From ALDERSON at mathom.xkl.com Wed Feb 2 02:36:18 2000 From: ALDERSON at mathom.xkl.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 18:36:18 -0800 Subject: Apologies for peculiar mail Message-ID: Dear Readers, Most of you will have received at least one, and possibly two, very peculiar postings from the Indo-European list in the last 18 hours or so. My apologies for the confusion. As most of you know, I run this list by hand, using a very old e-mail system on an antique operating system. In an attempt to keep the mail flowing while dealing with more than 60 new entries in the queue, I set up some batch jobs to handle breaking the queued messages down into groups of about 20--and quite without thinking named the batch files in a way that caused them (and their partial logs) to be treated as inputs to the mail system, at least by the batch jobs themselves. I have taken steps to insure that this partiuclar error cannot recur. Again, my apologies. Rich Alderson list owner and moderator From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 1 17:47:28 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 12:47:28 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >sarima at friesen.net writes: >For instance when Lois and Clark went through the area, the Dakota were not >yet living in the Dakotas!) -- the Navaho are recent arrivals in their current location as well. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 1 18:17:45 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 13:17:45 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: << Everything can be borrowed, and there are examples for everything actually >having been borrowed at some point in space and time. >> -- true, although of course some things are more _likely_ to be borrowed than others. Numerals, body parts, family relationships, and so forth, are less likely to be loan-words. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Feb 1 06:22:47 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 00:22:47 -0600 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000128223834.00997690@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: You're talking about massive upheavals triggered by the arrival of major imperialist powers poseessing overwhelming technical advantages. This was not an everyday occurance. Of course there were major migrations in South Africa and the Americas after Europeans arrived --but because of extraordinary events. >At 04:25 AM 1/25/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>Myself, I'd say that since population movements of various sorts (conquests, >>folk-migrations, refugees, colonizations, etc.) are common as dirt in the >>historical record as far back as we can see, and since they're also common in >>preliterate societies whenever these come under the observation of literate >>observers (18th and 19th-century Africa is full of them, for instance) then >>we have to assume that this was the case in prehistory. >Not to mention North America. It is unpopular to say so, but there are >clear records of major Indian migrations *after* the arrival of Europeans >in the Americas. (For instance when Lois and Clark went through the area, >the Dakota were not yet living in the Dakotas!) >-------------- >May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From edsel at glo.be Tue Feb 1 22:10:45 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 23:10:45 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stefan Georg" Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2000 10:28 AM >>AA>there is internal evidence in Uralic supporting the loan origin of p-U >>AA>*weti 'water'. >>.. Please try to fancy that there /could/ have been a common origin of >>that word ! >>I do not know a single linguist who would confirm that a word like 'water' >>could be object to borrowing! > Well, I can introduce you to at least one such person: > Tamil borrowed /udakam/, one of its "water"-words, from Sanskrit. > Gogodala (/wi/), Awin (/wae/), and Gira (/wai/), three Papuan languages, > borrowed Austronesian *wayEG (reconstructed by some Austronesianists as > *vaSeR, which does remind me of a language I know, but I cannot remember > which one ;-). > Several non-Semitic languages of Ethiopia have borrowed their word for > "water" from Ethiosemitic (I'll have to dig for the details both in my > memory and my files, if you insist). > I have encountered more examples. It may not happen all too often, but, > say, every ninth or tenth time I inspect a list of loan-words exchanged by > languages in close-contact I haven't seen before, a "water"-word is among > the suspects (and in most cases then it is found guilty too). [Ed] What about a.Grk. to hydo:r that was replaced by mod.Grk. to nero'? Was this borrowed too? Where from? [ Moderator's comment: No. This is an internal development in Greek, from the water-carrier's cry _to neron hydo:r_ "fresh water!". --rma ] > The claim that signifiants of some semantic notions are "so basic" that > they cannot be subject to borrowing is just one of those myths our > discipline seems to have real trouble to rid itself from. It is not true. > There are no such concepts. Everything can be borrowed, and there are > examples for everything actually having been borrowed at some point in > space and time. [Ed] Tagalog speaking Pilipinos count in Spanish. Ed. Selleslagh From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Tue Feb 1 15:08:44 2000 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 16:08:44 +0100 Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? Message-ID: "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: > In my opinion, there is an interesting possibility that *(H)e- is cognate > with a verbal prefix j-, used in the formation of hieroglyphic Old and Late > Egyptian verbal forms. I never came across such a prefix in Old Egyptian. Would you be so kind and quote a _text passage_ which illustrates the function of this /j-/? ***************************** Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet München Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 D-80539 München Tel.: +89-21805343 / Fax: +89-21805345 Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ ***************************** From rao.3 at osu.edu Tue Feb 1 10:57:46 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 05:57:46 -0500 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: I remember a post from J. E. Rasmussen in a previous incarnation of this list arguing that the augment has left traces outside Greek, Armenian and Indo-Iranian. I don't remember the details and though I think that I archived the message, I can't find it. > In Greek only the sigmatic aorist has an augment (grápho - égrapsa), > not the asigmatic one (e.g. mod. Grk. vrisko - vrika [was: eureka]), > while the latter is probably older, like the 'strong' verbs in Germanic. > I once heard that the augment was basically prosodic, because the > -sa ending didn't allow a stressed syllable preceding it. > Is the Indic mechanism similar? Is the lack of augment in asigmatic aorist absolute in Homeric/Attic Greek? I remember reading that there is a strong correlation in Homer, but not absolute. On in RV are unaugmented forms found. Hoffman (Injunctive im Veda) showed that unaugmented forms were tenseless. Post-RV Sanskrit does not have unaugmented forms except in prohibitions. So the Indic mechanism is not similar. --- There is an interesting typological problem here. According to Bybee et al (The evolution of grammar), unmarked past vs marked present is unknown in extant languages. This makes the usual classification of forms in Hittite (and PIE) quite unusual. I remember asking about this before. Miguel suggested Akkadian as another such example, quoting Lipinski to argue that iprus was preterite, iparras was present. But in `Outline', Lipinski explicitely assigns iparras to imperfective (putting present-future in quotation marks). So the anamoly still unexplained. From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 1 00:58:04 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 19:58:04 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: I wrote: There is a huge gap of time potentially there. And if this particular word for wheel entered after PIE dispersed but before those sound changes, then we'd should have exactly the same outcome. In a message dated 1/31/00 7:02:46 PM, sarima at friesen.net wrote: <> Yes, well, the only way to examine 'more than just a few words' is one word at a time - because otherwise that statement becomes incontrovertible. And please recall that we are not just talking about ONLY words here - the only reason those words have any value in dating PIE is that they are tied to some object. IF THE DATE OF THAT OBJECT CHANGES, THEN IN THEORY THE DATE OF PIE CHANGES. So, we have questions as to: A. the date of the sound changes (after PIE's dispersal) B. the latest date of the object C. whether the word in fact referred to the object or was an extension of an earlier meaning (e.g., *kuklos as a round object.) D. whether the sound changes visible in the word can be explained otherwise (e.g *rot(H)o- may be pre-Celtic) You wrote: <> The horse was known on the Steppes before 6000BC. How does this help you give a late date for PIE? I will try to get to metals and the axle shortly. None of this looks very fortuitous to say the least. You wrote: << It is not the drasticness, it is the regularity and *opacity* of the changes. For instance., modern Lithuanian has round vowels, so mapping borrowed words with 'o' to 'a' would be odd, to say the least. And changing t > d is totally unexpected in early German borrowings (and vice versa). Thus the differences seen above would be unusual, at least, in borrowed words, but completely normal in shared heritage.>> Would you care to address this thought by Miguel Carrasquer Vidal about one of the two words for wheel that are claimed to demonstrate a date for PIE? <<...whether *rot(H)o-, might not be a (pre-)Celtic borrowing in the other IE lgs. that have it (Latin, Germanic, Baltic, Indo-Iranian). The root *ret(H)- "run", besides the word for "wheel", does not have any semantic development (or e-Stufe forms) outside of a bit in Baltic and Germanic, but especially in Celtic. On account of the *o, the word can't be Germanic or Baltic (with the above caveats, but this is a merger *o > *a). If the word is a borrowing from Celtic, we can also dispense with the laryngeal. Celtic, like Armenian and Germanic, probably had started aspirating the IE tenues at an early stage (which would account for the loss of *p in Celtic [and Armenian]). A Celtic *rotos ([rothos]) would have been borrowed as *rathas in Indo-Iranian, and as there was no root *ret- (*rat-) in I-I, there would have been no pressure to make the word conform to its non-existent native cognates.>> Regards, Steve Long From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Tue Feb 1 02:51:19 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 20:51:19 -0600 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: At 07:01 PM 1/28/00 -0800, Stanley Friesen wrote: >At 02:55 AM 1/22/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >>In a message dated 1/22/00 12:12:34 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >><>of PIE unity. And if it was borrowed later, it wouldn't show the >>characteristic sound-shifts of the daughter languages... and it does. >>Therefore if it was borrowed, it was borrowed into unified PIE.>> >>Excuse me, but what are the dates on those specific sound changes you are >>talking about? And what makes you think they occurred immediately after PIE >>was disunited? >At least *some* of the individual sound changes must have occurred by the >break up of the unity, by *definition*. As long as there were no >differences between the speech in the different areas, PIE was still *by* >*definition* united. Then does the IE model posit that PIE, understood here as an actual unified linguistic system, was a linguistic isolate? It would seem that the model would have to do this. Otherwise one would be confronted with a simulation of linguistic prehistory in which PIE could be viewed as merely one member of a language family existing at that point in time. Stated differently, although I haven't heard this point discussed on the list, a cladistic model requires the end point to coincide with a linguistic system that is viewed as a total linguistic isolate. And even if PIE were posited as an isolate, would one not have to propose that, nonetheless, the proto-language, too, would have had the full characteristics of a human language, with the likelihood of suppletions, irregularities and substrata. And I believe that it is this latter point that creates problems. How does the model guarantee that the ultimate origin of the "common vocabulary" should not be traced back, for example, to the substrata that PIE, if understood as a natural language, must have had? >And the simple observed facts are that languages cannot spread beyond the >range of daily contact for very long without diverging, at least within two >or three centuries. For a pre-modern language to have been spread over a >large part of Europe without local divergence for *millennia* is just not >possible. (And millennia of non-divergence is what would be required for >the PIE speakers to have spread during the neolithic revolution and still >have the observed unity of Bronze age vocabulary) Hence, are we to understand PIE as a convenient shorthand for a set of sharted characteristics or as a term standing for a reified linguistic system spoken in prehistory? And if it is understood as the second, according to the model, how long did it just tread water? Stated differently, if one chooses the second version, then one must ask how long the unified (undifferentiated) linguistic system, as portrayed by the reconstructions, go unchanged. Languages do change. Are we to assume that PIE was different? It seems to me that this is a very slippery aspect of a cladistic modeling of the data. On the other hand, if we choose the first alternative, that PIE is a convenient shorthand, it acts like a frame in a moving picture: a convenient way of portraying a stop-action of events that are otherwise inevitably in motion. >>This has been brought up before a long time ago. The identifiable sound >>changes in the *kwelos group are prehistoric. The amount of time that lapsed >>between the end of PIE unity and the time those sound changes took effect is >>undetermined, except that they all occured before attested records. >True, for any given *specific* word, this objection is meaningful. But the >vocabulary placing PIE in the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age consists >of more than just one word, indeed more than just a few words. Could you (you'all) list, say, ten vocabulary items, excluding verbs, that are considered most representative of the PIE lexicon that you are talking about. And as an aside, are there explict criteria set forth that determine which items are most representative. I'm speaking of crtieria along the lines of those that have been suggested by Larry Trask (and debated by many) concerning the selection of items in Pre-Basque. I would be most interested in knowing if such criteria have been debated and/or laid out explicitly at some point in the past. For example, how many language groups must the item be attested in for it to quality? I assume, for example, that identifying cognates/reflexes of the same item in Sanskrit and Celtic would be sufficient for the item to qualify? Or is the bar set higher for these PIE items, e.g., that the item must be attested in Sanskrit, Germanic and Celtic or Hittite, Slavic and Romance, etc. For example, just glancing over the entries in Buck, it would seem that there isn't as much uniformity for "wheel" across IE languages, as there is for, say, "cart" which shows up most IE languages (obviously with the help of Latin). Thanks, Roz From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 1 03:20:30 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 22:20:30 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 1/31/00 8:40:36 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> I think if you consider it further you'll recall that experimental science often deals with probabilities, but of course in the lab there is more opporyunities for 'controls' - testing things different ways to see if the probabilities change. If I seem to be resisting probabilities, it is first of all because I am not sure how they are being calculated. I was not sure for example that there wasn't a linguistic principle that would take care of the cushion period between PIE unity date and the specific sound change date. And it becomes important to be insistent on that kind of question, because they can sometimes be minimized. But because I know about calculating probabilities, I can tell you they should not. As far as my purposes: my purposes have to do with understanding why there should be a conflict - if in fact there truly is one - between different views of what happened back then. I don't know that anything that you've written on this matter is incorrect - but asking why you believe would not seem to be inconsistent with honest scholarship. In case you think that I have some nefarious purpose in mind, I can forward you messages I've sent to archaeologists where I've brought up linguistic arguments I learned here to challenge their statements. I don't think it is fair to say that the evidence we have been discussing is inconsistent with linguistics or that external information has not been used in reaching some of the conclusions we've discussed here. (If you really want to see something 'external to linguistics' take a look at http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/Indo2.html (watch the wrap) where you'll find an article (co-authored by an environmental scientist at the Oak Ridge National Labs) reprinted from Current Anthropology that proposes to settle the supposed 'irreconcilable conflict between Renfrew and paleolinguistics' by hypothesizing that IE spread through Europe at the end of the Ice Age. It's called 'Did Indo-European Languages spread before farming?' and it offers dates of roughly 10,000BC. I believe that this sort of hypothesis gains credibility only because of that alleged 'irreconcilabilty' line. And I don't think that the conflict would stand up and give credibility to this sort of thing if experts like yourself were involved in an improved dialogue between one another - a better dialogue than I can hope to supply . I can't believe that linguistics and archaeology can not take different paths but ultimately end up at the same destination.) Regards, Steve Long From edsel at glo.be Tue Feb 1 14:29:38 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 15:29:38 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2000 9:28 PM > In a message dated 1/29/00 3:19:23 AM Mountain Standard Time, edsel at glo.be > writes: >> So, the linguistic spread of these words is not necessarily (in my view NOT) >> related to spread of the 'wheel technology' nor to its dating. If the >> technology had been responsible for the spread of the word(s), it is likely >> that all IE lgs. would have adopted the same word, quod non. > -- the fact that the _same_ words are used over so many language familes is > strongly indicative. [Ed] They aren't: Actually, basically three different, and very ordinary, words that probably exist (I mean words with these meanings) in any language. As I said before: all these words seem to have had different original meanings (*kwekwlo/'round, circle', *rotho/'revolve', *droghos (trochos-tropos)/'turn (back)'...). Different languages (or groups) picked different pre-existing words to describe the wheel, chariots, wagons etc. Since there are only three such words that were actually used for the wheel (I can't think of many other semantically related words than those meaning 'round', 'rotate' and '(re)turn' for 'wheel'; wagons are another matter), no wonder they appear, BUT seldom together, in tens of IE languages. e.g. in Du. 'rad' and 'wiel' do exist side by side, but the former is archaic and probably a loan from H.German, or from another dialect. It seems that 'rad' (meaning '(cart)wheel' has 'never' been used in spoken language, as far as we can know. Even the round ponds created by the vortex behind breaches in dikes are called a 'wiel' in Flanders. BTW, I wonder if the Du. word for whirlpool, '(draai)kolk' has any relationship with '*kwe(kw)los'. Ed. From alderson at netcom.com Tue Feb 1 03:07:00 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 19:07:00 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: (JoatSimeon@aol.com) Message-ID: In a reply to Steve Long, S. M. Stirling wrote: >>You are saying that here is Celtic was unchanging for 700 years. >-- no, I said saying that the Gallic form of around 100 CE is identical to >that of the Ogham inscriptions 200-300 years later. Actually, what was originally written on 25 Jan 2000 was: >Observers as late as the 4th century CE said that the Gallic-Celtic of Lyon, >in the Rhone valley, was mutually comprehensible with that of the Galatians of > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >Anatolia (who arrived from the Balkans about 270 BCE). All that is required of the underlined phrase is that speakers from the two regions be able to do what we are told (in another current thread on this list) speakers of Spanish and Portuguese can do. In other words, the languages need not be *unchanging* for any length of time. Rich Alderson From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 1 03:44:45 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 22:44:45 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: In a message dated 1/31/00 10:20:09 PM, sarima at friesen.net wrote: <> The question you are addressing has to do with whether Renfrew ever said that Celtic or pre-Celtic migrated to western Europe before 4000BC. My understanding is that he was simply saying that an early indo-european language did, not that anything identifiably Celtic did. Let me ask you how your comment is relevant? Regards, Steve Long PS - You wrote 'the claim that the words for things like 'wheel' were borrowed into IE *after* it spread throughout Europe - by over a thousand years.' But actually if we give a generous 4000BC date to wheeled-transport (as opposed to wheels in general or just plain round objects) and remember that in Hittite the word for wheel is different - we can squeeze in a time spread for the word that matches Renfrew's 4000BC date for western Europe to a 't' - presumably before of course the specific sound changes observed in e.g., '*kweklo' occurred in the attested IE daughters. Since those SPECIFIC changes could have happened a bit later (I believe) - there wouldn't be anything amazing about this, would there? From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 1 05:21:38 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 00:21:38 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >All that Renfrew's statement 'requires' is that "an early indoeuropean >language" arrive in europe 'north and west of the alps' before 4000BC. -- 7000 BCE, actually, for the start of the process. Agriculture in north-central Europe long predates 4000 BCE, and Renfrew attributes the spread of IE languages to the spread of agriculture. >AND that the Celtic languages were - perhaps very distant - descendents of >that language. -- well, that's what I said he said. >***And there is nothing in what Renfrew wrote that precludes the Celtic >languages from first developing as such at any particular time - even in >250BC.*** -- developing FROM WHAT? >From PIE? Is PIE supposed to have been around in 250 BCE for the Celtic languages to develop from? That's the whole POINT here. The time-gaps are ridiculous! As is the geographic spread. You do not GET uniform languages over large areas. The IE languages when first encountered are NOT DIFFERENTIATED ENOUGH to have bee separated by that depth of time! >great-great-grand parent IE language arrived in western europe in the >middle-late European neolithic. -- No. Renfrew specifically attributes the arrival of the IE languages in Europe to the EARLY neolithic; to the introduction of agriculture as such. >Even in Renfrew's map of the migration he expressly avoids labeling the arrows >of movement because 'attested divisions as we know them had not yet >occurred.') -- yes. Thus stating that the period of PIE unity dates to the beginning of the Neolithic; which, as has been pointed out, is linguistic nonsense. From mclasutt at brigham.net Tue Feb 1 07:49:10 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 00:49:10 -0700 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000128223042.00997cb0@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: > At 04:05 AM 1/25/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >> And one language does not replace another easily, or without very good >> reason. For adults to learn another language is _hard_. [Stanley Friesen replied] > Language replacement usually involves a prolonged period of bilingualism. > With the two languages undergoing various shifts in popularity and prestige > until eventually one dies out. Which one is hard to predict, given the > back-and-forth nature of the dance. Not necessarily. Witness what has happened in the Americas, especially in the western United States. Until the 1890s, the Native American languages were spoken predominantly by monolinguals. Over the next 50 years, the boarding school system took children away from their parents and made them speak English exclusively. After only a century, about half of these languages are extinct and the great majority of the others are only spoken by a dozen or so old people, none of whom are monolinguals. That's not "a prolonged period of bilingualism" nor is there any "back-and-forth dance". While Stanley's scenario may be the case in some parts of the world at some times, it is not the only scenario. Language use is determined, by and large, by local power. If it is more locally advantageous to use Language A rather than Language B, then Language A will survive and B will dwindle. As local power changes, B may be revived. However, if the relative power of A is much greater than B, B will simply die. This is not a recent phenomenon either. Remember what happened to the Gaulish, Etruscan, Oscan, Umbrian, Punic, and who knows how many other languages as the Roman Empire grew. Similar things happened as the Islamic world expanded and Arabic supplanted local languages. Even in ancient times, Aramaic spread with the Neo-Babylonian Empire and replaced other languages in its path. In 586 BCE, Hebrew was the native language of the Jews, but by their return to Palestine just a few decades later, their native language was Aramaic. Depending on the relative power of each language involved, language replacement can happen over centuries or just decades. Remember, it only takes one generation that doesn't learn the old language and the language is doomed. 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 stevegus at aye.net Tue Feb 1 12:37:16 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 07:37:16 -0500 Subject: NE Germanic Message-ID: Stanley Friesen writes: > From a different direction, the most believable derivations of the *name* > "Goth" link it with "Gotaland" in Sweden and/or the island "Gotland". > This suggests a northern origin for the tribe. My further understanding is that the name of -Gdansk- in Poland represents *gudaniska, which looks Germanic, and suggests a Gothic connection on the south shore of the Baltic. -- Sella fictili sedeo Versiculos dum facio. From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 1 19:23:34 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 20:23:34 +0100 Subject: Frisian In-Reply-To: <005d01bf6a47$65bbec20$2f03703e@edsel> Message-ID: "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >I'm afraid I can't tell you much more, except that: >-it is generally accepted that West-Flemish dialect (the oldest source of >literary Dutch, spoken from the Scheldt mouth to Dunkirk) is related to >Frisian. It is still the most archaic one. >-Frisian is also spoken (of course) in German E. Friesland and - I believe - >also on the German and Dutch coastal islands. >I think Miguel Carrasquer once wrote a well-informed e-mail to this list on >the subject of the coastal spread of Ingwaeonic/Frisian and its dating. Well, I could look it up sometime. I think was complaining about the notion of a coastal Ingwaeonic Sprachbund (*after* the Anglo-Saxon settlement of England and across the North Sea), as it's usually presented, as opposed to the IMHO more straightforward (and historically attested) explanation of Frisian settlement along the coast as far south as Dunkirk in late-Roman/ post-Roman times. At least for "Ingwaeonisms" on this (the continental) side of the North Sea. Are West Flemish and Hollands Ingwaeonized Frankish dialects or Frankish dialects on a Frisian substratum? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From sarima at friesen.net Wed Feb 2 02:21:46 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 18:21:46 -0800 Subject: Frisian In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 06:18 PM 1/27/00 -0800, Max Dashu wrote: >Ed Selleslagh writes, >>I'm anything but a specialist in Frisian, but I hear and read some from >>time to time. >Nevertheless, I'm going to ask you if you know anything about the >distribution of Frisian in medieval times. I've read that it extended over >more of the Netherlands than currently, and also towards Denmark. I have also read this. I also have it on good authority that the name Friesen is common as far east as Bremen, which extends the scope of the tribe, if not the language, into modern Germany. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 1 18:13:24 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 19:13:24 +0100 Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter In-Reply-To: <001101bf6bda$d509e020$7fae01d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: "petegray" wrote: >On inflectional morphology being borrowed, isn't the English plural -s >exactly such an example? The short answer is: "no". A somewhat longer answer can be found at . ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 1 19:11:43 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 20:11:43 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000128191248.009c4ef0@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: Stanley Friesen wrote: >At 01:53 AM 1/23/00 +0000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >>**n'akut-. The problem is the fate of stressed **i and **u, for >>which we can hypothesize spontaneous diphthongization to *ei, *eu >>(unlikely, I'd say, but an interesting possibility to account for >>possible Pre-PIE long *i: and *u:), or loss as in the case of the >>Slavic jers (with, as in Slavic, occasional retention to avoid >>excessive consonant clusters, e.g. **CiC > *C^C, but **CiCC > >>*C^eCC, likewise for **CuC > *CwC, **CuCC > *CweCC). >Why is it necessary to go this way? IMHO, there are sufficient instances >of 'i' and 'u' in PIE the do *not* alternate with ablaut variants such as >'eu' and 'ei' to suggest the inheritance of those vowels from the Pre-PIE >stage, at least in some environments. I'm not so sure. There are certainly "loose" *i's and *u's among the pronouns (e.g. *tu/*tu:), in affixes like *-i (dat/loc, "present tense"), but IMHO anomalously few among common nouns/adjectives and verbs. For instance, I don't think Benveniste's root-theory allows *i and *u in the V position (or does it?). It would be nice to have statistics. Surely the existence of *kw, *k^ etc. suggests that some high vowels were lost, passing their front- or backness to the adjacent consonants (is there another explanation?). Coupled with the comparative rarity of non-zero grade *i and *u, I think it's clear that *something* happened to the high vowels at some stage of Pre-PIE. The question is exactly what. In which environments (phonological or morphological) did *i and *u survive as such? What happened when they didn't? In itself, the loss/decimation/weakening of *i and *u is not a strange phenomenon. Besides the Slavic case, there is also Tocharian, where they merge [also *e] as (oops, that's a-umlaut), and some accounts of Afro-Asiatic vocalism (such as it is) also imply *i, *u > *@ (or viceversa!). On the subject of non-velar labialized/palatalized consonants, I was wondering: since in Greek *pj > pt, could not such old chestnuts as , be derived from palatalized *p^ (*p^lH-). I know Baltic "city" is in itself no supportive evidence (-il- [-ir-] is the normal Baltic development, even tough Baltic and Slavic offer anomalous cases of *ul, *ur which might be worth investigating) and Skt. pu:r- might be seen as counterevidence (but p- is a labial after all), but I still would regard *p^lH- as a neater solution than e.g. Beekes' *tplH- (CIEL, p. 190). Another thing to look at might be cases of Gmc. /i/ for expected /e/ and viceversa. * "fish" because of *-sk^-? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 1 15:26:56 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 10:26:56 EST Subject: Horses Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >The fact that Hittites use Sumerograms and Akkadograms does not mean that they >didn't meant them to be read aloud as native Hittite words >> -- correct. Of course, this is extremely frustrating, since it means we don't get a transcription of what the native Hittite word _was_. From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 1 18:10:20 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 19:10:20 +0100 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: <389267F3.5C02@cvtci.com.ar> Message-ID: Vartan and Nairy Matiossian wrote: >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> But Armenian eys^ (< *ek^wos) means "donkey". >Actually, it's es^ (<*ek^wos), genitive is^oy "donkey" (the s^ is >phonetically "sh"). Forgive me, I prefer to write in ASCII since I cannot write e-macron (and suggests a phonological length that probably wasn't there). At least it's historically correct (PIE *ei > Pre-Armenian *ey > Class.Arm. > Mod.Arm. /e-/, not /je-/). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 1 19:44:22 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 20:44:22 +0100 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Stefan Georg wrote: >That's Sumerian, and not Anatolian. (aside: the genitive morpheme is .A >only; the writing .RA has been used by specialists to argue that this term >is not really Sumerian, but pseudo-Sumerian invented by Akkadian-speaking >scribes. I'd be grateful if some specialist could confirm/debunk this). If I look at Thomsen's Sumerian quotes (e.g. from the Gudea inscriptions), I see many cases of this kind of spelling (e.g. Gudea cyl. A XX 23: {d}A.nun.na "Anuna Gods", i.e. "seed" () "of the prince" () Recently on the ANE list, Bob Whiting ("Re: ANE Horses in North Syria") wrote that the Sumerian word for "horse" was *, written descriptively (not phonetically) as "foreign equid/donkey". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Feb 1 20:25:29 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 20:25:29 -0000 Subject: Horses Message-ID: Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stefan Georg" Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2000 7:28 PM on *ek'wos >>-- but it doesn't mean "donkey" in Anatolian, the earliest attested IE >>language of the area, and Armenian is intrusive there. > Not really. It does, if we take into account the Sumerogramme > ANShE.KUR.RA - > ANShE 'Esel, ass' > KUR 'Berg, mountain' > RA - genitive-morpheme That's Sumerian, and not Anatolian. (aside: the genitive morpheme is .A only; the writing .RA has been used by specialists to argue that this term is not really Sumerian, but pseudo-Sumerian invented by Akkadian-speaking scribes. I'd be grateful if some specialist could confirm/debunk this). The fact that Hittites use Sumerograms and Akkadograms does not mean that they didn't meant them to be read aloud as native Hittite words (nor does it mean that they used the Sumerian/Akkadian terms as a loan-element). [PR] This is not meant as a criticism of R-S but only for the information of the readership of the list. Thomsen, p. 90 "The genitive posposition is /-ak/, but it is never written with the sign AK." *Very commonly*, the -a, which is written, is combined with the previous consonant so that spelling like e(2) lugal-la, house-king-of, is the rule rather than the exception. Therefore, no valid inference about origin should be made from a spelling like kur-ra ('of the mountain'). I believe there are no Sumerian "specialists" who would argue in this way. 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 X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 1 12:47:20 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 07:47:20 EST Subject: Horses in War Message-ID: I wrote >Well, that was my original point - that PIE was apparently not being spoken >by charioteers in the 2d millenium BC Near East. In a message dated 2/1/00 6:46:50 AM, sarima at friesen.net replied: <> Yes, we are. Although the dates of appearance of the chariot or spoked wheel in the evidence may be pertinent to other issues (e.g., the possible post-PIE use and spread of *rotHo as a word for wheeled transport), they appear to be too late to be to be relevant to the question of PIE dispersal. Others on the list may feel differently. I wrote: <> You wrote: <> Here we have a problem. I just don't find that kind of support for the idea of the chariot being a 'decisive' tactical unit. If the Egyptians introduced the idea of the chariot as an archer platform, as it said in that piece I quoted, then before that the chariot's other best function appears to be mounted infantry - as it appears in Homer - so that it acted as transport like APCs but not in combat. Most military histories that I've looked at are pretty insistent that the idea of using chariots for a direct charge would have been a losing proposition. Which relates to <> <> The stirrup seems to arise in India and to be transported to Europe by the Huns. Long before this cavalry appears to have replaced chariotry almost everywhere as the basic mounted unit. The assyrians are apparently developing cavalry before 1000BC and dropping chariots. By 600BC Persians and Scythians and Mesopotamians are all on horse back and chariots have pretty much been relegated. But the West Point book says that the first use of the horse in an offensive tactic was with the development of the Macedonian heavy cavalry and 'the hammer and anvil' scheme employed by Phillip and Alexander. Even there the anvil was the phalanx and the horse was employed in flanking operations - much as described by Clancy in Armored Cav. The British and Gauls appear to use the chariot as a pre-game psychological device, but all their main battles appear to feature footsoldiers versus footsoldiers. The original statement was or was supposed to be that the horse was not 'decisive' in any battle before 1000BC - and that includes Kadesh (an interesting word). And I believe that still stands up. Regards, Steve Long From mclasutt at brigham.net Tue Feb 1 15:47:28 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 08:47:28 -0700 Subject: Horses in War In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000128221943.009b9ae0@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: Just a few notes to clear up some things from a part-time military historian (I don't spend ALL my time with linguistics) since there's been quite a bit of speculation about the role of cavalry/chariotry vs. infantry in the horse discussion. There's a very ancient triumvirate in military structure: cavalry (which includes chariotry), heavy infantry (shields, armor, spears, swords), and light infantry (slingers, archers). In looking at history, there is also a "scissors-paper-rock" relationship among these three elements. Heavy Infantry will defeat Cavalry, Light Infantry will defeat Heavy Infantry, and Cavalry will defeat Light Infantry. While you can name a counterexample or two for each of these relationships, the vast preponderance of evidence supports it. Thus, while a poor power's army may have consisted only of light infantry, as it grew it also developed heavy infantry and cavalry. Once the horse was domesticated, it very quickly became a part of the army-building process wherever it went--whether pulling a battle platform or carrying a rider. It's most important function was never attacking the shield wall of the heavy infantry, but in scattering the enemy archers and slingers because it's speed could carry it "under the guns" well before it was eliminated. It's second function was as counter-cavalry to protect its own light infantry. Now, to the issue of stirrups. These have been highly overrated in the history of cavalry. Many great cavalry armies have existed and been quite successful without the benefit of stirrups. The Mongols and Arabs are particularly fine examples of stirrupless cavalry-heavy armies that kicked up a lot of trouble (even for those armies whose saddles had stirrups). Throughout history, technological innovations have had MUCH less influence than they are given credit for. They make their impact only when combined with effective leadership. The Battle of Hastings is often cited as the point when the stirrup came into its own, but William would have won the battle even without stirrups, and probably won it in much the same way--he had light infantry on the field along with heavy infantry and cavalry and it was these that defeated the English heavy infantry (Harold died with an ARROW through his eye) after the English shield was broken by incessant archery fire. The cavalry's main role at Hastings was to mop up. As far as chariotry is concerned. The comments that chariots were only useful for limited transport is absolutely false. The chariot was the cavalry arm of most of the major Near Eastern armies for centuries. When chariotry was used in battle, its greatest successes were always against the light infantry which was usually arrayed on the flanks of an enemy army. Once the light infantry broke, the heavy infantry was left unprotected on its flanks (heavy infantry can't easily turn) and it broke. It remained a powerful tool (although expensive) for routing enemy light infantry until confronted by Alexander the Great's combination of heavy infantry (which it couldn't defeat) and horse-borne cavalry in the fourth century BCE. Alexander also dispersed the light infantry into smaller units dispersed among the heavy infantry which could protect them from the chariotry. The Greeks had also developed a more maneuverable horse cavalry and this easily defeated the Persian chariotry. Don't underestimate the importance of the chariot in ancient warfare (it was, in a real sense, equivalent to the modern tank) and don't overestimate the importance of the stirrup. 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 X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 1 14:48:44 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 09:48:44 EST Subject: Horses and chariots. Message-ID: In a message dated 2/1/00 7:21:23 AM, you wrote: <> I don't know how the dates jive - but the move to cavalry by the Assyrians is apparently connected to developments in the saddle and armor. Almost all representations of riders from the period show no stirrups in the Near East and Europe - including most Scythian and Thracian evidence. That's plainly true in Greek and roman times. I still think that archers in chariots - from the point of view of concentration of forces - is very inefficient as Clancy et al points out with regard to the horse in general. SciAm for example published an article on slingers awhile back that seemed to give them the big edge as a projectile-using force with incredible range when used en masse. The mobility the archer on chariot gained was hardly worth the concentration of force and accuracy you'd get from massing standing archers. I suspect once again that the use of the archer on chariot was an elite matter in big battles and had to do more with very specific targets or separate battles between better armor-clad and mounted aristocrats. That's why they got the press they did. To a main force of archers or slingers, chariots would have been very vulnerable at great distances. They would never have been able to do anthing more but harass a main line of infantry - which is what we see historically. Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 1 15:29:48 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 10:29:48 EST Subject: Horses and chariots. Message-ID: >rao.3 at osu.edu writes: << If chariots came to Egypt from Mittani Aryans, this doesn't make sense. In >India, all chariot mounted warriors used the long bow. >> -- the bow was commonly used in the Middle East, too; eg., there are Hittite sculptures showing the Hittites using the chariot as an archery platform. It's been suggested that Egyptians couldn't show foreigners shooting from chariots because that was an iconographic symbol of conquest and victory. From edsel at glo.be Tue Feb 1 16:35:35 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 17:35:35 +0100 Subject: Frisian Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Gustafson" Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2000 4:33 AM > Max Dashu writes: >> Nevertheless, I'm going to ask you if you know anything about the >> distribution of Frisian in medieval times. I've read that it extended over >> more of the Netherlands than currently, and also towards Denmark. > According to the map in Robinson (Old English and its Closest Relatives), > Frisian was once spoken along almost the entire coast, from Bruges in the > southwest to just over the current Danish border in the northeast, > apparently with a gap at the mouth of the Elbe. Robinson also cites > Tacitus, who reports Frisii between the Rhine and the Ems. [Ed. Selleslagh] The very probably related (Ingwaeonic) West-Flemish dialect was and is spoken from French-Flanders (e.g. Dunkirk etc., where it has almost disappeared since Louis XIV conquered it) to the mouth of the River Scheldt (Schelde, Lat. Scaldis) in (Dutch) Zeeland. It shares a number of characteristics with Frisian, e.g. absence of diphtongation, but so did, apparently, Hollands (Dutch coastal area except Friesland, including Rotterdam and Amsterdam and some more inland cities) before it was mixed with (Frankish) Brabants (strongly diphtongating like English) in the 16th century, during the mass emigration of the protestants. Preservation of -(i)sk (or a later -isch /isx/ in all but a one West-Flemish dialect) - instead of becoming -/is/ - is limited to Frisian and West-Flemish. BTW, I'm not aware that Frisian proper was ever spoken in Bruges (Du.: Brugge, the capital of West-Flanders). The early Dutch of the author Jakob Van Maerlant (from Damme, the former port of Brugge. 1225-1295) is basically 'polished' (Middle-)West-Flemish. But many agree that some form of Ingwaeonic was spoken from Dunkirk to Sylt, i.e. along all of the original Atlantic 'haffen' coast. Ed. From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Feb 1 20:01:44 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 20:01:44 -0000 Subject: PIE and Uralic Message-ID: Dear Ante and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ante Aikio" Sent: Monday, January 31, 2000 1:26 PM On Thu, 27 Jan 2000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: [AA wrote] They can be identified with phonological and distributional criteria. The earliest loans show PU *k and *x as substituents of IE laryngals, and they have wide distribution in Uralic. The newer loans show the PU retroflex sibilant *S as a substituent of PIE *H, and have a more restricted distribution. The introduction of a new sound substitution pattern (IE *H > U *S instead of earlier IE *H > U *x/*k) seems to be connected with the fact that PU *x disappeared as an independent phoneme in all U language branches, and these developments probably took place at quite an early date. Some of the later loans also show other post-PU characteristics (e.g., labial vowels in non-initial syllables, see the examples below). The following serve as examples of later loans. All appear -only- in Finnic, except number 2 which also has cognates in Saamic and Mari. All etymologies derive (once again) from Jorma Koivulehto. (PU *S > Finnish h is a regular development). 1) Finnish rehto 'row (of constructions of one type or other)' (< *reSto) < PIE / Pre-Germanic *rH-ts- (> Germ. *radha- 'row etc.') 2) Finn. lehti 'leaf' (< *leSti) < PIE / Pre-Germ. *bhlH-ts- (> Germ. *bladha- id.) [PR] II am so glad that someone with your background has begun to participate in this list. I have two questions. 1) Why do the Uralists feel that it is necessary to reconstruct a transitional /S/ on the way to Finnish /h/? 2) Have Uralists speculated that the older responses (/k,x/) might be the result of the PIE "laryngal" being realized as a stop /?/ and a spirant /h,H,x/? [AA wrote] PU *peli- 'fear' < Pre-U ?*pelxi- < PIE *pelH- PU *puna- 'plait' < Pre-U ?*punxa- < PIE (zero grade) *pnH- PU *pura- 'drill' < Pre-U ?*purxa- < PIE (zero g.) *bhrH- PU *aja- 'drive' < Pre-U ?*xaja- < PIE *Hag4- PU *kdliw- 'brother/sister-in-law' (-w- is a suffix) < Pre-U ?*kdlxiw- < PIE *ghlHi- [PR] Would it be possible, in your opinion, for an alternate explanation that the words might have been borrowed before the *-H- root-extensions? I do have an axe to grind here but, mercifully, I will not grind it on this list. Of course, those who have been to my website know that I consider that a strong case can be made for ultimate common origin. 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 X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Feb 2 05:38:43 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 00:38:43 EST Subject: PIE and Uralic Message-ID: I wrote: <> [First let me correct the above to the extent that it refers to the mesolithic theories that are also mentioned in the same context by Dolukhanov (1996) p.46. This was read to me over the phone and I see looking at it now that Hajdu actually places proto-Uralic 'from the Baltic to the Urals' between 10,000-7000BP.] In a message dated 2/1/00 3:06:48 PM, anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi wrote: <> Just to take this one point at a time. Hajdu's date of proto-Uralic unity has it ending about 5000BC. Your 4000BC or earlier is as you say compatible from one point of view. But that 5000BC is noteworthy I believe for PIE. The extra thousand years or more could make a big difference. You wrote originally: <> BUT THE FIRST BIG QUESTION IS: What was the location of proto-Uralic? THE REASON THIS IS A BIG QUESTION IS: The 4000BC+ date for p-Uralic final unity could put it in contact with MORE THAN ONE CULTURE that might be the source of those 'PIE' loans. AND THOSE INCLUDE THE FIRST NEOLITHIC CULTURES in southeastern Europe. (Hajdu's 5000BC date makes this just as likely.) Neolithicism (including animal domestication) appears to enter eastern Europe/Ukraine from the Balkans in the packaged form of the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture. Dates for the initial wave begin at about 5500BC. By 4500, a middle stage of the culture has moved east and north to reach 'east of the Dniestr, penetrating to the Southern Bug catchment and reaching the Dnieper.' By this time copper metalurgy is also present, with ornaments and copper axes being found. Cucuteni-Tripolye culture shows many attributes distinctly relating it to the Balkan-Anatolian 'ceramic' neolithic culture that predated it to the south, including copper metallurgy. Also arising about this time to the east is the Sredni Stog culture - located 'in the forest-steppic interfluve between the Dnieper and Don rivers.' Early and middle Sredni Stog has been dated in the area of 4500BC. And it is a prime candidate for the first domestication of the horse, though remains show a primary reliance on other domesticates. It is a question whether animal domestication came to Sredni Stog from the south east across the Caucasus or from the west. There are also other developed neolithic cultures in the area at this time - Gumelnita and Michaelovka - located fundamentally on the Black Sea coast between the Danube and Dniester. North of all the cultures mentioned above is a long. slender band of river basin semi-neolithic settlements extending from the upper Prut to perhaps the Volga - not much further north than the modern north Ukraine - which is called Dniestr- Donetsian (5000-3500BC). Imported Bandkermik pottery - hallmark of the middle neolithic - is found throughout these sites. NOW THE IMPORTANT QUESTION: where is it that you understand Uralic might be in contact with any of these cultures 5000-4000BC? THE POINT: The evidence I have suggests that the PIE loans you describe could easily be associated with contact made with the first penetrations of neoliticism into south eastern Europe. So that perhaps what the loans represent not 'wide PIE' but post-Anatolian 'narrow PIE' - based on 'the neolithic hypothesis.' Here is my understanding of the situation north of these areas. I have that about this time apparently a continum of cultures with very similar typology ran from the Baltic eastward to the Volga - the Finnish 'Sperrings', Narva, Upper Volga and Volga Kuma - all roughly dating from 6000-4500 BC. Soon after this my sources describe an expansion of 'pit and comb' cultural markers southward (starting about 4500BC) that will cross into the areas described above - extending into the regions occupied by both Cucuteni-Tripolyte and Sredni Stog - but most of all, Dnieper-Donetsian. Dolukhanov identifies 'pit and comb' as likely the southward migration of "Finnish speaking peoples' from the north - based on continuity with Narva and Upper Volga typology - and the persistence of Sperrings and Narva in situ into the 2d millenium BC. CONCLUSION: All this suggests that these PIE loans might be most easily associated with the contacts coming alongside of the first neolithic ceramics to the Narva-Sperrings-Volga group. Or - on the other hand - with the coming of 'pit and comb''s later expansion into neolithic areas in the south. All dating before 4000BC. Please correct me, update me or whatever. Regards Steve Long From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Wed Feb 2 12:15:22 2000 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 13:15:22 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >> Georg at home.ivm.de writes: > << Everything can be borrowed, and there are examples for everything actually >> having been borrowed at some point in space and time. >> > -- true, although of course some things are more _likely_ to be borrowed than > others. Numerals, body parts, family relationships, and so forth, are less > likely to be loan-words. Why? Do you refer to statistics [which would be rather problematic] or do you think of some kind of 'motivated constraints' on borrowing "[n]umerals, body parts, family relationships, and so forth"? What kind of constraints would you think of? Cognitive, knowledge based, social (habitual) constraints? I agree with Stefan: everything can be borrowed and linguists should be prepared to accept the possibility of borrowings even if such an event does not fit into the general line of arguments. Linguists should 'obey' to languages, but languages never 'obey' to linguistic generalizations... Best wishes, Wolfgang -- ***************************** Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet München Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 D-80539 München Tel.: +89-21805343 / Fax: +89-21805345 Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ ***************************** From lmfosse at online.no Wed Feb 2 12:08:24 2000 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 13:08:24 +0100 Subject: SV: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com [SMTP:JoatSimeon at aol.com] skrev 01. februar 2000 19:18: > -- true, although of course some things are more _likely_ to be borrowed than > others. Numerals, body parts, family relationships, and so forth, are less > likely to be loan-words. For the record, I believe English numerals tend to be borrowed into Hind-Urdu. The reason is that phonetics have played havoc with the numerals from 1 - 100 (you more or less have to learn them all by heart), so that when you go above 20, English numerals are easier to use. But please correct me if I'm wrong! 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 Wed Feb 2 12:34:36 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 13:34:36 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >>Georg at home.ivm.de writes: ><< Everything can be borrowed, and there are examples for everything actually >>having been borrowed at some point in space and time. >> >-- true, although of course some things are more _likely_ to be borrowed than >others. Numerals, body parts, family relationships, and so forth, are less >likely to be loan-words. But in view that they are subject to borrowing after all, this "unlikeliness" cannot be used as a heuristic for demonstrating relatedness. Likely or un-, a case has to be made for every single instance of shared (or merely similar) vocabulary being not due to borrowing, before a claim of relatedness can expect the attention of the more skeptical parts of the audience. The "unliklely"-approach is a cul-de-sac. Given a sufficient degree of language-contact, the borrowing of every lexical item with every conceivable meaning is equally likely. If it weren't so, we had to watch out for a theoretical justification of the alleged resistence of some words to borrowing. What exactly makes them so "hard-wired" into the brains of language-users that they'd hardly give thought to using a different term for, say, "water", than all their ancestors did. What, for that matter, makes them "know" in the first place that, speaking of fully bilingual individuals, this term is "ours" and that one is "theirs". Lest this sounds naive, I'll add that frequency of use may be one firewall against borrowing (though not, as we see from empirical observation, an impermeable one). Structural differences, I have in mind drastic differences of phonological inventories, between languages in contact may also counteract large-scale borrowing, but, then, these tend to dwindle under a lonmg-standing areal pressure as well. Of course, I don't deny a general difference of borrowability between names for cultural items and every-day expressions. New technology changes hands together with terminology, more often than not. But "hand", "eye", "I", "water", "brother" aso. are not safe. They simply don't bear a label "Attention ! Native word! Don't replace by foreign gobbledeegook !" on them. Since it happened at some time, somewhere, it can happen anywhere. "Basicness" of vocabulary may be one factor slowing down large-scale borrowing processes. A different factor, one which may speed up the process, is intimateness and longevity of contact (and there are different kinds of language contact, which equally have to be taken into account). And the latter may overrule the former. The reason why I'm polemicising so determinedly against the "unlikely to be borrowed" mantra is that I see here the danger of a shortcut to the detection of genetic relationships being advocated. I don't maintain that anybody on this list actually thinks that, but I know people who do, hence my zeal. I think this started with the question whether Uralic *wete is borrowing from IE or common Indo-Uralic inheritance. I hope I'll be forgiven for being imprecise, but as far as I know the main argument for the borrowing scenario (general skepticism against Indo-Uralic can of course not play the role of a major argument here) builds on the fact that there seems to be another "water"-term in Uralic, shared only (??) by Saami and one (or both ??) Ob'-Ugric language, which gives the impression that *wete was a secondary intruder from outside, gradually replacing this original term in most of Uralic, but not reaching its extreme fringes. This is not "proof" of borrowing, but it is a state-of-affairs which squares neatly with such a scenario, so it shouldn't be brushed away, certainly not by saying "unlikely and that's that". I forgot the term itself, shoot, but I read about it a few days ago in a source I cannot pin down at the moment. If this source will turn out to be one of the postings on this list during the last week or so, you'll have evidence of my slightly deranged state of mind these days (and shoot again) ... St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Wed Feb 2 14:53:01 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 16:53:01 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <200001311807.p326@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: On Mon, 31 Jan 2000, Hans Holm wrote: (I wrote:) >>There is a misunderstanding here. We are -not- dealing [with random phono-semantic look-alikes between proto-IE and proto-U] (Hans Holm asked:) > .. who is 'we'? "We" is everyone who is dealing with the putative PIE loan words in Uralic. So that includes also you. (HH cited me:) >>precisely - >>radically >>has already been found out >>all of them have failed >>this has not been succesful I fail to see the point in citing these words from my mail without their proper context. If you wish to maintain this discussion at a sensible level, please quote me properly. (HH asked:) > E.g. it is much more likely for a > cultural concept like 'wheel' to be borrowed - as opposed to 'water', > isn't it? I couldn't agree more. But so what? It is obviously true that a word for e.g. 'cappuchino', 'neutron bomb' or 'virtual reality' is more easily borrowed than one for 'water'. But, for the third and last time, this does ABSOLUTELY NOT imply that a word for 'water' cannot be borrowed. (I wrote:) >>Of course, it is impossible to -prove- (...) that the lexical similarities >>are not due to common genetic origin. But then, it is impossible to >>disprove -any- proposed genetic relationship. (HH replied:) > .. Here we can agree. But: > "Relationship" is _always and only_ a question of degrees and ways. Just > try to calculate the number of _unrelated_ ancestors for you or me before > 10^n generations or years and your calculator will soon respond with > 'overflow'. This has nothing to do with relationships between languages. The genetic relationships between biological organisms and "genetic" relationships between languages are not analogous. A human, a horse, a latimeria or whatever has always two immediate ancestors, but a language (with the exception of creoles) has precisely ONE. Thus, a genetic relationship between two languages is not a question of degree, but of time depth. (I wrote:) >>Because of this, the task of proving belongs to those who propose a >>genetic relationship, and this has not been succesful for proto-Indo- >>Uralic or Nostratic. (HH asked:) > .. you know everything about that to be so sure? I know enough of the Nostratic hypothesis to say that there is little that distinguishes it from wishful thinking. However, I am not interested in entering any thorough discussion concerning the validity of this hypothesis, and I believe this is also outside the subject matter of this list. Those who are actively interested in Nostratic linguistics can of course discuss this question in other forums. (I wrote:) >>these contain at least 30 proto-IE loans, I'd say that chance >>correspondence is ruled out (HH replied:) > .. nobody denies that there are loans IE -> P-U, or? The conditions of > these contacts were object of a conference held in Finland, published by > Julku/Wiik 1998 at Turku "The Roots of Peoples and Languages of Northern > Eurasia". I am not familiar with this publication, but I know the views of Julku and Wiik quite well. It should be pointed out here that neither of these retired professors is a Uralist (Wiik is a phonetician and Julku a historian), and their fanciful theories concerning the origin and development of the U and IE languages have next to no support among Uralists. There isn't a single linguist in Finland who conforms with Julku and Wiik's views; on the contrary, J and W have received severe and justified criticism from specialists in Uralic linguistics, as well as Finnish IE-ists and Germanists. A final note concerning your message: I am not interested in continuing this kind of indescreet discussion. When you have some serious linguistic argumentation to support your views with, and are ready to discuss in a matter-of-fact manner, come back and talk. - Ante Aikio From mclasutt at brigham.net Wed Feb 2 15:29:13 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 08:29:13 -0700 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > Rick Mc Callister > You're talking about massive upheavals triggered by the arrival of > major imperialist powers possessing overwhelming technical > advantages. This > was not an everyday occurrence. Of course there were major migrations in > South Africa and the Americas after Europeans arrived --but because of > extraordinary events. > Responding to Joat Simeon >>>Myself, I'd say that since population movements of various sorts (conquests, >>>folk-migrations, refugees, colonizations, etc.) are common as dirt in the >>>historical record as far back as we can see, and since they're also common >>>in preliterate societies whenever these come under the observation of >>>literate observers (18th and 19th-century Africa is full of them, for >>>instance) then we have to assume that this was the case in prehistory. Rick is right and wrong in responding to Joat. He is right in saying that massive migrations and conquest are often related to technological developments and are not everyday occurrences. After the introduction of the horse into western North America in the 18th century, the Comanche moved from Wyoming to Texas and wiped out the Plains Apache there. After the introduction of the gun into northeastern North America, the Ojibwa expanded to the west driving everyone else before them--the Dakota, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho. When these displaced exiles ran into the sedentary tribes along the Missouri River and the Kiowa in the central Plains, they drove these tribes into smaller and smaller agricultural settlements and out of the area entirely (the Kiowa wound up being caught in a vise between the Comanche and the northern Plains invaders). In a nonconquest development, the Iroquois confederacy virtually depopulated the regions north and south of Lakes Erie and Ontario to the point that linguists have no clue as to who lived south of the lakes and along the upper Ohio River just before the arrival of the Europeans. Rick is incorrect when he tries to tie this only to "overwhelming technical advantages" and linking it to the modern era. There are many premodern examples of a people overrunning and overwhelming an older people--the Aryan invasion of India, the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England, the Roman conquest of southern and western Europe, the movement of the Southern Athapaskans from Canada to Arizona where they drove out native Pueblo and Papago farmers, the movement of the Aztecs into Central Mexico, and the spread of the Bantu in sub-Saharan Africa. These were all violent conquests that involved massive displacement and assimilation of older populations. None of them can be considered to have happened in modern times. Most of them involved no overwhelming technological advantage. While not necessarily and "everyday occurrence", conquest and depopulation is not a strictly modern event. The events have become more global in scale as transport is easier, but that is only a matter of scale, not of whether or not similar things have happened in the past. There are various kinds of evidence that demonstrate these events--the Pygmies still exist in Central Africa, but they now speak Bantu languages; there is an identifiable layer of substrate vocabulary from the Baltic Coast inhabitants in Germanic; there are historical records of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England and the Roman conquests; there are archeological records of the Babylonian expansion in the ancient Near East and the spread of Aramaic with it; there are folklore accounts of the invasions of the Aryans and Aztecs; there is linguistic evidence for the invasion of Bantu and the Athapaskan move south. The only difference between modern man, ancient man, and prehistoric man is one of scale. NOTE: In an earlier post, someone mentioned "Lois and Clark". It should be "Lewis and Clark" of course. "Lois and Clark" was an hour-long U.S. TV series in the mid-1990s about Superman and Lois Lane. It was also a cartoon strip in the newspapers. 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 mcv at wxs.nl Wed Feb 2 23:13:06 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 00:13:06 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>sarima at friesen.net writes: >>For instance when Lois and Clark went through the area, the Dakota were not >>yet living in the Dakotas!) >-- the Navaho are recent arrivals in their current location as well. Missed that the first time. It really says "Lois and Clark" :-) Were Ms. Lane and Mr. Kent's first names consciously chosen to resemble those of that other famous team? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl [ Moderator's comment: Probably not uppermost in the creators' minds 70 years ago. I took it to be a more subtle comment by Mr. Friesen; further discussion of this point should be taken to private e-mail. --rma ] From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Feb 2 23:14:07 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 00:14:07 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>Georg at home.ivm.de writes: ><< Everything can be borrowed, and there are examples for everything actually >>having been borrowed at some point in space and time. >> >-- true, although of course some things are more _likely_ to be borrowed than >others. Numerals, body parts, family relationships, and so forth, are less >likely to be loan-words. Numerals are relatively likely, though. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mclasutt at brigham.net Wed Feb 2 02:19:53 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 19:19:53 -0700 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000128224928.0099fb00@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: > Stanley Friesen > A) language is a biological phenomenon, and behaves like other such. Wrong. Language is not a biological phenomenon, but a cognitive one. The physical structures which allow complex human language evolved along biological lines, but language change is note like biology. When two species diverge, they can no longer influence each other. A Grevy's Zebra cannot interbreed with a Plains Zebra no matter how many times they try. However, Basque can (and has) borrow words from its unrelated and mutually unintelligible neighbors. Morphology and syntactic structures can also be borrowed as well as sound systems (I'm thinking in terms of areal features here). This ability to mix varieties even after differentiation is a fundamental difference between biological descent and linguistic descent. > B) language differentiation acts *very* much like biological speciation, > except for happening much faster. See above. The speed factor is, indeed, a critical one. > C) the 'mutual comprehensibility' definition of separate languages is > almost exactly equivalent to the biological species definition as a > criterion for recognizing species. But, as stated above, once species have differentiated they can no longer influence one another. Languages retain that ability no matter how long they've been separate. We even have examples of languages which are half one language and half another (mixed languages like Michif) as well as languages (creoles) that are created from stumps of other languages and sprout into complex human languages like every other. Species cannot arise from the leg of one animal and pieces cropped here and there from others. > D) as others have been pointing out here, the similarities are so close > that it is even useful to apply cladistic methodology in the study of > historical linguistics. There are just enough similarities to allow this on a limited scale, but tree diagrams have difficulty expressing relationships within a dialect chain and cannot show features due to geographic proximity. > In other words, the two sets of phenomena are so extremely similar that it > is ineffective to try and treat them very differently. While there is similarity, there is no "extremely similar" here. 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 Feb 2 14:48:11 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 14:48:11 +0000 Subject: "is the same as" Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Stanley Friesen writes: [LT] >> At least in biology, such relations as "can interbreed with" or "cannot >> readily be distinguished by eye from" need not be transitive -- I agree. >> But by what right can we identify the relation "is the same as" with one of >> these? And what would be the point of doing this? > Because: > > A) language is a biological phenomenon, and behaves like other such. Not really. Our language faculty, in the view of most linguists, is part of our biology, but the language faculty is not the subject matter of historical linguistics: it is the same for everybody. Historical linguistics deals in the particularities of individual languages, and these are not biological in nature. Rather, they are largely social. And, *pace* Richard Dawkins, social phenomena do not behave like genes. > B) language differentiation acts *very* much like biological speciation, > except for happening much faster. "Very much" in some respects, but not in all. There are important differences. Biologists recognize a certain amount of gene transmission between species, but only within limits -- ignoring our own genetic engineering. But languages allow sideways transmission without limit. Note, for example, the enormous Latino-Romance influence upon the very distantly related English and upon the unrelated Basque. In biological terms, this is rather as though ostriches had received massive gene transfusions from tigers or starfish. > C) the 'mutual comprehensibility' definition of separate languages is > almost exactly equivalent to the biological species definition as a > criterion for recognizing species. Really? I doubt it. Mutual comprehensibility is a continuum ranging from 0% to 100%, with everything in between. It is also not fixed: with exposure, mutual comprehensibility can greatly increase. The same is not true of biological species. We do not find pairs of species which can interbreed only at the 86% level, or only at the 32% level. And chimps and gorillas do not become more inter-fertile by living alongside each other. > D) as others have been pointing out here, the similarities are so close > that it is even useful to apply cladistic methodology in the study of > historical linguistics. This has been widely done, and almost every possible parallel has been noted. See, for example, Roger Lass's latest book. But historical linguistics is still not biological taxonomy. > In other words, the two sets of phenomena are so extremely similar that it > is ineffective to try and treat them very differently. Sorry; I disagree strongly. The differences are large and important. Just to take an obvious example: what would you say was the linguistic equivalent of the biological gene? This strikes me as a pretty big difference. > [P.S. the salamander ring I mentioned is formally considered one species > for taxonomic purposes]. So it is. And a dialect continuum is sometimes treated as a single language for linguistic purposes. But the decision is largely arbitrary. Difficulties and all, biological species are a lot more real than are languages. [LT on the Romance dialect continuum] >> Indeed, and this is a common state of affairs. But how does this constitute >> an argument for treating "is the same as" as a non-transitive relation? >> Better, I suggest, to forget about this last relation altogether, and to >> speak instead of some more appropriate relation, such as "is readily >> mutually comprehensible with" -- which again I agree is not going to be >> transitive. > That is more or less what I *mean* by "the same as". Well, if that's all you mean by "is the same as", why not drop the vague wording and stick to the explicit one? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From sarima at friesen.net Wed Feb 2 02:35:43 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 18:35:43 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 11:58 PM 1/27/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >It does not matter if they occured otherwise. The question is WHEN they >occurred. None of this dates these changes back to PIE dispersal. The wheel >may have been introduced BEFORE PIE *k ==> Germanic 'h' occurred BUT >AFTER IE dispersal. In each individual case, yes. But by the time you add in ALL of the shared words for late Neolithic technology found in IE languages, you have almost all of the major sound changes represented. This puts the origin of these words back to a time when virtually *none* of sound changes had occurred. This is, by definition, prior to the loss of unity. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From Georg at home.ivm.de Wed Feb 2 17:30:48 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 18:30:48 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <008301bf6cc7$2fa1fc60$6a01703e@edsel> Message-ID: >BTW, I wonder if the Du. word for whirlpool, '(draai)kolk' has any >relationship with '*kwe(kw)los'. Dat kan niet, wegens Krimm's (;-) wet. "kolk" behoort bij "keel", en dat behoort bij Lat. /gula/, Russ. /glotat'/ etc. Groeten, St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Feb 2 16:24:28 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 16:24:28 +0000 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: Roz Frank writes: > Then does the IE model posit that PIE, understood here as an actual unified > linguistic system, was a linguistic isolate? It would seem that the model > would have to do this. No; certainly not. The recognition and reconstruction of PIE does not, in itself, carry any implications at all as to whether PIE did or did not have relatives. Likewise, the reconstruction of Proto-Celtic or of Proto-Germanic carries no such implications. In the case of Celtic and Germanic, it can be demonstrated that these families have discoverable relatives, including each other. In the case of PIE, it has not so far proved possible to identify any secure relatives among known families, though people keep trying, and maybe one day they'll succeed. > Otherwise one would be confronted with a simulation > of linguistic prehistory in which PIE could be viewed as merely one member > of a language family existing at that point in time. That is exactly what everyone believes. But it does not follow that any discoverable relatives of PIE survived long enough to be recorded. If they didn't, we're just out of luck, and our reconstruction can proceed no further back in time. > Stated differently, > although I haven't heard this point discussed on the list, a cladistic > model requires the end point to coincide with a linguistic system that is > viewed as a total linguistic isolate. No; certainly not. No one believes Proto-Celtic or Proto-Germanic to be an isolate. It's merely that the reconstruction of one of these generally pays no attention to anything outside the particular family being investigated. And the case is no different for PIE. > And even if PIE were posited as an > isolate, would one not have to propose that, nonetheless, the > proto-language, too, would have had the full characteristics of a human > language, with the likelihood of suppletions, irregularities and substrata. Of course, except that there is no particular reason to posit any significant substrate influences. > And I believe that it is this latter point that creates problems. How does > the model guarantee that the ultimate origin of the "common vocabulary" > should not be traced back, for example, to the substrata that PIE, if > understood as a natural language, must have had? The items assigned to PIE are the items that can be reconstructed for PIE. How they got into PIE in the first place is another matter. But, regardless of origin, if they were present in PIE, then they were part of PIE, and they were available to be continued into the several daughter branches. That's all that counts for the reconstruction. > Hence, are we to understand PIE as a convenient shorthand for a set of > sharted characteristics or as a term standing for a reified linguistic > system spoken in prehistory? The second. > And if it is understood as the second, > according to the model, how long did it just tread water? Stated > differently, if one chooses the second version, then one must ask how long > the unified (undifferentiated) linguistic system, as portrayed by the > reconstructions, go unchanged. It did not remain unchanged for even a single generation. Our version of the Uniformitarian Principle, a cornerstone of all scientific investigation, requires that ancient languages should not have been different from modern ones. Since all living and recorded languages are or were constantly changing, so were ancient ones, and so was PIE. > Languages do change. Are we to assume that > PIE was different? No; of course not. > It seems to me that this is a very slippery aspect of a > cladistic modeling of the data. It is not. Remember, what we are reconstructing is the proto-language *at the last moment* at which it was still a more-or-less unified system, just before it began breaking up. The earlier changes which had doubtless occurred within the ancestral stages of PIE cannot be identified by comparative reconstruction, at least not without some secure relatives of PIE -- which we don't have. But it is possible in principle to reconstruct back further within PIE by using another method: internal reconstruction. And precisely this has been attempted by some specialists, perhaps most notably by W. P. Lehmann, who believes that he can identify at least one, maybe two, significantly earlier stages ancestral to the PIE that we reconstruct by the comparative method. > On the other hand, if we choose the first alternative, that PIE is a > convenient shorthand, it acts like a frame in a moving picture: a > convenient way of portraying a stop-action of events that are otherwise > inevitably in motion. That is exactly how we see it, but within the second alternative. > And as an aside, are there explict criteria set forth that determine > which items are most representative. I'm speaking of crtieria along the > lines of those that have been suggested by Larry Trask (and debated by > many) concerning the selection of items in Pre-Basque. But the two cases are very different. We have lots of IE languages, and so our main tool is the comparative method here. But Basque is isolated, and so the comparative method is of minimal use, and only internal reconstruction is available. Hence different criteria are appropriate in the two cases. > I would be most > interested in knowing if such criteria have been debated and/or laid out > explicitly at some point in the past. For example, how many language groups > must the item be attested in for it to quality? I assume, for example, that > identifying cognates/reflexes of the same item in Sanskrit and Celtic would > be sufficient for the item to qualify? Or is the bar set higher for these > PIE items, e.g., that the item must be attested in Sanskrit, Germanic and > Celtic or Hittite, Slavic and Romance, etc. There is no unchallengeable answer to this question. By Meillet's Principle, we require cognates in at least three branches of IE before we can reconstruct an etymon for PIE. But this is only a rule of thumb, and skilful specialists need not adhere to it slavishly. > For example, just glancing over the entries in Buck, it would seem that > there isn't as much uniformity for "wheel" across IE languages, as there is > for, say, "cart" which shows up most IE languages (obviously with the help > of Latin). But loan words don't count for the purpose of reconstruction. If an identifiable Celtic word is borrowed into Latin, from where it descends into the Romance languages and is borrowed into Germanic and elsewhere, it is still only the Celtic word which counts. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From alderson at netcom.com Wed Feb 2 21:32:41 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 13:32:41 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.20000131203549.006d8460@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu> (message from roslyn frank on Mon, 31 Jan 2000 20:51:19 -0600) Message-ID: Roz Frank wrote: > Then does the IE model posit that PIE, understood here as an actual unified > linguistic system, was a linguistic isolate? It would seem that the model > would have to do this. Not so much "posit" as "treat": With very few exceptions, the first 175 years or so of Indo-European linguistics held as a tenet that while PIE probably had relatives, we didn't know enough about PIE (yet) to give the question further consideration. > And even if PIE were posited as an isolate, would one not have to propose > that, nonetheless, the proto-language, too, would have had the full > characteristics of a human language, with the likelihood of suppletions, > irregularities and substrata. Of course. We have always recognized (i. e., I was taught as an undergrad ;-) that our information about PIE will always be incomplete, since methods such as internal reconstruction smooth away irregularities, as do natural processes like paradigmatic re-modeling (which can get rid of suppletions altogether). We know that there were suppletive verb paradigms in the language--some have survived into modern languages like English and Spanish. All of these teachings assume that nothing like Nostratic will ever be workably reconstructed to the degree that PIE has been, and tacitly urge that until such material *is* available, we needn't look at it at all. > How does the model guarantee that the ultimate origin of the "common > vocabulary" should not be traced back, for example, to the substrata that > PIE, if understood as a natural language, must have had? The model does not even address this question: PIE is defined as what we can reconstruct by the comparative method alone. Anything else, whether achieved by internal reconstruction or lexical inspection, is assigned to a nebulous past by calling it "pre-(P)IE", or is assigned to borrowing from a known external source. > ... are we to understand PIE as a convenient shorthand for a set of sharted > characteristics or as a term standing for a reified linguistic system spoken > in prehistory? And if it is understood as the second, according to the model, > how long did it just tread water? Stated differently, if one chooses the > second version, then one must ask how long the unified (undifferentiated) > linguistic system, as portrayed by the reconstructions, go unchanged. > Languages do change. Are we to assume that PIE was different? Coming out of the comparative method, it's "a convenient shorthand". Viewing it as "a reified linguistic system spoken in prehistory" is an interpretation of that shorthand, and an ill-advised one at that. We can assign some relative timelines to our reconstructions (e. g., "thematic stem formations are late"), but we should not allow ourselves to believe everything we can reconstruct from the data in the daughter languages, or by internal reconstruction on those results, ever formed a single coherent language at a single point in time. NB: I certainly am not denying that such a language existed, as some have been led to do (like Trubetzkoy and Boas), only that what we reconstruct represents accurately and completely any single stage thereof. Rich Alderson From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Feb 2 23:52:14 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 00:52:14 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <008301bf6cc7$2fa1fc60$6a01703e@edsel> Message-ID: "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >They aren't: Actually, basically three different, and very ordinary, words >that probably exist (I mean words with these meanings) in any language. As I >said before: all these words seem to have had different original meanings >(*kwekwlo/'round, circle', *rotho/'revolve', The primary meaning of *ret(h)-/*rot(h)- is apparently "to run". >BTW, I wonder if the Du. word for whirlpool, '(draai)kolk' has any >relationship with '*kwe(kw)los'. Surely not. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Tue Feb 1 19:19:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 19:19:00 GMT Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] JS>Observers as late as the 4th century CE said that the Gallic-Celtic of JS>Lyon, in the Rhone valley, was mutually comprehensible with that of the JS>Galatians of Anatolia (who arrived from the Balkans about 270 BCE). .. "mutually comprehensible" here should be seen quite relative. I remember a parallel: Most scholars would regard the branches of Turcic as different languages, wouldn't they? In spite of that, in a recent TV-film, a native speaker of Turcish presented himself talking to people of different Turcic languages (e.g. Uighur) on a bus-tour in central Asia with only little difficulties. But that seemed to be a very rudimental 'small' talk. And in such a sense the above cited "observer" could (should?) be understood. JS>This requires either no change, or perfectly synchronized change, in pre- JS>Celtic across thousands of miles, ... .. I propose "little change". And there are much more examples. JS>, ... for 4000 years. Which is in blatant violation of everything we know JS>about languages and how they develop. .. Is it? This is an IE group, but if we take a look beyond our IE nose, e.g. to Australia, we find about 70 % covered by speakers of Pama-Nyungan, the languages/dialects of which are regarded as very closely related. And archeologists now redate the first settlements back to more than 50.000 years (for a up-to-date overview see Stringer in Antiquity 73/99:876). Of course these must not be the direct predecessors of Pama-Nyungan. Back to IE: Renfrew's farmers in Ireland must not have been direct predecessors of Gaelic speakers, at least their language must not at all have been a predecessor. Mit freundlichen Grüßen Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover Tel=FAX x49-511-9585714. From strand at sedona.net Thu Feb 3 10:36:02 2000 From: strand at sedona.net (Richard F.Strand) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 05:36:02 -0500 Subject: Indo-Iranian Message-ID: >Rick Mc Callister inquired: > Why does Old Persian look as far removed [or more] from Avestan as >any of the others? What's the time difference? Is the difference between >Avestan and Old Persian as great as the chart would indicate? Old Persian is not so far out if you consider the evolution of IE palatals in Early Iranian to have proceeded through a dentalization process: k' > c > ts g' > j > dz The dental affricate stage persists in the Nuristani branch of Indo-Iranian, as discussed on my website (http://users.sedona.net/~strand/Nuristani/nuristanis.html). Subsequently, affrication was lost in most Iranian regions, with the dentalized affricates becoming /s/ and /z/; but Old Persian retained the dentalization while deaffricating /ts/ > /th/ and /dz/ > /d/. As to the time difference, inscriptional Old Persian dates from ca. 521 BC. Avestan has been traditionally dated from the 6th Century BC, but Burrow has argued for a date up to 500 years earlier. Richard Strand Richard Strand's Nuristan Site http://users.sedona.net/~strand From Georg at home.ivm.de Wed Feb 2 10:25:19 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 11:25:19 +0100 Subject: Indo-Iranian In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Looking at Watkins's chart of correspondences >IE Sanskrit Avestan Old Persian OCS Lithuanian >k s' s th s s >kw k/c k/c k k/c^/c k >g j z/g g/d z z >gw g/j g/j g/j g/z^/z g >gh h g/z g/d z z >gwh gh/h g/j g/j g/z^/z g > Why does Old Persian look as far removed [or more] from Avestan as >any of the others? Well, it's of course a different language ;-) I don't think the differences as evidenced by this list of correspondences are very dramatic. We have a secondary development s > th here (of course, it seems logically possible that Avestan went through an intermediate stage *k' > th > s, in which case the Old Persian stage would be a bit more archaic; I don't see at the moment how to decide this). With the labiovelars, Watkins' list shows k/c for Awestan (with /c/ as the result of the Law of the Palatals), but only /k/ for Old Persian. Well, this doesn't seem correct to me (and I can't tell from here whether the fault is really Watkins'), viz.: -ca: < *-kwe, -ciy < *kwid, shiya:ta "happy" < *kwje:tos (rules: kwe > ca, kwi > ci, kwj [or better: kwi _V] > shiy; so no real difference here. g' > d is indeed peculiar for Persian. On the whole, I don't find these differences, and others holding between OP and Aw. really drastic, but of course, they are different languages. > What's the time difference? Hard to say. The Achaemenid inscriptions are easily datable, they fall mostly in the 6th/5th centuries B.C. Traditional datings of Zarathushtra put him in the same time (mostly as a contemporary of Dareios I., but this has been challenged, lately by Mary Boyce, who assigned him a date considerably earlier on the time-scale (at least half a century up). More important than the time difference is, I think, a difference in location. Wile OP is essentially the dialect of Fars in SW Iran (with a smattering of Median influence, which language centered around the location of present-day Teheran), the dialectal basis of Avestan is considerably further in the East. Whether Avestan may already be classified as "Eastern Iranian" is a matter of debate, for some researchers the distinction between E and W Ir. begins to make sense only in Middle Iranian times; but, then, few will take issue with OP being called "Old (South) West Iranian"; quite naturally, then, Aw. would have to be called "Old E Ir.", but the snag is that it would be "East Iranian" without distinctive East Iranian features. Geographically, at least, it can be roughly located in the regions of Bactria, Mawarannahr (= Central Asian "Mesopotamia"), i.e. Northern Afghanistan, Southern Uzbekistan in modern terms. But the figure of Zarathushtra and the events of his religious revolution are quite elusive and have not been pinned down by historians with last certainty. I leave the rest to the experts. >Is the difference between >Avestan and Old Persian as great as the chart would indicate? Gut feeling: no. If you read texts in both languages you'll always "feel" them being quite closely related languages, what you've learned in the OP class, will help you in the Avestan class, and vice versa. Avestan has the reputation of being one of the "hardest" older IE languages to master, but this - at least for the Gatha dialect - is imho more due to the arcane contents of the texts, the proper understanding of which demands an intimate knowledge of Zarathustrian religion and its peculiar system of religious semantics, something few people can boast to have. OP texts, othoh, are more of the "I am the greatest and if you dare stand up against me I will smite you, some day XY tried and I smote him"-type, that's why they are preferred in beginners' classes (it's like Julius Caesar, who "simply cannot have been a great man, since he wrote only for beginners' Latin classes", as a popular saying has it here). Old Persian is, due to the limited number and stereotypical content of its extant texts, also more defectively preserved, so a good deal of its morphology is simply unknown (e.g. only one verb is attested in the optative and only one in the perfect; incidentally, both verbal categories are attested in one and the same hapax legomenon etc.). St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From jer at cphling.dk Wed Feb 2 15:39:18 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 16:39:18 +0100 Subject: Indo-Iranian In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 29 Jan 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Looking at Watkins's chart of correspondences > IE Sanskrit Avestan Old Persian OCS Lithuanian > k s' s th s s > kw k/c k/c k k/c^/c k > g j z/g g/d z z > gw g/j g/j g/j g/z^/z g > gh h g/z g/d z z > gwh gh/h g/j g/j g/z^/z g > Why does Old Persian look as far removed [or more] from Avestan as > any of the others? What's the time difference? Is the difference between > Avestan and Old Persian as great as the chart would indicate? First, the chart is not accurate, probably due to inaccurate copying (I don't know the exact source). In the IE column, kw, gw, gwh are obviously meant to include also plain velars (i.e. non-palatal k, g, gh), while the "IE k, g, gh" of the chart stand for palatals only. Second, some haceks are missing in the Lithuanian part of the chart (and of course understood in Sanskrit, Av., OP where "c, j" are traditional notations of c^, j^). It should be: > IE Sanskrit Avestan Old Persian OCS Lithuanian > k^ s' s th s s^ > k/kw k/c k/c k/c k/c^/c k > g^ j z d z z^ > g/gw g/j g/j g/j g/z^/z g > g^h h z d z z^ > gh/gwh gh/h g/j g/j g/z^/z g Thus, as regards palatalization (th alternative options following the slants), the two Old Iranian languages behave the same, and just like Sanskrit. The only difference between Avestan and Old Persian is now in the phonetics of the old palatals. It is known that the Proto-Iranian pronunciation of the old palatals was that of dental affricates [ts], [dz], because (1) there are loanwords in Tocharian and Armenian that retain this form, (2) inherited *-ts- comes out the same (Skt. matsya- 'fish' : Av. masiia- : OP unattested *mathiya- behind Mod.Pers. mahi:g), (3) the Iranian dialect distribution of zasta-/dasta- 'hand' shows d- in dialects that otherwise have z-, this being interpreted to represent a dissimilated reflex of Proto-Iranian [dzasta-] with loss of the first sibilant prior to the change of dz to z (Klingenschmitt's observation). Thus, the Avestan (and "Medic") developments ts > s and dz > z are as in French (Lat. palatalized c > OFr. [ts] > Mod.Fr. [s]), or Greek or Latin (nepo:s from *nepo:t-s), while the Old Persian ts > th is as in Spanish (and Albanian). The sibilant release of the old palatal was assimilated to the dental more and more, giving a change from ts' to ts and further to tth (i.e. stop t + fricative th, all within the duration of the old palatal), the final step being loss of the occlusion whereby ts became s, and tth became th. The voiced palatal must have a similar history: dz' > PIran. dz > Av. (etc.) z, pre-OPers. ddh (stop d + spirant dh release) > plain spirant dh > stop d (or ddh > d directly?). Thus the Avestan and Old Persians reflexes are straightforward further developments of the same Proto-Iranian stage. In most other respects, Old Persian is so plainly a close relative of Avestan that this has never been questioned, and indeed cannot seriously be. The Indic development, then, cannot represent the Proto-Indo-Iranian pronunciation unchanged. The palatal s' must have had some occlusion in PII, since there is still some in PIran. [ts], so this phoneme will have to be posited as [ts'] for PII; in parallel fashion, the reflex of IE *g^ (which has retained its occlusion in Indic j) must be PII [dz'], and its aspirated counterpart [dz'h]. In Iranian the aspiration was conbsistently lost in voiced consonants, so that both of these became [dz] (> z/d), while the late palatals j^ and j^h (i.e. [dz^h]) fell together as j^ (conventional notation j). In Indic the voiced assibilated affricates lost their buccal traits and simply gave a voiced [h]. The Proto-Indo-Iranian phonetic values of the IE palatals thus were [ts'], [dz'], [dz'h], or, in a simpler notation *c', *j', *j'h with an acute accent on the affricate to indicate prepalatal position (as opposed to the hacek on *c^, *j^, *j^h denoting a more central palatal position of the younger palatals). It appears that the IIr. occlusion of the old palatals is also retained in the Finno-Ugric renditions of the oldest loanwords that have been taken from a prestage of the Indo-Iranian protolanguage. Jens From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Wed Feb 2 21:38:46 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 15:38:46 -0600 Subject: Address for John Robb Message-ID: Would anyone on the list know the whereabouts of John Robb? I'm trying to locate an email and snail mail address for him. In the early '90s he was at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Just for the record he wrote two articles that I found quite original: "Random causes with directed effects: the Indo-European language spread and the stochastic loss of lineages" in Antiquity 65 (1991):287-91 and "A Social prehistory of European languages" in Antiquity 67 (1991):747-60. Thanks in advance, Roz From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Feb 2 14:30:19 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 14:30:19 +0000 Subject: SV: Indo-Hittite Message-ID: Stanley Friesen writes: > So far the "cladistic linguistics" I have seen has fallen far short of what > biologists do - many of the solutions to statistical issues that biologists > have come up with are not applied. But our problems are not identical to those of the biologists, and their solutions do not necessarily work for us. For one thing, the biologists have a lot more material to work with than we do. They have genes, but we don't. They have fossils, but we mostly don't. It is, in my view, an error to assume that comparative linguistics is isomorphic to biological taxonomy, and that what is true or successful in one field must be true or successful in the other. As for statistical (probabilistic) approaches, some linguists have been trying very hard to develop these, but the difficulties are considerable, indeed almost refractory, and so far no one has been able to come up with a probabilistic approach which can be regarded as generally satisfactory. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From pie at AN3039.spb.edu Wed Feb 2 15:58:26 2000 From: pie at AN3039.spb.edu (Alex Nikolaev) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 18:58:26 +0300 Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? In-Reply-To: ; from "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" at Jan 29, 100 2:52 Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote > Sean Crist wrote: >> To answer a few of the other points you bring up: >> -You suggest that Gmc /g/ could be the reflex of a laryngeal in ge-. In >> cases where we're lucky enough to have evidence from the other branches >> for a word-initial laryngeal, Germanic uniformly has zero (minus a very >> technical point regarding the development of the Gmc strong verb classes >> which isn't relevant here). If a laryngeal developed into Gmc */g/ in >> this case, it would be the only such case we have, and it would be >> inconsistent with all of the other Gmc words descending from a PIE word >> with an initial laryngeal. > There are a few cases where a non-word-initial laryngeal seems to > appear in Germanic as a velar stop (e.g. quick < *gwiH3wos), but > the result is always /k/, not /g/. There is a possibility, that the velar reflex of the laryngeal in this word may owe its existence to the assimilation with the initial labiovelar (note, that it's most likely for H3 to have had a labial appendix), thus IE *gwiH3-wo-s > Germanic kwikwaz. Then it's not directly PIE -H- > Germanic -k-. One could recall the Sapir-Martinet's "contiguous H's" (of the type costa/osteon, halina/gloios) to tie together lat. c-, p.-germ. g- and greek e-, but i know of no cases, where the *first* H were involved in this kind of "hardening". Best wishes, Alex From jrader at m-w.com Wed Feb 2 15:12:51 2000 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 15:12:51 +0000 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: I believe several scholars have claimed that the preverb in Old Irish, which is obligatory with the imperfect indicative, the secondary future, and the past subjunctive, is a functional replacement of the augment. Of course, etymologically is clearly unrelated to the Greek and Indo-Iranian morpheme, and it has other functions in Old Irish, serving as a semantically empty preverb to which infixed personal pronouns and relative markers are appended. Jim Rader > I remember a post from J. E. Rasmussen in a previous incarnation of this > list arguing that the augment has left traces outside Greek, Armenian > and Indo-Iranian. I don't remember the details and though I think that I > archived the message, I can't find it. >[Vidhyanath Rao] From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Feb 2 23:43:37 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 00:43:37 +0100 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) In-Reply-To: <00a001bf6ca3$45316f80$9471fe8c@lucent.com> Message-ID: "Vidhyanath Rao" wrote: >There is an interesting typological problem here. According to Bybee et >al (The evolution of grammar), unmarked past vs marked present is >unknown in extant languages. This makes the usual classification of >forms in Hittite (and PIE) quite unusual. I remember asking about this >before. Miguel suggested Akkadian as another such example, quoting >Lipinski to argue that iprus was preterite, iparras was present. But in >`Outline', Lipinski explicitely assigns iparras to imperfective (putting >present-future in quotation marks). So the anamoly still unexplained. Still, the unmarked form is a simple past, while the marked forms are the imperfective ("durative", "present-future") with geminated C2, and the perfect (CtCC [iptaras], with infix -t-). Such a system is potentially very close to one with unmarked past vs. marked present (all it takes is the loss of the perfect). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Wed Feb 2 20:18:33 2000 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 14:18:33 -0600 Subject: NW vs. E Gmc Message-ID: >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Sean Crist" >Sent: Friday, January 28, 2000 4:08 PM >>> The Gothic passive (actually, a PIE middle formation) has West >>> Germanic parallels, such as OE _ha:tte_ 'is named' (cf. Gothic >>> _haitada_), contrasting with active _ha:tT_ (T = thorn) 'calls' >>> (Gothic. _haitiT_). >[Ed Selleslagh] >In Du. 'heten' and Ger. 'heissen' (Eng. be called, named, bear a name, Fr. >s'appeler) the verb seems active, intransitive, but in Du. the past participle >'geheten' has a transitive meaning, or a passive one (called so and so by >somebody else, having received a name). This is rather confusing to me : could >you clarify? Since Sean Crist was quoting me, perhaps I had better clarify. In (at least) German and Dutch, the meanings which once required passsive morphology with _heissen/heten_ no longer do. Thus we find Er hat Meyer geheissen. 'His name was Meyer.' (Active, or rather, unspecified morphology; clearly intransitive. Patient ["theme"] "Case Frame", to use a useful expression from Case Grammar.) Er hat mich einen Dummkopf geheissen. 'He called me an idiot.' (Same morphology, transitive construction because of the Agent-Patient "case Frame".) >> It's true that an old passive form is fossilized here, but the speakers of >> OE and OHG almost certainly considered this word to be a separate lexical >> item in its own right. A similar case: most speakers of modern English >> probably consider "forlorn" a separate lexical item and are completely >> unaware that the word contains a fossilized old past participle of "lose". One could also cite _born_, kept distince even in spelling from _borne_, the normal participle of _bear_. Leo Connolly Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at memphis.edu University of Memphis From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Feb 2 23:17:11 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 00:17:11 +0100 Subject: NE Germanic In-Reply-To: <000701bf6cb1$1357de00$c1c407c6@oemcomputer> Message-ID: "Steve Gustafson" wrote: >Stanley Friesen writes: >> From a different direction, the most believable derivations of the *name* >> "Goth" link it with "Gotaland" in Sweden and/or the island "Gotland". >> This suggests a northern origin for the tribe. >My further understanding is that the name of -Gdansk- in Poland represents >*gudaniska, which looks Germanic, and suggests a Gothic connection on the >south shore of the Baltic. Or even better, *gUtaniskU (with g(U)t > gd). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Feb 2 19:37:17 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 19:37:17 -0000 Subject: Horses Message-ID: Dear Miguel and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2000 7:44 PM > Stefan Georg wrote: >> That's Sumerian, and not Anatolian. (aside: the genitive morpheme is .A >> only; the writing .RA has been used by specialists to argue that this term >> is not really Sumerian, but pseudo-Sumerian invented by Akkadian-speaking >> scribes. I'd be grateful if some specialist could confirm/debunk this). [MCV] > If I look at Thomsen's Sumerian quotes (e.g. from the Gudea > inscriptions), I see many cases of this kind of spelling (e.g. > Gudea cyl. A XX 23: {d}A.nun.na "Anuna Gods", i.e. "seed" () > "of the prince" () > Recently on the ANE list, Bob Whiting ("Re: ANE Horses in North > Syria") wrote that the Sumerian word for "horse" was *, > written descriptively (not phonetically) as > "foreign equid/donkey". [PR] In this connection, one might want to notice Egyptian s(j)s(j), 'hurry', and ssm, 'horse'; could these be connected with IE *se:i-, 'throw'? 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 alderson at netcom.com Thu Feb 3 01:47:32 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 17:47:32 -0800 Subject: Horses in War In-Reply-To: <35.ca93b7.25c82fd8@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: Steve Long wrote: > the chariot's other best function appears to be mounted infantry - as it > appears in Homer - so that it acted as transport like APCs but not in combat I thought we had had this part of the discussion already. By Homer's time, chariots had been out of use in Greek warfare for centuries; it is clear that, other than traditional vocabulary, he has no idea how they really worked, and describes their use as if they were cavalry horses, doing things no chariot every did (leaping ditches, forsooth!). On chariots, Homer is colorful but completely unreliable. Rich Alderson From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Wed Feb 2 02:39:48 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 20:39:48 -0600 Subject: Basque butterflies (and phonemes) again Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] At 05:12 PM 1/24/00 +0000, Larry Trask wrote: [LT] >In Hualde's alternative view, initial */b d g/ in Pre-Basque had facultative >voicing: that is, they could be realized, indifferently, either as [b d g] or >as [p t k] -- "indifferently", because there was no contrast of voicing in >word-initial plosives in Pre-Basque. So far, this view is not significantly >different from M's view, but now comes the difference. Hualde proposes that, >because of this facultative voicing, Pre-Basque word-initial */b d g/ >sometimes develop into modern /b d g/ but sometimes into modern /p t k/. In >other words, he reckons, one or the other voicing possibility was selected >arbitrarily for each word, with some words receiving both treatments in >different parts of the country. Larry, what you describe Hualde as proposing doesn't seem to coincide with the contents of the paper that I read. As you may recall, the last time you paraphrased Hualde's position, saying that he argued that Pre-Basque had facultative voicing, Hualde himself wrote a response to the list. Yet I notice that you are repeating the same thing again here. So I'm confused. Here is the rrelevant passage from an earlier exchange between the two of us that you sent to the list on Mon. 13 Sept 1999. I had already read Hualde's book on Basque phonology and I was asking you to clarify what you meant when you presented Hualde's position as one of believing that the voicing of initial plosives was "facultative". > [LT] >> Hualde has since developed his position in an article. In fact, he does >> not challenge Michelena's reconstructed phoneme system at all. Rather, >> he proposes to assign different phonetic features to the proto-phonemes. >> In particular, while he agrees with Michelena that Pre-Basque had no >> voicing contrasts in word-initial plosives, he believes that the voicing >> of initial plosives was facultative, rather than phonetically >> consistent. [RF] > Could you explain a bit more what is meant by the term "facultative" as > opposed to "phonetically consistent" by giving a few examples? LT] Well, facultative variation is free variation: a speaker may choose either variant freely, and it makes no difference. Michelena's reconstructed Pre-Basque plosive system is */(p) t k b d g/, where the symbols should not be taken too literally: they are chosen to represent the usual modern reflexes of the segments. (Note that */p/ was rare at best.) The two series, "fortis" */p t k/ and "lenis" */b d g/, contrasted only word-medially and mostly only intervocalically. Elsewhere the contrast was neutralized, and word-initially only the lenis plosives appeared. In M's view, lenis */b d g/ have generally developed into modern /b d g/, and hence ancient words generally do not begin with any of /p t k/ (from */p t k/), unless some identifiable process has intervened to bring about such a result. But Hualde's view is that word-initial */b d g/ were facultatively voiced: that is, speakers sometimes realized them as voiced [b d g], but at other times as voiceless [p t k], in an indifferent manner. ****************** And in response to LT's statements cited above Hualde sent the following to the list on Mon 16 1999: [JIH] Good morning everyone. I hope I am allowed to post this message, even though I am not a member of this list. Dale Hartkemeyer has forwarded me two or three recent messages regarding the ancient Basque plosives and I would like to be given the opportunity to clarify my position, since it has been the subject of some exchanges. The problem of the ancient Basque plosves, as stated by Martinet and others before him, can be summarized as follows: " How come Basque, which has a robust opposition between voiceless and voiced oral stops in intervocalic position, shows a much weaker contrast in word-initial position?" From Martinet's structuralist standpoint this is a problem because the word-initial position is supposed to be the one where the greatest number of contrasts is found in any language. To solve this problem, Martinet made up a story that has to do with an ancient contrast between fortis and lenis stops which was later somehow replaced by the modern voiced/voiceless contrast. Michelena adopts a version of this hypothesis, which has become the standard account. My view is different. Basque differs from most languages presenting assimilation in voice across morpheme- and word-boundaries in that it is the morpheme- or word-initial consonant that assimilates to the preceding morpheme- or word-final one, instead of the other way round. So in Basque /s+d/ becomes [st], etc., whereas in, say, Spanish, /s+d/ becomes [zd]. E.g. the initial /d/ of "s/he is coming" becomes /t/ in [estator] "s/he is not coming", [menditi(k)tator] "s/he is coming from the mountain", etc. Or, to give you another example, whereas "head"starts with a /b/, the same morpheme starts with /p/ in, say, [ajspuru] "stone head". Nowadays, there is little chance that Basque speakers will identify initial [p] and [b] as allophonic variants, bacause of (a) their familiarity with Spanish or French and (b) because the assimilation rule tends to apply only in restricted phrasal contexts. BUT assuming that this assimilation applied more frequently in the past (as Michelena also assumes) it stands to reason that if and , and , and so on for lots of plosive-initial words, are variants of the same word in different phonological context, this would inevitably lead towards a merger of the voiced and voiceless oral stops in morpheme- and word-initial position (where the alternation is found) but not morpheme-internally. End of the story. The more complicated Martinet-Michelena hypothesis (which in addition requires an unexplained transformation from ancient to modern Basque) is, in my view, simply not needed and has no serious evidence in its favor. Thanks for allowing me to clarify my position. **************** Are we talking about a terminological problem? I mean when you use the term "facultative" does it correspond to what Hualde describes. In other words, does the following sentence by you mean the same thing or infer the same thing that Hualde has stated? >Pre-Basque had facultative voicing: that is, they could be realized, >indifferently, either as [b d g] or as [p t k] -- "indifferently", Stated differently, and please excuse me if I'm being obtuse, can the terms "facultative" and "indifferently" be used to refer to a situation in which the voicing is conditioned by certain phonological constraints, i.e., that the voicing was phonological consistent when those constraints were present. Could it be that you are saying the same thing as Hualde but I don't understand the terminology that you are using. Confused, Roz From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Feb 2 12:36:45 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 12:36:45 +0000 Subject: Basque butterflies again (again) Message-ID: Roz Frank writes: [on my objections to Lloyd Anderson's attempts at seeing certain Basque words for 'butterfly' as ancient] > Well I guess that one can draw quite different inferences/conclusions from > the same data. The point I tried to make throughout my previous discussion > was precisely the opposite of "the lesson" that Larry drew from it, namely, > that the referentiality of the items discussed was, indeed, motivated. > Hence, if has a clear etymology, it does not follow that to > use the same term in a compound to refer to a butterfly, a daisy and a > poppy would demonstrate "multiple unrelated senses" for an individual > formation, quite the opposite, for the three objects would be projected as > analogically similar; metaphorically the same, if you wish. To refer to a > colorful flower fluttering in the wind and a colorful butterfly with the > same term isn't any less motivated, in my opinion, than referring to the > front end of a rocket as a 'nose-cone', or to a kite as a 'cerf-volant'. > It's simply a demonstration of the capacity homo sapiens sapiens have for > analogical thinking (cf. Lakoff, Turner, Johnson, et. al.) Oh, I agree that this *might* be so in particular cases. But it does not appear to be generally true in Basque. A particular expressive formation sometimes has such a diverse array of senses that a common semantic thread is, at best, extremely elusive. > What is less clear, however, is how one ought to go about explaining the > etymology of the second element *<-leta>, assuming, of course, that it is, > indeed, derived from what was once a meaningful suffixing element in the > language, perhaps a compound one (as opposed to being merely an > "expressive" ending). If you look at the full panoply of formations, I think you'll find that all those final elements like <-leta>, <-lota>, <-papa>, <-dola>, and so on are one-offs. They do not recur in multiple formations, and hence they are best regarded as meaningless (non-morphological) elements selected purely for their agreeable sound. > To examine the question in depth, one would need a > listing of all words in Basque ending in *<-leta> and then, after examining > them, attempt to see whether any sort of a pattern of meaning could be > detected, particularly if one were to view *<-leta> as a compound suffix. Are there any others? I can't think of any. I exclude, of course, cases like the surname , in which the /l/ is clearly part of the stem (here 'wide'), and the final part is merely the familiar suffix <-eta>. > Today there is no evidence in Basque for a productive suffix in *<-leta>, > as Larry has rightfully pointed out. However, if *<-leta> is viewed as a > compound suffix in *<-le-eta> things begin to look rather different. This > approach to the data would posit *<-le-eta> as a compound suffix that was > once productive in the language but no longer is and, hence, it is > encountered only as a fossilized suffix in compounds such as *. "Compounds such as"? Can you think of any others? > In favor of this thesis/hypothesis one could muster the following facts. > First, it should be noted that <-eta> itself is not in any way an uncommon > suffix in Basque where it confers the notion of a "collective" or "abstract > extension" to the root-stem (e.g., 'thief, to thieve' becomes > 'theft; the act of thieving' [and, yes, <-eta> has a variant in > <(k)-eta>). It shows up in compounds that are a bit harder to translate > into English, e.g., (sg.) '(processes involved in) thought, > thinking, desiring, remembering', from 'memory, desire, > consciousness, thought'. In the notion is conceptualized > in terms of an "abstract extension" of , i.e., an abstraction or > concept derived from the meaning of the root-stem. At other times <-eta> > appears to refer to the place where X or an abundance of X is found, > 'a place characterized by hawthorns, a hawthorn grove'. Agreed. But the evidence points pretty strongly to the conclusion that the collective sense was the earliest sense in Basque. And most specialists believe, or suspect, that this <-eta> is borrowed from the Latin collective suffix <-eta>, itself the direct source of the Spanish collective suffix <-eda>, as in 'chestnut grove' and 'poplar grove'. > Furthermore as Larry and others have pointed out, the same suffix of <-eta> > is used as the marker of grammatical plurality in the oblique cases. An identical marker. I myself believe it is the same suffix, and at least some of my colleagues agree, though I don't know if all do. > Indeed, this along with other aspects of <-eta> suggest that it existed in > the language before the system acquired the concept of singular/plural > contrast which is now has. This was my own suggestion a few years ago, though more specifically I suggested that this <-eta> was used to construct plural forms for the local cases, after a plural had been created otherwise for the grammatical cases. > The evidence suggests that previously this > suffix had a slightly different function in the noun phrase (or lexical > chain) than it does today. More work needs to be done on Basque along the > lines of what Lucy (1992) did for Yucatec Mayan since in Basque the marking > for number (as singular and plural) appears to be a relatively recent I agree, though I don't know how many of my colleagues agree. > and > not fully consolidated phenomenon as demonstrated by certain aspects of the > morpho-syntactic structure of the language, e.g., <-eta> as a suffixing > element still crops up with its older meaning and it has even been > suggested that in its modern meaning of 'and' is etymologically > linked to the same entity. Possibly, but I find this idea a bit hard to swallow. Not impossible, though. > For example, today it is not particularly > unusual to find a sentence in a novel or book of essays that begins with > (or 'Mikel-eta') and this expression is understood to refer to > 'Michael and (the rest)' or it might be glossed as 'the collection of > Michael'; as 'Michael in his extended form'. It's not all that easy to > render the Basque meaning into English. Stated differently, there is every > reason to believe that the suffix <-eta> shouldn't be considered the new > kid on the block, rather it would seem that it dates back to > morpho-syntactic structures found in Pre-Basque. Not if it's borrowed from Latin, which it very likely is. After all, Basque has borrowed lots of word-forming suffixes from Latin and Romance. > And in the case of <-le>, it, too, is quite common in Basque being an > agentive suffix (does it have another name?), 'Agentive' is correct: it derives an agent noun from a verb-stem -- though normally only from verb-stems of a certain class: those containing the prefix * in their non-finite forms. > regularly used with verbal > stems to refer to 'actors', e.g., from the non-finite verbal form 'to see', one constructs 'spectator'; it can also be added to > non-verbal stems where the compound takes on the same meaning, i.e., of an > 'agent' or 'actor', even when the compound refers to a non-animate entity. Sorry; I don't follow. I don't think <-le> is ever added to anything but a verbal stem, except in a couple of ill-formed neologisms. > For instance, from the same root-stem, i.e., based in turn on > a palatalized form of , we have 'that which lights, > animates, illuminates, enlivens, brings to life; brings about conception' > (Azkue II, 174) where demonstrates a totally normal compounding > process. Well, no. First, this isn't a compound, but a derivative. Second, it is far from being totally regular, since a <-tu> class verb like cannot normally take the suffix <-le>: it "should" take the other agent suffix. This is recorded by Azkue only for Lapurdian and High Navarrese, where it competes with the regular derivative . I don't have a date of first attestation, so I don't know how old it is, but I suspect not very. > Also, it is clearly related to 'to live; to be alive', Well, no; I can't agree. The word is not a verb, but only a noun meaning 'life' or an adjective meaning 'alive'. You can only obtain a verb from it by applying a suitable derivational process. One derivative is the compound intransitive verb 'live', 'be alive', 'dwell', with the auxiliary 'be'. Another is the transitive verb ~ 'light, kindle, ignite', 'animate', with the verb-forming suffix <-tu>. > e.g., we have examples of and even one document, Leizarraga's > translation of the New Testament, in which appears (cf. Agud & > Tovar III, 147). Again, there is no reason to assume that <-le> is a recent > addition to the language. Agreed. It shows every sign of being ancient. > Compounds, such as are of interest for another reason since they > show that non-finite verbs such as can be utilized to form new verbs > by the addition of the verbalizing suffix <-tu>. No; I'm sorry, but is not a verb. You can't add <-tu> to a verb to obtain another verb. You can add <-tu> to almost anything else -- noun, adjective, adverb -- but not to a verb. > In the case of , > the final /i/ is lost in the compound. Derivative. And, yes, this loss of /i/ is regular. > And as we have seen, the palatalized > form of went on to become a free-standing form, i.e., , > at least that is a relatively standard interpretation of events. Yes, but was a free form to begin with. > That means > a non-finite verb in produced a free-standing stem. Nope. Sorry; I can't agree. > I mention this > since Larry has argued that this never happens, This is not quite what I said. What I said was that a verbal root -- by which I mean a root that takes the prefix * in non-finite verb-forms -- never appears bare (unprefixed) in any derivative. The *stem* (prefix * plus verbal root) can occur as the first element in word-formation, though not as the last. > i.e., with reference to > whether the stem in could be related to the verbal radical > or stem <-bil-> in . However, I must say that I agree with Larry in > that (at least today) non-finite verbal stems (such as ) do > not tend to produce free-standing root-stems nor, for that matter, > non-finite verbs in <-tu>. Indeed. No verbal stem ever takes <-tu>, nor is there any evidence that such a process has ever been possible in Basque. I except here the process of borrowing Romance verbs by replacing the Romance infinitive ending with <-tu>, as in 'claim', from Spanish . > When speaking of the way that verbs can be constructed in Basque using > <-tu>, the following is one of the more curious examples of Basque's > morpho-syntactic ingenuity. The verb is which Mikel Morris > translates in his _Euskera/Ingelesa/Englis/Basque Dictionary_ (1998) as 'to > pass away, to give up the ghost; to disappear.' If one were to try to > unravel the etymology of this word following the normal discovery > procedures one would fail miserably. I mean that the normal strategy > involves looking first at the other lexical items demonstrating what > appears to be the same or a highly similar root-stem, i.e., phonologically > similar items. Er -- Roz, who says it is "normal" to look at phonologically similar but semantically unrelated items? Especially when the etymology of is transparent? > In this case, we would find dozens of examples of compounds > in and it is well known that in the case of these other examples the > root-stem has a phonological variant in and that that variant > derives in turn from 'of what (indeterminate)'. So one's first > inclination would be to assume that the etymology of should be > traced back somehow to, say, 'how many'. *Whose* "first inclination"? ;-) > But that would be wrong > for is a non-finite verb that has been constructed from a finite > verb form of the verb 'to be', concretely from the conjugated form > of the third person singular past tense 's/he/it was'. > Actually one might argue that is based on a relative clause > 's/he/it that was'. For instance, it is commonplace in Basque to speak with > respect of the deceased. So when talking about one's mother who is > deceased, one might say, '(My) deceased > mother did it this way [the way you/the interlocutor are doing it]' where > is which > converts the relative clause into an ergative subject. Hence, a root-stem > of derives from a relative clause that in turn is based on a third > person singular past tense of a verb. I must admit that the English > translation '(My) deceased mother' fails to capture the affectionate and > respectful tone of the Basque phrase. Almost, but not quite. The interesting verb has the following origin. In Basque, is a finite verb-form meaning 'was', a typically irregular inflection of 'be'. Like any finite form, this one can take the relative suffix <-n>, producing here the regular relative form 'who was', still normal in the language today. But this relative form has become specialized as a lexical adjective meaning 'late', as in 'the late Michelena'. And it is the *adjective* which takes the verb-forming suffix <-tu>, quite regularly, to yield the derived verb 'pass away, die'. Note also that both in the sense of 'late' and its derivative are recorded only from the 1850s. They do not appear to be ancient. The only parallel case I can think of is ~ 'all, every', derived from a relative form of 'is'. The original sense of was therefore 'which is'. But this is recorded no earlier than 1761, and it too is not ancient. > Which other languages do this sort of thing? I know that in Slavic > languages there are some pretty nifty ways of creating verbal compounds in > noun phrases. But I don't know of any thing that would correspond very > closely to what happens in the Basque example. Any ideas? This process is not productive in Basque, and the two examples just cited are the only two I know of. > In conclusion, a much more rigorous analysis of the data concerning the > suffixing element *<-leta> would be needed before alleging that 1) it is a > compound suffix composed of *<-le-eta> and/or 2) that <-leta> in > (*) is actually derived from that suffix > and not from a totally unmotived expressive formation. Not possible, I'm afraid. The agent suffix <-le> is added to verbal stems, and only to verbal stems. But (and variants) is not a verbal stem. > However, given that > 1) the old collective suffix in <-eta> gaves rise to the plural marker in > oblique cases in Basque Possibly. > and 2) it is found as a semi-fossilezed form in > toponyms, Indeed. It is common in toponyms and in surnames, but it is unproductive and rare to nonexistent in the ordinary lexicon. > it follows that previously formations in <-eta> were more common Well, quite likely, though I'm nervous about that "it follows". > and that consequently if *<-le-eta> was once a producive suffixing element, It couldn't have been. First, <-le> is only ever attached to verbal stems. Second, <-le> is never followed in any known case by another suffix -- though it can *follow* another suffix. Third, Agent-Collective makes no semantic sense in a word for 'butterfly'. Fourth, there is no trace in Basque of any such word-forming suffix as *<-le(e)ta>, in any function at all. > a formation like * could be considered to date back to > Pre-Basque. It's all in how one looks at the data. No, sorry; it isn't. We can look at the data any way we like, but the results are always the same: contains no recognizable suffixes, it cannot contain agentive <-le>, and it cannot be ancient. > I would close by saying that Azkue lists: > 'butterfly'; > 'butterfly' (var. in ); > 'daisy, poppy, butterfly' > 'daisy, poppy, butterfly'. > Was the protoypic form *? I don't really know. The argument > outlined above is simply one way of looking at the data. Indeed, until > additional examples in *<-leta> *What* additional examples? There don't appear to be any. > are subjected to rigorous analysis, the > case for * must remain a highly tentative one. I'd say it can be rejected out of hand. Sorry to be such an old grouch, as usual, but the evidence is uniformly against any such analysis. > It could be that > * dates back to an earlier stage and integrated what > was at that time a productive suffixing element made up of <-le> and > <-eta>. Over time the compound suffix fell into disuse and ceased being > productive in the language. At that point the suffix's phonology would have > become unstable, as often happens when a once meaningful element in a > compound can no longer be disambiguated. But at the same time we need to > remember, as has been mentioned previous on this list, there is a > possibility that the Spanish suffixes in <-ota/-ote> may have played some > role here. > So it would appear that once again Larry and I will need to agree to > disagree, at least on some of these points. OK. I agree to disagree. ;-) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Feb 2 07:17:39 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 08:17:39 +0100 Subject: Basque In-Reply-To: Message-ID: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote: >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal writes: >> Given Mitxelena's reconstruction of "fortis" consonants and your >> interpretation of them as geminates, wouldn't it be preferrable >> to derive: >> gurdi + bil > gurdbil > gurbbil > gurpil >> ogi + bil > ogbil > obbil > opil ? >I formerly favored this view myself, and I would very much like to favor >it now. Unfortunately, I can't, because the evidence is against it. >One piece in particular. The Basque word 'highway' is a >transparent compound of 'king' and 'road'. The final /e/ >of the first element is lost regularly. The analysis suggested above >would require * --> * --> * --> >. But the word is explicitly recorded in the medieval (early >12th-century) Fuero General of Navarra as : >Libro III, tit. VII, cap. IV, p. 53: > "...en logares en la cayll, que dize el bascongado erret bide." >This in fact is just one of several attestations of the form , but >it is the clearest one. And this, to my mind, is enough to settle the >matter. Much as I might prefer the other analysis, the facts point clearly >to a change of the first plosive ina plosive cluster to */t/. It's good evidence (esp. in view of beg(i) + ile > bet-ile), but maybe I'm too used to Catalan orthography to consider it decisive (-t- is used as a device to write geminated consonants, with or without historical justifaction: /semmana/ "week", /amel^l^a/ "almond", <-atge> /-addZe/, or "girl (Mall.)" (<*arlota). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From edsel at glo.be Wed Feb 2 11:16:52 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 12:16:52 +0100 Subject: Basque Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Monday, January 31, 2000 5:25 PM > Ed Selleslagh writes: > [on Basque * 'round'] >> What about *gorda-bil, where the first element could be a Romance loan (< >> corde, cuerda), i.e. coiled up rope? > Interesting, but I don't know this word, and I can't find it in any of my > dictionaries. I also note it carries an asterisk for some reason. > What's the source, please? [Ed] It was just a suggestion for a potential etymology. The asterisk was to indicate that it is a reconstruction (if my guess is right, of course). The word 'gorda' does not exist, nor can it be found in the historical documents available. It could have existed as a phonetically adapted (lost) loan from Romance. We just don't know. Ed. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Feb 2 17:16:26 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 17:16:26 +0000 Subject: Basque Message-ID: Roz Frank writes: > Conclusion: if there is a relationship between the Basque root-stem > and the IE materials, one needs to consider the time depth involved, i.e., > for determining when the "copying" or "borrowing" would have taken place. A problem with all proposed IE loans into Basque which cannot be derived from Latin or Romance. So far as we know, the first IE languages to reach the Basque-speaking area were the Celtic languages, probably in the middle of the first millennium BC. At the time of the Roman conquest, Aquitanian/Basque was apparently bordered by Celtic to the north (Gaulish) and to the south (Celtiberian). The position to the east, in the Pyrenees, is uncertain, but the neighbor there may have been the non-IE language Iberian. To the west, we have clear evidence for IE speech, but of uncertain affiliation. All I can say is that the sparse evidence is seemingly consistent with Celtic speech, but does not require Celtic speech. Of course, it is conceivable that some unknown branch of IE might have reached the area even before Celtic, but, if so, this hypothetical language seemingly disappeared without trace -- and I don't much care for positing hypothetical languages. But even Celtic loans into Basque are surprisingly few, given the long centuries of contact. We have only two or three certain cases, plus a few more doubtful cases. Accordingly, very little can be concluded, except that the evidence for IE loans into Basque before the Roman conquest is sparse to non-existent. > I > don't know whether anyone has tried to assign a time depth to Class I verbs > in Basque, although I believe Larry would agree with me that they can be > assigned to Pre-Basque with no difficulty. Perhaps Larry can add some > additional insights into the problems that are involved here. Almost certainly, even though we have no contemporary records. The reasoning goes like this. Early Basque had a suffix <-i> for making the participles of verbs. This suffix occurs in all prefixing verbs (those with the prefix *). It also occurs in a few denominal verbs, such as 'break, smash', from 'dust, powder'. (These last have no * because their roots are nominal, not verbal.) This <-i> was displaced in its function of making participles by <-tu>, which was borrowed from Latin <-tu(m)>. Basque borrowed Latin verbs in the form of their participles: for example, 'hear, understand', from Latin . This <-tu> has been the only productive participial suffix in the language for a long time. Now, the form <-tu> is conservative. Latin <-tu> developed regularly into Romance *<-do>, preserved today in Castilian as <-do>, but variously reduced in other Romance varieties -- for example, there is almost nothing left of it in French. So, if <-tu> was borrowed early, from Latin before the major Romance sound changes had occurred, and if it displaced <-i> as the productive participial suffix, then <-i> must already have been present in the Pre-Basque of the Roman era. More than that we can't say. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From edsel at glo.be Wed Feb 2 12:47:04 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 13:47:04 +0100 Subject: Basque * 'round' Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Monday, January 31, 2000 5:04 PM > Ed Selleslagh writes: > [on my puzzlement over a suggested PIE source] >> What I meant was this (I'm sorry for having been so elliptic), and you may >> agree or not: *kwekwlo (or *kwekulo) looks to me like a reduplicated form, >> probably inspired by the reconstruction from Grk. kyklos. Indeed, it is the >> logical thing to assume if you try to reconstruct from Germanic (Eng. wheel, >> or Du. wiel < hwi:l- < *kwelo), and we know the Old Greek tendency to >> reduplication and insertion of quasi-dummy syllables for basically >> 'prosodic' reasons, like in the sigmatic aorist etc. So, it is not >> unreasonable to assume (no hard evidence!!) that *kwelo gave rise to a >> Basque re-interpretation *bel-, via some intermediate (most likely IE) stage >> *(h)wel-. > "Not unreasonable"? > Well, first the vocalism is wrong. Basque does indeed have another ancient > stem of the form *, but this means 'dark', not 'round'. [Ed] I'm aware of that. Maybe it's the reason why the vowel changed, to mark the difference (A form of dissimilation) > Also, what has happened to the final vowel of the PIE form? I don't think > * was a PIE word-form, and Basque does not normally lose final vowels > in borrowed words. [Ed] That could be a problem, but not necessarily insurmountable. After all, my guess was that it would be a very ancient loan word, from an unidentified IE language. > Finally, for what it's worth (probably not much), medieval Spanish > was borrowed into Basque as , not as . Note Basque 'keep' > from Castilian or a related Romance form. [Ed] In medieval times, and from Spanish: yes. In modern times 'bapo' was derived from 'guapo', probably because the g is hardly pronounced (e.g. in the Spanish re-interpretation of indigenous toponyms in Latin America, gu- /gw/ almost always stands for /w/; sometimes hu- /w/ is used instead). In PB times we hardly know, and a lot depends on the intermediate language's phonetic adaptation of the PIE word. Had it *kw > gw, or w, or hw....? > [on the Basque temporal suffix <-te>] >> It is also part of (compound) 'extent' suffixes like -ate, -arte, ...You're >> right if you consider -te in isolation. > Sorry, but I don't recognize <-ate>. What is this, and where does it occur? [Ed] E.g. sagar-ate. See P. Mujika, e.g. > As for , this is not a suffix, but a noun meaning 'interval', 'space > between'. This often occurs as a final element in compounds, but it's still > not a suffix. Of course, it is possible that itself contains the > suffix <-te>, but there appears to be no way of investigating this. > [LT] >>> Finally, an original * should *not* develop into . There is no >>> parallel for such a development. >> Right, but not impossible for such an old term. > Not impossible, perhaps, but not supported by any evidence, either. > Anyway, if some ancient stage of Basque voiced intervocalic plosives, then > we have a problem with all those seemingly ancient words like 'door', > 'mud', 'piece', 'rag', 'drown', 'have', > 'denial, refusal', 'segment', 'father', and many others. > Why didn't they undergo voicing? [Ed] Probably because of complex etymological (derivation) reasons (cf. your comments on erret-bide) to be considered case by case. > [on my assertion that 'river' is a derivative of 'valley', > perhaps originally 'water meadow'] >> Agud and Tovar in Dicc. Etim. Vasco don't think so and neither do their >> numerous sources. They seem to find it rather problematic (the final r of >> ibar is rr). > No. Agud and Tovar, as usual, express no opinions at all, but merely report > the (numerous) proposals in the literature, which range from the sober > through the speculative to the silly. Nor do they describe the loss of the > final rhotic as problematic. Instead, they merely report Michelena's > observation that loss of a final rhotic in a first element in word-formation > was once regular. This is true for both Basque rhotics, which in any case > were probably not distinguished in final position in Pre-Basque. Note, for > example, that such words as 'earth', 'horn', 'thigh' and > 'grass', all of which have a final trill today, exhibit the combining > forms , , and , respectively, in a number of > compounds and derivatives. > [on and ] >> Two remarks: >> 1. There are clear indications that Iberian and Basque share some words, >> suffixes and some external features, probably through contact or other >> exchange mechanisms. > Typological features, probably -- maybe areal features. > Morphemes, possibly, but we hardly ever know the meaning of anything in > Iberian. > Contact, quite possibly, but contact is not a license for interpreting > Iberian as Basque -- which it plainly is not. [Ed] Personally, I think it went a little further: interpenetration. But they are probably not related in any normal sense (maybe they are, but very remotely: their arrival in Spain is probably separated by a not so small number of millennia: see e.g. H. Haarmann's article on Basque ethnogenesis in FLV). Both are clearly suffixing agglutinating languages, but so is Quechua. >> Quite a few Iberian toponyms could just as well be Basque (Oriola, > Looks vaguely Basque, but what would the Basque etymology be? [Ed] I saw it also spelled, archaically, as Uriola. Now it's called Orihuela, with Castilian diphtongation. Oriola is Valencian. It is near the ancient mouth of the Rio Segura in the fan-delta that is now the Vega Baja. All Iberian settlements are along that old beachfront (except Ilici near Elche/Elx, on an island in tha ancient mouth of the Vinalopo, in the same delta), nowadays the altitude line of 22 m above sea level (Spain is capsizing: the Med. coast rises, the Atlantic coast sinks). >> Aspe, > Looks a bit like the known Basque toponym , depending on how that > sibilant is interpreted. But the Basque name is late and secondary in its > form. It derives from * 'crag' + <-be> ~ <-pe> 'below', itself a > reduced form of -- and a very suitable name if you've seen the place. > Is the Iberian place also located under a towering crag? [Ed] Not a towering one. >> Ibi, > Not very distinctive, and I've already argued that modern Basque 'ford' > is late and secondary, from original *. >> Tibi..... > No. No native Basque word or name begins with /t/, or even with /d/. [Ed] In many compounds the t- of a suffixed element can appear or not: -(t)egi, -(t)alde, for instance. Word-initial t- may have existed in Antiquity, but we don't know about that. In Iberian it certainly does, and, remarkably, apparently as a variant of the same word ibi/tibi, eban/teban, in a number of cases. I wouldn't be surprised if word-initial t- had existed in Basque at an early date. >> and maybe Calpe). > But that initial /k/ is also intolerable in Basque, assuming that we are > really looking at a /k/, and not at a /g/. [Ed] In the written sources of Basque, yes. But there are not so few people who at least accept the possibility that a number of word-initial h- are remnants of an ancient k- (e.g. (h)arri < *karri). Note that the resort of Calpe on the Costal Blanca is under the towering Peñon d'Ifach. >> So looking for a Basque-like etymology is >> not far-fetched, even though it hasn't been proven that this is admissible. > The Iberian texts have been meticulously scrutinized for possible links with > Basque. The two major figures here, Tovar and Michelena, both concluded > independently that a Basque-Iberian link could not be maintained, apart > perhaps from a few areal features and a few loan words. >> 2. The Romans (after the Greek) called what is roughly Georgia 'Iberia'. >> This is probably derived from Kartvelian 'bari' meaning 'valley' (of the >> Araxes one can guess). > Maybe, but what has this to do with Basque? [Ed] To be read in context. It was about the old idea that Iberia in Spain and in the Caucasus had something to do with each other; one reason (among many others, like ergativity) for a belief in a Basque-Caucasian relationship that was popular at some time. > [on a possible IE source for Basque <(h)artz> 'bear'] >> Grk. arktos (and related IE) looks like a pretty good candidate to me. Of >> course, it is possible that it is a shared substrate. > Eh? The Greek word has an excellent PIE etymon. [Ed] That's true, but it cannot be excluded that the word belongs to an older (than PIE) layer. The bear-symbolism seems to be older than our 'linguistic time depth'. > Anyway, Greek should not have been borrowed as <(h)artz>. Given > what we know of early borrowings, we would have expected something like > *<(h)artotz> -- just as we would have expected from Celtic *. [Ed] I didn't say it was necessarily borrowed from Greek : in fact, most IE lgs. (including extinct ones we don't know about) that have (had) preserved the root, and were anywhere near Basque at some time, would do. It was probably a cult word. > [on possible genetic links for Basque] >> I am familiar with your viewpoint and I respect it. But there are those that >> think this is an unfinished business that needs to be looked into. > Well, be my guest. But be aware that practically every language in the Old > World has already been scrutinized for a possible link with Basque, and > yet nothing of interest has ever turned up. There can hardly be many stones > left unturned. [Ed] I wouldn't say that. The main problem seems to be the great time depth. >> If one never leaves the beaten track, it is hard to find anything really new >> or unsuspected: a priori theories and speculation are OK as long as 1) one >> is aware of it being speculation, 2) it is followed by verification, and the >> results of that, be they negative or positive, are accepted. It's the way >> science works. >> That's why I said myself that it was speculation, and hoped it would >> stimulate others to think about the problems involved. > Er -- what problems? Why does the existence of native words in the > genetically isolated language Basque constitute a problem? [Ed] The problems of determining which elements, even structures, that appear in Basque (potentially ancient PIE roots, suffixes like -(z)-ko...), are more general and how this relationship (if any) can be explained. I have no problem with native roots. I just can't believe that Europes oldest language couldn't have anything (apart from straight loans) in common with the other languages. I don't believe in genesis in situ, either. As I said, the biggest problem is the time depth, and hence, ancient languages like Iberian (unfortunately extremely poorly understood) that have been in contact for maybe millennia, could help in this respect. Ed. From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Feb 2 07:25:46 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 07:25:46 -0000 Subject: Re Personal pronouns Message-ID: Dear Larry and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Monday, January 31, 2000 4:33 PM [PR wrote previously] >> It is obvious that "she" can stand for either "(the) woman" or the fuller >> NP: "(the) woman (that) we are supposed to meet". [LT] > Nope. That 'she' cannot take the place of 'woman', and that is the end > of it. [PR] I think we shall just have to 'agree to disagree' on this question. The definition of 'pronoun' in your dictionary includes the phrase: "... and whose members typically have little or no intrinsic meaning or reference." Your position is obviously consistent. It is hard for me to accept that this is the consensus position. [PR previously] > [on 'possessive'] >> An interesting question for another time. Frankly, I believe that the >> definition of "possessive" can be rather simply stated. [LT] > Well, I'd certainly like to see your effort! ;-) [PR] Well, I may live to regret my audacity, but here goes: For any class of nominals, A, 'possessive' denotes the relationship between A and B, any nominal sub-class of A. 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 roz-frank at uiowa.edu Thu Feb 3 04:58:47 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 22:58:47 -0600 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: At 08:11 PM 2/1/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: [big snip] >On the subject of non-velar labialized/palatalized consonants, I >was wondering: since in Greek *pj > pt, could not such old >chestnuts as , be derived from palatalized *p^ >(*p^lH-). I know Baltic "city" is in itself no >supportive evidence (-il- [-ir-] is the normal Baltic >development, even tough Baltic and Slavic offer anomalous cases >of *ul, *ur which might be worth investigating) and Skt. pu:r- >might be seen as counterevidence (but p- is a labial after all), >but I still would regard *p^lH- as a neater solution than e.g. >Beekes' *tplH- (CIEL, p. 190). A couple of questions. 1) what then is the standard reconstruction proposed for Skt. pu:r-, Greek and Baltic ? And the prototype meaning assigned to it? 2) is this set considered a good candidate for admission to the (P)IE lexicon? Stated differently, does attestation in Sanskrit, Greek and Baltic languages suffice for a data set to be considered part of the (P)IE lexicon? Thanks, Roz From sarima at friesen.net Thu Feb 3 07:25:58 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 23:25:58 -0800 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 08:11 PM 2/1/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >Stanley Friesen wrote: >>Why is it necessary to go this way? IMHO, there are sufficient instances >>of 'i' and 'u' in PIE the do *not* alternate with ablaut variants such as >>'eu' and 'ei' to suggest the inheritance of those vowels from the Pre-PIE >>stage, at least in some environments. >I'm not so sure. There are certainly "loose" *i's and *u's among >the pronouns (e.g. *tu/*tu:), in affixes like *-i (dat/loc, >"present tense"), but IMHO anomalously few among common >nouns/adjectives and verbs. For instance, I don't think >Benveniste's root-theory allows *i and *u in the V position (or >does it?). It would be nice to have statistics. I think Benveniste's root-theory is somewhat artificial. I doubt the speakers actually thought of things that way. I admit there are not *many* roots in 'i' and 'u', but there are *some* roots that cannot be clearly reconstructed as having had an 'e' or 'o'. >Surely the existence of *kw, *k^ etc. suggests that some high >vowels were lost, passing their front- or backness to the >adjacent consonants (is there another explanation?). Coupled >with the comparative rarity of non-zero grade *i and *u, I think >it's clear that *something* happened to the high vowels at some >stage of Pre-PIE. I agree that some loss is likely. I was question *total* loss. At least that was how I interpreted your original model, since you discussed loss or change to e/o in all environments. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Feb 3 06:16:43 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 01:16:43 EST Subject: Horses Message-ID: In a message dated 2/2/00 6:04:58 PM, proto-language at email.msn.com quoted: <> Now the 'mountain' part of this was not really the original issue, I don't think. It was the donkey/ass connection. Just to go back to the original point I think... That I believe was Mr. Crist's statement that Armenian using an *ekwos word for donkey/ass was merely semantic drift. And of course if a Mesopotamian word for 'horse' was also somehow related to the donkey than that might be noteworthy - and it apparently was.... > ANShE.KUR.RA - > ANShE 'Esel, ass' > KUR 'Berg, mountain' > RA - genitive-morpheme When we shift to Hittite, we find the same symbol/?/ being used for horse, apparently also connecting it to the donkey. But... Dr Stefan Georg wrote: <> I take this to mean that the Sumerian/Akkadian horse symbol used in Hittite may have been nothing more than an ideogram and therefore give no phonetic information about the sound of the Hittite word. My question then becomes how often Hittite does this sort of thing - use a Sumerian symbol with no phonetic correspondence. It could not be all the time or we would have no basis for sounding the Hittite language. I take it that the following also suggests this phonetic/typographic split: In a message dated 2/2/00 5:43:41 PM, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: <, written descriptively (not phonetically) as "foreign equid/donkey".>> (Childe mention that the Sumerian symbol persists into Akkadian usage as horse (1954).) Let me suggest then that the answers to two questions that may help a little here: - What was the word/symbol for donkey in Hittite? - What was the word for horse in Armenian? If Hittite did not adopt the Sumerogram for donkey (ans^e-?), what did it use? (And why?) If Armenian used the *ekwos word for donkey, what is the source of its word for horse? (And does that explain perhaps the 'semantic drift'?) Thanks, Steve Long From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Thu Feb 3 15:59:04 2000 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 16:59:04 +0100 Subject: Horses Message-ID: "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: > [PR] > In this connection, one might want to notice Egyptian s(j)s(j), 'hurry', and > ssm, 'horse'; could these be connected with IE *se:i-, 'throw'? 'Horse' = an animal which throws the rider from its back???? If you relate Egyptian s(j)s(j) 'hurry' to ssm 'horse' (which sounds reasonable as for the semantics), what can you tell us about the final -m in Egyptian? Is it derivationbal? What function? What, if ssm stems from something like *sm with initial reduplication? No *zizi or what so ever connection anymore! By the way: Why is it so difficult to accept that Sumerians used to term horses 'donkeys (that stem from / of) the mountains' and that they might have used the term ans^e-kur(r)a as it appears ('phonetically' speaking)? Wolfgang ***************************** Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet München Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 D-80539 München Tel.: +89-21805343 / Fax: +89-21805345 Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ ***************************** From sarima at friesen.net Thu Feb 3 07:32:40 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 23:32:40 -0800 Subject: Horses in War In-Reply-To: <35.ca93b7.25c82fd8@aol.com> Message-ID: At 07:47 AM 2/1/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Stanley wrote: ><war weapon. Prior to 1250 BC all of the major powers made the chariot >corps the mainstay of their army. Entire combat units operated out of >chariots, not merely the brass. They would not have put so much money into >this sort of combat unit if chariots were useful only as non-combat >transport.>> >Here we have a problem. I just don't find that kind of support for the idea >of the chariot being a 'decisive' tactical unit. If the Egyptians introduced >the idea of the chariot as an archer platform, as it said in that piece I >quoted, Even if they introduced *archery* to the chariot, there are still thrown spears. > then before that the chariot's other best function appears to be >mounted infantry - as it appears in Homer - so that it acted as transport >like APCs but not in combat. Most military histories that I've looked at are >pretty insistent that the idea of using chariots for a direct charge would >have been a losing proposition. Agreed. The prior decisive tactical use was as a mobile missile platform, though not necessarily for *archers*. A sudden, dense, rain of darts on a combat line is a pretty effective way to disrupt it, or at least shake it up. It was only after the development of effective infantry defenses against these tactics that the chariot devolved to use as a mere troop carrier. >The original statement was or was supposed to be that the horse was not >'decisive' in any battle before 1000BC - and that includes Kadesh (an >interesting word). And I believe that still stands up. Some analyses I have seen of Qadesh would dispute this. [I cannot comment on the reliability of these analyses - I just point out there is disagreement]. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Thu Feb 3 07:37:43 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 23:37:43 -0800 Subject: Horses and chariots. In-Reply-To: <54.fb1369.25c84c4c@aol.com> Message-ID: At 09:48 AM 2/1/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >force and accuracy you'd get from massing standing archers. I suspect once >again that the use of the archer on chariot was an elite matter in big >battles and had to do more with very specific targets or separate battles >between better armor-clad and mounted aristocrats. You might suspect it, but you would be wrong. Prior to the Invasion of the Sea Peoples, the largest arm of the Egyptian army was the charioteers. They fielded division-sized chariot units at Qadesh, as did the Hittites. This is not what one would see if it were just the elite in the chariots. [There is also the matter of the financial records from Mykenean Pylos, which indicate a *large* outlay for the maintenance of a substantial chariot force]. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Thu Feb 3 07:02:41 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 23:02:41 -0800 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:22 AM 2/1/00 -0600, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > You're talking about massive upheavals triggered by the arrival of >major imperialist powers poseessing overwhelming technical advantages. This >was not an everyday occurance. Of course there were major migrations in >South Africa and the Americas after Europeans arrived --but because of >extraordinary events. This is not clear. There is reasonable evidence, from various lines of argument, for prior migrations. But in the absence of written records, these are harder to substantiate. For instance, one point of view on the combined linguistic and cultural evidence places the Proto-Souixan peoples in the Ohio Valley, which they left *prior* to the arrival of Europeans. (These were the ancestors not only of the Dakota, but also certain other tribes, ones that *preceded* the Dakota into the Great Plains). Also, it is extremely unlikely that the Navaho migrations were triggered by European incursion. First, they moved from the Northwest (probably modern western Canada) into the Southwest. This is the wrong direction for an event triggered by Europeans. Second, the migration was rather earlier, before significant European presence in western North America. [It is not even certain the Dakota migration westward can be laid at the feet of Europeans - the proximal cause was war with neighboring tribes, especially the Ojibwa] -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Feb 3 04:42:04 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 22:42:04 -0600 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I don't want to create an "I'm right, you're wrong" thread here. When I say major upheaval, I'm referring to catastrophic events along the lines of European invasions I should have added the fall of major empires: e.g. the fall of Rome, etc. with the subsequent scramble to pick up the pieces. The Anglo-Saxon conquest ties into this because when the legions left, the Britons were disunited and relatively indefended. In and of itself, I wouldn't qualify it at the same level as the turmoil created by the Europeans in America and Africa. However it was part of the major upheaval created by the fall of the Romans. The Bantu expansion was possible because of superior technology --the Basntu were iron-age agriculturalists who expanded at the expense of hunter-gatherers I don't know the particulars about the Athabaskan expansion but my understanding from popular literature/magazines is that they moved in during or at the end of a catastrophic drought The Aztec expansion was a product of instability produced by the fall of Tula and ultimately by the fall of Teotihuacan --evidently the first major imperial state in Meso-America [the Olmecs seem to have been a group of city-states and the Zapotec state under the aegis of Monte Alban was limited to the Oaxaca area] My overall point is that extraordinary events such as these are few and far between. >Rick is right and wrong in responding to Joat. He is right in saying that >massive migrations and conquest are often related to technological >developments and are not everyday occurrences. [ moderator snip ] >Rick is incorrect when he tries to tie this only to "overwhelming technical >advantages" and linking it to the modern era. [ moderator snip ] From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Wed Feb 2 18:01:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 18:01:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: SG>Gogodala (/wi/), Awin (/wae/), and Gira (/wai/), three Papuan SG>languages, borrowed Austronesian *wayEG (reconstructed by some SG>Austronesianists as *vaSeR, which does remind me of a language I know, SG>but I cannot remember which one ;-). ..you really don't mean German?;-)))) SG>The claim that signifiants of some semantic notions are "so basic" SG>that they cannot be subject to borrowing is just one of those myths SG>our discipline seems to have real trouble to rid itself from. .. of course that is correct; so nothing can be generalized. The cases you cited seem to be due to situations where water is quite precious. Except the Papuan cases, which could be doubted? SG>There are no such concepts. Everything can be borrowed, and there are SG>examples for everything actually having been borrowed at some point in SG>space and time. .. I agree here. And you could agree I think that there in fact are tendencies for words or meanings to be borrowed first or/easier, e.g. cultural words, not only because this is mainstream opinion. HJH From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Thu Feb 3 20:52:59 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 22:52:59 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <200001311807.p326@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: On Mon, 31 Jan 2000, Hans Holm wrote: > "Relationship" is _always and only_ a question of degrees and ways. No. Relationship is an absolute. Either two (or more) languages are related or they are not. This is the basic hypothesis of historical linguistics. It is based on the observation that certain languages have greater similarities than can be accounted for by chance or borrowing (= convergence). The hypothesis is that such languages were once one and the same language. Genetically related languages were once the same language. There is no other way to define genetic relationships in historical linguistics. The "degrees and ways" are only a matter of how long the languages have been separated, whether they have been completely isolated from each other during that time, and how many and what kinds of changes they have undergone since they separated. But genetic relationship in historical linguistics means "sprung from some common source." > Just try to calculate the number of _unrelated_ ancestors for you or > me before 10^n generations or years and your calculator will soon > respond with 'overflow'. This is totally irrelevant. If one wants to adopt a biological model for languages, it must be mitosis, not meiosis. Languages do not need a mommy language and a daddy language to have baby languages. At the point at which a language splits both (all) parts are identical. As the daughter languages exist in isolation they diverge more and more over time (and yes, the parent is also a daughter -- when an amoeba reproduces by mitosis there is no way to tell which is the original and which is the offspring). But two genetically related languages have only one common ancestor, not the myriad unrelated ancestors that biological entities that reproduce sexually require. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 3 21:13:32 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 16:13:32 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: In a message dated 2/2/00 5:08:22 AM Mountain Standard Time, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: << Of course there were major migrations in South Africa and the Americas after Europeans arrived --but because of extraordinary events. >> -- no, common as dirt. We have plenty of examples long before the European expansions. This is the common framework of human history. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 3 23:00:06 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 18:00:06 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: In a message dated 2/2/00 9:22:49 PM Mountain Standard Time, W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de writes: >Why? -- because they simply aren't borrowed as often. Yes, such words can be borrowings; no, they aren't as likely to be. Look at the extant languages. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 3 23:02:27 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 18:02:27 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: << But in view that they are subject to borrowing after all, this "unlikeliness" cannot be used as a heuristic for demonstrating relatedness. -- "good enough for Government work" as the saying goes. Any single word may be borrowed, but the _corpus_ of basic vocabulary is remarkably stable in most languages and is useful for doing a "first cut". Being painstaking about details is all well and good, but we should beware of being able to see the forest for the trees. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 3 23:08:10 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 18:08:10 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >But "hand", "eye", "I", "water", "brother" aso. are not safe. They simply >don't bear a label "Attention ! Native word! Don't replace by foreign >gobbledeegook !" on them. -- effectively speaking, they do. After all, when presented with a new language, what's the first thing we do to determine whether it's IE or not? We look at the numerals from one to ten, the family relationship terms, and so forth. Later on more detailed examination is necessary, but that's the first step. In fact, that's how the fact that there _is_ an IE family of languages was discovered in the first place. >Since it happened at some time, somewhere, it can happen anywhere. -- well, no. _Frequency_ or _likelihood_ is the determinative factor here. The fact that, when flipping a coin, you may come down "heads" six times in a row does not alter the fact that over time you'll have a 50-50 split between heads and tails. From sarima at friesen.net Thu Feb 3 07:13:04 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 23:13:04 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 10:44 PM 1/31/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 1/31/00 10:20:09 PM, sarima at friesen.net wrote: ><things like 'wheel' were borrowed into IE *after* it spread throughout >Europe - by over a thousand years!>> >The question you are addressing has to do with whether Renfrew ever said that >Celtic or pre-Celtic migrated to western Europe before 4000BC. My >understanding is that he was simply saying that an early indo-european >language did, not that anything identifiably Celtic did. Let me ask you how >your comment is relevant? Because unless the Celtic speakers arrived *much* *later*, by that very migration process that Renfrew tries to avoid, this widespread IE language *must* be a predecessor of Proto-Celtic, as there is no other possible candidate. I am simply making the logical conclusion from Renfrew's basic "party line" that no significant migrations have occurred in the right time frame to spread IE languages. If this is so, then Proto-Celtic cannot have spread by late occurring migrations either. Ergo, that widespread IE language he talks about is effectively pre-Proto-Celtic. >PS - You wrote 'the claim that the words for things like 'wheel' were >borrowed into IE *after* it spread throughout Europe - by over a thousand >years.' >But actually if we give a generous 4000BC date to wheeled-transport (as >opposed to wheels in general or just plain round objects) and remember that >in Hittite the word for wheel is different I seem to remember somebody posting a Hittite cognate with a reasonably similar meaning. > - we can squeeze in a time spread >for the word that matches Renfrew's 4000BC date for western Europe to a 't' - >presumably before of course the specific sound changes observed in e.g., >'*kweklo' occurred in the attested IE daughters. Since those SPECIFIC >changes could have happened a bit later (I believe) - there wouldn't be >anything amazing about this, would there? Not THAT much later. So you've cut it down from 3000 years to a "mere" 1000 years. Big deal! No widespread language has *ever* maintained unity that long! -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Thu Feb 3 07:15:02 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 23:15:02 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <47.12db94c.25c7c762@aol.com> Message-ID: At 12:21 AM 2/1/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- No. Renfrew specifically attributes the arrival of the IE languages in >Europe to the EARLY neolithic; to the introduction of agriculture as such. Worse, given that the Neolithic is *defined* by the advent of agriculture, he places the arrival of IE languages at the *base* of the Neolithic! -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Thu Feb 3 07:20:00 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 23:20:00 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:49 AM 2/1/00 -0700, Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote: >[Stanley Friesen replied] >> Language replacement usually involves a prolonged period of bilingualism. >> ... >Not necessarily. Witness what has happened in the Americas, especially in >the western United States. Until the 1890s, the Native American languages >were spoken predominantly by monolinguals. Over the next 50 years, the >boarding school system took children away from their parents and made them >speak English exclusively. Admittedly there is wide variation in the extent of bilingualism, and the rate of replacement. But even here I bet those children, at least those that had already learned to speak, became effectively bilingual! [This is an extreme case - for instance, even at their most oppressive the Romans never went this far]. >While Stanley's scenario may be the case in some parts of the world at some >times, it is not the only scenario. I would say it is the *majority* scenario. Forcible replacement of that sort is rare. >Language use is determined, by and large, by local power. If it is more >locally advantageous to use Language A rather than Language B, then Language >A will survive and B will dwindle. As local power changes, B may be >revived. However, if the relative power of A is much greater than B, B will >simply die. I believe that is more or less what I have tried to indicate - but the power need not be strictly military. It is mainly a matter, as you say, of what is locally advantageous to the people. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Feb 3 05:04:47 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 23:04:47 -0600 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <200002012119.p423@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: re: Gaulish of Trier & Galatian Wasn't it St. Jerome [correct me if I'm wrong] that said that and is it true that he had never been to Galatia to find out? Also, when did Galatian become extinct? If it were still spoken, we would be looking at about 600 years or so of separation, less than the difference between say Swedish and Norwegian, Spanish and Portuguese, Czech and Slovak, English and Scots So you would expect them to understand one another unless there was a strong substrate or one of the languages had become extinct. Now, if, as some on the list say, Old Irish was so close to Gaulish inscriptions at c. 700 CE. How did it become so radically different by 1400 CE? As far as I know, these changes were not due to the Viking and English invasions or to Latin influences. I throw out some possibilities Is it possible that WRITTEN Old Irish was NOT the direct ancestor of Gaelic? i.e that it held the same relationship to Gaeilge and Gaidhlig that Classical Latin held to Romance? Is it possible that WRITTEN Old Irish was only a literary language? Is it possible that WRITTEN Old Irish was the language of an elite of Briton or Gaulish origin and did not represent the speech of the majority? Other than the arcane reference to Iarn-Belre and references to Cruithne/Picts, is anything known of other speech varieties in early Ireland? Please answer with light rather than heat and with reasoned replies rather than appeals to received authority [snip] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 3 21:37:10 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 16:37:10 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >mclasutt at brigham.net writes: >Aramaic spread with the Neo-Babylonian Empire and replaced other languages in >its path. >> -- Aramaic began to spread long before the Neo-Babylonian period; it was carried by a folk-migration of nomads out of the desert fringes. Aramaic tribes were plaguing the Assyrians as early as the 11th century BCE and there was a concurrent spread into Syria. The adoption of Aramaic as a chancery language by the Babylonians and later the Persians certainly helped the spread of the langauge, but they didn't initiate it. Likewise, Arabic had displaced Armaean in the desert fringes of the Middle East long before the great Islamic expansion. From r.clark at auckland.ac.nz Fri Feb 4 00:02:57 2000 From: r.clark at auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 13:02:57 +1300 Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >>> Hans Holm 02/02 8:19 AM >>> >JS>This requires either no change, or perfectly synchronized change, in pre- >JS>Celtic across thousands of miles, ... >.. I propose "little change". And there are much more examples. >JS>, ... for 4000 years. Which is in blatant violation of everything we know >JS>about languages and how they develop. >.. Is it? This is an IE group, but if we take a look beyond our IE nose, >e.g. to Australia, we find about 70 % covered by speakers of Pama-Nyungan, >the languages/dialects of which are regarded as very closely related. And >archeologists now redate the first settlements back to more than 50.000 >years (for a up-to-date overview see Stringer in Antiquity 73/99:876). Of >course these must not be the direct predecessors of Pama-Nyungan. Apart from the highly uncertain claim that the common ancestor of Pama-Nyungan goes back to the first human settlement of Australia, the description of these languages as "very closely related" is extremely misleading. They could be considered closely related only by contrast to the highly diverse (lexically and typologically) other families of the north and west of Australia. Consider just the immediate neighbours of Dyirbal, as described by Dixon: Yidin (27% shared vocabulary), Mbabaram (18%), Warungu (47%), Wargamay (60%) >Back to IE: Renfrew's farmers in Ireland must not have been direct >predecessors of Gaelic speakers, at least their language must not at all >have been a predecessor. Mit freundlichen Grüßen Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover Tel=FAX x49-511-9585714. From edsel at glo.be Thu Feb 3 11:56:24 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 12:56:24 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2000 5:24 PM > Roz Frank writes: >> And even if PIE were posited as an >> isolate, would one not have to propose that, nonetheless, the >> proto-language, too, would have had the full characteristics of a human >> language, with the likelihood of suppletions, irregularities and substrata. > Of course, except that there is no particular reason to posit any > significant substrate influences. [Ed] Nor to posit the contrary, since we don't know the origin(s) of (wide) PIE. Unless you believe in the Nostratic hypothesis and the like. Nonetheless, we might find some elements in common with other, reputedly older, language groups like Uralic, or even Basque (e.g. via some extinct early parent or relative of one, that evolved in another area) , which could be interpreted as loans from those groups (or as a common substrate or heritage), although it is not always possible to determine which way the loan went. After reading Ante Aikio's contributions, I suspect Uralic might begin to shed 'some' light on this matter. On the Basque side we have the intriguing matter of a number of suffixes that also pop up in IE (e.g.-z-ko <> -(s)ko in Slavic, basically with the 'same' meaning and use). Ed. From edsel at glo.be Thu Feb 3 12:00:18 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 13:00:18 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2000 12:52 AM > "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >> They aren't: Actually, basically three different, and very ordinary, words >> that probably exist (I mean words with these meanings) in any language. As I >> said before: all these words seem to have had different original meanings >> (*kwekwlo/'round, circle', *rotho/'revolve', > The primary meaning of *ret(h)-/*rot(h)- is apparently "to run". [Ed] Or "to ride" maybe? Ed. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 3 21:22:52 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 16:22:52 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >frank at uiowa.edu writes: >Then does the IE model posit that PIE, understood here as an actual unified >linguistic system, was a linguistic isolate? It would seem that the model >would have to do this. -- no. To use a historical example, Latin was a member of a group of related languages ("Italic"). Eg., Latin "bos" is probably a loan from a related Italic language, since the regular shift from PIE *gwous would give "vos" in Latin, However, the group of Italic languages didn't expand; Latin, alone, did, and then diversified into the Romance languages we're familiar with. The other Italic languages were blotted out by the expansion of Latin. The PIE situation is similar, with the _possible_ exception of the Anatolian group. >For example, how many language groups must the item be attested in for it to >quality? I assume, for example, that identifying cognates/reflexes of the >same item in Sanskrit and Celtic would be sufficient for the item to qualify? -- two in widely separated IE languages is usually considered indicative, three fairly definitive; if you had a word in, say, Anatolian, Germanic and Indo-Iranian. >For example, just glancing over the entries in Buck, it would seem that >there isn't as much uniformity for "wheel" across IE languages, as there is >for, say, "cart" which shows up most IE languages (obviously with the help of >Latin). >> -- late loan-words can be distinguished. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 3 21:24:42 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 16:24:42 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >I can't believe that linguistics and archaeology can not take different paths >but ultimately end up at the same destination. >> -- we're not talking about linguistics and archaeology; it's linguistics and one small group of archaeologists. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 3 21:31:48 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 16:31:48 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >I don't think it is fair to say that the evidence we have been discussing is >inconsistent with linguistics or that external information has not been used >in reaching some of the conclusions we've discussed here. >> -- we're not talking about evidence; we're talking about the _interpretation_ of evidence; that is to say, which interpretation is most reasonable. That agriculture spread across Europe from south-east to north-west between about 7000 BCE and about 4000 BCE is not in dispute. The question at issue is whether this should be associated with a _linguistic_ change; ie., the spread of Indo-European languages. The _linguistic_ evidence is that it was not. Quite probabibly _some_ language/language family was spread across Europe by "demic diffusion" in the early Neolithic; but whatever it was, it wasn't PIE. Renfrew's theory requires PIE to exist in 7000 BCE, and linguistic evolution to produce, 5500 years later, the first observed IE languages in around 1500 BCE. This just isn't possible, according to everything we know about linguistics and have observed of the process of linguistic change. The degree of differentiation observable in the early recorded IE languages is just incompatible with a common origin in the early neolithic; so is the nature of the PIE vocabulary. Renfrew's hypothesis is not based on any new physical _evidence_; it simply represents an effort to "torture" the linguistic evidence -- hacking and chopping at it to fit it on the Procrustean bed of an archaeological _system of interpretation_. Not "evidence"; just an _hypothesis_. From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Thu Feb 3 09:00:12 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 11:00:12 +0200 Subject: PIE and Uralic In-Reply-To: <007101bf6cef$442c4a00$3bc71a3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: (Patrick Ryan asked:) > I have two questions. > 1) Why do the Uralists feel that it is necessary to reconstruct a > transitional /S/ on the way to Finnish /h/? Finnish h in root morphemes goes always back to PU *S (with the exception of the PU cluster *kt, which - like PU *St - gives Finnish ht). The change *S > Proto-Finnic *h is relatively late, and there are Proto-Germanic loan words which predate this change (e.g. Finnish kana 'chicken' < Germ. *hanan-; Germ. *h- gives Finnish k- because there was no h yet at the time of loaning). Thus, it would be anachronistic to assume a direct substitution PIE *H > Pre-Finn. *h. There are also loans in other U languages which show the same substitution IE *H > U *S, e.g. IE *pewHeno- 'sieve' > Pre-Permic *pewSinV- > Komi poZ(n-), Udmurt puZ(n-). (The Permic languages have retained PU *S as a retroflex.) > 2) Have Uralists speculated that the older responses (/k,x/) might be the > result of the PIE "laryngal" being realized as a stop /?/ and a spirant > /h,H,x/? The loans words may no doubt reveal something about the phonetic value of the laryngals, and the different substitutions (PU *k, *x, *S) might also, to some extent, reflect different phonetic values of the laryngals in different (P)IE dialects. Thus, my hypothesis of PU vs. Pre-U loans is of course debatable. An interesting question, which has not yet been touched upon, is if the Uralic substituents of *H1, *H2 and *H3 differ in any way. Regarding the sound values, it should be mentioned here that the phonetic value of PU *x is not entirely clear. However, there seems to be some evidence suggesting that it was actually a voiced velar fricative (and could thus be more properly written as *g). There are also two loan etymologies that support this: PU *wixi- 'take (somewhere)' < PIE *weg´h- id., PU *mexi- 'give, sell' < PIE *mey-gw- 'sell' (in the latter one PU *-x- instead of *-jx- because the latter would have been a phonotactically illegal cluster). (P.R. asked:) > Would it be possible, in your opinion, for an alternate explanation that the > words might have been borrowed before the *-H- root-extensions? I'd rather let IE-ists answer that. But I'd like to suggest another alternative explanation to the (Pre-)IE > Pre-U loaning hypothesis I put forward in my last mail. It is possible that e.g. PIE *pelH- did not give Pre-U *pelxi-, but rather directly PU *peli-; i.e., the laryngal was left without a substituent because PU *-lx- was phonotactically impossible. > I do have an axe to grind here but, mercifully, I will not grind it on this > list. Of course, those who have been to my website know that I consider that > a strong case can be made for ultimate common origin. I am familiar with your web site, and thus I know that we probably couldn't disagree more here. But I agree with you on that Nostratic etc. discussions should not take place on this list. But I have no need for mercy - I am not afraid to defend my views on the relatedness of U and IE. It's just that I don't have the time nor the interest for such a discussion at present. - Ante Aikio From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Feb 3 05:20:26 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 23:20:26 -0600 Subject: Indo-Iranian In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >On Sat, 29 Jan 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> Looking at Watkins's chart of correspondences >> IE Sanskrit Avestan Old Persian OCS Lithuanian >> k s' s th s s >> kw k/c k/c k k/c^/c k >> g j z/g g/d z z >> gw g/j g/j g/j g/z^/z g >> gh h g/z g/d z z >> gwh gh/h g/j g/j g/z^/z g >> Why does Old Persian look as far removed [or more] from Avestan as >> any of the others? What's the time difference? Is the difference between >> Avestan and Old Persian as great as the chart would indicate? >First, the chart is not accurate, probably due to inaccurate copying (I >don't know the exact source). The chart appears exactly as shown in Calvert Watkins, ed. The American Heritage Dictioanry of Indo-European Roots, rev. ed. Boston: Houghton, 1985. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 3 23:35:36 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 18:35:36 EST Subject: Indo-Iranian Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >The Achaemenid inscriptions are easily datable, they fall mostly in the >6th/5th centuries B.C. Traditional datings of Zarathushtra put him in the >same time (mostly as a contemporary of Dareios I., but this has been >challenged, lately by Mary Boyce, who assigned him a date considerably >earlier on the time-scale >> -- I would agree, given the _extremely_ close correspondances between the earlier Avestan and Vedic Sanskrit. From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Feb 2 19:51:13 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 19:51:13 -0000 Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? Message-ID: Germanic *ga- related to Latin co-: There is a discussion of this in Collinge, The Laws of IE, p 207, and reference to a paper by Bennett (1968) and a book by E Rooth, 1974, Das vernische Gesetz in Forschung und Lehre, Lund/Gleerup. Collinge's summary is that the connexion still puzzles people. Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Feb 3 05:30:00 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 23:30:00 -0600 Subject: NE Germanic In-Reply-To: Message-ID: In popular magazines [maybe National Geographic?, but publications along this line], etc. I've seen various references that claim Gdansk comes from a Germanic word for "Danish". >"Steve Gustafson" wrote: [ moderator snip ] >>My further understanding is that the name of -Gdansk- in Poland represents >>*gudaniska, which looks Germanic, and suggests a Gothic connection on the >>south shore of the Baltic. >Or even better, *gUtaniskU (with g(U)t > gd). >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal >mcv at wxs.nl From sarima at friesen.net Thu Feb 3 07:48:12 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 23:48:12 -0800 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 07:19 PM 2/1/00 -0700, Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote: >> Stanley Friesen >> A) language is a biological phenomenon, and behaves like other such. >Wrong. Language is not a biological phenomenon, but a cognitive one. Cognition is a biological process. Ergo, so is language. >The >physical structures which allow complex human language evolved along >biological lines, but language change is note like biology. When two >species diverge, they can no longer influence each other. Not always true. Closely related species can often exchange a limited amount of genetic material. Full cross sterility takes time to evolve. This means an occasional hybrid can move genes across a species boundary. And in prokaryotes, genetic transfers can occur between *distant* relatives. > A Grevy's Zebra >cannot interbreed with a Plains Zebra no matter how many times they try. But lions can interbreed with leopards, and most oak species are inter-fertile. >> B) language differentiation acts *very* much like biological speciation, >> except for happening much faster. >See above. The speed factor is, indeed, a critical one. Not that I can see. It just makes it easier to observe. >> D) as others have been pointing out here, the similarities are so close >> that it is even useful to apply cladistic methodology in the study of >> historical linguistics. >There are just enough similarities to allow this on a limited scale, but >tree diagrams have difficulty expressing relationships within a dialect >chain and cannot show features due to geographic proximity. Similar issues occur in biology. Cladistics has trouble with intra-specific variation, and can get confused by cross-species genetic transfer, especially in groups where it is frequent (such as bacteria). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Feb 2 19:21:31 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 19:21:31 -0000 Subject: "is the same as" Message-ID: On biology and historical linguistics: a reminder, that (quote) > C) the 'mutual comprehensibility' definition of separate languages (unquote) is very far from accepted, acceptable, or workable. It ignores psychological and political factors (already discussed recently on this list). I write because whoever posted that snippet seemed to be assuming that this definition had the same validity as the parallel in Biology - which it certainly does not. Peter From mclasutt at brigham.net Thu Feb 3 19:14:35 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 12:14:35 -0700 Subject: Re Personal pronouns In-Reply-To: <001201bf6d4e$ba2f4540$139f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: > [Pat Ryan wrote previously] >>> It is obvious that "she" can stand for either "(the) woman" or the fuller >>> NP: "(the) woman (that) we are supposed to meet". > [Larry Trask] >> Nope. That 'she' cannot take the place of 'woman', and that is the end >> of it. > [PR] > I think we shall just have to 'agree to disagree' on this question. The > definition of 'pronoun' in your dictionary includes the phrase: "... and > whose members typically have little or no intrinsic meaning or reference." > Your position is obviously consistent. It is hard for me to > accept that this > is the consensus position. It is. Larry's quite clear in his explanation why it is so. 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 JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 3 21:09:29 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 16:09:29 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Well, I've seen recent dates- coinciding with the Balkan-Anatolian pottery >group - putting the intial expansion into Europe at 6000-5500BC. -- Cereal domestication in the Middle East and Anatolia is dated to 9000 BCE and earlier. Farming had spread to the whole of the Balkans by 7000 BCE and well into what's now France by 5000 BCE. This is unlikely to change, except possibly for earlier dates for plant/animal domestication. >The hypothesis does not require that those languages change slowly at all. -- yes it does, because the first recorded IE languages are still so similar. Any "intermediate steps" would have involve very little change for the descendant languages to be so close. Short form: linguistic nonsense. >But the hypothesis does actually reasonably suggest that Greek's >'grandparent' and Hittite's 'grandparent' should have had a closer >relationship than a coeval IE language located across the continent. -- yes. And they DON'T. >But you get a much better time-spread in which Greek and Sanskrit can make >whatever connection is there - which after all is based on similarities that >I believe are post-PIE. -- the similarities are the result of _common origins_. They can't be due to subsequent contact. >I don't believe that any current theory is that Greek and Sanskrit managed >to split-off from PIE in the Ukraine and went their separate ways sharing >innovations that are not found in PIE. -- that is precisely the current consensus theory. Both Greek and Sanskrit (and Armenian and Phyrgian) belonged to an east-central group of dialects within PIE. They lost contact sometime in the course of Indo-Iranian's spread to the east and pre-Greek's movement south. This accounts parsimoniously for all the observable linguistic data. > to consider how a change in data -- there has been no change in the relevant data; only in (Renfrew's) _interpretation_ of the data; ie., saying that a linguistic change requires a massive amount of archaeological evidence associated with fundamental technological-economic transformation. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 3 22:48:45 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 17:48:45 EST Subject: NE Germanic Message-ID: .stevegus at aye.net writes: >My further understanding is that the name of -Gdansk- in Poland represents >*gudaniska, which looks Germanic, and suggests a Gothic connection on the >south shore of the Baltic. -- the first historical mention of the Goths places them on the Vistula, in what's now Poland. There is also a layer of specifically Gothic loan-words datable to the Common Slavic period. My own guess (no more than that) would be that the Goths, then the easternmost Germanic group, received some sort of leadership element from Scandinavia, roughly the way the nascent Russian state did, and the origin myth of this ruling group was taken over by the much larger, hybrid group that came into history as "Gothic". From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 3 22:56:14 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 17:56:14 EST Subject: Horses in War Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >If the Egyptians introduced the idea of the chariot as an archer platform -- no, they did not introduce the idea of the chariot as an archery platform. This is simply wrong. It long antedates Egyptian use. Any standard text will so inform you. >the first use of the horse in an offensive tactic was with the development >of the Macedonian heavy cavalry -- incorrect. If you look at the Assyrian wall reliefs, you will see cavalry being used both for mounted archery and carrying armored lancers. >>and that includes Kadesh (an interesting word). -- Kadesh was a chariot battle virtually _pur sang_. 1275 BCE was towards the _end_ of the period when massed chariots were the decisive arm of middle eastern warfare. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Feb 3 06:07:07 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 00:07:07 -0600 Subject: Basque In-Reply-To: Message-ID: There's the possibility that Lusitanian may have been non-Celtic and to get from Central Europe to W. Iberia, it presumedly would have been in contact with Basque, correct? True, not too much is known about Lusitanian and it does seem similar to Celtic and Italic [snip] >A problem with all proposed IE loans into Basque which cannot be derived >from Latin or Romance. >So far as we know, the first IE languages to reach the Basque-speaking area >were the Celtic languages, probably in the middle of the first millennium >BC. At the time of the Roman conquest, Aquitanian/Basque was apparently >bordered by Celtic to the north (Gaulish) and to the south (Celtiberian). >The position to the east, in the Pyrenees, is uncertain, but the neighbor >there may have been the non-IE language Iberian. To the west, we have >clear evidence for IE speech, but of uncertain affiliation. All I can say >is that the sparse evidence is seemingly consistent with Celtic speech, >but does not require Celtic speech. >Of course, it is conceivable that some unknown branch of IE might have reached >the area even before Celtic, but, if so, this hypothetical language seemingly >disappeared without trace -- and I don't much care for positing hypothetical >languages. [snip] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Feb 4 01:36:24 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 20:36:24 EST Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: >frank at uiowa.edu writes: << 1) what then is the standard reconstruction proposed for Skt. pu:r-, Greek > and Baltic ? And the prototype meaning assigned to it? -- *pelh(x), "fort, fortified place". There's a possible cognate in Armenian -- 'k'alak', meaning "city". >2) is this set considered a good candidate for admission to the (P)IE >lexicon? Stated differently, does attestation in Sanskrit, Greek and Baltic >languages suffice for a data set to be considered part of the (P)IE lexicon? -- a dialect word of the south and east of the PIE world, at least. There's also *uriien, 'fort', which gives Mycenaean 'rijo', promontory, and Tocharian 'ri', 'town'. From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Feb 4 03:14:35 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 04:14:35 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.20000202225635.0075b6f8@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu> Message-ID: roslyn frank wrote: >A couple of questions. >1) what then is the standard reconstruction proposed for Skt. pu:r-, Greek > and Baltic ? And the prototype meaning assigned to it? *pl.His "citadel" (Pokorny: *pel- "Burg") [Did I say pu:r-? I did. Should be pur- (nom.sg. pu:r)] >2) is this set considered a good candidate for admission to the (P)IE >lexicon? Stated differently, does attestation in Sanskrit, Greek and Baltic >languages suffice for a data set to be considered part of the (P)IE lexicon? Well, yes: it's in Pokorny. At the very least it suffices for being considered a solid East-PIE etymon. On the downside, it's not attested in the Western languages (Italic, Celtic, Germanic) or in Anatolian; it's unclear whether Pokorny is correct in his unmotivated assignment of the word to the undisputable PIE root *pelh1- "full, to fill"; the formation with zero grade in the root *plH- and in the suffix *-is can hardly be ancient. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Feb 4 03:20:05 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 04:20:05 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000202232126.00995800@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: Stanley Friesen wrote: [**i and **u] >I agree that some loss is likely. I was question *total* loss. At least >that was how I interpreted your original model, since you discussed loss or >change to e/o in all environments. I don't really have a model (yet). I was merely playing with the Slavic parallel. I forgot to mention Class. Armenian, where *i and *u (but not *a, *e and *o) were dropped in unstressed (pretonic) position, at least orthographically (in some cases they were still pronounced as [@]). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Feb 4 03:53:10 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 04:53:10 +0100 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: <3899A5C8.E96C4E95@lrz.uni-muenchen.de> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Wolfgang Schulze wrote: >By the way: Why is it so difficult to accept that Sumerians used to term >horses 'donkeys (that stem from / of) the mountains' and that they might have >used the term ans^e-kur(r)a as it appears ('phonetically' speaking)? It's not difficult to accept, it's just that the Sumerian word apparently (according to Miguel Civil) *was* (usually written , just like "smith" was usually written , to quote Robert Whiting on ANE). It's of course the same word as Akkadian sisu^ "horse", but the Akkadian is also borrowed from an unknown source. Given the phonetic shape (*tsitsi-), one might think (just a thought) of some reduplicated form *dzidzei- connected with Skt. hayah. "horse" and Arm. ji, jioy ([dzi]) "horse" < PIE *g^hei- (satem *dzhei-). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Feb 4 04:10:01 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 05:10:01 +0100 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: <33.d21795.25ca774b@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Dr Stefan Georg wrote: ><they didn't mean them to be read aloud as native Hittite words (nor does it >mean that they used the Sumerian/Akkadian terms as a loan-element).>> > >I take this to mean that the Sumerian/Akkadian horse symbol used in Hittite >may have been nothing more than an ideogram and therefore give no phonetic >information about the sound of the Hittite word. In fact we can be pretty sure it *was* an ideogram. >My question then becomes how often Hittite does this sort of thing - Too often... >use a >Sumerian symbol with no phonetic correspondence. It could not be all the >time or we would have no basis for sounding the Hittite language. Indeed. Some words, though, are never spelled out using the syllabary subset of cuneiform, and we only have the ideogram. >[...] >Let me suggest then that the answers to two questions that may help a little >here: > >- What was the word/symbol for donkey in Hittite? ANS^E (ideogram, pronunciation unknown, I think). There is a Luwian word, apparently (I.M. Dunaevskaja, "Jazyk xettskix ieroglifov") or , syllabic . I don't know if one can segment tark-asna, which would allow a connection with Sum. ans^e, Grk. onos, Lat. asinus, Gafat ans^@la, Argobba hansia, etc. >- What was the word for horse in Armenian? ji >If Armenian used the *ekwos word for donkey, what is the source of its word >for horse? (And does that explain perhaps the 'semantic drift'?) *g^hei- "antreiben, lebhaft bewegen (schleudern) oder bewegt sein". Skt. hayah. "horse". See my other message. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Feb 3 22:40:04 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 22:40:04 -0000 Subject: Horses Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Wolfgang and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Wolfgang Schulze" Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2000 3:59 PM "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >> [PR] >> In this connection, one might want to notice Egyptian s(j)s(j), 'hurry', and >> ssm, 'horse'; could these be connected with IE *se:i-, 'throw'? >[WS wrote] > 'Horse' = an animal which throws the rider from its back???? If you relate > Egyptian s(j)s(j) 'hurry' to ssm 'horse' (which sounds reasonable as for the > semantics), what can you tell us about the final -m in Egyptian? Is it > derivational? What function? What, if ssm stems from something like *sm with > initial reduplication? No *zizi or what so ever connection anymore! > By the way: Why is it so difficult to accept that Sumerians used to term > horses 'donkeys (that stem from / of) the mountains' and that they might have > used the term ans^e-kur(r)a as it appears ('phonetically' speaking)? [PR] The evidence to make a definite determination about these matters dos not yet seem to be present so these ideas are all purely speculative. As for 'throw (a rider)', I had a connection more along the lines of 'move quickly' / 'cause to move quickly' in mind, rightly or wrongly. -m is not currently recognized as a formant for Egyptian though I believe there are other examples of it as an elative (for example in sDm, 'hear', which I connect with IE *sta:-mo- and Hittite iStamaS-, 'hear'). 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 friesen.net Fri Feb 4 04:45:01 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 20:45:01 -0800 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: <33.d21795.25ca774b@aol.com> Message-ID: At 01:16 AM 2/3/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >I take this to mean that the Sumerian/Akkadian horse symbol used in Hittite >may have been nothing more than an ideogram and therefore give no phonetic >information about the sound of the Hittite word. That is correct. This is somewhat of a truism in reading cuneiform. Within that speciality they use the term "Sumerogram" for ideograms that trace back to the Sumerian roots of the writing system. >My question then becomes how often Hittite does this sort of thing - use a >Sumerian symbol with no phonetic correspondence. It could not be all the >time or we would have no basis for sounding the Hittite language. Not all the time, but still fairly frequently. There is a standard stock of Sumerograms that most cultures using cuneiform continued to use out of tradition, regardless of the language they spoke. One of the most prominent of these is the glyph for "king". But it is understandable that horse/donkey is also written this way. The phonetic values of the cuneiform symbols are used mostly for those words not covered by the standard Sumerograms. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Feb 4 19:21:33 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 14:21:33 EST Subject: Horses Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >My question then becomes how often Hittite does this sort of thing - use a >Sumerian symbol with no phonetic correspondence. -- quite often. It's equivalent to having English write "maison" and prounounce "house". It's a major handicap with Hittite documents. Luckily they didn't do it all the time, but it's fairly frequent. From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Fri Feb 4 07:52:57 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 07:52:57 GMT Subject: Horses in War Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:- >> (from Tom Clancy - who also mentions cavalry's superiority to chariotry:) > Only once the modern stirrup was invented. I once saw on TV a reconstruction of a Roman cavalryman :: on each skirt of his saddle was a sideways projection, which the rider hooked his knee round, and that held him quite firm against impacts. From sarima at friesen.net Fri Feb 4 04:13:35 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 20:13:35 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <200002012119.p423@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: At 07:19 PM 2/1/00 +0000, Hans Holm wrote: >JS>, ... for 4000 years. Which is in blatant violation of everything we know >JS>about languages and how they develop. >.. Is it? This is an IE group, but if we take a look beyond our IE nose, >e.g. to Australia, we find about 70 % covered by speakers of Pama-Nyungan, >the languages/dialects of which are regarded as very closely related. And >archeologists now redate the first settlements back to more than 50.000 >years (for a up-to-date overview see Stringer in Antiquity 73/99:876). Of >course these must not be the direct predecessors of Pama-Nyungan. Indeed they almost certainly are NOT. The very fact that they are so similar indicates a *very* recent date for their arrival in most of their current localities. For a first guess as to the homeland of the Pama-Nyungan languages, one might look to the area with the greatest diversity of languages in the group in the smallest area (suggesting greater time depth for differentiation in that area). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Feb 4 04:18:43 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 23:18:43 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: In a message dated 2/2/00 12:43:52 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: [objecting to Renfrew's 4000BC date for an 'early IE language' in western Europe that was an ancestor of Celtic] <> Is this differentiation is quantifiable? Are you sure it works in your favor? Let's try this. [As much as 5500 years might separate Anatolian and wide PIE from the above languages. But I'm going with non-Anatolian PIE and a 5000BC date because the subject is Celtic.] Following Renfrew, roughly 4000 years separates non-Anatolian PIE from Mycenaean (1200BC), Sanskrit (1000BC?) and Latin (500BC). How 'differentiated' are those three languages? On a scale of 1 to 10? Using the 3300BC date of last unity: - roughly 2000 years would separate PIE from Hittite (1600BC), Mycenaean (1200BC) and Sanskrit (1000BC?). Again, degree of differentiation, 1-10? - roughly 3500 years would separate PIE from Germanic (500AD), Tocharian (500AD), Old Irish (700AD) Armenian (500AD) and Church Slavonic (800AD). How differentiated are these languages - 1 to 10? And you say there is too little differentiation for Renfrew's scenario to be true? Some would say that there is too much differentiation for the 3300BC date to be correct!!!! But once again, based on any objective standard at all, what is the measure of differentiation and how do you apply it against the ancient IE languages so you know what date is too much and what is just enough? <<<< A very specific question! Regards, Steve Long From r.clark at auckland.ac.nz Fri Feb 4 06:26:11 2000 From: r.clark at auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 19:26:11 +1300 Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >>> Hans Holm 02/02 8:19 AM >>> JS>This requires either no change, or perfectly synchronized change, in pre- JS>Celtic across thousands of miles, ... >.. I propose "little change". And there are much more examples. JS>, ... for 4000 years. Which is in blatant violation of everything we know JS>about languages and how they develop. >. Is it? This is an IE group, but if we take a look beyond our IE nose, >e.g. to Australia, we find about 70 % covered by speakers of Pama-Nyungan, >the languages/dialects of which are regarded as very closely related. And >archeologists now redate the first settlements back to more than 50.000 >years (for a up-to-date overview see Stringer in Antiquity 73/99:876). Of >course these must not be the direct predecessors of Pama-Nyungan. I think you mean "may not" or "cannot", and indeed it is most unlikely that the common ancestor of Pama-Nyungan dates to the period of the earliest human occupation of Australia. In fact we have hardly any idea of the time depth of this family. And "very closely related" is a very misleading way to describe these languages. They may sometimes be described as closely related, but only by way of contrast to the other language families in the north and west of Australia, which are lexically and typologically highly diverse. Consider the immediate neighbours of Dyirbal, as described by Dixon (1972): Yidin (27% common vocabulary), Mbabaram (18%), Warungu (47%) and Wargamay (60%). Only the last shows any structural similarity to Dyirbal, and Dixon is uncertain whether this is the result of a relatively close genetic relationship or a long period of contiguity and convergence. All this is within Pama-Nyungan, in fact within a 100 km radius in one small corner of Queensland. Ross Clark From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Feb 4 14:24:59 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 15:24:59 +0100 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000202230556.0099a220@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: Stanley Friesen wrote: >>But actually if we give a generous 4000BC date to wheeled-transport (as >>opposed to wheels in general or just plain round objects) and remember that >>in Hittite the word for wheel is different >I seem to remember somebody posting a Hittite cognate with a reasonably >similar meaning. As far as I know, the Hittite word for "wheel" is . No relation to the *kwel-words. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Feb 4 05:53:07 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 00:53:07 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: I wrote: >It does not matter if they occured otherwise. The question is WHEN they >occurred. None of this dates these changes back to PIE dispersal. The wheel >may have been introduced BEFORE PIE *k ==> Germanic 'h' occurred BUT >AFTER IE dispersal. In a message dated 2/3/00 3:02:06 AM, sarima at friesen.net wrote: <> I simply MUST point out what is happening here. Much of your 'late Neolithic technology' - aside from the wheel - no longer supports the unity dates they once did and they do not necessarily refute the neolithic hypothesis regarding PIE. in the Ukraine, metal smelting appears about 4500BC - hammered metal appears well before that. The domesticated horse is now at about 4000BC and horse bones are in the food pits a thousand years before that. Alot of this 'late' neolithic technology is now arriving in the Ukraine with neolithicism or just afterwards. The list of objects that will establish PIE unity in say 3300BC in the Ukraine is now fast dwindling. Heck, even red ochre graves were identified in the Bug-Dniestr sites dating before 4500BC. Now the question becomes - if all of these other objects with any confidence can only hold a last date of say 4500BC - how can wheeled transport still be used to preserve PIE unity as much as 1500 years later? And that is why the relative dates of the sound changes of wheeled transport ALONE do matter - because they almost ALONE argue for a later last date of unity than neolithicism. BUT they can only really be used to establish that the wheel came before those sound changes occurred - not necessarily establish the last days of PIE unity. And in the process they may suggest other locations where an earlier PIE unity occurred. Regards, Steve Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Feb 4 06:46:33 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 06:46:33 -0000 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Ed and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Eduard Selleslagh" Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2000 12:00 PM >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" >Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2000 12:52 AM >> "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >>> They aren't: Actually, basically three different, and very ordinary, words >>> that probably exist (I mean words with these meanings) in any language. As >>> I said before: all these words seem to have had different original meanings >>> (*kwekwlo/'round, circle', *rotho/'revolve', >> The primary meaning of *ret(h)-/*rot(h)- is apparently "to run". >[Ed] >Or "to ride" maybe? [PR] I have established (to my own satisfaction, at least) that Egyptian ' [hand on outstretched arm] corresponds to IE *dh/th. On that basis, I believe that a comparison of Egyptian r', 'sun' (ideographically written: a circle with *central dot* [=axle?]) and IE *rot(h)o-, 'wheel', is likely. Therefore, I would opt for a primary meaning of 'wheel', secondarily 'roll'. 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 mcv at wxs.nl Fri Feb 4 16:53:38 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 17:53:38 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <5b.18357d5.25cb4dc4@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Renfrew's hypothesis is not based on any new physical _evidence_; Indeed not. In fact, Renfrew's theory when published in 1987 wasn't even a _new_ theory. Similar proposals had been made by the Spanish historian Pere Bosch-Gimpera and others. Take for instance this excerpt from the introduction to Colin McEvedy's Penguin Atlas of Ancient History (1986?): "... the "Danubian" [i.e. LBK, Bandkeramik or Linear Pottery --mcv] culture, the earliest Neolithic culture of Central Europe, has a comparatively small area of contact with the old-established Neolithic communities of the Balkans which indicates that its originators were few; it undoubtedly represents a spread by these originators because the type of shifting agriculture they had evolved would rapidly disperse any population practicing it. And the density of a Neolithic people being greater than that of a mesolithic one by a factor of at least ten, the ethnic contribution of the aborigines -- even if they were absorbed rather than exterminated or expelled -- must have been insignificant [this is indeed borne out by the genetic data --mcv]. And given that the "Danubians" were a genuine people and remained so until provincial differences began to appear among them a millennium after they had expanded across Central Europe, it is difficult to avoid the view that their movement created an Indo-European heartland which must be postulated for roughly this time and place on purely linguistic grounds. Therefore the "Danubian" culture represents the arrival and establishment of the Indo-Europeans in Central Europe." As usual, McEvedy makes a lot of sense. If we now turn to the map for 4500 bc (i.e. 5500 BC calibrated), the Balkan cousins of the "Danubians" (labeled Starc^evo) are also marked as Indo-European, which comes very close indeed to Renfrew. Maybe it's a Colin thing, but it certainly has nothing to do with immobilist Procrustean beds. There's plenty of arrows and quite a lot of population movements going on in McEvedy's maps that follow. Note that equating the Linear Pottery movement, together with its eastern offshoots into the Pontic area [Tripolye, Dnepr-Donets], with the spread of Proto-Indo-European fits in rather nicely with the other evidence we have. There is contact with Proto-Uralic in the Baltic/Forest steppe zone by 5000 BC, as must be assumed on the basis of PIE ~ PU linguistic contacts. There is contact and eventually assimilation (TRB culture, ca. 4000 BC) of a sizeable autochthonous group in Denmark and Southern Scandinavia, which explains the important non-IE substrate in Germanic. At the same time, the Balkanic (and ultimately Anatolian) roots of the Linear Pottery culture explain the close connection with Lemnian/Etruscan in the Aegean area, and provide one possible explanation for the linguistic contacts with Semitic ("bull", "wine", numerals, etc.) or Kartvelian (numerals, "heart/chest", "yoke", etc.). There were horses in the Linear Pottery area, and although knowledge of the wheel must have spread from the Near East at a slightly later date, it stands to reason that the LBK-Pontic area was still linguistically relatively uniform until about 4500-4000 BC. This doesn't mean one has to take a static view on the further development (and spread!) of Indo-European, which entered a new phase at about 3500 BC with the Corded Ware/Bell Beaker cultures in the western area and the Kurgan culture (Yamnaya kul'tura) in the eastern, initiating the eventual Indo-Europeisation of Atlantic and Mediterranean Europe as well as Central Asia and beyond. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Feb 4 16:54:28 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 11:54:28 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 2/4/00 8:15:15 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> First, let me say again that 7000BC dates for neolithicization in Europe beyond the Balkans are off by 1500 years, and for western Europe and the Ukraine by another 1000 years. All the diffusion needs to represent linguistically is 'narrow PIE' and not the beginnings of agriculture in the Near East. The cultural separation between Anatolian-Balkan assemblages and Danubian cultures becomes clearly distinct about 5500BC. Addressing the evidence and your interpretations: -You have a population of speakers sharing strong cultural affinities from the Ukraine to Holland that culminates about 3500BC - for a period their settlements and artifacts often replicate the same patterns no matter where they are found. -It is plain to see that as these speakers migrated, their populations grew exponentially and they cleared and settled areas almost to the extent that they are settled today from northwestern Europe to the western Ukraine. - By 4200BC, these unknown speakers were building the largest buildings in the world, erecting megaliths, developing a large array of specialized domesticated animal and plant species, becoming adept metallurgists, maintaining extensive trade contacts with the Near East, building fortified settlements against one another, laying out roads - not paths - along the same routes as modern highways follow today and just possibly beginning to co-invent wheeled transport. - Almost all evidence points to the notion that this population of speakers has remained fundamentally indigenous in most of this areas to the present day And yet you find it linguistically plausible that the language of this mass of technically advanced speakers across Europe was completely substituted without leaving any thing remotely resembling a substrate by a language of a thinly populated culture that first dispersed from the Ukraine in 3500BC and that did not even bother to leave a relative behind in its haste to spread from the Ireland to India in a mere 3000 years. Not to mention that a large part of the Ukraine had already been neoliticized when this happened - and most probably by these speakers of the lost neolithic language of Europe. - By 3300BC, evidence of a new influx from the east comes into the eastern fringes of the post Bandkeramik areas show this influx were all also neolithicized, shared animal husbandry, agricultural and metalurgical characteristics with middle Bandkeramik cultures - and in their original locations they were for the most part demonstrably already under the influence of Bandkeramik cultures. Plus the population movement represented by this 'influx' appears at best to be relatively small and reaches no further than the eastern half of previously neolithicized Europe. - General areas where this particular group of neolithicizing cultures did NOT colonize - Spain, the Italian peninsula, the Uralic northeast - all show in historic times substantial evidence of non-IE speakers - Iberian, Basque, Etruscan, Finnish, etc. You say with definiteness that this rather massive population of European speakers represented "_some_ language/language family was spread across Europe by "demic diffusion" in the early Neolithic; but whatever it was, it wasn't PIE." Linguistically, you have no a substrate across this vast region to support such a claim. Linguistically, you are relying upon many objects developed by this group of European cultures to date a last possible date for what you consider a foreign language - PIE. Linguistically, you are changing the languages of a massive group of speakers across the middle of a continent on the basis that a starting date (narrow PIE) from the Danube of 5500BC is too early. Yet your best evidence of the substitute language yields a rather weak latest date of dispersal of 3500BC - and you have no way of accounting for where that language was or what it looked like in 5500BC. If we know anything about Steppes culture at this time, it is that it moved eastward out of the Ukraine, carrying clear emblems of influence imported from the west and south - ceramic agriculture, animal husbandry, metallurgy. Not the other way around. Linguistically, you have this other evidence of proto-Uralic borrowings from PIE that are dated no later than 4000BC, but I believe are more often dated at no later than 5000BC - in an area possibly not 500 miles from one of the original center of Bandkeramik. I must suggest to you that linguistically AND archaeologically your interpretation has some serious holes in it. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Feb 4 05:09:58 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 00:09:58 EST Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 2/2/00 12:43:52 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- 7000 BCE, actually, for the start of the process. Agriculture in north-central Europe long predates 4000 BCE, and Renfrew attributes the spread of IE languages to the spread of agriculture.>> Well, agriculture may have been first developed in the Levant - so you have him there, too. And of course you'll find agriculture in the Far East and in the Americas and presumably IE languages did not accompany those developments. Seems this theory is falling apart:) I'll try to address this again from this angle. --- Actually, what Renfrew does is associate the original spread of IE languages in Europe with PARTICULAR CULTURAL REMAINS (assemblages) that coincide - in many but NOT all cases - with the diffusion of agriculture. The appearance of agriculture itself of course cannot possibly in all instances equal IE - this should be apparent. Here's a rough chronology of that cultural evidence - very rough now - that may help straighten this out with regard to Celtic: @7000BC - farming in Anatolia and southern Greece (cultural uniformities not yet visible) @6500 - 5400BC - the neolithic culture associated with Balkan-Anatolian painted ware develops and reaches the Danube. @5400BC - early stages of 'Bandkeramik'; beginning of expansion east and northwest; beginnings of C-T in the western Ukraine @4900BC - early 'Bandkeramik' reaches Holland; evidence for regular trade contacts with the Danube - extremely small populations, few settlements, 'remarkable uniformity' in remains evidenced @4600BC - expansion beyond the early narrow Bandkeramik corridor north of the Alps and northwestern Europe @4200BC - pollen evidence shows first extensive clearances of land in peripheral areas, exponential growth in populations and settlements; differentiation in local cultures @4000BC - megalithic period begins, evidence of metallurgy (smelting) has expanded from the Balkans to Denmark, northern Italy and the Ukraine; beginnings of the secondary products revolution; beaker and corded ware cultures begin to appear By 4000BC, there is enough differentiation between regional expressions of Bandkeramik to suggest that the former cultural unities are giving way to local identities in western Europe and north of the Alps. [Southwestern Europe is a different matter not addressed here.] So if we were going to hypotheize a corrolation between language and these events we MIGHT do something like this: @5500BC - 'Wide PIE' splits into Anatolian and "narrow PIE" @4900BC - Migration spreads 'Narrow PIE' @4600BC - A north western European version of [narrow PIE] arises @4000BC - An "early IE language" develops in parts of western Europe and north of the Alps. @3500BC - Local differentiation in this 'early IE language' begins @2200BC - A dialect of one of these languages becomes 'pre-Celtic' @1500BC - A dialect of 'pre-Celtic' becomes 'proto-Celtic' near the Alps @ 800BC - A dialect or dialects of 'proto-Celtic' become associated with, expand along with and control a trade network that spreads iron metalurgy,etc. in western Europe. @ 600BC - Celtic languages make their first apparent appearance in the Lepontic tablets, using a Ligurian (non-Celtic) script. @ 350BC - Celtic languages begin to appear in other scripts. Speakers of early Gaulish - a Celtic language associated with southeastern France/southwestern Germany migrate to other areas in eastern and western Europe - partly due to incursions coming from the direction of Italy and northern Germany Some might at first have a problem with this scenario feeling that this puts too much time - 5500 years - between "narrow PIE" (the theoretical ancestor of all IE languages minus Anatolian) and say Celtic at say 1BC. But does it really? Let us consider another language as it would have developed under a later, Ukraine homeland theory. @3300BC - Wide PIE disperses, speakers leave the Ukraine @ between 3000 and 2000BC - an early IE language arrives in Italy. @ between 2000 and 1500BC - perhaps a dialect becomes Pre-Latin @ between 1500 and 1000BC - perhaps a dialect becomes proto-Latin @ between 1000 and 300BC - a dialect becomes early Latin @ between 300BC and 600AD - Latin scripts show a 'remarkable uniformity' from Britain to Persia and Africa @ between 600AD - 1000AD - dialects of Latin become Romance languages @ between 1000AD - 2000AD - scripts in the Romance languages appear from Quebec to Ethiopia, showing 'a remarkable uniformity.' Italian is particularly Latin-like. Perhaps more importantly, inscriptions appearing in Latin, on the US Dollar, on religious objects and at the end of e-mail messages (but not on ogham sticks) show NO CHANGE IN THE LANGUAGE at all - 1800 years later! The journey is 5300 years and it seems to show all the same evidence you object to in the Renfrew scenario. Regards, Steve Long From sarima at friesen.net Fri Feb 4 04:36:08 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 20:36:08 -0800 Subject: SV: Indo-Hittite In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 02:30 PM 2/2/00 +0000, Larry Trask wrote: >Stanley Friesen writes: >> So far the "cladistic linguistics" I have seen has fallen far short of what >> biologists do - many of the solutions to statistical issues that biologists >> have come up with are not applied. >But our problems are not identical to those of the biologists, and their >solutions do not necessarily work for us. To some extent. But things like long-branch attraction are *certainly* potential trouble-spots in linguistics as well as in biology. And the UPenn trees were done in a way that is particularly prone to that particular malady. So simply ignoring the work of the biologists is not the way to go. What must be done is an analysis of the applicability and utility of each process. (Also, I am not certain the UPEnn people paid enough attention to the issue character selection and its potential for introducing a bias in the results: character selection is ultimately necessary, but must be done with extreme care to avoid bias). >For one thing, the biologists have a lot more material to work with than >we do. They have genes, but we don't. They have fossils, but we mostly >don't. These are relatively minor points. In many cases neither has been available to biologists either. >It is, in my view, an error to assume that comparative linguistics is >isomorphic to biological taxonomy, and that what is true or successful >in one field must be true or successful in the other. I am not making *that* assumption. But what I have read of the papers from UPenn show a lack of awareness of even the most basic precautions needed to make cladistic analyses truly reliable - precautions against potential problems that are intrinsic to the *method*, and do not depend on the realm of application. Long branch attraction is a mathematical feature of basic model, and sampling issues are fundamental to any mathematical analysis, but are especially important when one is doing statistical analyses (which is what cladistics is). Some while back I posted a *long* article on the weaknesses in the method described in the one paper I have analyzed in detail. If it is not available in archives somewhere, I could send it to you directly. (I will not repost it here, unless there is mass demand for it). >As for statistical (probabilistic) approaches, some linguists have been >trying very hard to develop these, but the difficulties are considerable, >indeed almost refractory, and so far no one has been able to come up with >a probabilistic approach which can be regarded as generally satisfactory. The same is true in biology. In fact I have, on several occasions, discussed the problem of statistical significance in cladistic analysis in the dinosaur mailing list. As yet this has only been solved for gene sequence analysis. It is an unsolved problem for character based analysis. Even with my training in statistics I have been unable to come up with a model that can be used to compute significance statistics for comparing cladograms that differ by only a few steps. I am not complaining about *that* here. Indeed if *that* were the only problem I saw in the UPenn trees, I would consider them well established. My biggest beef is that, due to the way they did the analysis, few, if any, of the major branches of the tree can be said to be clear of long-branch attraction, making the basal branching sequence dubious, at best. This is why, in another post, I said I would have been more confident in their results if they *had* used Luwian to help test the Indo-Hittite hypothesis. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Fri Feb 4 08:31:02 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 10:31:02 +0200 Subject: Basic vocabulary borrowing (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: <6a.8ad589.25cb645a@aol.com> Message-ID: >> But "hand", "eye", "I", "water", "brother" aso. are not safe. They simply >> don't bear a label "Attention ! Native word! Don't replace by foreign >> gobbledeegook !" on them. > -- effectively speaking, they do. > After all, when presented with a new language, what's the first thing we do > to determine whether it's IE or not? > We look at the numerals from one to ten, the family relationship terms, and > so forth. Later on more detailed examination is necessary, but that's the > first step. > In fact, that's how the fact that there _is_ an IE family of languages was > discovered in the first place. This is irrelevant. This is what a linguist would do, but one must remember that a linguist is not a normal speaker (I prefer this term to the widely used "naive native speaker"). Normal speakers don't even have the concepts of "IE" or "related language" unless they've been taught to them in school. From experience I can say that most speakers find it hard to perceive even obvious borrowings as e.g. Finnish pelaa- 'to play' < Swedish spela, Finnish (s)kaappi < Swed. skåp. I would like to elaborate it is a different thing for a word to be borrowed and for the borrowing to become established. Words are borrowed because they are recognised as foreign and the speakers want to use them precisely for this reason (e.g., many young people in Finland who want to sound "cool" use words like "anyway", "cool", "about", "shit", "place" etc. because they are English and not Finnish). If the borrowed word remains in use for a couple of generations, it may undergo phonological nativization. Then it becomes established, because it is no longer recognised as a borrowing. A note: the migration discussion is also very interesting, but perhaps the subject line should be changed? There is not much in common between the U / IE contacts and the Bantu expansion, I believe... :) - Ante Aikio From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Fri Feb 4 09:07:08 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 11:07:08 +0200 Subject: basic vocabulary borrowing (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: (Joat Simeon wrote:) >-- true, although of course some things are more _likely_ to be borrowed than >others. Numerals, body parts, family relationships, and so forth, are less >likely to be loan-words. What is likely to be borrowed and what is not in a given circumstance depends on many factors. In U languages, the numerals are largely cognate and there are no known borrowings except for 'seven', 'hundred' and 'thousand'. But even numerals can become cultural items; e.g. the loan origin of Ob-Ugric/Hungarian *säptä '7' (< Aryan / Iranian) and Samoyed *sejpti (< Tocharian?), replacing PU *s´exs´imi '7', is perhaps connected with the 7-day week. Words for '100' and '1000' are probably related to trade; for the same reason, even lower numerals may have been borrowed to some languages, since counting is important in trading. (A note on the U numerals: Samoyedic has curiously replaced the U numerals 3-6 with roots of unknown origin; this is perhaps connected with the strong lexical substrate from an unknown source that seems to be present in Samoyedic. The U word *wixti '5' is generally considered to survive in Samoyedic in the meaning '10', but the semantics seem peculiar to me. Does anyone know any parallels?) Kinship terms can become subject to borrowing in situations where intercultural marriages between two language groups are common. This probably explains the loaning of such words as e.g. Finnish äiti 'mother' (< Germ.), morsian 'bride' (< Balt.), sisar 'sister' (I can't quite recall the precise IE source of this one at the moment). Curiously, words for female relatives appear to have been more freely borrowed by the U languages than words for male ones. This perhaps tells something about how marriages were organized. As for body parts, there is hardly a real "reason" for replacing native words by foreign ones in any circumstance (other than the wish to be considered fashionable, of course). - Ante Aikio From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Fri Feb 4 09:54:30 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 11:54:30 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 24 Jan 2000, Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: [snip] > We need very specific evidence to tell whether Anatolian had separated > from the rest or not by the time of the oldest loans in Uralic [snip] This popped into my mind. The PU word for 'name', *nimi-, shows curious variation: the Mordvin and Mari forms show and irregular *l- (< PU *limi-). *nimi has been considered an IE loan (< PIE *nmen-). Now as far as I know, Hittite shows irregular initial l- in the word for 'name', but the other IE languages have uniformy *n-. This might be pure speculation, but do you think there is any chance of Mordvin-Mari *limi- instead of regular *nimi- resulting from Pre-Anatolian influence or even being a separate loan from Pre-Anatolian? (If I recall correclty, Koivulehto may have suggested something like this, but I can't recall the exact source right now.) Of course, the changes might be coincidental, but this would seem a bit weird since both of them are irregular, as far as I understand. But then again, there are a couple of words in Mordvin with a dialectal alteration between initial n- and l-, but these seem to be relatively late descriptive formations. - Ante Aikio From Georg at home.ivm.de Fri Feb 4 12:47:25 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 13:47:25 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <6a.8ad589.25cb645a@aol.com> Message-ID: >After all, when presented with a new language, what's the first thing we do >to determine whether it's IE or not? >We look at the numerals from one to ten, the family relationship terms, and >so forth. Later on more detailed examination is necessary, but that's the >first step. That'd make Thai Sino-Tibetan (or Japanese, for that matter), but it isn't. Or it'd make a lot of languages what they aren't (if only in the first step). It may be even *my* first step when presented with completely new data, but I'd insert some further steps *before I write down what I "found" in the first step* and rush it out to publishers (no personal snide intended, I have in mind other people than those present here ...). >In fact, that's how the fact that there _is_ an IE family of languages was >discovered in the first place. Sorry, but that's not how the fact that there is an IE family of languages was discovered in the first place. The fact that there is an IE family of languages was discovered in the first place by looking at cognate verbal morphology. Best, Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From Georg at home.ivm.de Fri Feb 4 13:15:29 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 14:15:29 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <200002022001.p531@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: >SG>Gogodala (/wi/), Awin (/wae/), and Gira (/wai/), three Papuan >SG>languages, borrowed Austronesian *wayEG (reconstructed by some >SG>Austronesianists as *vaSeR, which does remind me of a language I know, >SG>but I cannot remember which one ;-). >..you really don't mean German?;-)))) Yes, thanks, that was the name. >.. of course that is correct; so nothing can be generalized. The cases you >cited seem to be due to situations where water is quite precious. I'm not beginning to understand ? Serbocroatian borrowed its word for "excrement" (balega) from Roumanian, and come to think of the English terms /faeces/, /manure/ or the gloss above. Surely, "high value" cannot really lurk behind the motivation for borrowing ? (addendum a: yes, I know that dung as fuel is precious in some societies; addendum b: yes, I know that taboo may play a role here; but, addendum c: I really don't think that pointing to a parameter of "value" as a motivation for borrowing is anything but [quite desperately] ad hoc. Addendum d: Water is pretty precious everywhere.). >Except >the Papuan cases, which could be doubted? Well, if you doubt them, then go ahead, but, then, I'd like to have some detailed reasons (which should not run along the lines of "nobody knows anything about Papuan languages, so we should doubt anything said on them or quoted from them in the first place"). Of course, this is a straw-man only, I'm sure this will not be your line of argumentation. >SG>There are no such concepts. Everything can be borrowed, and there are >SG>examples for everything actually having been borrowed at some point in >SG>space and time. >.. I agree here. And you could agree I think that there in fact are >tendencies for words or meanings to be borrowed first or/easier, e.g. >cultural words, not only because this is mainstream opinion. No reason not to agree here. I was only taking issue with your earlier statement that (not literally) "no linguist will maintain that a word such as one for 'water' could be subject to borrowing" (correct me if I misquoted; if so, no intention). It could, and there are, no shortcut. Best, St. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Feb 4 04:40:08 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 22:40:08 -0600 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000202225420.009a41c0@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: The Dakota mirgation was triggered by European technology in that the Ojibway acquired firearms from the French and used them to expel the Dakota from the NW Great Lakes area. Like the Comanches, later Dakota expansion was based on their skill in using horses for hunting and warfare --another mirgation triggered by European colonization [smip] >[It is not even certain the Dakota migration westward can be laid at the >feet of Europeans - the proximal cause was war with neighboring tribes, >especially the Ojibwa] >-------------- >May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Feb 4 19:29:59 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 14:29:59 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >I don't want to create an "I'm right, you're wrong" thread here. When I say >major upheaval, I'm referring to catastrophic events along the lines of >European invasions -- catastrophe is the norm of history. Eg., the rise of the Zulu kingdom (due to purely indigenous developments) killed half the population of South Africa, caused other upheavals like the Kololo migration which changed the language of the Upper Zambezi to a Sotho dialect from 1000 miles southwards, and sent Nguni-speaking war bands marauding as far north as Lake Victoria -- all within a single generation, all on foot, and all with a technology in most respects more primitive than that of the European neolithic. No wheeled vehicles or draught animals, to name only two aspects. (Archaeological traces of all this are nil, by the way. We wouldn't know about it at all if it weren't for written records and linguistic traces, like Sotho in Zambia and Ndebele in Zimbabwe.) The Galla migrations into the Ethiopian highlands, or the movement of the Maa-speakers into Kenya (the Maasai and Samburu) are other examples. Not to mention that the Germanics had been expanding at the expense of Celtic-speakers for centuries before the Romans came along; as a matter of fact, it was Caesar who forced them out of Gaul and back across the Rhine. What's now Southern Germany and the German-speaking parts of Switzerland was once Celtic-speaking territory. As was Bohemia, which became Germanic and then Slavic in turn. From HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu Fri Feb 4 13:17:54 2000 From: HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu (Herb Stahlke) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 08:17:54 -0500 Subject: Phonological symmetry and merger Message-ID: Pattern pressure, the tendency of sound change to turn asymmetrical phonological inventories into more symmetrical patterns, is a motivation for sound change that historical linguists have often discussed but with a sense of talking about a disreputable cousin. Most of the examples I've seen in texts dealt with it as an influence on phonological splits or the addition of new segments through borrowing, as in the development from the Old English system of voiceless fricatives that voiced between voiced segments to a late Modern English system in which all voiceless fricatives contrasted phonologically with corresponding voiced fricatives, even if the interdental and palato-alveolar pairs are only weakly contrastive. I have not seen discussions of phonological symmetry as a factor in patterns resulting from merger, that is, producing phonetic systems that are balanced even if the underlying phonological systems are not. I'm working on a problem of that sort in the vowel systems of Yoruba dialects. Proto-Yoruba can be reconstructed with a nine-vowel system with nine oral and seven nasal vowels. Mid and high oral vowels, as well as high nasal vowels, contrast for tongue root position [ATR], so that there are two each of high front, mid front, high back, and mid back, one ATR and the other RTR. The system changes in four dialects so that the tongue root contrast disappears as a phonological contrast in high vowels. However, the original system is reflected in one modern dialect in that the high RTR vowels may show up in prefixes on RTR roots and in another in that the high nasal vowels are RTR while the oral vowels are ATR. Thus the original pattern persists but in a phonologically non-contrastive way. I haven't this side of the phonological symmetry issue discussed. There are undoubtedly references I'm missing, and I'd appreciate any insights others may have into this problem. Herb Stahlke Ball State University From Georg at home.ivm.de Fri Feb 4 15:27:05 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 16:27:05 +0100 Subject: Indo-Iranian In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >>Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >>The Achaemenid inscriptions are easily datable, they fall mostly in the >>6th/5th centuries B.C. Traditional datings of Zarathushtra put him in the >>same time (mostly as a contemporary of Dareios I., but this has been >>challenged, lately by Mary Boyce, who assigned him a date considerably >>earlier on the time-scale >> >-- I would agree, given the _extremely_ close correspondances between the >earlier Avestan and Vedic Sanskrit. As far as I remember - and I remember this only vaguely at best - this was indeed part of the argument. Though, would archaicity of language *alone* *really* justify such a drastic readjustment of historical dates ? But maybe someone listening is better informed on this than I am, and there maybe more reasons. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From edsel at glo.be Fri Feb 4 15:49:01 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 16:49:01 +0100 Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2000 8:51 PM > Germanic *ga- related to Latin co-: > There is a discussion of this in Collinge, The Laws of IE, p 207, and > reference to a paper by Bennett (1968) and a book by E Rooth, 1974, Das > vernische Gesetz in Forschung und Lehre, Lund/Gleerup. > Collinge's summary is that the connexion still puzzles people. > Peter [Ed Selleslagh] A personal, rather uninformed suggestion: Could it be that there really are two different prefixes *ga-, one related to the most frequent use of Latin co(n)- (e.g. Gemeinde, Gesellschaft...) and the one in past participles, even though they still may have a common (PIE?) origin, but branched into two separate uses with their own dynamics. On the other hand, Lat. co- is ALSO used in a second type of context where the notion of 'collectivity, togetherness...' is absent, while the meaning is rather one of 'completion': comple:re, comedere.... So: It looks like both meanings exist in Latin and W.Germanic, but in one of the two the syntactic characteristics are quite different. Ed. From Georg at home.ivm.de Fri Feb 4 17:16:35 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 18:16:35 +0100 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000202234209.00997120@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: >>Wrong. Language is not a biological phenomenon, but a cognitive one. >Cognition is a biological process. Ergo, so is language. Language is a social phenomenon, which humans have been able to develop and are able to use and process for purposes intimately connected with social interaction, because they are furnished with certain cognitive abilities; which they are, because their physis meets certain biological prerequisites. The biological substratum furnishes the ability to develop, use and change the tool, it doesn't determine its shape. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From mclasutt at brigham.net Fri Feb 4 19:26:21 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 12:26:21 -0700 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000202234209.00997120@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: > Stanley Friesen >> (John McLaughlin wrote) The >> physical structures which allow complex human language evolved along >> biological lines, but language change is note like biology. When two >> species diverge, they can no longer influence each other. > Not always true. Closely related species can often exchange a limited > amount of genetic material. Full cross sterility takes time to evolve. > This means an occasional hybrid can move genes across a species boundary. > And in prokaryotes, genetic transfers can occur between *distant* > relatives. But prokaryotes are EXTREMELY simple creatures. Language is not simple. Can a horse and an ass produce a fertile offspring? Absolutely not, yet when French mixed with Cree it produced a completely "fertile" offspring--Michif. When a stump of English mixed with lots of Papuan languages, the result was a completely "fertile" offspring--Tok Pisin. You mention that a lion and a leopard can interbreed, yet is the offspring fertile? Or even capable of surviving to adulthood? The only instances of cross-species breeding among complex organisms in any case are man-caused and artificial. While cross-species permanent genetic influence is only found in very limited circumstances among very simple creatures (one-celled) and is not common, cross-linguistic influence is EXTREMELY common and languages that don't participate are extremely rare (if any even exist at all). It's like saying that there are a couple of Australians who know the Star-Spangled Banner, and therefore since all Americans know the Star-Spangled Banner (at least the chorus), Australians are Americans. Doesn't work that way. 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 sonno3 at hotmail.com Fri Feb 4 17:22:20 2000 From: sonno3 at hotmail.com (Christopher Gwinn) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 12:22:20 -0500 Subject: One World Language Message-ID: I wonder if anyone else saw this article? http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/020100sci-archaeo-language.html [ Moderator's note: This URL takes you to a registration page for the on-line _New York Times_. I assume this is the article written by Nicholas Wade about Joseph Greenberg and his Eurasiatic theory. I'll note here that Mr. Wade made use of the public archives of both the Indo-European and Nostratic mailing lists for deep background material. --rma ] From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Feb 4 23:55:12 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 00:55:12 +0100 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) In-Reply-To: <77.1403866.25cb4889@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- there has been no change in the relevant data; only in (Renfrew's) >_interpretation_ of the data; ie., saying that a linguistic change requires a >massive amount of archaeological evidence associated with fundamental >technological-economic transformation. That's not at all what Renfrew says. He's saying that "a massive amount of archaeological evidence associated with fundamental technological-economic transformation requires a linguistic change", as it were. Which is true. The Neolithic Revolution was the second most important such event in European history (the most important was the introduction of language --as we know it-- itself in the Upper Paleolithic, 50-40,000 BP). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Feb 4 18:24:38 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 18:24:38 -0000 Subject: Re Personal pronouns Message-ID: Dear John and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dr. John E. McLaughlin" Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2000 7:14 PM >> [Pat Ryan wrote previously] >>>> It is obvious that "she" can stand for either "(the) woman" or the fuller >>>> NP: "(the) woman (that) we are supposed to meet". >> [Larry Trask previously] >>> Nope. That 'she' cannot take the place of 'woman', and that is the end >>> of it. >> [PR previously] >> I think we shall just have to 'agree to disagree' on this question. The >> definition of 'pronoun' in your dictionary includes the phrase: "... and >> whose members typically have little or no intrinsic meaning or reference." >> Your position is obviously consistent. It is hard for me to >> accept that this is the consensus position. [JM wrote] > It is. Larry's quite clear in his explanation why it is so. [PR] I think you are coming into this discussion a bit late to be able to intuit the point I am trying to make, whether correctly or not. But, I will give you the benefit of the doubt; and ask, before I answer, "why it is so" refers to what point Larry is making? 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 proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Feb 3 21:50:20 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 21:50:20 -0000 Subject: Basque * 'round' Message-ID: Dear Ed and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Eduard Selleslagh" Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2000 12:47 PM ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Monday, January 31, 2000 5:04 PM > Ed Selleslagh writes: > [on my puzzlement over a suggested PIE source] >> So, it is not unreasonable to assume (no hard evidence!!) that *kwelo gave >> rise to a Basque re-interpretation *bel-, via some intermediate (most likely >> IE) stage *(h)wel-. [LT] > "Not unreasonable"? > Well, first the vocalism is wrong. Basque does indeed have another ancient > stem of the form *, but this means 'dark', not 'round'. [PR] For which a look at IE *pel- might be of interest. 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 mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Fri Feb 4 08:04:56 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 08:04:56 GMT Subject: Basque butterflies Message-ID: Among all this talk, it should be remembered that how a language handles a word depends somewhat on the named object or action's place in the life of the people. Butterflies are pretty little things, but they are not a central or essential part of life (unless the early Basques knew already of the connection between some species of butterfly and damage to crops from caterpillar infestations). Thus the word would be liable as centuries passed, to frivolous alterations and replacements. From sonno3 at hotmail.com Fri Feb 4 19:30:09 2000 From: sonno3 at hotmail.com (Christopher Gwinn) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 14:30:09 -0500 Subject: Basque Message-ID: The big problem with accepting Lusitanian as Celtic is that Lusitanian preserves the PIE -P- (lost by Celtic) in the word Porcom (Celtic *Orco- "pig" note British Orcades "Pig-land"). It is possible that Lusitanian may be a late survival of a type of Proto-Celtic, however. From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Fri Feb 4 16:11:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 16:11:00 GMT Subject: Basque Message-ID: This wonderful argumentation seems to be somewhat 'neo-grammarian'. Which has added much to our knowledge, but we know where the limits are. Of course we must try to find out rules, but we must accept that there always are many variations in natural languages and dialects, where these rules only exist in written 'classical' literature (cf. sanskrit). After all, this is an Indo-European list, and therefore I looked for a possible loan influence. HJH From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Fri Feb 4 16:10:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 16:10:00 GMT Subject: Basque Message-ID: No problem to change it a little: > What about being 'bil' a loan from Gaulish? > PIE *kwel- > Cel *kwi:l- > Gaul *pi:l > ! > bask. bil > cf PIE *penque > Cel *kwinkwe > Gaul *pimpetos (ordinal) 1) Regarding the semantics: Remember that the Celts were famous for their cartwright-technique. 2) Regarding the phonetics: loans are often changed to the next native sound available. Listen to a Bavarian trying to spell "German"! He most times will change the [dzh-]>[tsh-] (cave any Bav. reading here!). Of course the i-prefixed verbform is an argument /against/ borrowing from Celtic. HJH From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Feb 4 09:12:47 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 09:12:47 +0000 Subject: Hualde's view Message-ID: Roz Frank writes: > Larry, what you describe Hualde as proposing doesn't seem to coincide with > the contents of the paper that I read. As you may recall, the last time you > paraphrased Hualde's position, saying that he argued that Pre-Basque had > facultative voicing, Hualde himself wrote a response to the list. Yet I > notice that you are repeating the same thing again here. So I'm confused. In the quoted passage, Hualde elaborates somewhat on his views, but the fundamental point remains the same. In Michelena's view, Pre-Basque permitted only a single labial plosive word-initially, */b-/. This */b-/ develops regularly into modern /b-/, except in circumstances in which it becomes /m-/. Similar remarks apply to the other plosives. As far as I can see, Hualde agrees in not recognizing a "robust" (his word) contrast between */b-/ and */p-/ in initial position in Pre-Basque, though his view of the phonetics is different from Michelena's. But the crucial difference is as before: Hualde allows Pre-Basque */b-/ to develop variably into /b-/ and /p-/ in the modern language. He has elaborated on his account of this, but he doesn't seem to have changed his central view. [quote from Hualde] > The problem of the ancient Basque plosves, as stated by Martinet and > others before him, can be summarized as follows: " How come Basque, which > has a robust opposition between voiceless and voiced oral stops in > intervocalic position, shows a much weaker contrast in word-initial > position?" From Martinet's structuralist standpoint this is a problem > because the word-initial position is supposed to be the one where the > greatest number of contrasts is found in any language. OK; I'll try to respond to this. The view attributed here to Martinet is not one which most linguists, structuralist or not, would defend to the death. Look at English. English has three contrasting nasals in medial and final position, but only two in initial position. English has an [esh]-[ezh] voicing contrast in fricatives word-medially (even though the functional load is low), but not initially. And nobody seems to think that this is intolerable or impossible. > To solve this > problem, Martinet made up a story that has to do with an ancient contrast > between fortis and lenis stops which was later somehow replaced by the > modern voiced/voiceless contrast. Michelena adopts a version of this > hypothesis, which has become the standard account. Correct. > My view is different. Basque differs from most languages presenting > assimilation in voice across morpheme- and word-boundaries in that it is > the morpheme- or word-initial consonant that assimilates to the preceding > morpheme- or word-final one, instead of the other way round. So in Basque > /s+d/ becomes [st], etc., whereas in, say, Spanish, /s+d/ becomes [zd]. > E.g. the initial /d/ of "s/he is coming" becomes /t/ in [estator] > "s/he is not coming", [menditi(k)tator] "s/he is coming from the mountain", > etc. Or, to give you another example, whereas "head"starts with a > /b/, the same morpheme starts with /p/ in, say, [ajspuru] "stone head". Agreed. > Nowadays, there is little chance that Basque speakers will identify initial > [p] and [b] as allophonic variants, bacause of (a) their familiarity with > Spanish or French and Indeed, but, in the standard account, it is widely suspected that it was largely the influence of Romance which led to the introduction of voicing contrasts into initial plosives in Basque. > (b) because the assimilation rule tends to apply only > in restricted phrasal contexts. BUT assuming that this assimilation applied > more frequently in the past (as Michelena also assumes) it stands to > reason that if and , and , and so on for lots > of plosive-initial words, are variants of the same word in different > phonological context, this would inevitably lead towards a merger of the > voiced and voiceless oral stops in morpheme- and word-initial position > (where the alternation is found) but not morpheme-internally. End of the > story. The more complicated Martinet-Michelena hypothesis (which in > addition requires an unexplained transformation from ancient to modern > Basque) is, in my view, simply not needed and has no serious evidence in > its favor. Thanks for allowing me to clarify my position. First, I query that word "unexplained". The standard account holds that the explanation was mainly Romance influence. This influence led to the introduction of contrasts like 'wharf, quay' (a loan) and 'material' (a native word), and 'pair' (a loan) and 'slug' (zool.) (and other senses) (native). This doesn't look to me like the absence of an explanation -- though of course no one is obliged to buy this explanation. Second, why is this version less "complicated" than Michelena's? Michelena posits a Pre-Basque with no initial voicing contrast, developing under Romance influence into modern Basque, with initial voicing contrasts. Hualde appears here to be proposing a Pre-Pre-Basque with initial voicing contrasts, followed by a "merger" resulting in a Pre-Basque with no initial voicing contrasts, followed by modern Basque, once again with initial voicing contrasts. This is simpler? > Are we talking about a terminological problem? I mean when you use the term > "facultative" does it correspond to what Hualde describes. In other words, > does the following sentence by you mean the same thing or infer the same > thing that Hualde has stated? >> Pre-Basque had facultative voicing: that is, they could be realized, >> indifferently, either as [b d g] or as [p t k] -- "indifferently", > Stated differently, and please excuse me if I'm being obtuse, can the terms > "facultative" and "indifferently" be used to refer to a situation in which > the voicing is conditioned by certain phonological constraints, i.e., that > the voicing was phonological consistent when those constraints were > present. Could it be that you are saying the same thing as Hualde but I > don't understand the terminology that you are using. Yes, I *think* we are saying the same thing -- namely, that, in Pre-Basque, the voicing of initial plosives was non-contrastive. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Feb 5 02:57:47 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 21:57:47 EST Subject: Horses in War Message-ID: In a message dated 2/3/00 10:18:48 AM, alderson at netcom.com wrote: <> Gadzooks! But I must repeat what I reported at that time: Homer DOES NOT have chariots jumping ditches. He has Hector come up with that bright idea - Hector representing the brawn not the brains of the Trojan staff. He does suggest- and this was the only time I find it in Homer - "our horses shall lightly leap over the digged ditch." He is talked out of it by Polydamas, who points out the ditch "has sharp stakes set in it." Polydamas then patiently gives Hector an alternative suggestion: "As for the horses, let the squires hold them back by the trench, but let us on foot, arrayed in our armour, follow all in one throng after Hector; and the Achaeans will not withstand us,..." Illiad 12.50 et seq Apollo later sends a storm that tramps down the banks of the ditch protecting the Achaean ships and creates a causeway that the Trojans can cross, but they get banged up and have to beat a quick retreat and that's where Homer tells us precisely what happens when chariots cross a ditch: "nor was it in good order that they crossed the trench again.... tbe hosts of Troy, whom the digged trench held back against their will. And in the trench many pairs of swift horses, drawers of chariots, brake the pole at the end, and left the chariots of their lords...." Iliad 16.369 (et seq) As far as Homer's credibility in general, please recall that the ever-mentioned consensus at one time was that there was no Troy, there were no Greek-speaking Mycenaeans, the catalog of ships was pure fantasy, if there were chariots there would also have been mounted riders, etc. etc, etc. I remember being told a long time ago that if the Classicist has learned anything important in the last 150 years, it was don't bet against Homer - "it's like betting against the Yankees." The oral tradition that 'Homer' [or the Homers] put in writing keeps demonstrating that it had a powerful vein of accuracy running through it. With much forsooth, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Feb 5 06:14:25 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 01:14:25 EST Subject: Horses in War Message-ID: In a message dated 2/5/00 12:40:52 AM, mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk wrote: << X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:- >> (from Tom Clancy - who also mentions cavalry's superiority to chariotry:) > Only once the modern stirrup was invented. I once saw on TV a reconstruction of a Roman cavalryman :: on each skirt of his saddle was a sideways projection, which the rider hooked his knee round, and that held him quite firm against impacts.>> Yes - the principle was to either tie or grasp yourself to the saddle or tie or grasp yourself to the horse. The rudimentary stirrup (now dated to India 2d century BC) was a block of wood -essentially something to stand on. The improvement was of course the shifting of leverage of the rider's weight down to his or her feet. And the difference from the Roman knee grips is the difference between playing tug-of-war on your knees versus your feet. Or for that matter turning to shoot an arrow on your knees versus on your feet. The weight of armor of course gave other advantages to the stirrup - including getting on and not falling off. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Feb 5 07:19:58 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 02:19:58 EST Subject: Horses Message-ID: I wrote: <<- What was the word for horse in Armenian?>> In a message dated 2/4/00 11:16:42 PM, mcv at wxs.nl replied: <> I also wrote: <> mcv at wxs.nl replied: <<*g^hei- "antreiben, lebhaft bewegen (schleudern) oder bewegt sein". Skt. hayah. "horse". See my other message [which was:] Given the phonetic shape (*tsitsi-), one might think (just a thought) of some reduplicated form *dzidzei- connected with Skt. hayah. "horse" and Arm. ji, jioy ([dzi]) "horse" < PIE *g^hei- (satem *dzhei-).>> So this appears to be a different word for horse - coming from a different (?) root than *ekwos - with the sense "mover, self-mover, something that propels?" (I think.) I assume that *g^hei has not been suggested as >*ekwos or vice versa (that may be a mistake) so this suggests that the two words may reflect different 'traditions'. And the traditions possibly conflicted in Armenian or at least the outcome was that both words appear and either the *ekwos word was applied to donkey first or the *g^hei word was applied to horse first? And the other was applied by default? Does this make sense? And if it does, could it be possible that ji<*g^hei reflects a more native PIE word for horse or equid than *ekwos - which does not necessarily show known PIE roots (that's my understanding at least)? Also mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> Would this suggest that onus/asinus are not from PIE and that the occurence of 'ass' in IE languages happens late? Regards, Steve Long From edsel at glo.be Sat Feb 5 14:50:20 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 15:50:20 +0100 Subject: Horses Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" Sent: Friday, February 04, 2000 4:53 AM > Wolfgang Schulze wrote: >> By the way: Why is it so difficult to accept that Sumerians used to term >> horses 'donkeys (that stem from / of) the mountains' and that they might >> have used the term ans^e-kur(r)a as it appears ('phonetically' speaking)? > It's not difficult to accept, it's just that the Sumerian word > apparently (according to Miguel Civil) *was* (usually > written , just like "smith" was usually > written , to quote Robert Whiting on ANE). It's of > course the same word as Akkadian sisu^ "horse", but the Akkadian > is also borrowed from an unknown source. Given the phonetic > shape (*tsitsi-), one might think (just a thought) of some > reduplicated form *dzidzei- connected with Skt. hayah. "horse" > and Arm. ji, jioy ([dzi]) "horse" < PIE *g^hei- (satem *dzhei-). > Miguel Carrasquer Vidal [Ed] Note that in Basque, 'zezen' means 'bull'. At least it has four legs ;-) Coincidence? Another loan cum semantic shift? Or did these words originally mean 'big four-legged domesticated animal' or 'head of cattle' or something of that kind? Ed. Selleslagh From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Feb 5 03:30:23 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 22:30:23 EST Subject: Archaeologists Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 2/4/00 7:48:48 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- we're not talking about linguistics and archaeology; it's linguistics and one small group of archaeologists.>> It's not a small group, sir. And it's not one with small influence. But certainly it is a group that might offer some open minds, if anyone were looking for such an odd quality in a scholar. ;) Regards, Steve Long The Tyranny of Paradigms: An Americanist's Participant Observation of Archaeological Practice, Methods and Theory in Europe. By Maximilian O. Baldia Institute for the Study of Earth and Man Heroy Science Hall Southern Methodist University 3225 Daniel Avenue Dallas, Texas 75275-0274 USA. mobaldia at earthlink.net As an American trained archaeologist, dealing largely with Northern European archaeology, one is enabled to perceive the diverse paradigms that guide European archaeologists from various countries in the analysis of a single North European archaeological culture. This involuntary participant observation provides amazing insights into what is and is not considered archaeological fact. Examples are provided that show the weight that diverse paradigms bring to bear on chronology, explanations of culture change, and even the measurement and reconstruction of archaeological monuments from what may or may not be a single archaeological culture. From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Feb 5 04:09:16 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 23:09:16 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: In a message dated 2/4/00 12:17:35 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> It seems the only way to do this is one "factoid" at a time. I have a book here Harper-Collins Atlas of Archaeology (rev 1999) (with foreward by Colin Renfrew) that states that 'Agriculture reached the Balkans in the 7th millenium BC.' And I have here from A Whittle Neolithic Europe: A Survey a date for Kremikovci in Bulgaria - a mesolithic settlement in the Balkans acquiring agriculture about 5800BC. Now both of these clearly contradict your statement that 'farming had spread to the whole of the Balkans by 7000 BCE'. Might this apparent conflict with your information suggest that you might want to get more familiar with the subject matter? To paraphrase your own statements, what that statement may be is 'historical nonsense." Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Feb 5 04:45:10 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 23:45:10 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: In a message dated 2/4/00 12:17:35 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> Next 'factoid': "Farming had spread ... well into what's now France by 5000 BCE." Actually I have one site in France from this period - at the southern edge of the Bandkeramik corridor - Cuiry-les-Chaudardes. I'm not sure that it isn't slightly later than 5000BC and I'm not sure that it is a Bandkeramik settlement. (Any corrections are welcome, please.) However, core analysis of pollen deposits indicating forest clearance and the growth of domesticated plants have not yielded dates in France earlier than I believe 4600BC. The earliest Bandkeramik style sites in France I have been able to find is at Larzicourt which I believe yields a date of @4700BC. (Corrections, please, of course.) (Once again, any sign of farming by itself quite obviously does not correlate to the spread of IE languages. The origins of farming in the Near East - for example - do not appear to involve PIE.) As to your statement - ""Farming had spread ... well into what's now France by 5000 BCE." It appears that a more correct statement is that evidence of farming appears in France before 5000BC. It also appears that a more correct statement is that the evidence indicates "Farming had spread ... well into what's now France by @4500 BCE." This would be about the time - maybe a little later - that colonists from the Danube area would have populated the area sufficiently to settle in and begin to differentiate in their language. The circumstance is perhaps similiar to the first appearance of Spanish settlers in the Americas (@1492) and the differentiation in one sees in Latin American Spanish in 2000AD - 500 years later. Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Feb 5 05:13:05 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 00:13:05 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: In a message dated 2/4/00 12:17:35 PM, you wrote: <> So let's stick to linguistics and let's not find ourselves arguing the archaeological evidence - which seems to keep happening in the last posts. Let me suggest a date of @4500BC for the functional final unity of non-Anatolian 'narrow PIE' and located it at that time stretching from Holland across north central in a 6 degree lat band to the upper Dniestr, Dnieper and Bug - the extent of the Bandkeramik culture. (This is I think roughly half the expanse of Latin about100AD.) You are saying that that in 3500 to 4000 years this language would have given rise to more differentiation than is seen in the attested IE languages at those later dates (1000-500BC) Your 3500BC? date for wide PIE - 3500 to 4000 years later - would give us the IE languages of 1-500AD. Can you point to the increased differentiation in that period? It isn't that more languages are attested, is it? Because that is not differentiation, that's preservation. I'm beginning to suspect that 'linguistic nonsense' may be a two-way street. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Feb 5 05:42:01 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 00:42:01 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: I wrote: <<>But the hypothesis does actually reasonably suggest that Greek's >'grandparent' and Hittite's 'grandparent' should have had a closer >relationship than a coeval IE language located across the continent. In a message dated 2/4/00 12:17:35 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: -- yes. And they DON'T.>> And not a paragraph before that you say 'You do not GET uniform languages over large areas.' And then you talk about Latin. Or English for that matter. There's a new rule for every situation. Linguistic nonsense. I wrote: >great-great-grand parent IE language arrived in western europe in the >middle-late European neolithic. JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- No. Renfrew specifically attributes the arrival of the IE languages in Europe to the EARLY neolithic; to the introduction of agriculture as such.>> Yes. SORRY. But yes. Not 'the introduction of agriculture as such' - The term 'middle neolithic' as applied to Europe as a whole (not locally) encompasses my 4500-4000BC date. For some reason you are calling the whole process 'early neolithic'. Neolithic is basically a distinction from mesolithic. Early neolithic in Europe as a whole generally denotes the period before 5000BC. Locally the term is sometimes used when different sub-periods can be identified. But in terms of Europe, farming 'as such' is also being introduced in the late neolithic and in some areas even in the 'European iron age.' Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Feb 5 05:52:41 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 00:52:41 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com In a message dated 2/4/00 12:17:35 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<>I don't believe that any current theory is that Greek and Sanskrit managed >to split-off from PIE in the Ukraine and went their separate ways sharing >innovations that are not found in PIE. -- that is precisely the current consensus theory. Both Greek and Sanskrit (and Armenian and Phyrgian) belonged to an east-central group of dialects within PIE. They lost contact sometime in the course of Indo-Iranian's spread to the east and pre-Greek's movement south. This accounts parsimoniously for all the observable linguistic data.>> Now this is interesting. And it actually gets back to the subject of the thread. So you are saying a proto-language of Greek, Sanskrit, Armenian and Phrygian was located in the Ukraine? And this language was not PIE or even narrow PIE. What dates would you put on that language? Would you have any notion of how that group of speakers would correlate with archaeologically? What shared attributes would you suggest uniquely group those four languages as opposed to other IE languages? As far as the consensus goes - where do you find evidence of this consensus? (I mean apart from Mallory.) Is there a specific poll that was taken or is it something that's reflected in a count of recent papers on the subject? Regards, Steve Long From sarima at friesen.net Sun Feb 6 06:24:52 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 22:24:52 -0800 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:55 AM 2/5/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >That's not at all what Renfrew says. He's saying that "a >massive amount of archaeological evidence associated with >fundamental technological-economic transformation requires a >linguistic change", as it were. Which is true. The Neolithic >Revolution was the second most important such event in European >history (the most important was the introduction of language --as >we know it-- itself in the Upper Paleolithic, 50-40,000 BP). I think that date is rather too late. That is more likely the date at which language was introduced into Europe. How much earlier language was invented is unclear, but it could be as long ago as 200,000 years ago, with the first appearance of anatomically modern humans in Africa. The Upper Paleolithic (or its equivalent) begins earlier,and more gradually, outside of Europe. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From lmfosse at online.no Sun Feb 6 12:26:41 2000 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 13:26:41 +0100 Subject: SV: