misrepresentation is however consistent with
> what Larry Trask repeatedly does.  (See further below.)

Lloyd, look at your earlier postings.  You have repeatedly brandished mutual
intelligibility as the sole or principal criterion used by linguists.  You have
called this a "highly technical definition", to be contrasted with other
possible definitions.  You have suggested strongly that the man in the street
normally uses a much wider range of criteria in identifying languages than do
linguists.  And you have constantly cited a passage from Lyle Campbell's book,
extracted it out of its context, and brandished it explicitly as though it were
Campbell's own attempt at a universal definition -- which it is not.  Moreover,
you have done this even though you have apparently not read the book, and even
though you apparently do not understand what Campbell is trying to do, or why.
Several respondents, including me, have pulled you up sharply on the list for
this piece of misbehavior.

And you are accusing me of deliberate misrepresentation?

> Saying that many linguists commonly use a definition of distinct
> languages referring in some way to "mutual intelligibility"
> in no way implies that they are in any sense unaware of other factors
> which would enter into a refined definition.

Then why did you never admit this in your several postings?

You kept calling mutual intelligibility a "highly technical definition".
Now we are to understand that, by this phrase, you meant something that falls
considerably short of a "refined definition" -- whatever that might be.
Is that it?

See what I mean when I tell you I have trouble understanding what you write?

> Nor do they or we need to be lectured about mutual intelligibility
> being a gradient phenomenon (70% or etc.) as Larry Trask does.
> We are all quite aware of that, thank you very much.

Then why did you show no awareness of it while claiming that mutual
intelligibility was a highly technical definition and the one normally used by
linguists?

> NOR does it imply that such a simple definition is used only for children
> nor that it is "not a serious definition", as Trask has attempted to argue.

Nonsense.  I have said no such thing.  You are putting words into my mouth.

What I have said is this:

Mutual intelligibility is not the sole or usual criterion invoked by linguists
for identifying language boundaries.  It is only one of many.  It is not even a
very good criterion, but it is the one we must fall back on, as best we can,
when nothing else is available.

Find me a passage in one of my earlier postings in which I assert that mutual
intelligibility is suitable only for children.  And find me a passage in which
I assert, in so many words (you have used quotation marks) that mutual
intelligibility is "not a serious criterion".  Do it quickly.

If you can't do it, would you like to ponder the force of your phrase
"knowingly misrepresent[ing] others' views"? ;-)

> Lyle Campbell (whom Larry Trask professes to admire) uses exactly
> that definition in his book *American Indian Languages*
> which many consider a definitive reference work on the current
> status of knowledge of genetic relations in this field.

I think Lloyd's use of Campbell's book has already been dealt with more than
adequately.

> These are all red herrings.  Trask simply refuses to deal with
> the paradox raised.  He clearly does not like the obvious conclusion.

Sorry, but I have seen no paradox.  As I have pointed out several times,
publicly and privately, if you insist on claiming that "same language" and
"different language" constitute coherent, principled and definable notions,
then you will only fall into confusion and absurdity.  As indeed I believe
Lloyd has done here.

> As pointed out previously, the conclusion almost certainly stands
> EVEN IF one changes the definition to suit him, AS LONG AS
> the definition of "same" vs. "different" language does not preclude
> that some dialects of a language can change substantially so that
> (under one's favorite definition) they count as a distinct language,
> while other dialects can in the same time span change so little that
> one is more comfortable treating them as still the same language.
> The only way to avoid this appears (so far) to be a definition which
> circularly prevents the paradox by  defining ANY CHANGE HOWEVER
> SMALL as meaning we no longer have the "same language".
> This certainly does violence to any normal definition of
> same vs. different language (see also the next paragraph).

There is no "normal definition".  The relation "is the same language as" cannot
be given rigorous content.

> (Of course, saying there is no such thing as same vs. different
> language also evades it.  But that is a perversion of the English
> language, and a denial of normal usage among both linguists
> and lay people.

Aha!  Exactly.  Lloyd is taking his understanding of "normal usage" among both
linguists and laymen, and he's trying to reify it into something with rigorous
content, so that he can deduce consequences by rigorous logic.  Can't be done,
Lloyd.

> In a most recent message, Trask affirms this is his
> position, but then fails to admit that he should not have pretended
> to be answering the paradox with his many other red herrings,
> which appear relevant to the statement of the paradox only if one DOES
> admit that the notions of same vs. different language mean something.
> Because without that, the statement of the paradox means nothing
> and so should not be under discussion at all.)

Lloyd, this last sentence sums up my position magnificently.
That's just what I've been trying to say.

> On Trask's continued attmempts to discredit others:

Gee whiz, Lloyd -- you've really got it in for me, haven't you?
While you're at it, would you also like to blame me for corrupting the nation's
youth, a la Pat Ryan, or for the Reichstag fire?  ;-)

>>> Unless of course the writer literally means as he writes
>>> that mutual intelligibility is "one of many factors which may help to
>>> determine whether varieties are best regarded as two languages
>>> or as a single language".  Note the "one of", in which case the
>>> response should have been not "NO, WRONG", but
>>> "YES, WITH ADDITIONAL SPECIFICATIONS".

[LT]

>> Eh?  I say it's one of many factors, and you complain that I am overlooking
>> other factors?  What does this mean?

> Mr. Trask should have asked first, if he did not know what it means.

So your obscurity is my fault, because I failed to ask you for clarification
before replying to your public posting?  I see.  Anything else you'd like to
lay on my shoulders before we continue?

Actually, I couldn't have burned the Reichstag, because my mother had only just
turned 15 at the time, and she wouldn't even meet my father for another seven
years.  As for corrupting the nation's youth, well, most of the youth I recall
attempting to corrupt already seemed to know more about it than I did. ;-)

> As I have pointed out to him elsewhere, it means that he should not always
> try to find fault with the expressions of others' views, by saying they are
> wrong, then giving his own version which includes their views as part.  That
> is both rude and not entirely honest (at least I would consider myself
> dishonest if I did that).  Rather he should agree with his interlocutors as
> far as he can, and say he accepts their views as a PART of his own when he in
> fact does (as in this case he clearly did), and say that he needs to add some
> refinements or modifications before he can agree fully.
> It's an attitude and politeness problem, and also one of misrepresentation.

No, Lloyd.

The problem here is that, insofar as I can understand your position at all, I
disagree with it *fundamentally*.  Your entire case appears to me to rest upon
postulates which I reject as false or incoherent.  That's what I've been trying
to say.

> As to other misrepresentations, Trask in the list paraphrased here
> implies he disagrees with others of us on a long list of items.

> Trask says he does *not* believe that mutual intelligibility is *the*
> criterion
>      for setting up language boundaries.
> He says he does *not* believe that it is the primary or sole criterion
>      used by linguists in general.
> He says he does *not* believe that it constitutes a "serious technical
> definition".

> He says he does *not* believe that it can be applied in a principled way.

> He says he does *not* believe that the man in the street has a better
>      conception of language boundaries than professional linguists do.
> He says he does  *not* believe that individual languages just exist
>      as discrete entities "out there".
> He says he does *not* believe that the question "Are A and B the
>      same language or different languages?" is generally meaningful
>      or capable of being answered in a principled way.
> He says he does *not* believe that a language can remain unchanged over time.

> And Trask says he is afraid that this cumulation of disagreements
>      doesn't seem to leave him many points of contact with me.

> As has been apparent from his many communications, Mr. Trask
>      repeatedly tries to paint others as having the views listed above,
>      and similar ones.

> Every one of these is a misrepresentation, and Mr. Trask has been
> repeatedly informed of this fact.  So it is a deliberate misrepresentation.

Interesting.

Lloyd cites a series of beliefs which he imputes to me -- correctly, as it
happens, though I'm not at all sure that I've made all these points on the
list.

He now states the following: "Every one of these is a misrepresentation".

Lloyd, tell me: how the hell can my own assertions of my own beliefs constitute
a set of misrepresentations?

This discussion is becoming surreal.

Oops.  Gotta go, or my wife will have my ass.  Back later, if and when I have
the time.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From swheeler at richmond.edu  Sat Oct 16 18:25:07 1999
From: swheeler at richmond.edu (Stuart Wheeler)
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 14:25:07 -0400
Subject: Greater Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite Language Family
Message-ID: <SAT.16.OCT.1999.142507.0400.>

I apologize for a second posting.  But in my original message announcing the
University of Richmond Colloquium: "Greater Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite
Language Family," I inadvertently gave the wrong title for Prof. Colin
Renfrew's opening lecture.  The title should be "IndoEuropean Origins:  The
Case for Anatolia."  see http://hermes.richmond.edu/anatolia.

Stuart Wheeler


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sun Oct 17 03:15:13 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 23:15:13 EDT
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
Message-ID: <SAT.16.OCT.1999.231513.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/15/99 12:23:37 AM, Sean Crist wrote:

<<In an earlier post, I suggested that the speakers of Greek entered Greece
around 2100-1900 BCE.  Steven Long suggested that the SPEAKERS of Greek could
have been in Greece as early as 7000 BCE, and cites Renfrew as a source.>>
(caps mine)

Actually what I wrote was:
<<Based on the [archaeological] evidence above, there is NOTHING TO PRECLUDE
the conjecture that "Greeks were in Greece" during or even before the
Neolithic.  If one connects PIE with the first appearance of agriculture (a
la Renfrew), then that could move the date of "proto-Greek" OR ITS ANCESTORS
being in mainland Greece back towards 7000BC.>>

My first point of course was that there was no evidence of material culture
to PRECLUDE Greek, proto-Greek or IE speakers from being in Greece before the
dates Crist gave (2100-1900 BCE).  Crist referred to material evidence that
is apparently not there.

My second point was that IF you follow Renfrew, the material evidence of the
spread of neolithic agriculturalism might date essentially the same people
speaking an ancestor language of Greek as far back as 7000 BC.  This is NOT
inconsistent with the archaeological evidence, BTW.  And that is a VERY
IMPORTANT POINT.

Colin Renfrew's Archaeology and Language - given its date - is a formidable
piece precisely because it sticks with the hard evidence and appraises it
objectively.  And though I admire Mallory's In Search of... very much, it
should be said that Mallory's summaries of Renfrew's arguments are not
complete.  I'll try to point to certain items specifically in a later post.

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.

With regard to Renfrew's approach, Crist writes the following:
<<...the introduction of the agricultural cultural complex thru Europe is the
result of a population movement from Anatolia to the Balkans during the 7th
millenium BCE (which Renfrew accepts).  We're also forced to say that the
spread of the Indo-European languages implies a population movement.
Renfrew's response is to try to collapse these two migrations into one, thus
keeping the number of migrations to a minimum.>>

Actually, there are a better reason given by Renfrew for equating the spread
of neolithic agriculturalism with the spread of Proto-IndoEuropean.  Not the
least of which is the extent of IE dispersal at those periods in time when
ACTUAL DOCUMENTABLE EVIDENCE of language becomes available.

I once tried to find holes in the Neolithic Hypothesis on this list based on
the archaeological evidence.  Miguel Carrasquer Vidal did a darn good job of
presenting the case in a thread called appropriately "the Neolithic
Hypothesis" that may be preserved in the archives.  The strength of his
explanations is that he does know the archaeological evidence as well as the
linguistic.

Sean Crist goes on to write re Renfrew's theory:
<<Unfortunately, this solution cannot be made to work without ignoring a
huge amount of evidence.>>

I'm not sure what "huge amount of evidence" Sean is referring to.

Crist wrote:
<<An archaeologist here at Penn told me that he
was very "annoyed" at Renfrew for having put forward this view, and said
that if anyone with less than Renfrew's prestige had put it forward, it
simply would have been ignored as not worthy of consideration.>>

It's funny how much worse ideas can get through based on "prestige."  One
particular example comes to mind.

If there were any reason for archaeologists to be "annoyed" it would probably
be because they are becoming wary of conclusions many beginning to take the
position the evidence they are collecting to be particulary probative of
ethnic or linguistic conclusions in general.  Especially because of recent
accusations of allowing their work to support cultural bias.

In response to my request for an evaluation of another item that has been
discussed on this list, one rather eminent practioner simply wrote back to me:

<<Archeologist have become increasingly unhappy using
terms based upon language for labeling cultures which are
prehistoric--ie the culture has left no written documents upon which a
historican can exercise analysis. With rare exceptions, physical artefacts do
not include evidence about the language used by those who left the artefacts
recovered.>>

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sun Oct 17 03:36:19 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 23:36:19 EDT
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
Message-ID: <SAT.16.OCT.1999.233619.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/15/99 7:43:37 AM, sarima at ix.netcom.com wrote:

<<I sometimes think the critics of linguistic archaeology make too much of
this sort of continuity.  In a mixing of cultures in which one language
eventually displaces another, *naturally* many aspects of the culture of the
"losing" language will persist afterwards.>>

It's not a criticism of "linguistic archaeology" or "paleolinguistics".  It's
simply that material remains speak for themselves.  If you have "mixed
cultures", one can make any linguistic conclusions one feels appropriate.
That doesn't change the hard evidence and the fact that it may not endorse
any particular conclusion about the languages being spoken.

sarima at ix.netcom.com also wrote:
<<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
...".>>

And that is exactly the case.  If you are saying that material culture has
remained, than what would you expect him to report?  ANYTHING else would be
INCORRECT.

The point you've made is that the material culture can sometimes be
independent of language change - which is exactly what the problem is in
expecting that archaeological evidence can be used to support  e.g., the
presence or absence of Greek being spoken in parts or all of Greece in
prehistoric times.  Which is why I wrote ALTHOUGH THIS MIGRATION (from
Anatolia) MAY HAVE INTRODUCED GREEK INTO GREECE, THERE IS NO REAL
[archaeological] EVIDENCE TO JUSTIFY EVEN THIS CONCLUSION.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sun Oct 17 04:23:15 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 00:23:15 EDT
Subject: "Horse" in Native American Languages
Message-ID: <SUN.17.OCT.1999.002315.EDT.>

In connection with the posts below, I have a question for the list.  Any help
would be greatly appreciated:

Q: What word/words were used to refer to "horses" among the various Native
American languages/dialects after those animals were introduced by Europeans?
 Were the names unique to the various languages or did the same words cross
language borders?  Were they adaptions of European words or "home grown?"
Again, any help will be greatly appreciated.

In a message dated 10/15/99 7:43:37 AM, sarima at ix.netcom.com wrote:

<<Except that Renfrew can only reach this "conclusion" by ignoring many facts
about PIE that are quite secure (e.g. the universality of *ekwos, and the
original distinction between wlkwos and kuoon) and which are inconsistent
with what is known about early Neolithic culture (no domesticated equids and
no domesticated dog).>>

I do not know about "quite secure."  In fact, Renfrew did address this
general issue in terms of both convergence and technical innovations.  (We
would not date a proto-language of English and Russian for example based on
the fact that "harddrive" sometimes appears identically in both languages.)

Another important point is that "semantics" come creeping into the *ekwos
analysis.  "No DOMESTICTED equids" - for example - seems to disregard the
fact that horse bones are common in the debris of pre-neolithic sites in
Greece.  It seems they were the number one source of meat.  Was there a
different word for earlier wild horses versus later domesticates?  Are we
also possibly being presumptive that *ekwos was literally a horse rather than
something like a particular kind of horse - true horses being only one kind
of horse-like animal that appears in the archaeological evidence.

I am not too sure about what the story is with <<the original distinction
between wlkwos and kuoon>> but much the same questions might arise if
"hounds," "curs" and "dogs" actually always represented dogs of different
purposes rather than dogs in general.  Simple equivalencies over the course
of thousands of years I suspect always carry a high measure of uncertainty.

Regards,
Steve Long


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sun Oct 17 13:13:26 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 14:13:26 +0100
Subject: excluding data
Message-ID: <SUN.17.OCT.1999.141326.0100.>

ECOLING at aol.com writes:

[LT: on proposed alternatives to my criteria]

>> Are you ever going to answer these questions?

>  Larry has repeatedly made the statement above.
>  It is a red herring, avoiding dealing with the poins which WERE raised.

It is not a red herring.  I have put my criteria on the table with considerable
explicitness.  Lloyd and others have repeatedly implied that there is, or might
be, something wrong with my criteria.  I have therefore asked for alternative
criteria.  I have seen none, except for Lloyd's suggestion that 1700 is a
better cutoff date than 1600 and his insistence that sound-symbolic words
should be self-consciously added to the list according to no specified
criteria.  I have agreed that the first is possible, but dismissed the second
as lacking in specifics and intrinsically circular.

>  I have repeatedly answered these questions.
>  I have done so here yet again.

Nope.  I have yet to see a set of fully explicit criteria for choosing, in a
principled manner, how words should be included or excluded.

>  Partly the answer is fewer exclusions, this will give better results
>  because of earlier awareness of the full range of native and
>  ancient vocabulary.

No.  "Fewer exclusions" is not in the least specific.  What criteria should be
invoked to determine inclusion or exclusion?

>  Anything more specific has to refer to specifics which
>  have been given elsewhere, some of them here yet again.

Sorry, but I don't recall seeing any further specifics.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sun Oct 17 13:35:19 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 14:35:19 +0100
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
Message-ID: <SUN.17.OCT.1999.143519.0100.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Sean Crist writes:

>  With all of this background in mind, we can see the general ideological
>  framework which is leading Renfrew to seek the kind of solution which he
>  has done.  Renfrew wants to keep to an absolute minimum the number of
>  prehistoric migrations which we have to posit.  He'd probably prefer that
>  we not need to posit _any_ prehistoric migrations, but even Renfrew would
>  surely concede that the spread of a language over a large area implies a
>  population movement.

Actually, he doesn't, and he's quite explicit about it.

Renfrew allows language spread by wholesale population movement in just two
circumstances: the first settlement of previously uninhabited areas, and spread
by elite dominance.  Otherwise, he sees language spread as proceeding by
diffusion across established populations along with the spread of technology
and culture.  In particular, he sees the spread of IE as having proceeded in
this way.

>  Technology in agriculture, pottery, metallurgy, etc.
>  can plausibly spread by diffusion without a large-scale movement of
>  populations; but language (other than loan words) does not diffuse this
>  way.  Verb conjugations, etc. only spread when speakers move.

This is precisely the position which Renfrew attacks.  And, to be fair, it is
not difficult to point to cases in which prestige languages have spread,
displacing earlier languages, without massive population movements.

>  So what Renfrew is trying to do is kill two birds with one stone.  Suppose
>  we assume that the introduction of the agricultural cultural complex thru
>  Europe is the result of a population movement from Anatolia to the Balkans
>  during the 7th millenium BCE (which Renfrew accepts).  We're also forced
>  to say that the spread of the Indo-European languages implies a population
>  movement.  Renfrew's response is to try to collapse these two migrations
>  into one, thus keeping the number of migrations to a minimum.  If you're
>  assuming that it's a bad thing to posit prehistoric migrations, this is
>  the sort of solution you'd like to try for.

I think it's rather that Renfrew prefers to posit a minimum of population
movement and a maximum of diffusion.

>  Unfortunately, this solution cannot be made to work without ignoring a
>  huge amount of evidence.  An archaeologist here at Penn told me that he
>  was very "annoyed" at Renfrew for having put forward this view, and said
>  that if anyone with less than Renfrew's prestige had put it forward, it
>  simply would have been ignored as not worthy of consideration.  But
>  Renfrew's earlier contributions (i.e. to the notion of process
>  archaeology, to C-14 recalibrations, etc.) are so well respected that he
>  has to be answered.  He has been answered indeed.
>
>  Mallory (p. 164 ff.) discusses the whole issue at some length, and makes
>  the following arguments:
>
>  -Renfrew proposes that Anatolia is the homeland of the Indo-Europeans.  If
>  so, it is very odd the Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic existed in the midst of
>  languages (Hattic and Hurrian) which are not only not Indo-European but
>  which bear no typological resemblance to Indo-European. If there were any
>  language family which we might guess to be a sister of Indo-European, it
>  would be Finno-Ugric, which would argue for a Ukrainian homeland, not an
>  Anatolian one.

Well, as Mallory himself has pointed out at length, mainly in his article in
the first Blench and Spriggs volume, there are very many criteria which may be,
and have been, invoked in arguing for the location of a linguistic homeland --
some of them even mutually incompatible.  For an Anatolian homeland, the
presence of non-IE languages in Anatolia violates just one of these proposed
criteria, the exclusion principle.  But Anatolia is arguably supported by a
different principle, the linguistic relationship principle.

>  -There is clearly a substantial non-Indo-European substrate in Greek, both
>  in place names and in loan words.  This would be a bit surprising if
>  Indo-European speakers had been in the area since the beginning of the
>  Neolithic.

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.

>  -Most importantly, placing the initial dispersion of the Indo-Europeans at
>  the beginning of the Neolithic around 6500 BCE in entirely incompatible
>  with the reconstructed Indo-European vocabulary.  Words such as yoke,
>  wheel, etc. are reconstructed for PIE, but this technology is not attested
>  until much, much later- namely, not much after 4000-3500 BCE, which is the
>  date which Mallory and others put forward as the final date of IE
>  linguistic unity.

This is exactly the point which troubles me the most.  But Renfrew has in fact
met it head on in his latest paper on the issue, presented at a symposium in
Cambridge last summer and due to be published in the proceedings early next
year.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sun Oct 17 13:37:49 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 14:37:49 +0100
Subject: Campbell's def. of "language"
Message-ID: <SUN.17.OCT.1999.143749.0100.>

Herb Stahlke writes:

[on Campbell's book]

>  By the way, unlike Larry, I think it was, I've found Campbell's intro very
>  well done,

No; it wasn't me.  I haven't uttered a single hard word about Campbell's book,
on this list or elsewhere.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sun Oct 17 13:49:56 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 14:49:56 +0100
Subject: PIE vs. Proto-Language
Message-ID: <SUN.17.OCT.1999.144956.0100.>

X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>  Let me just posit a slightly different scenario.  That the first change that
>  happened that moved early primates towards homo was the ability to make
>  complex sounds.  One of the core understandings of evolutionary theory is
>  that all adaptation is local and limited in time.
>  So this adaption would have had a very local and limited advantage - say, in
>  the ability to hunt communally or to signal with precision where food or
>  danger was on an ad hoc basis.

>  But with the ability to make more complex sounds would have come a number of
>  additional features that became more long term.

Clarification, please: what is meant here by "complex sounds"?

It is not obvious to me that the sounds produced by human vocal tracts are more
complex than the sounds produced by other creatures -- acoustically more
complex, I mean.  I would suggest rather that our sounds are more numerous than
those of other creatures, and that, crucially, he have the more-or-less unique
ability to combine sequences of meaningless sounds into meaningful units.
Other creatures generally operate on the principle of 'one-sound-one-meaning',
but we don't.

And it is the emergence of this duality of patterning that seems to me to
require an explanation.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sun Oct 17 14:04:14 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 15:04:14 +0100
Subject: Contributions by Steve Long
Message-ID: <SUN.17.OCT.1999.150414.0100.>

Stanley Friesen writes:

>>> This actually accords with what one book on linguistic change suggested is
>>> the *main* cause of language change: a social desire to differentiate one's
>>> group from some other group.  ...

[LT]

>> I don't know of any book or article which makes such a strong claim as this,
>> and I must confess I find it implausible.  But there *has* been some recent
>> work showing that this desire for linguistic distance has been a major
>> factor in certain cases.

> I may have slightly overstated (without the actual book, I cannot get a
> quote: all I know is the source of this is certainly NOT Hock's book).

> But I am fairly certain that the book at least cast doubt on the importance
> of "mis-hearing" by children in language change.  So, I think saying the
> author asserts that it is the most important cause of change is reasonable.

The idea that all, most or much language change results from imperfect learning
by children has very occasionally been defended, but few linguists, I think,
take it seriously: there is just too much evidence against it.

At the same time, I know of nobody who is currently defending the claim that
all or nearly all language change results from a desire for linguistic
distance.  Of course, we know that such a desire can be important, and we have
data on a number of cases in which it has clearly been a major factor.  But
*all* language change?  Who is defending such a view?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sun Oct 17 14:13:22 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 15:13:22 +0100
Subject: Basque 'sei'
Message-ID: <SUN.17.OCT.1999.151322.0100.>

Max Wheeler writes:

> We shouldn't assume, without looking at the evidence, that the current
> distribution of laminal versus apical /s/ phonemes in Europe can be projected
> way back into the past.

Indeed.  Those who don't know it might like to look at the following article,
which in fact argues for a rather complex distribution of apical and laminal
sibilants in several European languages in the medieval period, including a
contrast between the two in some of them:

Martin Joos (1952), 'The medieval sibilants', Language 28: 222-231.  Reprinted
in M. Joos (ed.) (1957), Readings in Linguistics I, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, pp. 372-378.  In an appendix to the reprinted version, Joos
notes the existence of a laminal/apical contrast in Basque, and wonders if this
might represent a preservation of a former European areal feature.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sun Oct 17 15:23:57 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 16:23:57 +0100
Subject: Basque 'sei'
Message-ID: <SUN.17.OCT.1999.162357.0100.>

Roz Frank writes:

> Four items.

> 1) Larry Trask has brought into play what appears to be compelling toponymic
> evidence in order to refute the claim that <sei> might have been copied into
> Euskera from Gascon. Yet Seguy (1951) whose research is discussed in Ruffie
> and Bernard (1976) indicates that the final element of such the place names
> was rendered variously as <-os>, <-osse>, <-ons> <-ost> and <-oz>. If one
> assumes that the original suffixing element was in all cases <-otz> "cold"
> (which is not entirely clear), there seems to be a certain ambivalence
> concerning which sibilant was chosen to represent the original Basque suffix
> in Gascon. The relevant map with the isoglosses is reproduced in Trask 1996:
> 41). It also indicates attestations of corresponding Aragonese endings in
> <ues> and <ueste>.

Yes.  If this toponymic ending is of Aquitanian/Basque origin, then the
presence of the single Romance sibilant in any given area is readily
understandable.  There is indeed reason to suspect an Aquitanian origin, given
the distribution of the ending, but Basque <hotz> 'cold' doesn't look a good
bet, since it's hard to see why this should recur in dozens of toponyms.

> 2) Larry Trask hasn't mentioned (with respect to this item) that in Euskera,
> /z/ regularly undergoes palatalization, e.g., in the case of the pronoun <zu>
> "you" which commonly becomes <xu> (palatalized) in northern dialects, and
> that Azkue and others write or represent that sound as <s> with a "tilde."
> Furthermore, palatalization of sibilants in Basque creates a situation in
> which both the letter <z> and the letter <s> can become conflated and
> represented by the same letter, e.g., as <s> although at times with a "tilde"
> (cf. the dozens of examples of this in Azkue's dictionary).

Yes; palatalization occurs in various circumstances in Basque.  But, in native
words other than expressive formations, it's always secondary.

> Among the commonplace palatalizations in northern dialects we have the case
> of <sei> (Azkue II: 247).  This permutation is so common in other dialects of
> Euskera that when I learned Basque, primarily through contacts with native
> speakers of the language from Goierri in Gipuzkoa (a southern dialect), I
> thought that it always had a palatalized sibilant.

The variant <xei> for <sei> is indeed found in parts of Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa.
But, as usual, this palatalized variant is secondary.  The textual evidence
shows clearly that <sei> is the original form, and hence the form to be
considered.

> 3) Furthermore, in reference to whether <sei> was copied at some time in the
> past from some non-Basque language, one could construct the following
> argument.  In the case of the numbers 5, 7, 8 and 9, if one were to assume
> that they were all indigenous to Euskera (that none of them are "loans" not
> even ancient ones, (cf. Miguel C.'s contribution suggesting the contrary) we
> would find that we could argue that earlier all of them ended in a consonant
> cluster that had /z/ as an element: <bortz> (*<bortzi> 5, <zazpi> (*<zatzi>
> or *<zaptzi>) 7, <zortzi> 8, and <bederatzi> 9. Such a reconstruction would
> make <sei> an anomaly in the series and, hence, suggest that it was copied
> from some non-Basque language, e.g., perhaps an IE language, which was in
> contact with it at some time in the past.

I think this is going too far.  Both <z> and <s> are frequent in Basque, with
the first being more frequent, and either may occur in any arbitrary word.  The
occurrence of numeral-names with both does not strike me as a problem to be
explained, nor does the greater frequency here of the laminal, which is more
frequent generally in the language.

> The past 2500 years would have brought it into close contact with Celtic,
> Latin/Romance, Germanic (Visogoths) speaking peoples. As a result, there
> would have been a number of opportunities for this IE item to have entered
> the language.

But no plausible IE source has been identified.  Latin and Romance, the usual
sources of loans into Basque, appear to provide no plausible sources.  I don't
know much about Celtic here, but I've never seen a proposed Celtic origin.
Germanic, like Romance, retains a final sibilant in the word for 'six', and
anyway it's not even clear that the Visigoths were still speaking Gothic when
they settled in Spain.  You have to come up with a specific proposal involving
a specific language.

Finally, nobody is suggesting a non-native origin for the Basque names of the
numbers above 'six', so a borrowing of 'six' alone would be isolated and
mysterious.

> 4) I believe that Larry Trast argued that in the case of words copied
> (early?)  from Latin and ending in <x> (sorry I can't find the exact email),
> the Basque word never drops the final sibilant complex, i.e., it is copied
> into Euskera as /tz/ (again forgive me if I"m misquoting). However, there
> would seem to be a few words that don't follow this rule, e.g., Basque
> <trebe> which I was once told comes from Latin <trebax>. Are there others?

It is hard not to see a connection between Basque <trebe> 'adroit, skilful,
expert', and also 'cunning', and the more-or-less synonymous Latin <trebax>.
But the Basque word can't possibly derive directly from <trebax>.

First, Latin loans into Basque almost invariably enter in the accusative, not
in the nominative, and the Latin accusative <trebacem> doesn't end in a
sibilant.

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>.

Actually, Basque <trebe> is a bit of a puzzle.  The Latin word, itself of Greek
origin, was apparently uncommon, and it appears to have left few traces in
Romance.  The unreliable Lhande notes a supposedly synonymous <treba> ~ <treva>
in unspecified varieties of Romance, but the major Romance sources at my
disposal recognize no such word.  Quite possibly the Basque word is borrowed
from an obscure Romance continuation of the Latin word, but it can't be
borrowed from Latin.

> Conclusion: things are somewhat more complicated than they might appear to be
> at first glance.

True.  But that doesn't mean we can't work out a good deal of the truth.

> Although I don't believe we are any closer to a definitive solution to the
> problem, there does seem to be evidence that could be mustered for several
> different scenarios. The four points above are meant only to provide a bit of
> additional data for the analysis, not necessarily to suppport one position or
> another.  I leave it to the experts to figure out whether any of the above
> information helps one cause over the other.

Well, my own view is that there exists absolutely no reason for seeing Basque
<sei> as anything other than native and ancient -- that is, as going back at
least to Pre-Basque.  The word is in no way unusual or problematic within
Basque.  Whether, as Miguel C V suggests, the Basque word itself goes back
still further to a very ancient pan-Afro-Eurasianism, I can't say.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From Odegard at means.net  Sun Oct 17 10:57:10 1999
From: Odegard at means.net (Mark Odegard <Odegard@means.net>)
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 10:51:10 -6
Subject: The last native speaker of Latin.
Message-ID: <SUN.17.OCT.1999.105110.6.>

If one wants a candidate for the 'last native-speaker of Latin', I
suggest Isidore of Seville, (c. 560-636).

Of his Latin, it is said:

"His style, though simple and lucid, cannot be said to be
classical. It discloses most of the imperfections peculiar to all
ages of transition. It particularly reveals a growing Visigothic
influence. Arevalo counts in all Isidore's writing 1640 Spanish
words."

http://www.knight.org/advent/cathen/08186a.htm

By comparison, Jerome is about c. 342-420.

There is a movement to have Isidore named Patron Saint of
the Internet.

--
Mark Odegard   mailto:odegard at means.net


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Mon Oct 18 05:20:53 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 01:20:53 EDT
Subject: the UPenn trees /PIE chronology
Message-ID: <MON.18.OCT.1999.012053.EDT.>

On Thu, 7 Oct 1999, Stanley Friesen (sarima at ix.netcom.com) wrote:

<<I question the assumption that the Anatolian languages necessarily split
off earlier than the others.  Given the linguistic and archaeological facts,
I suspect that the northern European languages, and probably Proto-Tocharian,
split off at least as early as Anatolian.  Thus I see an original three or
four-way split, not a simple bidding off of Anatolian...>>

Sean Crist replied (message dated 10/15/99 4:36:35 AM):
<<You must be new on this list; during August and September, the question of
the phylogeny of the IE languages was hashed over in great detail.  I'm
curious as to what linguistic and archaeological evidence you have in mind;
your claim is at odds with the work of Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor which I have
been discussing.  If you like, I can forward you some of the emails which I
sent out as a part of this dialog.>>

Just a couple of notes:

1. Whatever was "hashed over in great detail about the UPenn tree," there
wasn't much if anything that necessarily contradicts Mr. Friesen points.
Since the UPenn tree provides only "relative chronologies" there's nothing
that conflicts with Mr. Friesen's apparent point which might be that PIE
dispersed first and then "split up" into different languages or groups of
languages.

2. The "phylogeny" (more properly "trees") produced by the UPenn group are of
two different kinds -

One is the so-called "pure phylogeny" which does NOTHING but "measure of the
consistency of the historical linguist's linguistic judgements,..."  Note
that the measure is of "CONSISTENCY" not ACCURACY or VALIDITY.  What the
"pure phylogeny" does not do is say whether any theory (Ringe's or someone
else's) is correct or not.
As the web site that reports on this tree explains the methodology can be
used "to quantify the support for different evolutionary hypotheses."  What
it basically does is rearrange pre-selected data until it matches the
methodologist's notion of "consistent" groupings
of data - called "convexity" which essentially means nothing more than that
common PRE-SELECTED data should fall together in certain favored
sub-groupings.

(BTW, I'd strongly urge Mr. Friesen or anyone interested on the list to go to
website itself for a more through and accurate explanation of the method than
is available in any past postings on this list - pace Sean Crist.  The site
begins at http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~histling/home.html
If anyone has a problem opening or printing the papers - the files are
unfortunately in postscript form - let me know and I may be able to provide
you with Acrobat or text versions.)

3. The other "phylogeny" referred to on the website may reflect - I believe -
the point of view of Ringe rather than Warnow, who is a computer specialist.

Adjustments were made (it is not clear when) to the "IE" data which was ONLY
then processed.  There are all kinds of questions that can be raised about
the validity of these "directionality" corrections as well as to the basic
data itself.  I have now read the papers myself and asked a number of experts
to look them and I will be getting to those problems in a future post.

Suffice it to say, for the purposes of Mr. Freisen's points, that the tree
actually does no more than reflect Prof. Ringe's (et al.) positions on what
is appropriate data and what is not - and it does not reflect simple raw data
in any sense.  The processing does nothing more than provide an arrangement
of those judgments (about 350 pieces of "data" derived from various sources)
that is consistent in a certain graphical way.  Matters of pre-attested dates
are still entirely dependent NOT on the algorithm, but ON THE DATA which is
determined BEFORE any processing occured.  Most of this data - including the
"directionality" adjustments are NOT available to us, so we simply do not
know if they are speculative, valid or otherwise.

So with regard to Mr. Friesen's statement that he questions <<the assumption
that the Anatolian languages necessarily split off earlier than the others>>
I sincerely doubt whether the UPenn trees or our discussions of them give
here will enlighten him much.  If anything related to the trees might, it
would be Prof Ringe's explanation of why Mr. Friesen's position would or
would not be the case - since this explanation would be what is reflected a
priori in the trees.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Mon Oct 18 06:40:38 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 02:40:38 EDT
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
Message-ID: <MON.18.OCT.1999.024038.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/15/99 1:18:35 AM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu wrote:

<<The arrival of the Greeks may not have disrupted the local culture
in any great way e.g. ... or.... a continuous arrival of technologically less
advanced people whose language was adopted by the elite>>

Good point.  One archaeologist who was active in the area has described to me
what he would dig for to test what he calls the Greeks as "migrant workers"
hypothesis.  He's mentioned it on a list and got a consensus answer that a
truly transient population probably would leave no material remains that
could be correctly identified as separate from the culture that was "hosting"
them.

A separate issue is really whether our latest picture is now "favoring" a
different theory altogether of how Greek (the language) got to Greece.  The
evidence points only to a signficant "migration" from Anatolia, but does that
tell us anything about the language question?

With regard to your peaceful influx scenario - like the Lefkandi I migration
starting about 2500BC that seems to be the only clearly identifiable one of
the EH/early MH period - Herodotus says that the inhabitants of Attica were
all originally "Pelagasians" who voluntarily adopted the Greek language
because it was to their mercantile advantage (which is consistent with one of
Mallory's formulas for the spread of IE.)

Someone else brought up however that the situation might be analogous to the
Slavic invasions of the Balkans.  For a long time, it was commonly said that
the Balkans had been depopulated and the Slavs had merely moved in.  It was
only after the events were synced up properly with the Byzantine records that
it started becoming plain that the old towns and manufacturing facilities of
the Balkans were not abandoned, they were attacked and rather thoroughly
destroyed.  But apparently the invading "southern" Slavs used only
degradeable wooden utensils and imported or looted metal tools and
weapons,etc., - and very little ceramics or uniquely native metalwork - so
that a gap appears in the stratigraphy.

Prehistory would be stuck in such situations, because archaeology can only
recover what is recoverable.  So it's correct to say that "the absence of
evidence" - an important issue - is not always enough to preclude the fact
that an event like the Greek "northern" migration happened.  All we can say
is that the material evidence of it can't be identified.

Regards,
Steve Long


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Oct 18 08:22:46 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 09:22:46 +0100
Subject: Africa vs. Americas, Multilateral Comparison
Message-ID: <MON.18.OCT.1999.092246.0100.>

ECOLONG at aol.com writes:

>  For a more succesful future for historical linguistics in general,
>  as for any other field,
>  it is essential that we use issues which generate public excitement
>  and channel that interest in productive ways.

Well, I agree that we should try to keep the public aware of our findings, of
course.

But it's a sad fact that journalists, even on supposedly serious publications,
generally prefer sensational but ill-founded ideas to sober but unspectacular
work.

If you publish a book "proving" that Etruscan is Basque -- as somebody recently
did -- you get substantial and even drooling coverage in major newspapers.
If you then write to those newspapers explaining that they have reported garbage
as serious work, you get ignored.

>  Historical linguists shouldbe at the forefront of actively
>  exploring correlations between language, ethnicity, blood groups,
>  dentition types, DNA studies, and all other sources of information
>  which can give clues to the history of humanity.

Why?

Historical linguists have no competence in these other areas, and many of us
are skeptical that there exists anything there to be found.  Surely we are
better off sticking to what we do best, and merely making sure that our results
are publicly available.

Anyway, as usual, the sensational reports concerning languages, genes and teeth
have received a good deal of popular coverage, while the critiques advanced by
specialists in all the relevant fields have received rather less coverage.  It
is not so easy to popularize good work in the face of competition from shoddy
but eye-catching work.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au  Mon Oct 18 10:32:56 1999
From: jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au (Jon Patrick)
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 20:32:56 +1000
Subject: Excluding Basque data
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 30 Sep 1999 09:33:03 +0100."
 <Pine.GSO.4.03.9909300847200.25900-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <MON.18.OCT.1999.203256.1000.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

My Apologies to the list for reposnding rather late to this item. I have been
overwhelmed with classes.

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999 09:33:03 +0100 (BST) Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
wrote in repsonse to Lloyd Anderson,
a long message which I will deal with in only a few parts-

    On Sun, 26 Sep 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote:

    [on my statement that databases do not free us from choosing criteria]

    > It is very different,
    > because no "exclusion" of data need be a permanent exclusion,

    And who has ever suggested that any exclusions should be permanent?
    Certainly not me.  Read what I've written.

    > because different users can choose different criteria  for proceeding,
    > and because the same user can change his or her mind at different times
    > and choose different criteria for proceeding.
    > One does not have to be "right" on the first choice,
    > there are no serious consequences for making an initial error.

    But this is equally true regardless of the technology in use.
    Look: databases do not save you from the consequences of your decisions.
    They only allow you to investigate the consequences of making different
    decisions more rapidly than working on paper does.  Convenient, of
    course, but there is no point of principle here.

    > With a paper method in which one cannot go back and change one's mind,

    And who has ever suggested such an approach?

    > there is a truly excessive focus on being "right" the first time round.

    No, there isn't.  The emphasis is only on being *cautious* the first
    time round.  But how does a database permit us to throw such caution to
    the winds without fear of error?

    > And disastrous consequences if one is not.

    There are many ways of achieving disastrous consequences in scholarly
    work.  And I cannot see that a policy of massive inclusion is a better
    way of avoiding disaster than a policy of prudent exclusion.

The debate on the use of databases I feel doesn't get to the nub of the
matter. Larry is correct in that databases do not stop disasters nor ecuse one
for a lack of caution. However Lloyd I believe is correct from the operational
perspective. I think databases are important because they add two features
that are not readily available using pen and paper methods of analysis.
Firstly comprehensiveness and secondly transparency. The latter being
dependent on the former. I think Larry doesn't feel either are important
undoubtedly due to faith in his own integrity and that's his right.
The moment data is lodged into a database and then systematically analysed by
a method that is invariant on each data item we have a more reliable result
because all of us collectively can see the data and the results the method
produces (I assume there is public access to the database). This is not
available by a pen and paper method as the data and the methods are not as
readily visible or dispersible. So the difference is in terms of access by the
public (us) and accountability. I notice that Larry more often than others
tells one to go read the texts   when we don't understand him, whilst that is
valid at one level, it also a strategy that lowers the accountablity of an
argument because public access to it is more limtied.

    >>I flatly deny this, and I challenge you to back up your assertion.

    > Like Jon Patrick, I believe that Larry Trask's criteria MAY IN EFFECT
    > bias the results to favor hypotheses which he himself espouses.
    > This DOES NOT MEAN that he is consciously aware of this,
    > (nor that he is deliberately manipulating the data,
    > as he seems to have inferred he was being charged with).
    > Quite the contrary, it probably results from his being so convinced of
    > certain hypotheses that he can scarcely conceive of them not being
    > correct.
    > Others may find it easier to conceive of that
    > (as is so often true in research, nothing unusual here).

    This is no answer to my challenge.

    You assert that you personally believe that my criteria "may in effect"
    bias the findings.  But you have signally failed to explain how this
    result might come about.

    So tell me: how do my principal criteria of early attestation,
    widespread distribution, and absence from neighboring languages "have
    the effect" of biasing my results on phonological form?

Simply, it is possible that the words used to currently define the
phonological form of early euskara are drawn from words that already conform
to these criteria. Hence Larry's "beliefs" about the forms of early-euskara
will be vindicated by an analysis of words that conform to his criteria.
Alternatively it might be said he have chosen these criteria because they will
produce a word list that matches the "beliefs" he has already constructed
about early-euskara phonolgy, afterall he has  told us that  he has a pretty
good idea of what the results are.

As such a situation is a possibility then it is sensible to look at the merits
of the criteria of themselves.
I would comment
a. early attestation -it is known words were missed in early dictionaries and
documents
b. widespread distribution - it is known the lesser dialects (northern,
Roncevalles) provide important information on early euskara.
c. absence in neighbouring languages - open to interpretation/debate for some
words whether they are original or borrowed.

cheers
Jon
______________________________________________________________
The meaning of your communication is the response you get


From jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au  Mon Oct 18 10:55:34 1999
From: jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au (Jon Patrick)
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 20:55:34 +1000
Subject: Excluding data
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 30 Sep 1999 11:38:29 +0100."
 <Pine.GSO.4.03.9909301126150.25900-100000@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <MON.18.OCT.1999.205534.1000.>

    Date:       Thu, 30 Sep 1999 11:38:29 +0100 (BST)
    From:       Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>

    On Mon, 27 Sep 1999, Jon Patrick wrote:

    > I'm concerned that the current extent of the thesis on early Basque
    > phonology is already based on the subset of data restricted by your
    > non-phonological criteria.

    But how can this be so?  How can my non-phonological criteria for
    selection affect the phonological properties of the words selected?
    Please give me a reply of substance, and not just vague, dark hints that
    something or other sinister is going on.

No dark hints - it is entirely possible that the criteria have been selected
so that
they only admit words that will provide the answer that you "believe" is true.

    Further: what *alternative* criteria do you propose for identifying the
    Basque words which are most likely to be native and ancient?  I've
    already put my criteria on the table.  What are yours?

MY approach is defined by a method rather than by criteria and produces a
study wider and lengthier in scope. I believe that it is necessary to take the
Azkue list of monomorphemes and for each meaning (not word) determine which
can been shown to be borrowed. The residual represents the data set of native
basque words. Any further evidence of morphological devleopment would need to
be included in the database.  I also propose that the analysis of all meanings
needs to presented in a database that contains justification for each decision
of categorisation. Such a database then has to become a public piece of
evidence for others to process as they see fit.   Only then can issues such as
this or that criteria for limiting the dataset in analysis  be fairly
appraised, as only then would one scholar be able to deal with the SAME data
set as others and evaluate their own pet theories in a direct and publicly
accountable display. That is, we all could actually evaluate the effect of
your criteria per se, or in competition with any other criteria anyone cared
to produce.

    > This thesis is the basis of many of your
    > comments as immediately below and I muse over the question which
    > should come first, the rules that declare a word's form to be
    > "curious" or the systematic and rigourous analysis of all the words.

    My observation that a particular word has a "curious" form has
    absolutely nothing to do with whether it goes into my list or not.
    In my view, the words <ke> `smoke' and <mutur> `snout, muzzle' have very
    curious forms indeed, but they meet my criteria and so must go into my
    initial list, whether I like it or not.  Once I've chosen my criteria, I
    have to stick to them.

    When I observe that a given word has a "curious" form, that happens
    because I've already done a good deal of work on Pre-Basque phonology,
    and I already have a pretty clear idea of what's going to emerge when
    the whole thing is done -- though, as I've already said, I do expect to
    find a few surprises waiting for me.  But I never exclude a word merely
    because I judge it to have a "curious" form.

Larry, that's precisely the worry, that your criteria are excluding entirely
valid words. Whilst I understand they seem perfectly sensible to you, others
don't share the same view because they are excluding and people are concerned
that excluded words are never actually available for them to scrutinise the
validity of excluding them. Now you can tell us to go and look up the words
ourselves but that is now excluding not only those words but us also from the
process as we don't know what specific words you have excluded.
hence my proposal above -one starts by showing everyone the comprehensive list
and telling them why EACH item is excluded.

Jon
______________________________________________________________
The meaning of your communication is the response you get


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Oct 18 14:39:09 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 15:39:09 +0100
Subject: Change and What Remains
Message-ID: <MON.18.OCT.1999.153909.0100.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

[snip a quote from my textbook]

> You know full well what you yourself wrote in your textbook.  You can't with
> "the best will in the world" forget that you yourself drew a line at which
> point a language is no longer the same language: 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.)

> You can say that that quote was not meant for specialists, only for students.
> But you really CAN'T say you don't understand what it meant.  It meant that
> MUTUAL COMPREHENSIBILITY was the measure of when a language is no longer the
> same language.  If you find that an inadequate definition for
> "professionals", that's fine.

Let me clarify a bit.

When a language splits into daughters, there comes a time when we must finally
speak of distinct languages.  For example, I have no problem in regarding, say,
Portuguese and Romanian as distinct languages, even though they have a common
ancestor.

But one of my points on this list has been that the time when this occurs is
not, and cannot be, well defined.  That is, there was no moment when people
ceased to speak Latin and began to speak Portuguese.  And all of my objections
to various postings on this list have centered on this fact, and on related
facts.  All the points I have objected to, it seems to me, depend crucially
upon the assumption that such a moment exists, and that the notion of "same
language" can be given a precise and principled sense.  This I deny.

Nor does the passage in my book commit me to any view that mutual
comprehensibility is the sole or principal criterion for drawing language
boundaries.

> But please don't pretend that a language
> "changing enough" to be become a different language - ancestor or otherwise -
> is something you don't understand.

In the context in which this notion has featured recently on this list, I find
this notion incoherent -- as I hope I have made clear by now.

> It is precisely how you described Latin
> changing into other languages: "Within another couple of centuries, speakers
> of Latin in Spain, France, Italy... could no longer understand each
> other,...it no longer made much sense to apply a single name to this babel of
> regional varieties...."

Yes, but again this passage was written for beginning students.

> I wrote:
> <<The coexistence of ancestor with daughter language is obviously a separate
> question.>>

> Larry Trask replied:
> <<I don't see how.  A living language never remains identical from one
> generation to the next.>>

>  With the help of "the best will in the world" I'm sure you can "see how":

> There is no need for the ancestor to remain IDENTICAL in order for it to be
> the same language, by mutual comprehensibility standards.  You drew the line
> between former dialects and new languages in your textbook at the point where
> the dialects "cease to be mutually comprehensible at all."  That is far, far
> from the point where a language is no longer IDENTICAL to its former self.

Yes, but.

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

Second, I repeat: there is no principled or coherent basis for deciding that
daughter A is "the same language" as its own ancestor while daughter B is not.
And the positions I have argued against all seem to assume the contrary.

> As far as requiring that an ancestor must be IDENTICAL to its former self
> when a descendent shows up, why would you set such a standard?  When is such
> a standard ever applied in any science that observes identity over time?

Fine.  But you and Lloyd Anderson apparently want to defend a notion along the
lines of "A and B are the same language but are not identical".  And this
notion, I think, cannot be given any coherent content -- at least not
sufficiently coherent for the purposes you appear to have in mind.

> You are not identical in shape or size to the person you were when you were
> two years old.  Morphologically, even down to the cells you once were made up
> of, you are not IDENTICAL to "Larry Trask" at that age.  However, any
> biologist would be willing to say you were the same organism.  Members of
> biological species are hardly identical among themselves or over time.  But a
> specialist can easily identify the bones of a domestic cat or a human from
> 200 years ago and confidently distinguish the two species.

No doubt, but so what?

If we had a recording of somebody's speech from around AD 400, could we
confidently identify it as representing either Latin or Romance?  I don't think
so.  Languages do not behave like organisms, and reasoning from one to the
other is often fatal.

Anyway, it is not even true that biologists can always distinguish species with
confidence.  This applies to living creatures as much as to fossils.  At
bottom, the notion of "same species" is just as elusive as that of "same
language".

> It is totally inconsistent to require that the ancestor stay IDENTICAL to
> itself in order to be called the same language.  If you want to find a way to
> make it a different language,  the obvious thing any scientific methodology
> would do is point to an ESSENTIAL change, one that alters the DEFINING
> CHARACTERISTICS of the language.  E.g., the point where the biologist or
> biochemist or doctor would say that the organism being viewed is no longer
> "Larry Trask."

Sorry, but I don't follow.  In fact, I am astounded to see the notion of
"essential" properties being invoked.  To me, this smacks of something straight
out of medieval discourse.  And it's incoherent.

Something called 'English' has existed for well over a thousand years, but that
something has undergone dramatic changes.  What would you put forward as the
"defining characteristics" of English?  As the "defining characteristics" of
any particular stage of English?  As the "essential changes" that sharply
differentiate one variety from another?

[on my comments on generational differences]

> With "the best will in the world", I cannot believe you are asking this.
> This all started with my asking if the peak on the UPenn tree meant that PIE
> co-existed with Anatolian.  And you think I meant that your parents are
> speaking an ancestor language of modern English?

I think you're tangling up different postings on different points.

My comment about PIE and Anatolian, as I recall, simply drew attention to two
different uses of the label 'PIE' -- no more.

> No, you don't think that.  You were quite confident in describing the
> relationship between an ancestor language and a daughter and even a sister.
> You wrote: <<So, that top node, with its two DAUGHTERS, represents an initial
> split of the single language PIE, with one DAUGHTHER being the ANCESTOR of
> Anatolian, and the other DAUGHTER being the single common ANCESTOR of
> everything else.  We now often speak of `broad PIE' -- the ANCESTOR of the
> whole family -- and `narrow PIE' -- the ANCESTOR of everything except
> Anatolian.  Narrow PIE is a SISTER language of Proto-Anatolian...>> [Caps are
> mine]

> Did you mean that there were some parents who were speaking "wide PIE" at the
> same time that the young people were speaking "narrow PIE?"  Is that what you
> meant by an ancestor?  I don't think so.  So why would you think that's what
> I meant?

I didn't think that's what you meant.  But, after things got going, I found
myself deeply puzzled as to what you did mean.  My observations about
generational differences led me to observe that there appeared to be at least
one sense -- admittedly a trivial sense, in my estimation -- in which we might
say that mother and daughter languages could co-exist.  And I simply asked
whether this sense is what anybody on the list had in mind.

> And BTW did you mean that "wide PIE" was not "identical" to "narrow PIE"?  Or
> did you mean that "wide PIE" was totally incomprehensible to speakers of
> "narrow PIE"?  Which was it?

Neither.  I was only drawing attention to two different uses of the label 'PIE'
-- no more.  You should not read any more into that posting.

> Apparently the only distinction you make
> between "wide PIE" and "narrow PIE" is by their descendents - you don't even
> seem to consider whether they were identical or mutually comprehensible or
> not.

Indeed I did not, because that had nothing to do with the purely terminological
point I was making.

> I will tell you what I meant and I think that if you use anything close to
> "the best will in the world," you will have no problem understanding it.  I
> will not assume that you are cynically pretending to misunderstand me.

Oh, I do tend to be a bit cynical by nature, I guess -- but, no, I have not
been deliberately trying to misunderstand you or anyone else.  And I get rather
cross when somebody accuses me of doing this.

> In your textbook, you wrote about dialects fragmenting and forming different
> languages:  "And it is clear that such fragmentation of single languages into
> several different languages has happened countless times..."

> Up to that point, a dialect is still just a variety of the original language.
> (See your Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology where you define "dialect" as
> "a regionally or socially distinctive variety of a language, differing from
> other varieties in its grammar and/or lexicon.")

True.  But why relevant?

> This is all that is required for "an ancestor language to coexist with its
> descendent" - by your own terms above :
> Given ten co-existing, changing dialects "of a language" - say, Latin as an
> example - one dialect is the first to become "mutually incomprehensible."
> The other nine are all still mutually comprehensible.  The nine are still
> "varieties" of Latin.  The nine are dialects of the "ancestor language."  The
> new language is a descendent.  They co-exist.

Nope.

Once again, you are engaged in reification.  That is, you are assuming that,
because we sometimes find it convenient to speak of dialects, then those
dialects must actually exist as real, discrete entities "out there".  But they
don't.

Anyway, all you have cited here is a hypothetical case in which Latin splits
into two main varieties which are no longer mutually comprehensible.  The fact
that *you personally* choose to classify one of them as "nine dialects" and the
other as "one dialect" is not a piece of reality, but only your own imposition.

> I think with enough of the best will in the world, you can understand why
> this is a serious, good faith counterargument to your statement - in terms
> drawn from statements that you yourself have published.  If you have
> rethought those terms, that's fine and understandable.  But I do hope that
> you will not take the position that what I wrote above is something
> particularly difficult for you to understand.

Well, what more can I say?

In my view, the relation "is the same language as" cannot be coherently given
the kind of precise and principled content which you appear to require for your
arguments.  Except in a very broad and rough sense -- which is insufficient for
the kinds of conclusions you want to draw -- language varieties simply cannot
be divided absolutely into "the same" and "not the same".

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Oct 18 15:41:47 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 16:41:47 +0100
Subject: The Parent/Daughter Question (was Contributions)
Message-ID: <MON.18.OCT.1999.164147.0100.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

[LT]

> <<Is modern English "the same language" as Proto-Germanic?  As PIE?  If not,
> then at what stage do we have a cutoff point between one language and the
> next, and why?>>

> I'm sure that Larry Trask's apparent position here - that Proto-Germanic and
> modern English can't be linguistically distinguishable as separate
> "languages" - deserves a much more formidable counterpoint than this
> non-specialist correspondent can offer.

No; this is emphatically not my position.  I may be a cantankerous old fart,
but I'm not mad. ;-)

Recall my question: is 1999 English "the same language" as 1998 English?  If
you answer "yes" to this, then it appears to me that you are doomed to arrive,
inexorably, at the unpalatable conclusion just described.  Since I regard this
conclusion as unacceptable, and since I can see no principled way of avoiding
it if the answer to my question is "yes", then I conclude that there must be
something wrong either with my question or with the answer "yes".  We may
therefore conclude either that 1999 English is not the same language as 1998
English, or that the very question is incoherent.  Take your pick.  But I favor
the second.

The only way round this is to posit sudden discontinuities in the history of
English.  For example, as another correspondent has suggested, we might argue
that, while 1484 English was the same language as 1485 English, 1485 English
was *not* the same language as 1486 English.  This ploy evades the undesirable
consequences, but at terrible cost: it requires us to regard English as "the
same language" for a period of perhaps centuries, and then to disappear
overnight in favor of a different language.  And I don't see this as a
defensible position, either.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Oct 18 15:57:38 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 16:57:38 +0100
Subject: Basque 'sei'
Message-ID: <MON.18.OCT.1999.165738.0100.>

Stephane Goyette writes:

[LT]

>> Perhaps, but how old is the Gascon phonology?  As I've pointed out
>> elsewhere, place names appear to show Gascon /s/ corresponding to Basque
>> laminal <z>, not to apical <s>.

> I'm not sure I follow. In the case of these place names, one is dealing
> with Basque (or 'Aquitanian') names borrowed into Late Latin/Early
> Romance, which only had one sibilant: laminal and apical /s/ would both be
> borrowed as Latin/Romance /s/, whatever its exact point of articulation
> was.

Yes.  If the relevant toponyms are of Aquitanian origin, this follows.  Or,
at least it follows if Gascon only had a single sibilant at the time.  And
just such a conclusion has been drawn by a number of people from the
geographical distribution of the toponyms of relevant form, even though no
really plausible identification for the ending in question can be provided
from within Basque (I dismiss <hotz> 'cold' as implausible).

It would be very helpful, here and elsewhere, if some kind of firm date could
be placed upon the appearance of the apical /s/ in Ibero-Romance -- but I
have never seen a serious attempt at this.  Has anybody?

Since Latin /s/ almost invariably enters Basque as the laminal <z>, it seems
safe to conclude that the Latin sibilant was laminal, or at least usually
laminal.  In Basque, we can catch a glimmering of the replacement of the
Latin laminal by the Ibero-Romance apical.  For example, Latin <scribere>, or
some early Romance reflex of this, was borrowed as <izkiri(b)atu> 'write',
with the laminal sibilant accompanied by other phonological characteristics
of early borrowings.  This is still the form today in the east.  In the west
of the country, however, the usual word for 'write' is <eskribatu> ~
<eskribitu>, from Castilian <escribir>, with an apical sibilant and with
other phonological characteristics of late borrowings.

Sadly, we can't date any of this, since the Romanists have no dates to offer
us as a standard.   But I stress again that any attempt at seeing Basque
<sei> 'six' as a loan from Romance, quite apart from its other problems,
requires a "late" borrowing into Basque -- whatever that may mean in real
time.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Oct 18 16:49:45 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 17:49:45 +0100
Subject: Possessives
Message-ID: <MON.18.OCT.1999.174945.0100.>

Pat Ryan writes:

[LT]

>> The English possessives like `my' are determiners because they behave
>> like determiners.  They do not behave like pronouns, and so they are not
>> pronouns.  And they certainly don't behave like adjectives.

> It seems to be the rationale of the approach Larry espouses to assign words
> to classes based on their ability to occur in certain positions within
> grammatically well-formed sentences --- what I would call the slot-theory.

More traditionally, the slot-and-filler approach.  This is one kind of
distributional approach.  More generally, distribution is arguably the single
most important general criterion for setting up parts of speech -- especially
for morphologically impoverished languages, or for items in any language which
exhibit little or no morphology.  Inflectional and derivational possibilities
are also valuable criteria, where these exist, but distribution is, so to
speak, the bottom line.

> That is certainly one method of analysis; and, in certain cases, I would
> admit it may be useful.

> But, it is not the only useful rationale that may be used, a broad-minded
> position that I have not seen Larry espouse in any context.

Not sure what "broad-minded" means here.  Parts of speech are grammatical
categories, and they can only be identified by grammatical criteria.
And non-grammatical criteria like meaning are out of order.

> His preference is a direct outgrowth of the school to which he subscribes,
> and the definitions that school generates.

Didn't know I belonged to any school.  All contemporary work on parts of speech
I have ever seen operates with essentially the same criteria.  Couldn't name a
single linguist working today with significantly different criteria.

> His definition of 'pronoun' (as contained in his dictionary) is: "The
> lexical category, or a member of this category, whose members typically
> function as noun phrases in isolation, not normally requiring or permitting
> the presence of determiners or other adnominals, and whose members typically
> have little or no intrinsic meaning or reference."

Yep.  And words like 'my' do not fit this definition.

Think I'm weird?  Look at Peter Matthews's dictionary, or at David Crystal's
dictionary.  Look at the work of such linguists as Paul Schachter or
Hans-Juergen Sasse.  Hell, even a good modern desk dictionary of English
usually gets this right.  I have the Collins here (British; maybe not available
in the US); it defines 'pronoun' correctly, and it labels 'my' a determiner.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com  Tue Oct 26 00:35:48 1999
From: ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1999 17:35:48 -0700
Subject: the Indo-European mailing list
Message-ID: <MON.25.OCT.1999.173548.0700.>

Dear Readers,

I find myself in a difficult position.  I have received complaints about
the running of this list which have led me to postpone sending out any
messages for a week; the input queue now contains more than 100 messages.
Before I resume sending to the list, I have some things to say.

This is the Indo-European mailing list.  The assumption is that those who
post here are at least familiar with the basics of historical linguistics,
even if they are not Indo-Europeanists themselves, and rightly so, in my
opinion.

The topics of discussion on this list have always been broader than *just*
Indo-European studies narrowly construed, because every Indo-Europeanist of
my acquaintance in the last 30 years has had broader interests than just IE
linguistics, and has welcomed input from other linguists and from other
disciplines.

For several weeks, there has been a large number of posts to the list on
several topics related to the issue of how we, whether as Indo-Europeanists
or more generally as historical linguists, deal with the imperfections of
our data, in the interpretation or in the selection thereof.  Discussions
frequently have turned on misunderstandings between pairs of writers,
whether based on differences of theoretical background or on the level of
background knowledge that is assumed here, and have in turn engendered
meta-discussions on and off the list about how these discussions have been
conducted.

The on-list meta-discussions stop now.  I have frequently returned posts to
the author for removal of commentary addressed to personality rather than
to topics under discussion; I will now make it my policy *always* to do so.
If you as a reader do not like the way a writer has expressed a point of
view, take it up with the writer in private.

I will turn off the incoming queue address tonight, before this message
goes out, and begin emptying the queue, which will take approximately 72
hours.  I would appreciate your holding responses until all messages on a
particular subject have gone out; to facilitate this, I will send out every
message now in the queue with the same Subject: header at the same time,
in order as received.

								Rich Alderson
								Indo-European
								list owner and
								moderator


From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu  Mon Oct 25 17:42:53 1999
From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus)
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1999 12:42:53 -0500
Subject: Milan conference program posting
Message-ID: <MON.25.OCT.1999.124253.0500.>

Dear Rich,

We just got a link up to the Milan conference on our website:

http://www.dla.utexas.edu/depts/lrc/iedocctr/

then under Links.

You may already have this, but I only found out when Lehmann came, handed
me the program, and announced that he would be in Milan this week! So I got
the program up as soon as I could.

Best,  Carol

[ Moderator's note:
  Although this is addressed to me by name, I think it belongs on the list.
  I've seen nothing else about it that I recall.
  --rma ]


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Tue Oct 19 02:54:51 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 22:54:51 EDT
Subject: language origins
Message-ID: <MON.18.OCT.1999.225451.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/15/99 1:45:35 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk wrote:

<<Language, I'd say, is a lot *more* complex than calculus.  But I don't
think degree of complexity is the issue.  The point is that our language
faculty appears to be part of our biological inheritance in a way that the
ability to construct or use calculus is not.>>

I think there is a whole trend - at least since guys like Wittgenstein - to
consider calculus just a particular rule-directed form of language.  Most
assuredly, we would not have calculus if we did not have language, and the
same might be said of any kind of formal logic.

Even if one tries to make a distinction here between non-verbal and verbal
logic, the fact is that verbal logic just demonstrably carries a much greater
amount of information when it comes to communication between two people.  An
"eminent" theorist in this field sent me a note (semi-name dropping)
reminding me that the great majority of our use of language is in talking to
ourselves.  That seems very true, and it points to the fact language's
enormous benefit as a MANAGER of information.  Newton devising calcalus was
Newton talking to himself.  Language as information manager allowed him to
manage the details of calculus AND retain those details as he went along.

So, even if we didn't invent language, we well might have INVENTED ITS
COMPLEXITY.  How much of that complexity, by natural selection, found its way
into the evolving structure of the brain is another question.

<<I think we learn a first language because our ancestors, at some point,
evolved a very specific biological proclivity to learn and use language.>>

My ex definitely had such a "proclivity."

Just to offer an alternative point-of-view.  If we are talking here about
"language" as communication - a great many animals have such specific
biological traits.  If we are speaking of language as the ability to transfer
information via sound, that too is not unique to humans.  If we are taking
about what is unique to humans - something human "ancestors" evolved
specifically - then that refers to language in a different sense.  And
comlexity is the most obvious difference between human language and other
forms of communication.  Human language just carries an ENORMOUS lot more
hard-science-quantifiable information in it.  Ask Jonpat.

The complexity of structure in human sounds or written words seems logically
to reflect an original complexity in the environment.  It would make no sense
for a species to devote all those valuable resources to develop complex brain
structures (or alternatively to invent complex language systems) unless there
was some corresponding complexity to initiate it.  The simple life form is
often in evolution more sucessful than the complex one.  (And BTW neither big
brains nor the ability to speak necessarily increases your survival chances
in local and short term situations - and these are the ones that determine
survival value in a trait.)  So was that complexity in the generating
environment the same one that still operates today?  Was it human society
right from the start that created language?  Obviously if we humans were not
as social as we are, we would not have needed anywhere as much language as we
have.

<<All physically normal human infants in passably normal surroundings learn a
language.  Even in highly abnormal surroundings, they will do their best to
learn a language, and they will succeed if there's any significant
reinforcement at all.  They do this at an age when they can hardly do
anything else, and they go about it in a highly orderly and consistent way.>>

I don't think we know this.  In fact, I think everything points to children
being very haphazard about making sounds until they start getting regular
feedback.  And a child who doesn't make sounds is considered "abnormal"
precisely because we KNOW that this will hinder development of language.
Whether language is innate or not, lack of language in most human cultures is
not favored - for the obvious reasons that the main vehicle of human cultures
is language.  That is enough to make a silent child "abnormal."  (Reminds me
of the joke about little Johnny at the dinner table suddenly saying "the
potatoes are cold."  The parents and sisters and brothers drop their knives
and forks in shock.  The mother says: "Johnny, we thought you couldn't talk.
For 13 years you never said a thing.  And now it turns out you can talk and
all you can say is "the potatoes are cold!?"  So, Johnny says: "Well, up till
now, everything has been okay.")

The fact is that no individual has ever been observed developing a "natural"
language from scratch.  There is Bickerton's argument for example that in
Hawaii creoles developed out of pidgin in only a single generation,
demonstrating an innate structural propensity for language complexity.  But
it is easy to point out that the children who devised the creoles did have a
model of complexity to imitate all around them, even if they did not adopt
its specific elements.

The real test is the one we can't ethically conduct - how much language would
a human child show who had never been exposed to any of the cultural
contingencies that demonstrably bring forth language?  There is no such
experiment on record.  But it just MIGHT show that, without human culture,
the "language centers" of the brain can easily and naturally and sucessfully
go to work on other things.  (There is some evidence for this.)

So, perhaps it's legitimate to hypothesize that language isn't inherited, but
that the need to be part of a human culture is - and that there is no way to
become part of a human culture without learning some vehicle of language -
even if it is as limited as Helen Keller's, for example.

Regards,
Steve Long


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Wed Oct 20 04:23:34 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 00:23:34 EDT
Subject: language origins
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.002334.EDT.>

>sarima at ix.netcom.com writes:

>I agree, I just do not think the whole of this model is yet completely
>established. >>

-- very true.  This is an area where complete understanding of the human (and
pongoid) genomes will greatly increase our knowledge.

It seems to me that language is an outgrowth of the capacity to conceptualize
and manipulate symbolic representations of reality.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Tue Oct 19 03:05:32 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 23:05:32 EDT
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <MON.18.OCT.1999.230532.EDT.>

>vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu writes:

>Kamil Zvelebil, in his original review of McAlpin, pointed out several
>problems; his more recent books seem to indicate guarded acceptance, but
>still he leaves himself some escape hatches.

-- yes, it's not a settled question.  For one thing, our knowledge of Elamite
proper is still so patchy!

On the whole, though, it seems to be gaining acceptance.  An Elamo-Dravidian
speech community through Iran to the Indus and beyond in the Neolithic and
Early Bronze Age, later disrupted by the intrusive Indo-Aryan and
Indo-Iranian languages, does fit the archaeological and historical data
rather nicely.

(Eg., the specifically Indo-Aryan linguistic element in the Mitannian kingdom
which can be shown to definitely preceed about 1600 BCE, but postdate 2000
BCE.)

And it accounts for the presence of Dravidian loanwords in Vedic, and their
absence in Avestan.

>Anyway, i:zham nowadays refers to Sri Lanka or rather the northern parts of
>it. I am not sure why anyone should have rushed to connect this to Elam.

-- I agree; that sounds like folk-entymology to me.


From edsel at glo.be  Tue Oct 19 07:52:22 1999
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 09:52:22 +0200
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.095222.0200.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

-----Original Message-----
From: Vidhyanath Rao <vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu>
To: Indo-European at xkl.com <Indo-European at xkl.com>
Date: Tuesday, October 19, 1999 4:38 AM
Subject: Re: Pre-Greek languages


>Eduard Selleslagh <edsel at glo.be> wrote:
>> after all, Elamite - which was in the same situation - was
>> finally recognized as Dravidian

>Actually, Dravidianologists profess agnosticism or reservations: The most
>sympathetic view seems to be that a connection is believable but not
>proven. Kamil Zvelebil, in his original review of McAlpin, pointed out
>several problems; his more recent books seem to indicate guarded
>acceptance, but still he leaves himself some escape hatches.

>>[rather strangely late, if you ask me, because
>> the word Elaam still exists in Tamil, I was told]

>I don't know what Elamites called themselves and how they pronounced it.
>In Modern Tamil it is i:zham, where the `zh' stands for the same sound as
>in `tamilzh'. In some dialects, it comes out a retroflex l, but the older
>pronunciation (and still the standard pronunciation) is not quite an l.
>People have claimed success in teaching it to Americans starting from some
>American varieties of r. Some attempt to connect retroflex s of Sanskrit
>to it (and the transliteration as zh or z-underdot seems to come from
>Cyrilic which makes sound like a shibilant). It seems to me that the
>difficulty is describing it due to ignoring the most important bit: the
>tongue moves along the roof of the mouth >while< the sound is being made.

>Anyway, i:zham nowadays refers to Sri Lanka or rather the northern parts
>of it. I am not sure why anyone should have rushed to connect this to
>Elam.

[Ed Selleslagh]

Thanks for the useful comments.

1. The word Elaam: it's the usual (inaccurate?) western press transcription of
the name of the region you describe (cf. the independence guerrilla war) as
part of the native name of the pro-independence movement (I can't recall its
complete name).  So, it might be regarded as the native name for 'a Tamil
homeland' (in casu in Sri Lanka). That, together with the fact that both
regions are/were Dravidian, explains why Elam (Persia) might be - rightly or
wrongly - connected to Elaam (Iizham, Sri Lanka). I don't think that's
'rushing' it, only mildly speculating without grave danger.

2. The name of Elam (SW of the Zagros mountains in SW Iran): it is based upon
the Assyrian designation Elamtu, itself derived from the indigenous name
<(h)alamtu>. Greek: Elymai?s. It is mentioned in the Bible (books of Esther
and Genesis XIV). In Achemenid old Persian it's (h)uzhi, which seems to
indicate an original pronunciation of the l like Tamil L, described (in Meillet
& Cohen) as a 'voiced retroflex palatalized sibilant, often confounded with
double underdotted l, ditto d, r or even y'.

[N.B. Sometimes the name of its capital Sousa (Hebr. Shushan) was used to coin
a name for the country.]

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.

It is very likely that the present-day Dravidian territory is the result of the
Dravidians and/or their language being relegated to the E and SE, almost
certainly by the IE Indo-Iranians.

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?

4. The Dravidian language family is probably of great interest to the study of
the upper nodes of the Indo-Hittite (or whatever) Stammbaum. I guess one day it
will be connected to it, several nodes above the PIE/Anatolian split. (There
are sometimes strange resemblances with IE: the -b- futurum and -<double
underdotted d>- perfectum in Tamil, the -r- medio-passive in Kurukh, etc. Pure
coincidence?)

Unfortunately, my impression is that it is rather undervalued.

Does anyone have any news about the present status of this still highly
speculative part of language (pre-)history?

Ed.

Dr. Ir. Eduard Selleslagh edsel at glo.be
B-9120 Haasdonk
Belgium


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Oct 19 08:56:49 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 09:56:49 +0100
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.095649.0100.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Sean Crist writes:

[LT on Colin Renfrew's recent article]

>> 3. Many of the problematic words in Greek (though not all of them) must have
>> been borrowed into Greek, *not* during the first Greek settlement of Greece,
>> but much later, during the Bronze Age, when the Greeks came into contact wih
>> the advanced Minoan civilization.  These words are thus not ancient
>> substrate words in Greek, but late adstrate (or even superstrate)
>> borrowings.

> How does Renfrew claim to know this?  If we assume that the speakers of
> Greek were somewhere in what is now Greece from a date as early as Renfrew
> would like to claim, it would be very surprising if they didn't borrow
> words for trade items, etc. from their neighbors to the south.  Cf. the
> Latin loan words in Germanic (wine, cheese, street, etc.)

Renfrew's argument is that a number of the troublesome words in Greek appear to
reflect a sophisticated urban civilization of a type which is not known to have
existed anywhere in the Aegean area until the rise of the palace civilization
in Minoan Crete in the second millennium BC.  Since the referents of these
words could not have existed earlier, he concludes, the words could not have
been present in Pre-Greek or in Greece before the Greeks, but must have been
borrowed into Greek later, after contact with the Minoan civilization.

[LT]

>> Renfrew acknowledges some difficulties with this scenario, pointed out by
>> John Chadwick and others.  In particular, the problematic words which are
>> names for flora and fauna indigenous to Greece cannot readily be explained
>> as late borrowings from Minoan, and are more likely to be substrate words of
>> some kind.  But Renfrew does not see this as a serious obstacle to his
>> scenario.

> Not only that, but many of the place names in Greece (Corinth, Salamis,
> Larisa, Samos, Olympus, Mycenae) are not of Greek origin, which is not
> what we would expect if the speakers of Greek had been in the area for a
> long time.

In the same article, Renfrew suggests that these place names are indeed
pre-Greek but not pre-IE.  He sees them as reflecting an IE presence in Greece
and the Aegean at a time before the Greek language had crystallized out.  He is
also inclined to see them as probably Anatolian.

> I ought to pull that article and take a look at it.  I had heard that
> Renfrew had backed off from some of his claims, but if he published this
> as late as 1998, it sounds like it is not so.

Oh, I know Colin fairly well, and I can assure you that he has not backed off
from his major claims, though he has modified his views on some of the details.
Last August he gave a talk at the Cambridge symposium on time-depth in
languages in which, among other things, he addressed the problem of the
horse-and-wagon words in IE.  This will appear in the proceedings, to be
published early next year.  I'm one of the editors, so it's partly down to me
how fast we can get the volume out.

Almost at this very moment, Colin is in the States giving a talk on his
Anatolian homeland for PIE.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl  Tue Oct 19 18:44:28 1999
From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 19:44:28 +0100
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <007401bf1747$304f8d60$5510063e@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.194428.0100.>

>By the way, no one ever did tell me if the plural of Sprachbund
>was -unds, -|nde, or -unde.   I guess I go for the middle one, making it a
>language-association, rather than a language-collection.

Sprachbuende/Sprachb"unde, or, for those with a really cosmopolitan
mail-reader, Sprachb?nde


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Tue Oct 19 18:05:15 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 14:05:15 EDT
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.140515.EDT.>

>Odegard at means.net writes:

>So. As a seat-of-the pants theory that cannot be proved, the Anatolians
>were, oh, 3100, 3200 BCE while the other group of IE-speakers, the group
>that was ancestral to all the other IE languages, were still hopelessly
>land-lubbers up where the steppe merged into forest. Anatolian can be seen
>as a happenstance offshoot that got lucky and left us written records 2500
>years later.

-- seems sensible, except that it's 1500 years later, not 2500.  1000 years
later if you count the Anatolian/IE names found in the records of the
Assyrian merchant colonies in Anatolia in the early second millenium.


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Tue Oct 19 18:50:50 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 14:50:50 EDT
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.145050.EDT.>

On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, Larry Trask wrote:
<<Many of the problematic words in Greek (though not all of them) must have
been borrowed into Greek, *not* during the first Greek settlement of Greece,
but much later, during the Bronze Age, when the Greeks came into contact with
the advanced Minoan civilization.>>

Sean Crist wrote (dated 10/19/99 1:51:17 AM) :
<<How does Renfrew claim to know this?>>

Well it's hardly a wild guess.  Starting in the early Middle Helladic, around
Middle Minoan IA, Cretan imports are not only found on the Greek mainland,
but are also manufactured there in a few very discrete colonies.  The
Mycenaean culture will shows many obvious debts to Minoan influences many
centuries later.  But this Minoan influence is not really apparent BEFORE
this time.  In fact, conversely, there is even evidence earlier of Korakou
(Greek mainland EH II-III culture) making its way to Crete.

Sean Crist also wrote:
<<If we assume that the speakers of Greek were somewhere in what is now
Greece from a date as early as Renfrew would like to claim, it would be very
surprising if they didn't borrow words for trade items, etc. from their
neighbors to the south.  Cf. the Latin loan words in Germanic (wine, cheese,
street, etc.)>>

Well, what trade goods would you be talking about in 6000-4000BC? Minoan
innovations might be quite different from neolithic ones, simply because
Crete was relatively undeveloped at the time.  And it is not clear that Crete
represented the language group that may represent the most ancient substrate
- Semitic.

First of all, the MAJOR misunderstanding is that we are talking about
"speakers of Greek" at this point.  Renfrew's premise is that an IE ancestral
language is in Greece at the time.  And that it might be a linear ancestor of
Greek.

Just as importantly, Greece is Renfrew's second or third step in his
hypothetical IE diffusion, so we would in theory be finding ourselves dealing
with dialects much closer in time to PIE than to documented Greek.

And that's where there IS EVIDENCE of word commonalities between very early
Greece ("narrow PIE" or something like it) and "southern" neighbors.

In a message on this list dated 2/4/99 12:49:05 AM, we learned the following:
<<In Gamq.relidze--Ivanov, you can find (e.g.)

IE *tauro- + Sem. *t_awr- "bull"

IE *ghait.- + Sem. *gadj- "goat"

IE *agwno- "lamb" + Sem. *`igl- "young animal"

IR *qe/op- + Sem., comp. Akkad. uk.u:pu, OHebr. k.?p_, Aram. k.o:p_a:

"monkey"

IE *bhar(s)- "grain, cereals" + Sem. *burr-/*barr-

IE *dhoHna:- "cereals, grain" + Sem. *duh,n- "millet"

IE *Handh- "edible plants" + Sem. *h.int.(at-) "wheat"

etc. See also V.M. Illic^-Svityc^'s article (1964) and other IE-Sem articles.

Alemko Gluhak
...Linguistic Research Institute of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts
gluhak at hazu.hr>>

When I read "IE *bhar(s)- "grain, cereals" + Sem. *burr-/*barr-", it stopped
me.

"Melie^dea puron..." the Illiad (8.180), "kata puron alessan" - grind wheat.
Pu_ros in Homeric Greek is wheat.  Or sometimes just grain.

Larry Trask also wrote:
<<In particular, the problematic words which are names for flora and fauna
indigenous to Greece cannot readily be explained as late borrowings from
Minoan, and are more likely to be substrate words of some kind.  But Renfrew
does not see this as a serious obstacle to his scenario.>>

And the Greeks themselves had a memory of non-Greeks living among them from
earliest times.  There is NO QUESTION that Greece was populated BEFORE the
coming of agriculture and that those settlements persisted well into the
neolithic.  In northern Europe, pre-agriculturalist cultures persisted right
into the Bronze age without evident discontinuity.  Indigenous plant names
(see "squash") even when they sound not very tasty, are known to persist in
this way.

Sean Crist wrote:
<<Not only that, but many of the place names in Greece (Corinth, Salamis,
Larisa, Samos, Olympus, Mycenae) are not of Greek origin, which is not what
we would expect if the speakers of Greek had been in the area for a long
time.>>

I believe that this question has been encountered before on this list and
that it has been suggested that these names may be from an IE language,
specifically Anatolian.  If they were in fact not IE, then that suggests only
that IE was not the first language group to be spoken in Greece - which is
NOT INCONSISTENT in any way with Renfrew's scenario.  What qualifies as a
"long time" is not really an operational term in these 1000 years time-bite
scenarios.

BTW, what was the story with "Knossos" again?  What kind of a word is it?

Regards,
Steve Long


From Georg at home.ivm.de  Tue Oct 19 23:34:59 1999
From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 01:34:59 +0200
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19991015183030.0096eeb0@popd.netcruiser>
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.013459.0200.>

>>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. 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.

>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 !?!

>(They do indicate an early appearance of proto-Iranian
>peoples to the east of Mesopotamia)

Indian

>>Even if you don't buy Anatolia as the PIE homeland, why couldn't Anatolian
>>have entered Anatolia across the Caucasus or from east of the Caspian Sea,
>>through Iran?

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

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

>and the *total* lack of any pre-Armenian IE substratal
>influences in any of the non-IE languages of the Caucasus.
>
>For the second you have to explain why the Sumerians, Old Bablyonians and
>Assyians make NO mention of any possible pre-Anatolian peoples, while they
>*do* give indications of the existence of proto-Iranian peoples in Iran
>(look at the Mitanni words for charioteering).

Indian

Just asking ...

Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
+49-228-69-13-32


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Oct 20 02:42:10 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 19:42:10 -0700
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <199910150946.EAA00815@orion.means.net>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.194210.0700.>

At 04:46 AM 10/15/99 +00-06, Mark Odegard <Odegard at means.net> wrote:
>My own current view is that Anatolian moved from what is now SE
>Bulgaria into Anatolia via the Black Sea (yeah, boats).
>... The did not go over the mountains
>into Thessaly and thence into nothern or central Greece. They went to
>Troy! An easier route when you have boats.

Actually, this is quite an interesting possibility.  Certainly I agree, the
earliest IE type cultures in Anatolia appear in the Troy area.

>So. As a seat-of-the pants theory that cannot be proved, the
>Anatolians were, oh, 3100, 3200 BCE while the other group of
>IE-speakers, the group that was ancestral to all the other IE
>languages, were still hopelessly land-lubbers up where the steppe
>merged into forest. Anatolian can be seen as a happenstance offshoot
>that got lucky and left us written records 2500 years later. The rest
>of us, of course, were still chasing aurochesen somewhere rather
>north of the Black Sea.

Actually by that date the IE speakers were apparently very widespread
indeed, from the Corded Ware groups in northern Europe to the Afanasievo
culture of central Asia.  That is an east-west range of over 3000 km.

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


From gwhitta at gwdg.de  Wed Oct 20 11:37:20 1999
From: gwhitta at gwdg.de (Gordon Whittaker)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 12:37:20 +0100
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.123720.0100.>

In the ongoing debate between Stanley Friesen and Larry Trask concerning
early  Indo-European  movements and whether or not the Caucasus was a
transit region, the point was raised by Stanley Friesen that "cultures with
written history predate the probable appearance of the Hittites ... None of
these written sources give *any* indication of any likely pre-Anatolian
people anywhere near Mesopotamia" and that "the Sumerians, Old Bablyonians
and Assy(r)ians make NO mention of any possible pre-Anatolian peoples".

This is somewhat misleading. While it is perfectly true that there are no
obvious references to any Indo-European group predating the written record
of Anatolian, there is a considerable amount of evidence in the Mesopotamian
writing system and in the vocabularies of Sumerian and Akkadian for just
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. Up till recently there had been no attempt in
print to identify this language (or languages) or to marshal evidence from
the writing system bearing on this question. The whole matter is commonly
referred to as the Sumerian Problem.

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'. By orphan readings I mean values
without any known link to actual Sumerian words in the depicted semantic
domains. Usually, the phonetic value is reassigned to a rough homophone in
Sumerian. Thus, *pesh* has the logographic value 'be broad',
*gurush/geresh*, the value of a sign depicting a vehicle with runners (sled)
or alternatively wheels (wagon), has the logographic value 'young
man/able-bodied worker'. In other cases the entire logographic value was
borrowed, as in the case of *nirah* 'snake, adder', recalling IE *neh-tr-ah
'snake, adder', or *umbin*, variously 'nail, claw', 'wheel', 'container for
pig and sheep fat', represented by one sign depicting a claw or nail. The
latter value recalls IE terms for 'nail', 'navel', and 'salve'. And so on.

Now that early phonetic renditions of Sumerian terms are known from Ebla
(ca. 2300 B.C.), Old Sumerian forms of well-known terms are coming to light.
The Sumerian term for 'ewe' is *u* (with subscript 8), preserved as *us* in
a compound. This word crops up in Ebla in the earlier form *uwi* (and
'vowel-harmonized' as *uwa*), reflecting IE *how-i- 'sheep'. Early
speculation about a link between Sum. *gud* 'bull, ox' and IE *gwou-s
'bovine' can now be turned on its head. Final Sum. *d/r* corresponds
regularly to IE nom. case marker *-s. I'll leave it at that for now.

The problem with all of this is simply that it is unacceptable to most
Assyriologists to pursue such lines of enquiry, much for the same reason
that Indo-Europeanists used to discount excellent evidence for a PIE word
for wine -- it doesn't belong because the Indo-European speakers were
allegedly nowhere near wine-growing regions originally. Or, as Calvert
Watkmns succinctly put it to me, " What are Indo-Europeans doing in
Mesopotamia anyway?"

Germans have an appropriate expression, that 'nicht sein kann, was nicht
sein darf'!

-----Urspr|ngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Stanley Friesen <sarima at ix.netcom.com>
An: Indo-European at xkl.com <Indo-European at xkl.com>
Datum: 19 October 1999 23:03
Betreff: Re: Pre-Greek languages

>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.
>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.  (They do indicate an early appearance of proto-Iranian
>peoples to the east of Mesopotamia)

>>Even if you don't buy Anatolia as the PIE homeland, why couldn't Anatolian
>>have entered Anatolia across the Caucasus or from east of the Caspian Sea,
>>through Iran?

>The first is made unlikely by the lack of IE-related cultural artifacts in
>the Caucusus and the *total* lack of any pre-Armenian IE substratal
>influences in any of the non-IE languages of the Caucasus.

>For the second you have to explain why the Sumerians, Old Bablyonians and
>Assyians make NO mention of any possible pre-Anatolian peoples, while they
>*do* give indications of the existence of proto-Iranian peoples in Iran
>(look at the Mitanni words for charioteering).


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Fri Oct 22 06:57:45 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 1999 02:57:45 EDT
Subject: Pre-Greek languages (Horses and such)
Message-ID: <FRI.22.OCT.1999.025745.EDT.>

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?

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

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?

<<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 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."

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.
This is a very large chronological gap with the evidence in the Ukraine,
especially with the hypothesized soft bits.  I believe earlier evidence of
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 Hellanic - at more or less the same
time as evidence first appears in Troy.  This is about a thousand years after
the first apparent evidence in the Middle East.  And western European
evidence is even later.

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.

Not that this "absence of evidence" eliminates any theory.  But separating
the evidence from the theories does help us to know what evidence the
theories are being built on.

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

And this whole question of toponyms in Greece.  Why don't we encounter this
problem so extensively in northern and western Europe?  We know there was an
existing population there from well before 2000 BC or even 4000 BC.  What
happened to that substrate?  Why aren't there all these non-IE or unknown IE
place names distributed all over Europe?

There's a lot here that just doesn't seem to be answered by pointing to
isolated pieces of evidence.

Regards,
Steve Long


From petegray at btinternet.com  Wed Oct 20 20:22:22 1999
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 21:22:22 +0100
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.212222.0100.>

>other
> Anatolian languages had a more typical IE verbal system,

Let me wave my flag again.    Even if they are more like the Greek-Sanskrit
system, I still don't believe we can equate this with general IE.   There is
some argument that the Germanic-Hittite system might have at least as strong
a case for being closer to the original PIE.   As for attested IE, it may be
difficult to identify what the "IE" system is, given the variety.

Peter


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Oct 22 13:27:40 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 1999 14:27:40 +0100
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <FRI.22.OCT.1999.142740.0100.>

Pete Gray writes:

> Thank you, Larry, for the summary of Renfrew's article.  I am continually
> amazed how poorly stocked the great libraries of England are on PIE!

>> I'm responding to the idea that
>> ... Greek itself evolved within Greece ... out of a more-or-less vanilla
>> variety of PIE which had already
>> occupied the territory.

> You mention that Renfrew "acknowledges some difficulties" and it may be that
> he answers my question in the article.    I would like to know how he
> maintains this position in the light of a fairly probable Greek -
> Indo-Iranian - Armenian Sprachbund, which on some views is innovative, not
> merely retentive or conserving.   Does he suggest that somehow the I-I-ans
> also originated within Greece?  Or that the vanilla ur-pre-Greek had already
> acquired the characteristics it shares with II and Armenian before its
> speakers occupied the terrritory - which would make it much more raspberry
> ripple than vanilla?   Or does he believe that the shared characteristics
> are mere retentions?   Any of these positions is open to serious question.

Renfrew does not devote much attention to this issue in the article I was
citing.  My own conversations with him suggest to me that he does not regard
the proposed Greek-Armenian-I-I Sprachbund as so well established as to be a
major stumbling block, but I may be putting words into his mouth here.  (Though
note Clackson's book, which largely dismisses the Greek-Armenian idea as
unsubstantiated.)

> By the way, no one ever did tell me if the plural of Sprachbund
> was -unds, -|nde, or -unde.   I guess I go for the middle one, making it a
> language-association, rather than a language-collection.

Oh, I'm quite sure that the <Bund> of <Sprachbund> is the word meaning
'alliance, league', and not the homophonous word meaning 'bunch, bundle'.
So, the German plural should be <Sprachbuende>.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Tue Oct 19 20:21:06 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 16:21:06 -0400
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <007601bf1747$31b7a8e0$5510063e@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.162106.0400.>

On Fri, 15 Oct 1999, petegray wrote:

> Stanley Friesen may be in good company in maintaining that the NW IE
> languages separate early - this is the position taken by Lehmann among
> others.

Well, for whatever an argument from authority is worth, there are several
prominent Indo-Europeanists who have reached conclusions approximating
those of Ringe et. al., but on the basis of different kinds of
argumentation from those used by Ringe et. al. But let's set that aside
and argue this on the basis of evidence rather than on authority.

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 partly because the problem is a very hard one,
computationally speaking.

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.)

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU  Tue Oct 19 06:28:28 1999
From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 01:28:28 -0500
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.012828.0500.>

>[Ed Selleslagh]

>I forgot to mention that in Modern Greek (NeoEllinik=F3) the use of the
>definite article before proper names is standard practice, e.g. O Yorghos
>("the George", written Ho Gio:rgos). And of course also with titles, like in
>Spanish:  o k=EDrios ("el se=F1or", written Ho Kyrios) XYZ, i kir=EDa ("la
>se=F1ora", written He: Kyr=EDa) XYZ. I know of no special connotation.

This is already standard in the Greek of the New Testament (mainly first
century AD).  I haven't looked at classical stuff from the 4th or 5th century
BC for many years, but I don't remember seing the promiscuous personal article
there.  Certainly it's not in Homer, where there hardly seems to be an article
at all (just spotty weak demonstratives).

Leo

Leo A. Connolly                         Foreign Languages & Literatures
connolly at memphis.edu                    University of Memphis


From mrr at astor.urv.es  Tue Oct 19 11:12:35 1999
From: mrr at astor.urv.es (Macia Riutort Riutort)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 13:12:35 +0200
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.131235.0200.>

Lieber Larry,
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. 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). Im letzten Jahr
hatte ich in derselben Klasse zwei Iciar (23 Jahre alt und 27 Jahre alt). 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.
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.
Mit freundlichen Gr??en

Macia

>Well, the only way I can think of to decide whether <Maite> originated in the
>Basque Country is to check the historical records, if there are any.

>But <maite> happens to be an ordinary Basque word, and moreover a most
>appropriate one for naming a woman: it means 'beloved' in Basque, and is hence
>a translation equivalent of Romance female names like French <Aimee> and
>Castilian <Amada> -- and perhaps of something in Catalan?

>I'd be interested to hear what the Spaniards or the Catalans think of the
>female name <Arantxa>.  This is unquestionably of Basque origin -- it's a
>Marian name, from the Basque word for 'thorn' -- yet it is now far from rare
>in Spain: there's famous tennis player with this name, and she claims no
>Basque ancestry that I know of.  Is the name perceived as Basque in the
>Peninsula generally?

>Larry Trask

[ Moderator's 7-bit-friendly transcription:

Lieber Larry,

Arantxa wird in Katalonien doch als baskischer Name empfunden. Es ist
n{\"a}mlich so, dass es besonders in den Jahren 1977-1980 zu einer gewissen
Mode wurde, Kinder auf baskische Namen zu taufen. So habe ich zur Zeit in einer
Klasse eine Ar{\'a}nzazu (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 ({\"u}brigens, Arantxa wird hier in
Katalonien als Koseform zu Ar{\'a}nzazu verwendet). Im letzten Jahr hatte ich
in derselben Klasse zwei Iciar (23 Jahre alt und 27 Jahre alt). Im Gegensatz zu
all diesen Namen, die, wie gesagt, als baskisch empfunden werden, wird der Name
Maite als Abk{\"u}rzung von Maria Teresa empfunden. Als ich eine der
Kolleginnen, die so heissen, fragte, sagte sie mir, dass sie nicht auf die Idee
gekommen w{\"a}re, Maite als baskisch zu sehen. F{\"u}r sie und ihre Familie
ist der Name einfach eine Koseform.
Andererseits habe ich noch nie eine Frau kennengelernt, die Amada heisst,
obwohl ich, um die Wahrheit zu sagen, gestehen muss, dass ich Amandas kenne.
Mit freundlichen Gr{\"u}ssen

  --rma ]


From mcv at wxs.nl  Tue Oct 19 16:19:02 1999
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 16:19:02 GMT
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <E11cAe4-0004CA-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.161902.GMT.>

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote:

>Well, the only way I can think of to decide whether <Maite> originated in the
>Basque Country is to check the historical records, if there are any.

>But <maite> happens to be an ordinary Basque word, and moreover a most
>appropriate one for naming a woman: it means 'beloved' in Basque, and is hence
>a translation equivalent of Romance female names like French <Aimee> and
>Castilian <Amada> -- and perhaps of something in Catalan?

I suppose Amat (Cast. Amado as in Alonso) is a Catalan name,
although I can't think of any examples (and Altavista only gives
me Amat as a family name).  I seem to recall the existence of a
provencalizing Aimat or Aymat, at least in the Middle Ages.

In any case, although Maite is generally associated with Maria
Teresa, and people generally don't know that the word means
anything in Basque, there may be an association between the name
and the "North".  Mainly because of the song "Maitetxu mia".

>I'd be interested to hear what the Spaniards or the Catalans think of the
>female name <Arantxa>.  This is unquestionably of Basque origin -- it's a
>Marian name, from the Basque word for 'thorn' -- yet it is now far from rare
>in Spain: there's famous tennis player with this name, and she claims no
>Basque ancestry that I know of.  Is the name perceived as Basque in the
>Peninsula generally?

Because of the <tx>, it's probably perceived as Basque or
Catalan.  Since "Arantxa" doesn't mean anything in Catalan, I
suppose most Catalans at least will tend to perceive it as
Basque.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl


From sarant at village.uunet.lu  Tue Oct 19 17:16:57 1999
From: sarant at village.uunet.lu (Nikos Sarantakos)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 18:16:57 +0100
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
In-Reply-To: <007d01bf16ff$8c3ad280$d806703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.181657.0100.>

At 13:20 15/10/99 +0200, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

>I forgot to mention that in Modern Greek (NeoEllinik?) the use of the
>definite article before proper names is standard practice, e.g. O Yorghos
>("the George", written Ho Gio:rgos). And of course also with titles, like in
>Spanish:  o k?rios ("el se?or", written Ho Kyrios) XYZ, i kir?a ("la
>se?ora", written He: Kyr?a) XYZ. I know of no special connotation.

No, there is no special connotation.

Now, this is extreme nit-picking perhaps, but in Modern Greek
there is no "written Ho Gio:rgos". Rough breathing (which you
note with H) is neither written since 1981, nor pronounced
since much earlier, so it is dubious
why H should be used for transliteration of Modern Greek.

ns


From roz-frank at uiowa.edu  Wed Oct 20 01:43:37 1999
From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 20:43:37 -0500
Subject: Pre-Basque Phonology
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.204337.0500.>

At 04:04 PM 10/15/99 +0100, you wrote:
>Roz Frank writes:

>[on Basque <bat> 'one' from *<bade>]

>> In other words, for you the meaning of <bedera> is "one apiece"? I think
>> you defined it this way in an earlier mailing, also.

>Yes.  The word has other meanings, but 'one apiece' is the most widespread,

Just how wide-spread in your opinion? And what are those other meanings?

>and, more importantly, it's the earliest sense recorded -- in Leizarraga, in
>1571.

I'm curious what precisely the sentence was in which the term had that
meaning. Could you provide it?

I'm assuming it might be something like "Bakoitzari liburu bedera" (which
could be glossed roughly as "a book to each one"). Or is found it some
other context? It is important to pay attention to the nuances of the term.

>>  Hence, the data set under analysis consists solely of <bedera> and
>> <bederatzi> since these are the only two examples mentioned by Michelena,
>> right?

>Primarily, yes.  There are one or two other words which may also be connected,
>but these are less clear.

Could you share with us what are these other one or two words are precisely?

>> You have shared with us two statements concerning the etymology of <bat>:
>> First your own which you phrased as follows:

>> 1). that <bat> "is pretty clearly derived from earlier *<bade>."

>> Then you provided us with a paraphrase or synopsis of Michelena's
>> statements on the topic:

>> 2). that in Michelena's opinion the etymology from *<bade> "lacked
>> compelling evidence" and hence
>> "was not secure." It should be considered, therefore, "only a plausible
>> suggestion."

>> Having read over Michelena's comments, I believe your summary of them,
>> provided above, is quite accurate and appropriate. It expands on
>> Michelena's representation of *<bade> as "*<bade>?". He clearly didn't feel
>> fully confident about it. Also, above you state that you "endorse Gavel's
>> and Michelena's suggestions," once again emphasizing the tentative nature
>> of the reconstruction and once again a very measured statement on your part.

>Correct.

>> However, there is a third instance in which you have spoken about this same
>> problem although in rather different terms. Specifically on that occasion
>> you stated the following:

>> "It is most unusual for a native Basque word to end in a plosive, and <bat>
>> is clearly from earlier *<bade> or *<bada>  suggested by  the morph <bede->
>> in derivatives as (northern) <bedera> 'one apiece' and <bederatzi> 'nine'."

>> To my knowledge Michelena did not list the second etymon *<bada>, although
>> perhaps he did so on some other occasion, i.e., not in his work _Fonetica
>> Historica Vasca_.

>The variant proposal *<bada>, which I do not endorse, was not made by
>Michelena, but by somebody else more recently.  Sorry; I've forgotten who it
>was.

I have not found any reference to it except in your book which doesn't list
a citation for the source. If you listed it also in your doctoral
dissertation (1979?), perhaps you included the citation in that version.

>> As you will recall, the above quote is found on page 273 of your book _The
>> History of Basque_. Your statement, therefore, seems to contradict what you
>> have shared with us on the IE list or at least to be far less cautious.
>> Furthermore, I note that in your book you list <bede-> as a morph, not as
>> *<bede->. Earlier on this list you also affirmed that <bedere(n> contains
>> the same morph, if my memory serves me right.

>No; I didn't affirm any such thing.  I merely noted that it was possible.

>As for <bede->, this is an attested morph, and so it gets no asterisk.

I'm not following this discussion here very well. First, I thought that in
this scenario <bedere>, <bedere(n)> and <bedera> are proposed as related
items, i.e., as sharing the same elements or at least the same
root-stem/morpheme. And, second, I thought that you/Michelena were
proposing that the root-stem/morpheme of <bedera> was *<bede>. And then
from that assumption, proposing that <bat> should be reconstructed as
*<bede>. Other than this, if <bede> is an attested morph, could you give me
a source/explanation for your allegation.

I repeat: to my knowledge, *<bede> is not attested in Euskera outside of
its hypothesized existence, i.e., from a reconstruction of <bedera> from
*<bede>. Stated differently, the morph *<bede> comes into exsistence as the
reconstruction of <bat> because of the fact that <bedera> is deconstructed
as *<bede-ra>. This latter reconstruction of <bedera> is what brings the
morpheme *<bede> into being; otherwise it is not attested anywhere.
Correct? It all depends on whether one accepts this derivation for <bedera>.

>> Before you wrote your book, did you discover additional evidence -beyond
>> that presented by Gavel and Michelena- which strengthened your conviction
>> concerning this version of events? And if you did find additional proof for
>> this position, could you share it with us?

>> Furthermore, based on your statements in the email on this topic cited
>> above ("I can claim no credit."), you seem to be saying that all you have
>> done is repeat the positions of Gavel and Michelena, nothing more. Yet in
>> this section of your book you do not cite or otherwise overtly refer to the
>> specific works of Gavel nor Michelena where they discuss this problem.
>> Indeed, your statement "<bat> is clearly from earlier *<bade> or *<bada>"
>> leaves the impression that there is no other possibility: that yours is a
>> summary of the consensus opinion.

>I am more enthusiastic about *<bade> than Michelena was, that's all.

Why?

>I don't know if there exists a consensus.  But I know of nobody who has
>criticized Michelena's proposal of *<bade>.

Do you know of anyone other than yourself who has discussed it at any
length? Remember, as you yourself stated, Michelena wasn't particularly
convinced by the data. So he wasn't really inviting people to agree or
disagree with him. Stated differently, he wasn't setting it up as something
to be defended or criticized. In fact, as far as I know, this item is not
something that has been debated at all in print, other than a brief email
discussion which took place on Basque-l some time back.

Best wishes,
Roz
************************************************************************
Roslyn M. Frank
Professor
************************************************************************
Department of Spanish & Portuguese
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242
email: <roz-frank at uiowa.edu>
fax: (319)-335-2990


From dwanders at pacbell.net  Tue Oct 19 10:29:04 1999
From: dwanders at pacbell.net (dwanders at pacbell.net)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 10:29:04 +0000
Subject: Indo-European Studies Bulletin
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.102904.0000.>

A new issue of the Indo-European Studies Bulletin has just
appeared. The IES Bulletin is affiliated with the Indo-European
Studies Program at UCLA.

Volume 8, Number 2 August/September 1999
Contents

Articles:
"A Review of Recent Baltological Research" by Rick Derksen
"The Cimmerians  -- Their Origin and Expansion" by Andrzej Pydyn
"TheUse of Computers in Historical and Comparative Linguistics"
    by Javier Mart?nez and James Bisso

Reviews:
The Mummies of ?r?mchi by Elizabeth W. Barber (K. Jones-Bley)
Noah's Flood: The new scientific discoveries about the event that
    changed history by William Ryan and Walter Pitman (J. P.
    Mallory)
Indian Epigraphy, A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit,
    Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages by Richard
    Salomon (H. Scharfe)

Conference Reports:
Contacts between Indo-European and Uralic Speakers, Tv?rminne
	Research Station, Finland, January 8--10, 1999 (J. P.  Mallory)
SegundasJornadas de Micenolog?a de la Universidad de Alicante,
    Orihuela-Alicante, Spain, February 17-19, 1999 (E. Lujan)

Notes and Brief Communications
Electronic Resources for IE
Upcoming Conferences
New Books
New Journals
IE Dissertations
Books for Review

The IES Bulletin, affiliated with the Indo-European Studies Program
at UCLA, is published twice yearly by the Friends and Alumni of
Indo-European Studies. The Friends and Alumni of Indo-European
Studies is a support  group for the Indo-European Studies Program
at UCLA.  Contributions go toward the publication and mailing of
the Bulletin,  prizes at the annual IE conference for Best Paper by
a New  Scholar, as well as for bringing speakers to UCLA during
the  academic year and at the annual conference.

The membership runs from 15 May-15 May. Contribution levels are
$10 (student), $20 (regular member in US and Canada), $25
(regular member outside US and Canada). Checks, made payable
in US dollars to "FAIES/UCLA Foundation" should be sent to:
FAIES, 2143 Kelton Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90025. Credit cards
are also accepted. For further information on how to pay by credit
card or for any other questions, please contact D. Anderson at
dwanders at socrates.berkeley.edu or FAIES, 2143 Kelton Ave., Los
Angeles, CA 90025. Note: We are unable to accept Eurochecks
at  this time.


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Oct 20 03:00:43 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 20:00:43 -0700
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <007601bf1747$31b7a8e0$5510063e@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.200043.0700.>

At 08:43 PM 10/15/99 +0100, petegray wrote:

>I didn't post very much in that discussion myself, because I didn't think it
>was worthwhile, but myy guess is that I am not alone in being both (a)
>relatively silent about it and (b) totally convinced that the discussion has
>not yet proved anything.

Certainly I do not find the contents of the UPenn Web site convincing as
yet.  (I haven't yet read the detailed articles, as they are in postscript,
and I do not seem to have a postscript display app here).

I have some preliminary comments on the UPenn tree, and my general take on
applying phylogenetic analysis to languages which I will present shortly.

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


From DRC at stargate1.auckland.ac.nz  Tue Oct 19 06:42:12 1999
From: DRC at stargate1.auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 19:42:12 +1300
Subject: Nors Josephson's Theory about a linguistic and
 culturalinfluence of Ancient Greek on East-Polynesia
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.194212.1300.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Another tiresome piece of mock-linguistics (retailed by Charles Berlitz,
wouldn't ya know?). I think this came up a year or so ago, but perhaps
not on this list. The only really amusing part is that some of the
Hawaiian words (such as those for "bread" and "plough") are actually
from Greek -- 19th century loanwords introduced by educated
missionaries.

Is this the same Nors Josephson who has a day job as a musicologist?

Ross Clark

>>> <X99Lynx at aol.com> 10/15 2:39  >>>
In a message dated 10/13/99 5:33:08 PM, MF1107 at mclink.it wrote:

<<I should like to know some scholarly opinion about N. Josephson's theories
concerning a presumptive linguistic Greek influence on Pacific area (ex. gr.
cf. N. Josephson, Greek Linguistic Elements in the Polynesian Languages,
Universitaetsverlag C. Winter, Heidelberg, 1987; or Idem, Eine
archaisch-griechische Kultur auf der Osterinsel, Universitaetsverlag C.
Winter, Heidelberg, 1999 ).>>

For those interested, there's a brief page on Josephson's '87 piece with word
comparisons at:
http://www.ancientgr.com/Unknown_Hellenic_History/Eng/Words_in_Hawai.htm

(the url may wrap around in e-mail and have to be deleted back to one line)

S. Long


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Tue Oct 19 18:59:00 1999
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 18:59:00 -0000
Subject: Nors Josephson's Theory about a linguistic and
 culturalinfluence of Ancient Greek on East-Polynesia
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.185900.0000.>

Dear Steve and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: <X99Lynx at aol.com>
Sent: Friday, October 15, 1999 1:39 AM
Subject: Re: Nors Josephson's Theory about a linguistic and
    culturalinfluence of Ancient Greek on East-Polynesia

> In a message dated 10/13/99 5:33:08 PM, MF1107 at mclink.it wrote:

> <<I should like to know some scholarly opinion about N. Josephson's theories
> concerning a presumptive linguistic Greek influence on Pacific area (ex. gr.
> cf. N. Josephson, Greek Linguistic Elements in the Polynesian Languages,
> Universitaetsverlag C. Winter, Heidelberg, 1987; or Idem, Eine
> archaisch-griechische Kultur auf der Osterinsel, Universitaetsverlag C.
> Winter, Heidelberg, 1999 ).>>

> For those interested, there's a brief page on Josephson's '87 piece with word
> comparisons at:
> http://www.ancientgr.com/Unknown_Hellenic_History/Eng/Words_in_Hawai.htm
> (the url may wrap around in e-mail and have to be deleted back to one line)
>
> S. Long

I have not read Josephson's book so my comments will be based solely on what
can be seen at the website referenced above.

In three examples, the Hawaiian word contains a <t>:

toko-toko, 'wood'; tarra, 'courage'; aeto, 'hawk'.

These are respectively compared with Greek doko's, tha'rros, and aeto's.

While the extreme reduction of the consonantal inventory in Polynesian
languages might lead to a situation where Greek d/th/t *all* show up in
Polynesian as <t>, it would take many more examples than are contained on
the webpage to make it worthy of serious consideration.

Though I am suspicious of misapplications of theories of random coincidences
and the associated mathematical rationales, I see nothing at the website
that would persuade me that these few correspondences are not legitimate
examples of random relationships.

In the case of some words, not containing stops, like angou (suffocate),
nou-nou (thought), manao (think), the possibility of common descent from
some earlier language should be considered.

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 meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er
mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sat Oct 23 15:34:39 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sat, 23 Oct 1999 16:34:39 +0100
Subject: Nors Josephson's Theory about a linguistic and cultural
 influence of Ancient Greek on East-Polynesia
Message-ID: <SAT.23.OCT.1999.163439.0100.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

I've just had a look at the little Web page recommended for Nors Josephson's
idea of Greeks in the Pacific around 950 BC.  For anyone who enjoys this sort
of thing, I'd like to cite a much earlier scholar who developed not only the
idea of Greek words in the Pacific, but also the idea of Hawaiian words in the
pre-Columbian Americas, and indeed all other conceivable permutations of such
notions:

Arnold D. Wadler (1948), One Language: Source of All Tongues, New York:
American Press for Art and Science.

The late Professor Dr. Wadler, whose colorful academic career is movingly
described in a brief preface, was there firstest with the mostest.  Nobody who
is interested in pan-global linguistic connections can afford to overlook this
masterpiece of 1930s multilateral comparison, now sadly out of print.  Joe
Greenberg, eat your heart out. ;-)

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Oct 19 08:34:08 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 09:34:08 +0100
Subject: Respect goes both ways!
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.093408.0100.>

Vidhyanath Rao writes:

[LT]

>> I am completely mystified.  The relation "is the same as" is
>> unquestionably transitive. [Rest of the argument deleted]

> As philosophers have been aware for two or more thounsands of years, this
> argument leads to conclusions which make all science questionable [for one
> extreme example, read Nagarjuna].

> Am I the same person I was when I wrote the previous sentence? After all,
> merely by breathing, the set of atoms that make up me (whatever that
> means) has changed. But if you say yes, by a long chain of equivalences,
> it must follow that I am the same person that I was when I was conceived.
> But was I even a person at that point?

Sure.  I don't dispute this at all.

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.  The problems only arise when we try to decide whether the
relation can be appropriately applied to entities in the world.

In the case of languages, I have argued that the relation cannot, in general,
be meaningfully applied at all.  The strange and unpalatable consequences
that I have objected to on this list seem to me to derive wholly from the
inappropriate application of this relation to language varieties.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Oct 19 08:43:55 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 09:43:55 +0100
Subject: Campbell's def. of "language"
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.094355.0100.>

Ed Selleslagh writes:

[snip examples]

> So, according to Campbell: Spanish = Italian, and West-Flemish or Limburgish
> do not belong to the same language as Holland Dutch.

Wonderful, Ed, wonderful!

But, in fairness to Campbell, let's recall that his definitions were never
intended to be universal: they were only a policy designed to let him get on
with his book on American languages.

Still, Ed's examples are a superb counter to any attempt at raising mutual
intelligibility to universal status as a criterion for drawing language
boundaries.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Tue Oct 19 18:01:13 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 14:01:13 EDT
Subject: Mutual Intelligibility. [was Re: Misrepresenting others'
 views]
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.140113.EDT.>

>Odegard at means.net writes:

>But if you, the modern linguist, did a word-for-word
>phonemo-grammatico-lexical analysis, you'd see it was the *same* language.

-- no, you'd see it was a closely related language.  That is, after all, how
you _get_ new languages -- dialect divergence.

>The question becomes pointed when you also ask if the language of the
>Makedones was really 'Greek'.

-- probably a closely related but distinct language, or an extremely
divergent Greek dialect, a somewhat arbitrary distinction; but we don't have
enough information to be sure and probably never will.  The other evidence --
personal names, religious practice -- would seem to indicate that the
Makedones proper were fairly close to Greek.  In any case, their upper class,
by Alexander's time, were bilingual in Macedonian and standard Greek, roughly
as the Russian aristocracy used to be in Russian and French.

(It's a pity we have even less on Molossian (Epirote) and so forth.  My own
guess, which is no more than that, is that there was a fringe of
related-to-Greek languages around the northern edge of Greece proper, a relic
of the folk-movements which originally brought proto-Greek south from the
Balkans.  Phyrgian seems, on what scanty evidence we have, to have stood in
some close relationship to Greek -- eg., use of a cognate of "wannax" for
"king".)

>What happens when there are major grammatical innovations, but of a such
>transparent nature that the next-door cognate has no problems understanding it
>(e.g., collapsing locative ablative and instrumental into dative+preposition)?
>My answer is they are separate languages, inasmuch as both speakers will
>regard the other's speech as 'ungrammatical'.

-- If the two dialects are perfectly mutually comprehensible, it is, to be
frank, absurd to regard them as separate languages.


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Tue Oct 19 18:20:13 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 13:20:13 -0500
Subject: Updates regarding UPenn tree
In-Reply-To: <00d701bf178e$5c5a9b60$24a394d1@roborr.uottawa.ca>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.132013.0500.>

But why the Irish dialect form <fuisce> said [I believe] to actually be
Scots Gaelic uisge beatha via  English whisky/whiskey and the alternate
forms Whelan and Phelan for what seems to be the same lastname? Did the
f/*w alternation survive in some places?

>Gaelic has an f/zero alternation (f/fh orthographically), and also what
>looks like an  s/f alternation (Lenited IE *sw develops to Goidelic f
>(non-lenited sw becomes s) and Welsh chw (there are not many examples, and
>these are often obscured by subsequent sound chnages and levellings).

>Gaelic f is actually a development of Indo-European *w in non-lenited
>position (lenited *w develops to zero).  cf. fear/fhear (< IE wir-);
>Brythonic  develops IE *w to g(w) in non-lenited position, cf. Welsh gwr (<
>IE *wir-).

[snip]
>Robert Orr

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Tue Oct 19 18:10:37 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 14:10:37 EDT
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.141037.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/19/99 1:41:33 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu writes:

<< n fairness to Renfrew, *ekwos is not probative.  It's true that the horse
had not >been domesticated at the early date for PIE unity which Renfrew
postulates; but >you need not have domesticated the horse to have a word for
it.  The PIE speakers >could have been hunting wild horses for their meat,
for example. >>

-- the words for wheel, wheeled vehicle, 'to journey by wheeled vehicle', and
for axle, plow, yoke, coulter-pin, etc., are rather more probative.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Tue Oct 19 18:11:42 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 14:11:42 EDT
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.141142.EDT.>

<< On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, Stanley Friesen wrote:

 > Except that Renfrew can only reach this "conclusion" by ignoring many facts
 > about PIE that are quite secure (e.g. the universality of *ekwos, and the
 > original distinction between wlkwos and kuoon)  >>

-- on the other hand, the domestic dog is firmly dated to at least 15,000
BCE, so wlkwos/kuoon doesn't count.


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Oct 20 02:50:01 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 19:50:01 -0700
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.991015101727.3740C-100000@unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.195001.0700.>

At 10:23 AM 10/15/99 -0400, Sean Crist wrote:
>In fairness to Renfrew, *ekwos is not probative.  It's true that the horse
>had not been domesticated at the early date for PIE unity which Renfrew
>postulates; but you need not have domesticated the horse to have a word
>for it.  The PIE speakers could have been hunting wild horses for their
>meat, for example.

This could be a bit tricky - did the wild horse have a range corresponding
to the extent of IE speakers postulated by Renfrew prior to its
domestication?  I cannot remember if the quagga extended into northern
Europe.  And even if it did, it is not clear it would be given the same
name as _Equus caballus_ (or its wild antecedents).

Without a locally present animal to apply the word to, it would be expected
to either die out or be transferred to some other animal.  If the latter
occurred it would not now have the uniformity of meaning it in fact has.
(Look at what happened to some of the tree names in areas where the
original tree was not present).

There is also the word for "metal" or "copper", which indicates a
post-neolithic culture for the PIE speakers.

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


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Oct 20 03:20:20 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 20:20:20 -0700
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
In-Reply-To: <0.182295de.253a9e33@aol.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.202020.0700.>

[ Moderator's note:
  I have combined two messages from Mr. Friesen into this single posting, since
  the second was additional commentary on the first.
  --rma ]

At 11:36 PM 10/16/99 -0400, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 10/15/99 7:43:37 AM, sarima at ix.netcom.com wrote:

><<I sometimes think the critics of linguistic archaeology make too much of
>this sort of continuity.  In a mixing of cultures in which one language
>eventually displaces another, *naturally* many aspects of the culture of the
>"losing" language will persist afterwards.>>

>It's not a criticism of "linguistic archaeology" or "paleolinguistics".  It's
>simply that material remains speak for themselves.  If you have "mixed
>cultures", one can make any linguistic conclusions one feels appropriate.
>That doesn't change the hard evidence and the fact that it may not endorse
>any particular conclusion about the languages being spoken.

All I really look for is that it be *consist ant* with the model that is
developed using a combination of evidence from many sources.  It need not,
*on* *its* *own*, uniquely support any particular model.

><<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
>...".>>

>And that is exactly the case.  If you are saying that material culture has
>remained, than what would you expect him to report?  ANYTHING else would be
>INCORRECT.

I am not expecting them to report anything else.  What I was reacting to
was, perhaps, not what you were actually saying.  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.

>The point you've made is that the material culture can sometimes be
>independent of language change - which is exactly what the problem is in
>expecting that archaeological evidence can be used to support  e.g., the
>presence or absence of Greek being spoken in parts or all of Greece in
>prehistoric times.  Which is why I wrote ALTHOUGH THIS MIGRATION (from

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

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

Message-Id: <4.1.19991020082121.00980b40 at popd.netcruiser>
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 08:45:51 -0700
Subject: Fwd: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE

[ moderator snip ]

>All I really look for is that it be *consistant* with the model that is
>developed using a combination of evidence from many sources.  It need not,
>*on* *its* *own*, uniquely support any particular model.

To follow up on this matter in more detail:

What we see in Polynesia and Roman Gaul is a mixture of continuity and
change.  And the change is often such that it, itself, involves admixture
of native and imported elements.

To take the case of Roman Gaul, as more apropos to the Early Helladic of
Greece, we see the following effects superimposed upon the continuity of
Gaulish culture:

1. Extensive destruction of older settlements
2. (Re-)Estblishment of settlements with a different site layout (generally
a hybrid of Italic and Gaulic town plans).
3. Application of Roman technology, and to some degree artistic styles, to
typically Gaulic artifacts, causing a subtle change in style in these
artifacts.

It is almost exactly this pattern we see in the EH II to EH III transition.

Note, I am far from convinced that this is the arrival of the Greeks: it
may as easily represent the arrival, or beginning of the arrival, or a
pre-Greek IE substratum.  The Greeks may not have arrived until the
two-wheeled war chariot showed up near the end of the MH (around 1600 BC).

Certainly if a late unity of Greek and Indo-Iranian is valid (the
Greek-Armenian-Indo-Iranian Sprachbund), then Greeks are almost certainly
to be associated with war chariots, as that seems to be a late innovation.

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


From adahyl at cphling.dk  Wed Oct 20 13:51:12 1999
From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 15:51:12 +0200
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.991015101727.3740C-100000@unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.155112.0200.>

On Fri, 15 Oct 1999, Sean Crist wrote:

> It's true that the horse had not been domesticated at the early date for
> PIE unity which Renfrew postulates; but you need not have domesticated
> the horse to have a word for it.  The PIE speakers could have been hunting
> wild horses for their meat, for example.

That is not even necessary. I think the PIE speakers had a word for
every animal just _living_ in the area.

Adam Hyllested


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Thu Oct 21 15:39:44 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1999 08:39:44 -0700
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
In-Reply-To: <0.68f3dc5f.253c1ae6@aol.com>
Message-ID: <THU.21.OCT.1999.083944.0700.>

At 02:40 AM 10/18/99 -0400, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 10/15/99 1:18:35 AM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu wrote:

><<The arrival of the Greeks may not have disrupted the local culture
>in any great way e.g. ... or.... a continuous arrival of technologically less
>advanced people whose language was adopted by the elite>>

>Good point.  One archaeologist who was active in the area has described to me
>what he would dig for to test what he calls the Greeks as "migrant workers"
>hypothesis.  He's mentioned it on a list and got a consensus answer that a
>truly transient population probably would leave no material remains that
>could be correctly identified as separate from the culture that was "hosting"
>them.

I doubt, however, that "migrant workers" could impose their language on an
area.  A language must be prestigious for a native population to abandon
their old language for a new one.  It was the prestige of Latin that led to
Gauls abandoning Gaulic in favor of Latin.  The bottom line is that there
must be a perceived advantage to speaking the new language to justify the
trouble of learning it, and of speaking it enough at home to make it a
birth language for ones children.

>With regard to your peaceful influx scenario - like the Lefkandi I migration
>starting about 2500BC that seems to be the only clearly identifiable one of
>the EH/early MH period - Herodotus says that the inhabitants of Attica were
>all originally "Pelagasians" who voluntarily adopted the Greek language
>because it was to their mercantile advantage (which is consistent with one of
>Mallory's formulas for the spread of IE.)

Actually, I suspect that *most* "Greeks" were originally "Pelasgians".

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


From Georg at home.ivm.de  Tue Oct 19 23:28:33 1999
From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 01:28:33 +0200
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19991015181910.0099a530@popd.netcruiser>
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.012833.0200.>

>At 11:28 AM 10/13/99 -0400, Sean Crist wrote:
>>-Renfrew proposes that Anatolia is the homeland of the Indo-Europeans.  If
>>so, it is very odd the Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic existed in the midst of
>>languages (Hattic and Hurrian) which are not only not Indo-European but
>>which bear no typological resemblance to Indo-European.

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

If you allow for a little snide (which is not directed against you):

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 ...

St.G.

Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
+49-228-69-13-32


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Wed Oct 20 02:30:26 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 22:30:26 -0400
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
In-Reply-To: <0.92d12bd9.253a9941@aol.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.223026.0400.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

On Sat, 16 Oct 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com 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.

It's quite true that the reconstructed IE vocabulary puts certain
constraints on the possible dates for the final IE unity.  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.
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.
Other such examples could be given.

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?

> Actually, there are a better reason given by Renfrew for equating the spread
> of neolithic agriculturalism with the spread of Proto-IndoEuropean.  Not the
> least of which is the extent of IE dispersal at those periods in time when
> ACTUAL DOCUMENTABLE EVIDENCE of language becomes available.

Suppose that we accept that the latest period of PIE unity was 4000-3500
BCE.  The first written records are dated to the second millenium BCE.
I'm prepared to accept that 2000-2500 years is enough time for a mobile
and warlike culture to spread over such distances.

> In response to my request for an evaluation of another item that has been
> discussed on this list, one rather eminent practioner simply wrote back to
> me:

> <<Archeologist have become increasingly unhappy using terms based upon
> language for labeling cultures which are prehistoric--ie the culture has left
> no written documents upon which a historican can exercise analysis. With rare
> exceptions, physical artefacts do not include evidence about the language
> used by those who left the artefacts recovered.>>

It depends on what you're trying to do.  If you're trying to explain the
internal economy of a prehistoric culture, to explain how and why it
changed over time, to work out the diet and life expectancy, etc., then
there's no particular need to try to figure out what language was spoken
in that culture, or whether it is the ancestor of any language attested in
the historical record.  You can do perfectly good archaeology without
concerning yourself with language.

That's not the only sort of question which one might ask, however.  We
observe that a family of related languages has a particular geographical
distribution, and we also reconstruct a particular vocabulary for the
proto-language, and perhaps also a detailed phylogeny of that language
family.  With this information in hand, it's very reasonable to ask what
the archaeological record can tell us about where and when the
proto-language was spoken, and how it came to have the later distribution
which we observe.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Wed Oct 20 04:20:40 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 00:20:40 EDT
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.002040.EDT.>

>sarima at ix.netcom.com writes:

>The appearance of horse-bits (for riding) in the Sredny-Stog culture is quit
>telling here.  (Mallory does not actually mention this, as it was not yet
>known when he wrote his book).>>

-- very true; they showed up just where he predicted them.

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.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Wed Oct 20 04:56:58 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 00:56:58 EDT
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.005658.EDT.>

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>Colin Renfrew's Archaeology and Language - given its date - is a formidable
>piece

-- nobody much in this field takes it at all seriously because it ignores all
the _linguistic_ evidence, and in fact flatly contradicts everything learned
by comparative and historical linguistics over the past 250 years.  Either
our reconstructive linguistics are all wrong, or Renfrew is wrong.

And Renfrew has shown repeatedly that he doesn't understand the linguistic
arguments he's attempting to critique.

>Not the least of which is the extent of IE dispersal at those periods in time
>when ACTUAL DOCUMENTABLE EVIDENCE of language becomes available.

-- we know from historical examples that languages can spread very quickly
over very large areas, so this is not a significant argument.

We also know that the spread of a language doesn't necessarily leave much
archaeological evidence at all.


From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu  Wed Oct 20 11:54:32 1999
From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 07:54:32 -0400
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.075432.0400.>

Stanley Friesen <sarima at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> The appearance of horse-bits (for riding) in the Sredny-Stog culture is
> quit telling here.  (Mallory does not actually mention this, as it was not
> yet known when he wrote his book).

I don't know if bits themselves have been found in datable context. What I
remember is report of a horse head (skeleton) that showed evidence of bit
wear. There was some problem dating this. David Anthony dated it to about
4000 BCE. Later attempts to date the bones suggested about 3000 BCE. I
don't know if this has been resolved.

There is another major problem: It is usually assumed that Indian
chariotry goes back to PIIr or PIE times. If PIE already had bits, why
were bits unknown in India till 4th c BCE? And why are cheek pieces of the
type used with nosebands found in Myc. Greece and the steppe during 2nd m.
BCE, and not bits? [I think that the four little disks shown in the
photots about the Sintasha cemetries are such cheek pieces, though the
articles I have seen pass over them in silence.]

Littauer has raised these specific questions, I am not aware of any
responses by David Anthony.

---

For an informative description of early bits etc, see Littauer in
Antiquity ``Bits and pieces'' sometime in later 60s.
There are articles in South Asian Archaeology 1993 about cheeck-pieces
from various areas together with comparative charts.

---


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Wed Oct 20 18:10:19 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 14:10:19 EDT
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.141019.EDT.>

>larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:

>Actually, he doesn't, and he's quite explicit about it.

>Renfrew allows language spread by wholesale population movement in just two
>circumstances: the first settlement of previously uninhabited areas, and
>spread by elite dominance.  Otherwise, he sees language spread as proceeding
>by diffusion across established populations

-- which is palpably absurd; the historical record is full of large-scale
movements of population.

Renfrew has to assume that as soon as written records aren't present, the
whole structure of historical causality immediately and radically changes.

It's as clear a case of torturing the historical evidence to fit on the
Procrustian bed of theory as I've ever seen.


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Oct 20 15:20:26 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 08:20:26 -0700
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
In-Reply-To: <E11cqTX-0002xx-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.082026.0700.>

At 02:35 PM 10/17/99 +0100, Larry Trask wrote:

>This is precisely the position which Renfrew attacks.  And, to be fair, it is
>not difficult to point to cases in which prestige languages have spread,
>displacing earlier languages, without massive population movements.

And in this, I think Renfrew is probably closer to right than he is in
other areas.  Where he falls down is in failing to realize that this means
that even a subtle change in material culture can represent a switch of
language.

Indeed, I quite agree that IE probably spread largely by elite dominance,
with only the tribal overlords actually migrating to the new areas.  (Note,
prior to modern communications, language spread by elite dominance requires
that at least *some* speakers of the new language move into the new area).

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 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.

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

>This is exactly the point which troubles me the most.  But Renfrew has in fact
>met it head on in his latest paper on the issue, presented at a symposium in
>Cambridge last summer and due to be published in the proceedings early next
>year.

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

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


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Wed Oct 20 15:16:42 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 11:16:42 -0400
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
In-Reply-To: <E11cqTX-0002xx-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.111642.0400.>

On Sun, 17 Oct 1999, Larry Trask wrote:

>>  ... Verb conjugations, etc. only spread when speakers move.

> This is precisely the position which Renfrew attacks.  And, to be fair, it is
> not difficult to point to cases in which prestige languages have spread,
> displacing earlier languages, without massive population movements.

I'm wondering what cases you've got in mind; in all the ones I can think
of (Prussian, Oscan, etc.), the area to which the language spreads is
under some sort of political domination by the area from which the
language is spreading.  And this, in turn, involves some kind of military
movement, which is a sort of movement of speakers.

> 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.

I could potentially buy that in the case of words for cultural items, but
not in the case of the large number of non-Greek toponyms in Greece.

>>  -Most importantly, placing the initial dispersion of the Indo-Europeans at
>>  the beginning of the Neolithic around 6500 BCE in entirely incompatible
>>  with the reconstructed Indo-European vocabulary.  Words such as yoke,
>>  wheel, etc. are reconstructed for PIE, but this technology is not attested
>>  until much, much later- namely, not much after 4000-3500 BCE, which is the
>>  date which Mallory and others put forward as the final date of IE
>>  linguistic unity.

> This is exactly the point which troubles me the most.  But Renfrew has in
> fact met it head on in his latest paper on the issue, presented at a
> symposium in Cambridge last summer and due to be published in the proceedings
> early next year.

Well, I'll look forward to reading it.  It isn't available online
anywhere, is it?

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de  Thu Oct 21 08:38:58 1999
From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze)
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1999 10:38:58 +0200
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
Message-ID: <THU.21.OCT.1999.103858.0200.>

Stanley Friesen schrieb:

> At 11:28 AM 10/13/99 -0400, Sean Crist wrote:
>> -Renfrew proposes that Anatolia is the homeland of the Indo-Europeans.  If
>> so, it is very odd the Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic existed in the midst of
>> languages (Hattic and Hurrian) which are not only not Indo-European but
>> which bear no typological resemblance to Indo-European.

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

As far as I remember the IE list already had a lengthy discussion of a
possible affiliation of Hattic, Hurrian etc. to 'North Caucasian'. So I
won't pick all the whole matter but will restrict myself to some basic
(and rather trivial) claims:

1) [in re Sean Crist]: 'Typological resemblance' can NEVER be a
criterion to support a hypothesis concerning language affiliation. This
is common sense in the linguistic community, I think. Obviously,
however, it cannot be repeated often enough. 

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]. All we have is a rather strong evidence for 'West Caucasian'
(Abkhaz, Abaza; Ubyx, Adyghej, Kabarda) and a NOT SO STRONG evidence for
what is called East Caucasian (29 languages, if we neglect the position
of certain dialects of Dargwa etc.). Neither Proto-WC nor Proto-EC have
ever been reconstructed as more or less 'complete' language systems,
hence it is rather difficult to tell, HOW they really looked like
[believe me, I have been working in this domain since more than 25 years
and very often got desparated when trying to say more about these
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. Only if we can tell HOW the systems of WC and EC looked alike
say 5000 years ago (we generally calculate that EC has split up 3000 -
2500 BC and we need an additional time gap (say 2000 years) to
accomodate for the high degree of 'divergencies', Hattic, Hurrian etc.
show) AND only if we are able to reconstruct earlier forms of Hattic,
Hurrian etc. via internal reconstruction than we might get a point of
reference that would allow us to judge any possible affinity of any
language of Ancient Asia Minor to those that are (at present!) spoken in
the Caucasus. The desastrous 'results' of an ad hoc comparison between
the languages in question can be easily checked with the help of D.
Diakonoff/ S.A. Starostin 1986. Hurro-Urartian as an East Caucasian
Language. M?nchen (Kitzinger) (see my review in Kratylos
1987:154-59).

W.S.
--
[Note: My email address has been modified: Please use
W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de!]
___________________________________
| Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze
| Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft
| Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen
| Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1
| D-80539 Muenchen
| Tel:	+89-21802486 (secr.)
|      	+89-21805343 (office) NEW ! NEW !
| Fax:	+89-21805345
| Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de
|http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/
_____________________________________________________


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Tue Oct 19 19:52:59 1999
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 19:52:59 -0000
Subject: Refining early Basque criteria
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.195259.0000.>

[ moderator edited with author's consent ]

Dear Larry and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Sent: Friday, October 15, 1999 4:09 PM

<snip>

> [on words like Basque <ama> 'mother' and <tu> 'spit']

[PR]

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.

An interesting statement on this topic may be found at my website:

<"http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/comment-Baby-Talk.htm">

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.

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 meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er
mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)


From stevegus at aye.net  Tue Oct 19 19:14:18 1999
From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 15:14:18 -0400
Subject: Linear A to Linear B
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.151418.0400.>

petegray wrote:

> Much of Larry's posting appears to me reasonable and common sense, except
> that here I wish to add a quibble.   It seems to me more likely that the
> idea that a language could be written down did not develop in isolation in
> Crete, but was imported from somewhere.    We know that when this happened
> elsewhere, it was very common for the inspiring script to be adapted to the
> new language, rather than for a totally new script to be developed ex nihilo
> (although I grant there are one or two exceptions).    This adaptation often
> meant inadequacies or infelicities in the resultant script.

My impression would be that this is often a matter of cultural prestige;
the prestige of Chinese and Sumerian/Akkadian writing was so great,
that  the one was (badly) used for unrelated languages across Asia, and
the other made into an ill-fitting script for Hittite.  Closer to home,
it hardly seems that the Latin script works well for English, and it
never has; but English speakers learned their letters from people who
looked to Rome as the font of religious and political truth.  The Arabic
script was also adopted to languages that were ill suited to use it,
again as a matter of religious tradition.

On the other hand, the more original the script, the more thought seems
to have gone into its creation.  The Brahmi script may have borrowed the
idea of writing, and maybe a few letter shapes, from a Semitic alphabet;
but it seems to have been extensively remade by sophisticated
grammarians for the purpose of writing Indic languages.  Greek (and
Roman) alphabets were consulted by St. Cyril, but he realized he needed
more, and invented dozens of new letters to create Cyrillic.  The Korean
Hangul script seems to owe something to Chinese writing, at least in the
square shapes and calligraphic forms of the character combinations; but
it is equal to the task of writing Korean.  It has been said that
Sequoya did not quite grasp the notion of alphabetic writing, since his
Cherokee script contains oddly shaped signs reminiscent of Roman letters
used capriciously and without regard to their original values; but his
syllabary is well adapted to the task of writing Cherokee.

The Cretan scripts seem to follow this pattern.  Linear B seems to
resemble Linear A, at least in its general appearance and the shapes of
the characters.  When Greek was written using this script, it was
obvious that it enjoyed some prestige even if it didn't work very well.
But if Linear A is poorly matched to the language it was used for, what
language was it well-made for?

--
Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law
Fox & Cotner:  PHONE (812) 945 9600   FAX (812) 945 9615
http://www.foxcotner.com

Nummus ubi loquitur, fit iuris confusio;
Pauper retro pellitur, quem defendit ratio,
Sed dives attrahitur pretiosus pretio.


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Oct 20 02:58:08 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 19:58:08 -0700
Subject: Linear A to Linear B
In-Reply-To: <007501bf1747$310fd020$5510063e@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.195808.0700.>

At 08:32 PM 10/15/99 +0100, you wrote:
>Larry asks for responses in a posting where he says:
>> Linear A was used to write the unknown language we call Minoan.  In all
>> likelihood, it was invented for the purpose of writing that language.

>Much of Larry's posting appears to me reasonable and common sense, except
>that here I wish to add a quibble.   It seems to me more likely that the
>idea that a language could be written down did not develop in isolation in
>Crete, but was imported from somewhere.    We know that when this happened
>elsewhere, it was very common for the inspiring script to be adapted to the
>new language, rather than for a totally new script to be developed ex nihilo
>(although I grant there are one or two exceptions).    This adaptation often
>meant inadequacies or infelicities in the resultant script.   I would
>therefore be very cautious in using the argument that the script of Linear A
>must reflect the language well, since it was "invented" for linear A.

If Linear A were in some sense imported, one would expect to see *some*
prior trace of it elsewhere.  We do not.  Instead we see prior pictorial
inscriptions in Crete.

Also, importing the *idea* of writing does not necessarily imply importing
a script.  It seems likely that Mesopotamia influenced Egypt in the
formation of hieroglyphic writing, but the Egyptians *still* seem to have
gone ahead and invented their own system.  And, more controversially, I
suspect much the same thing happened with regard to the Chinese script,
many years later.

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


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Wed Oct 20 04:57:48 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 00:57:48 EDT
Subject: Linear A to Linear B
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.005748.EDT.>

In a message dated 10/15/99 12:48:37 AM, Larry Trask wrote:

<<We've been seeing quite a bit of speculation on this list about possible
stories for Linear A and Linear B.  Well, look.  The conventional position, as
I understand it, is this... [given below]

I know of no single piece of substantial evidence that conflicts with the
standard interpretation.  Does anybody?  If not, then what reason can
there be for constructing ever more complex, ever more implausible and ever
more outlandish alternatives?  What can we possibly gain from this? How does
any given alternative story account for the known facts better than the
standard story?>>

Well, I'll try not to belabor this then, if there is nothing to gain in
anything but the standard explanation.

But there is now some evidence that may "conflict" with the standard
explanation.  And I don't know if an alternative explanation accounts for the
facts "better" than the "standard" explanation (Larry's criteria) but there
are some that seem to work just as well.

As I mentioned before there is new evidence.  Two years ago, it could be
stated with confidence as to Linear A that "Only three sites outside of Crete
itself have so far produced examples of true texts (as opposed to an
individual sign or two) in this script: Ayia Irini on Keos, Phylakopi on
Melos, and Akrotiri on Thera."

This seems to no longer be the case as a number of true texts in Linear A and
an intermediate form between A and B form of it were recently found at
"Canaanite" sites in Isreal.  I posted some information about it earlier
based on it presentation at the UCinn symposium in '97.  I've been told these
findings will be published soon.  M. Finkelberg, who was the first to present
this new evidence, has suggested that:  "Since it can be shown that the
script of the Lachish inscription is intermediary between Linear A and Linear
B, it can further be inferred that the place where the direct graphic
predecessor of Linear B developed should be sought in areas other than Minoan
Crete..." (Abstract: Bronze Age Writing: Contacts between East and West/THE
AEGEAN AND THE ORIENT IN THE SECOND MILLENNIUM,1997)

The importance of these findings apparently centers around two facts, both of
which might put into question the origins and content of Linear A and the
relation of Linear A to B.

1. There is apparently a large gap in time between Linear A and B that leaves
open what the direct source of B was.  ("For many years, the tablets at
Knossos were dated within the period ca. 1425-1385 B.C.  [end of LM II or ca.
1425 B.C. (Evans); early LM IIIA2 or ca. 1385 B.C. (Popham)], but there is a
growing consensus that they are to be attributed not to the destruction
horizon of ca. 1385 B.C. at Knossos but rather to a subsequent destruction of
the site sometime in the mid- to later 13th century, that is, to a period
broadly contemporary with the Linear B tablets from the Mainland. The most
recent and perhaps most decisive piece of evidence in favor of a later
dating in the 13th century B.C. for the Knossos tablets is the discovery
of a pair of tablets at Chania in a LM IIIB1 destruction context, one of
which appears to have been written by a scribal hand already known at
Knossos.")  This means that there might be AS MUCH AS 400 years potentially
separating Linear B from Linear A. ("The latest Linear A inscriptions appear
to be no later than LM I and hence all predate the supposed Mycenaean
occupation of Knossos in LM II and early LM IIIA.")

The finding of "transitional" Linear A-B in Canaanite settlements apparently
in the intervening period therefore would suggest that Linear B was not
necessarily the Greek adoption of a "Minoan" script, one that may have been
out of use in Crete for some time before it was adopted by the Mycenaeans.

2. The findings also raise the question of whether Linear A itself arose in
Crete, by the very fact that the "proto" scripts of Linear A - called
"pictograms" or "glyphs" - have been found in Anatolia, in the Aegean and
elsewhere.  The assumption has always been that these were merely Minoan
trade markings - like the "token" markings used prior to the development of
cuneiform.  But the appearance of Linear A and transitional text outside of
Crete might leave open the idea that only the accident of clay inscriptions
preserved the Minoan versions of Linear A.   So that one might consider that
the difficulty in deciphering Linear A may lie in the fact that it did not
actually evolve in a Minoan context.  (See message dated 10/19/99 12:54:01
PM, from petegray at btinternet.com: <<I would therefore be very cautious in
using the argument that the script of Linear A must reflect the language
well, since it was "invented" for Linear A.>>)  Part of the ambiguoty is
created by the fact that even Linear B contains a large amount of either
pictograms, ideograms or logograms.  A true pictogram would intend to have
meaning without regard to spoken language.  Apparently one explanation being
considered for the Lachish inscriptions is that Linear A might not reflect a
single language but instead an intentionally multiregional accounting script
using multi-cultural symbols.

Both these alternative don't seem "ever more implausible and ever
more outlandish" and they do seem to have some factual advantages over the
"standard" explanation.  And I certainly hope I haven't wasted anyone's time
by presenting them.

Larry Trask wrote:
[Linear A was used to write the unknown language we call Minoan.  In all
likelihood, it was invented for the purpose of writing that language.  Minoan
was not Greek, was not closely related to Greek, was very likely (though not
certainly) not even IE, and was very possibly a language of which we have no
other knowledge.

Linear B was used to write an archaic form of Greek.  It seems highly likely,
perhaps even close to certain, that Linear B is derived in some way from
Linear A, most likely that it simply represents a modification or adaptation
of Linear A for the purpose of writing an entirely different language.

Now, as far as I can see, this scenario is not only the simplest possible one
but the most obvious interpretation of the evidence at our disposal, such as
that evidence is.  The scenario seems to be entirely consistent with the
evidence.]

Regards,
Steve Long


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Oct 22 14:26:26 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 1999 15:26:26 +0100
Subject: Linear A to Linear B
Message-ID: <FRI.22.OCT.1999.152626.0100.>

Pete Gray writes:

>  Larry asks for responses in a posting where he says:
>> Linear A was used to write the unknown language we call Minoan.  In all
>> likelihood, it was invented for the purpose of writing that language.

> Much of Larry's posting appears to me reasonable and common sense, except
> that here I wish to add a quibble.   It seems to me more likely that the
> idea that a language could be written down did not develop in isolation in
> Crete, but was imported from somewhere.    We know that when this happened
> elsewhere, it was very common for the inspiring script to be adapted to the
> new language, rather than for a totally new script to be developed ex nihilo
> (although I grant there are one or two exceptions).    This adaptation often
> meant inadequacies or infelicities in the resultant script.   I would
> therefore be very cautious in using the argument that the script of Linear A
> must reflect the language well, since it was "invented" for linear A.

Sure.  I have no objection to this in principle.  But I'm not aware that there
exists any great evidence that Linear A was derived in any manner from any
earlier writing system.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From edsel at glo.be  Tue Oct 19 23:01:06 1999
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 01:01:06 +0200
Subject: Basque 'sei'
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.010106.0200.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

-----Original Message-----
From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv at wxs.nl>
Date: Tuesday, October 19, 1999 12:35 PM

[snip]
>One problem with apical vs. laminal /s/ is the lack of data.
>Because of the fact that the two *are* distinguished
>phonologically in Basque [I'm not aware of any other language
>where this is the case], and this fact linked with the
>observation that the default /s/ in Castillian is apical, has led
>to a decent amount of data being available for the areas
>surrounding Basque and Castilian.

[Ed Selleslagh]

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

The Castilian s and z/c (theta) are the descendants of the old Basque-type
distinction, I believe. S. American Spanish spoken by indigenous peoples mostly
uses a (more or less) laminal s for orthographic s and z.

What about Arabic? It certainly has various sibilants.

[MCV]
>As to myself, were it not for the fact that I've studied a bit
>phonetics, I would have spoken Dutch with apical /s/ my whole
>life without even knowing it (now I do so knowing it: too late to
>change now).  Nobody ever told me, or probably even noticed...

[Ed]

The Dutch pronunciation of s varies with the main dialect groups.  In Holland
it is almost always apical, in Flanders much less so, especially in the central
area (Brabants). In Antwerp it is laminal.

This has probably to do with the fact that Dutch dialect groups have different
origins (Ingwaeonic, Frankish, Saxon,...) and are not the result of divergence.
Dutch is rather the result of convergence.

You're not alone: Michelena once wrote that until his father (I think) drew his
attention to the different pronunciation of Basque s/z (orthographic), he
hadn't noticed it himself.

[MCV]
>In that sense, it's not unlikely that the current distribution of
>apical and laminal /s/ *can* be projected "way back into the
>past".  Unlike other phoneme substitutions, this is one that
>might have gone completely unnoticed, in say the Roman era,
>without any purist pressure whatsoever to replace it with "real",
>laminal, Latin /s/.

>Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl

[Ed]

The historic spelling systems may cloud it somewhat, but Aquitanian and
Medieval Basque seem to indicate that at least in this case the apical/laminal
distinction can be projected 'way back'.  And Iberian, that seems to share some
characteristics with Basque, undoubtedly had two sibilants and two rhotics in
its semi-sillabary 'alphabet', just like Basque and even Castilian (Z/C-theta
is treated as a sibilant in Peninsular Spanish), even though the values may
have been different or have shifted.

In my opinion, the real problem arises when one jumps from one phyllum or
branch of it to another one, while within the same language or closely knit
family there is only a shift to be expected, and possibly a breakdown of a
distinction.  When originally differing lects converge into one language,
anything may happen, but almost never a further differenciation of phonemes.

Ed.

Dr. Ir. Eduard Selleslagh edsel at glo.be
B-9120 Haasdonk
Belgium


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Wed Oct 20 20:46:51 1999
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 15:46:51 -0500
Subject: Basque 'sei'
In-Reply-To: <E11csAe-0003ue-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.154651.0500.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

	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.

[snip]>
>
>It is hard not to see a connection between Basque <trebe> 'adroit, skilful,
>expert', and also 'cunning', and the more-or-less synonymous Latin <trebax>.
>But the Basque word can't possibly derive directly from <trebax>.

>First, Latin loans into Basque almost invariably enter in the accusative, not
>in the nominative, and the Latin accusative <trebacem> doesn't end in a
>sibilant.

>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?

>Actually, Basque <trebe> is a bit of a puzzle.  The Latin word, itself of
>Greek origin, was apparently uncommon, and it appears to have left few traces
>in Romance.  The unreliable Lhande notes a supposedly synonymous <treba> ~
><treva> in unspecified varieties of Romance, but the major Romance sources at
>my disposal recognize no such word.  Quite possibly the Basque word is
>borrowed from an obscure Romance continuation of the Latin word, but it can't
>be borrowed from Latin.

[snip]

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Wed Oct 20 01:29:57 1999
From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 21:29:57 -0400
Subject: Possessives
In-Reply-To: <016501bf1773$88c430a0$5b14153f@oemcomputer>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.212957.0400.>

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

> [SC]
>> Just to amplify on this point, consider "a counterfeit dollar".  The whole
>> point here is that the item in question is _not_ a dollar; it doesn't
>> belong to some subset of dollars in the way that a black dog belongs to a
>> subset of the dogs.  Likewise with "a fake moustache", "an imposter
>> policeman", etc.

> [PR]
> One of the most challenging things about interpretation of any language is
> that words, spelled and pronounced the same, do not always mean the same
> things.

> In the phrase, "a counterfeit dollar", the "dollar" cannot mean a 'real
> dollar', obviously that would be self-contradictory. It means, in this
> phrase, rather 'something that looks, feels, etc.  like a dollar'. In that
> category, there are the 'real' ones and, another circle for the
> 'counterfeit' ones.

> But, for the sake of discussion, let us pretend to assume that it means
> 'real, genuine dollar'. Then what part of speech is 'counterfeit', and how
> would you say it is used syntactically?

Based on its distribution, it's obviously an adjective.  Despite its
semantics, it has exactly the same syntactic distribution as, say,
'green'. The point was that you can't always model adjectives strictly as
things which form subsets over nouns, which is what I understood you to be
saying in an earlier post.

Some commentary.  In mathematical terms, a language is a set of finite
strings over some set of symbols (and, folks, I am determined to ignore
anyone who takes me to task for defining the word 'language' in this sense
in this context).  The task of the syntactician of natural languages is to
produce a model which correctly assigns the right strings to the 'accept'
and 'reject' bins.  For example, a model of English is incorrect if it
accepts "John Mary loves"; it's also incorrect if it rejects "John loves
Mary".

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.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
 ---  |  |    \ /     http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
   |  |  |    [_]


From ECOLING at aol.com  Wed Oct 27 22:29:54 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 18:29:54 EDT
Subject: Revised Re: Campbell's def. of "language"
Message-ID: <WED.27.OCT.1999.182954.EDT.>

The paradox that, with the usual meaning of the terms,
a language and its own descendant can coexist,

arises precisely because ANY definition which involves
matters of degree, and which uses a cutoff point to make the
answer to its question a discrete answer, will yield that result.

(One may of course call it a paradox or not, that is immaterial.
It's not a paradox when one understands it,
just like many other paradoxes,
but the result still remains, however inconvenient.)

"Mutual intelligibilty" is a minimally complex criterion
which has this property of turning a gradient measurement
into a yes-or-no answer.  So it is ideal for stating the
paradox clearly, and I used it precisely for that purpose.

Non-transitivity of "is the same language as" is an automatic
consequence of converting a gradient measure into such a
categorical answer, just as non-transitivity will be a property
of any other predicate whose meaning is of the type
"is in the same category C as", when it derives
from a gradient measure (sufficient similarity for some
practical purpose).

***

Even with Larry Trask's or anyone else's preferred definition,
adding other parts to a complex criterion,
the paradox originally mentioned will normally STILL obtain
as long as that definition contains a component which thus
derives a discrete answer from a gradient.
(I add "normally" only because a clever mathematical logician
might possibly be able to devise some odd combination of conditions
which indirectly make the paradox impossible to set up,
not because I believe any definition anyone has ever actually used
would be able to escape the paradox.)

Unless one defines the terms circularly to evade it,
or unless one denies (implausibly) that two dialects of the same
language can change at radically different rates so that one of them
would be considered the "same language" as the parent,
the other would not (under one's preferred definition,
WHATEVER that preferred definition is) .

WHATEVER definition one uses,
of the gradient measure type,
this is simply the paradox of different rates of gradient change,
combined with a categorial concept based on a gradient measure.

***

Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics


From ECOLING at aol.com  Thu Oct 28 16:50:50 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 1999 12:50:50 EDT
Subject: 9 specifics on Including and excluding data
Message-ID: <THU.28.OCT.1999.125050.EDT.>

This is a consolidation of a list of nine (9) specific suggestions
to modify Trask's criteria for data to be included as
potential candidates for early Basque.
It was originally sent on October 20th, this is a revision on October 28th.

Seven of these specific proposals were stated previously in messages
available to Trask before he wrote the message to which this is a reply,
in which he said that specific proposals had not been received.
Two of them were sent to the list before receiving Trask's message
of October 20th, but Trask would not have seen them yet.

***

>Lloyd and others have repeatedly implied that there is, or might
>be, something wrong with my criteria.  I have therefore asked for alternative
>criteria.  I have seen none, except for Lloyd's suggestion that 1700 is
>a better cutoff date than 1600 ... [and one on expressives, see below]

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.

***

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 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.

***

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

***

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 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).

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.
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.

Here is the information from Trask:

>For example, <uko> 'forearm', is nowhere attested before the 17th-century
>writer Oihenart, but then it appears to be attested *only* in Oihenart,
>so it will fail to be included anyway.

>But this example raises another interesting point.
>Though <uko> itself is not found outside of Oihenart,
>its transparent compound <ukondo> (and variants>
>'elbow' (from <uko> plus <ondo> 'bottom') is close to universal in the
>language, and recorded from 1596.
>Now <ukondo> must be excluded as obviously
>polymorphemic, but I will have to decide whether its existence should or
>should not license the listing of <uko>,
>which itself does not meet my criteria.
> At the moment, I have not yet decided, though I lean toward the negative.

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

***

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

***

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

>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.

>I have agreed that the first is possible,

[but Trask argued against the important part of it,
suggesting that a list of ranges of vocabulary subject matter are
not native, a topic which might be explored in greater depth
by those who know the field, I disclaim competence here
except to evaluate the logic of proposals]

>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.

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

***

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

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.

***

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.

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.

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.

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

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.  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.

***

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.

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

***

Sincerely,
Lloyd Anderson


From ECOLING at aol.com  Thu Oct 28 19:35:16 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 1999 15:35:16 EDT
Subject: Revised: Refining early Basque criteria
Message-ID: <THU.28.OCT.1999.153516.EDT.>

[The following message has been re-written,
at the request of the list moderator.
In addition, in order to avoid duplication,
I have cut parts of it which were better treated in
a message sent later, titled
"9 specifics on Including and excluding data".
Please see that message in conjunction with this one.
LA]

We are gradually reaching greater clarity concerning Larry Trask's criteria.
When he has said that he only wants to include the "best" cases,
that is quite different from trying to include only cases which are
highly likely to have been in early or proto-Basque.

So in a sense, I could immediately agree with ALL of his criteria if
our goal were only the *absolutely* "best" cases,
because that means that every reasonable criterion we can think of
should be satisfied maximally, otherwise by definition
the proffered example could not be a "best" case.
But I think linguists very rarely use that goal in such an absolute sense,
and Larry doesn't quite either.

Taking it literally,
it would have an unfortunate logical consequence,
if applied in a truly absolute sense.
Our data set would become hopelessly small,
because we could always discover that some members of our tentative
data set actually scored higher on some criterion than others,
so the "others" would have to be dropped as not absolutely "best".
This simply means we must use common sense.
But then "best" does not have an absolute meaning,
and we are really looking for "better" to some sufficient degree.
Thus, all practical considerations are relevant, not absolutes.

***

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

***

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).
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.)

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"

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).

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.

An example of the kind of response:

[LA]
> I have repeatedly pointed to the problem of selection against
> sound-symbolic vocabulary through accidents of limited recording,
> having the effect of biasing our notions of canonical forms.
> Using Larry's mention of the difference of subject matters
> between 16th-century and 17th-century documentations,
> it is easy to explain why using too early a cutoff in time,
> or requiring too many or the wrong dialect attestations,
> can systematically bias against vocabulary in certain semantic
> fields, because these, like sound-symbolic items more generally,
> were not within the subject matter favored by the documents.

[LT]
>Possibly, but not a problem for me.

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?  I simply don't follow this failure to appreciate the
snowballing consequence of certain kinds of errors,
or perhaps rather the certainty that he already knows the answers.
Because that seems to me to imply that he is only seeking the "best"
*examples* to *illustrate* *conclusions he has mostly already drawn*,
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.

***

Here is an example where I think Trask's emphasis on the absolutely "best"
vocabulary is somewhat out of the mainstream.

[Example was <uko> and <ukondo>, please see the other message
"9 specifics on Including and excluding data"
so it is all treated in one place, no duplication here.]

***

Trask has often missed the more subtle and sophisticated paragraphs
in previous messages, or simply answered:

[LT]
> This is becoming extremely abstract.

***

Notice the complete non-sequiturs here:

[LA, clarifying that including nursery words and expressives,
for the purposes of having a truly representative sample of
early Basque, is NOT the same thing as handling the difficulties
of reasoning about external comparisons, precisely because
expressives may not undergo all of the sound changes which
apply to other words.
Therefore, of course, arguments from the *difficulty*
of the latter task are not arguments to exclude such words.]

> It DOES make it difficult to use such words in trying to prove
> a deep genetic relation between languages, because one must then
> have sufficient knowledge of sound-symbolic forces to argue
> something more specific is shared between particular languages,
> not merely a vague resemblance.
> That is quite a separate issue.

Trask's reply:

[LT]
>Yes, but I don't think that <ama> 'mother' is
>"only vaguely" a nursery word, or
>that <tu> 'spit' is "only vaguely" an imitative word.

We were both assuming that these were very clearly
a nursery word and an expressive word, that was not at issue.

>[on words like Basque <ama> 'mother' and <tu> 'spit']
>
[LA]
>> That does not argue either for or against such words actually being
>> inherited from Proto-Basque.
>
[LT]
>Of course, but not the point.

If one is seeking words which are likely to be inherited from
Proto-Basque, and one indicates that some feature of them
does not argue either for or against such words
actually being inherited, it must by definition be relevant to the
method of finding words which are likely to be inherited from
Proto-Basque.

Trask has several times been explicit that he does not want
to include nursery words, and does not exclude them explicitly,
but is glad when his other criteria manage to exclude them.
I have not understood why he should be glad of this.

***

I do understand from Trask's most recent message that it is widely
suspected that there are words from third languages borrowed into
both early Basque and early Ibero-Romance (no other Romance),
and Trask wants to exclude such from his considerations.
This does skate on the edge of excluding not merely one or two,
but perhaps quite a number, of words which really were in early Basque,
but this kind of data DOES have a different status.  So tag it,
don't exclude it, would be my suggestion.

***

[on Swadesh list and borrowing of even basic vocabulary,
please see now instead the later message
"9 specifics on Including and excluding data".]

***

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.

Trask's further comments emphasizehis belief
that vocabulary in a number of topics is clearly borrowed:

[LA]
> Thinking of subject matters attested or not, we have the following,
> which ties this issue back to the specifics of subject matter noted
> by Larry Trask for 16th vs. 17th centuries:
> If only two dialect areas have documents in certain subject matters,
> then vocabulary specific to those subject matters will be systematically
> excluded by requiring their attestation from more than two dialect areas.
> This is obviously undesirable.  It suggests that a moderate position might
> be to categorize documentary attestations by subject matter,
> and vary the number of dialect areas required according to the number
> of areas attesting documents in each subject matter.
> Of course in practice, this can be done in another way.
> Record ALL vocabulary items for a particular concept,
> and study the UNIFORMITY of etyma for that concept,
> without much regard AT FIRST for whether it comes from two or from five
> areas.
> If variants for a particular concept cannot be established as loans from
> neighboring languages, then remaining variety of non-cognate terms
> argues against immediately positing any of the conflicting forms
> as candidates for very early Basque (even though one or more
> of them MIGHT be a direct descendant of very early Basque).
> Additional argumentation would then be necessary, either way.
> Of course things are not this simple,
> but Larry Trask is an expert at using all of these varied sorts of
> information.

[LT]
>Well, much of this is very reasonable,
>but only for a different task from the one I have in mind.

How would Larry characterize such a "different task"?
It seems highly reasonable to think about this when selecting
words which are likely to be inheritances from Proto-Basque.

***

Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Oct 20 03:10:49 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 20:10:49 -0700
Subject: Wheeled Vehicles.
In-Reply-To: <199910160410.XAA13326@orion.means.net>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.201049.0700.>

At 11:10 PM 10/15/99 +00-06, Mark Odegard <Odegard at means.net> wrote:
>There are some practical requirements if you are to have sturdy,
>steppe-worthy wagons and carts. The first of them, of course, is a
>source of wood. While there were trees the river valleys of the
>steppe, the real source for lumber would have been the southern edge
>of the North European forest -- the forest which is essentially
>co-extensive in area as is the 'incessantly discussed' Corded Ware
>horizon.

However, there is also evidence of trade over relatively wide areas from
this time.  Artifacts from the Balkans appear in Yamnaya burials, for
instance. Indeed copper from a relatively few mines can be found over large
areas of southeast Europe and western Asia.  So it is quite possible the
PIE peoples *traded* for the wood they needed.

>they are to share a single material culture? Mallory, in the closing
>pages of his 89 book seems suspicious of the reputed IE-ness of the
>Corded Ware horizon.

Overall, however, I find the argument *for* an IE association with the
Corded Ware cultures to be stronger than the argument against.

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


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Wed Oct 20 04:37:53 1999
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 00:37:53 EDT
Subject: Wheeled Vehicles.
Message-ID: <WED.20.OCT.1999.003753.EDT.>

>Odegard at means.net writes:

> ca. 3500 and 1000 BC and not be detected as a loan word.

-- at a minimum, the wheeled-vehicle terminology must have been acquired
before Tocharian or Indo-Aryan split from the main body.  That's certainly no
later that 2000 BCE, and probably a good deal earlier.

For that matter, the light, spoke-wheeled, bentwood-and-wicker chariot was
pretty fully developed in the 21st century BCE, and in the traditional
Androvonovo area.

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).

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.

Incidentally, chariots feature in Scandinavian rock-art as early as the
1300's BCE.

>>From this we can see that while the shared wheeled vehicle terminology
>cannot be explained as loan words between individual Indo-European
>languages, they also need not be explained as the fourth millennium BC terms
>either -- they could have diffused later. [pp. 15-16]

-- that depends on assuming an implausibly late and large area for PIE.

>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.


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Oct 20 03:12:32 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 20:12:32 -0700
Subject: Phylogeny
In-Reply-To: <001101bf17bc$285ae800$95f0abc3@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <TUE.19.OCT.1999.201232.0700.>

At 09:07 PM 10/15/99 +0100, petegray wrote:

>By the way, in all the discussion of the UPenn tree, no one has referred to
>the book:
>"An Indo-european classification, a lexicostatistical experiment" by Joseph
>B Kruskal et al (Transactions of the American Philological Society, vol. 82,
>part 5).

>This may also show some strengths and limitations of a purely
>computer-generated model.

I have studied it on at least two occasions, and am quite skeptical of
their results.

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


From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu  Fri Oct 29 11:25:10 1999
From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 07:25:10 -0400
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY
 ANDLANGUAGE)
Message-ID: <FRI.29.OCT.1999.072510.0400.>

<JoatSimeon at aol.com> wrote:

>> sarima at ix.netcom.com writes:

>> The appearance of horse-bits (for riding) in the Sredny-Stog culture is quit
>> telling here.  (Mallory does not actually mention this, as it was not yet
>> known when he wrote his book).>>

> -- very true; they showed up just where he predicted them.

I will apreciate references to this (to publications on the finds of
>actual bits<).

> 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.

If we use chariots to mean >highly maneuverable< light two wheeled
vehicles, the jury is still out. The Shintasha burial simply left
impressions of spoked wheels. There is no evidence for the
``transmission'' that marks the true chariot. There is at least one point
in which the Shintasha evidence fails. See the article by Littuer and
Crowell in Antiquity (1996 or 1997).

Putting spoked wheels and horses on ox-carts does not make a chariot
anymore than putting an internal combustion engine and mag wheels in an
horse carriage will make it a racer. The transmission must match the
source of motive power or else it will just slef-destruct.


From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk  Fri Oct 29 07:48:50 1999
From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard)
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 07:48:50 GMT
Subject: Subject: Re: NEWS re Black Sea Flood
Message-ID: <FRI.29.OCT.1999.074850.GMT.>

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
. Trask wrote:
> But how could the Black Sea have been a freshwater lake during a period
> when it had no outlet to the sea?

  The Caspian Sea also has an outlet: into a big narrow-necked bay called
Kara Bogaz Gol (Turkic for "Black Bay Lake"), and THAT is maximum saline and is
the ultimate sink for that drainage basin's salt.

  Re the Black Sea : perhaps this happened. The Ice Age came. The sea level
sank below the sill in the Bosporus. The straits got blocked with alluvial fans
washed in from side valleys such as the Golden Horn at Istanbul. So the Black
Sea wouldn't refill until the sea had overtopped and broken that natural dam.
(I read that a similar natural catastrophic dam-burst was why in Nevada and
area (USA) Lake Bonneville suddenly drained down to the Lake Provo level.)


From varny at cvtci.com.ar  Sun Oct 31 01:48:04 1999
From: varny at cvtci.com.ar (Vartan and Nairy Matiossian)
Date: Sat, 30 Oct 1999 22:48:04 -0300
Subject: Fwd: Re: Pre-Basque Phonology
Message-ID: <SAT.30.OCT.1999.224804.0300.>

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Larry Trask wrote:
> I can claim no credit here, but I do endorse Gavel's and Michelena's
> suggestions.  But note that, for lack of compelling evidence, Michelena
> did not regard the reconstruction *<bade> as secure, but only as a
> plausible suggestion.  This reconstruction is nothing like as secure as
> some others, like *<ardano> `wine'.

> Incidentally, this last word might intrigue the IEists on the list.
> Basque is unusual among European languages in showing no trace of the
> widespread `wine' word.  Its *<ardano> (with a number of regional
> reflexes in the modern language) has often been compared with Albanian
> <ardhi> and Armenian <ort>, both `wine', the suggestion being that the
> `wine' word spread across Europe, displacing an older widespread word
> from all but these three languages.  Don't know if there's anything in
> this.

I would like to make a correction. Armenian <ort'> (not <ort>) doesn't
mean 'wine', but 'grapevine, grape'. There are two plausible hypotheses
regarding its IE origins, by Pedersen and Ajarian. The latter adds that
Albanian <ard, ardhi> is unrelated to the Arm. term. Incidentally,
"wine" is "gini" in Armenian, both English and Armenian terms coming
from a common PIE source, seemingly borrowed from Proto-Semitic
(according to V. Illyich-Svidich).

Vartan Matiossian
Casilla de Correo 2, Sucursal 53
1453 Buenos Aires
Argentina


From jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au  Sat Oct 23 06:13:09 1999
From: jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au (Jon Patrick)
Date: Sat, 23 Oct 1999 16:13:09 +1000
Subject: Azkue's dictionary
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 12 Oct 1999 11:47:03 +0100."
 <E11azPN-0006Ss-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SAT.23.OCT.1999.161309.1000.>

[ Moderator's note:
  This message has been languishing while I cleared up several other backlogs.
  My apologies to Mr. Patrick for letting it go for so long.
  --rma ]

ON Tue, 12 Oct 1999 11:47:03 +0100  larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote:

a response to Lloyd Anderson about the use of Azkue's dictionary. I comment
that his objections were centred firmly around its ease of use for
etymological studies not on the merit of the content itself and by default
Larry's answer justifies Lloyd's assertion, namely:

    >  On the whole, it seems from Larry Trask's review of it that Jon Patrick
    is
    >  on very solid ground in using Azkue's dictionary as a basis for
    >  analytical studies.
Larry reponded:
    But only, I think, if a detailed knowledge of Basque linguistics is first
    superimposed on the raw data.

Larry's response to Lloyd's comment struck me as an oblique but transparent
attack on the merit of my contribution to the analysis basque, being the only
person on the list without a "detailed knowledge of Basque linguistics", who
is debating the topics. Yes, I admit that I'm rising to a bait that will be
disclaimed but that's OK , I'm a grown up, I can take responsibility for my
own incompetencies.
Let me assure Larry that he has no fear of me claiming to come anywhere near
his hippopotamic knowledge base of Basque. A competency I am in awe and
admiration of.
However I am not running blind in this work.


Jose Ignatio Hualde who made a contribution to the list a few weeks ago is
supporting the work as the expert with detailed knowledge of basque. Likewise
he is in collaboration with Joseba Lakarra undoubtedly the one of most
respected living historical linguists of Basque, and more to the point both of
them are native basque speakers. As well I have presented my methods and their
putative results in a seminar to Filology Dept at the Uni of the Basque
Country in Gasteiz, where it was complimented on and considered as worthy of
publication. A point Lakarra himself took the time to make to me. Since that
time I have established a collaboration with that Dept and 2 of their PhD
students spent a month with me this summer working on preparing the data of
the Azkue list for  analysis. Furthermore I have stated publicly that whatever
I produce in terms of computational analysis has no meaning by itself but has
to be interpreted in the context of the filological traditions of the study of
Basque.

In summary the native speaking experts think my approach is sound, work
collaboratively with me, let their students lose in my hands and want me to
publish my results.  Somehow in someway I can only guess I just might be doing
something right.

Jon
______________________________________________________________
The meaning of your communication is the response you get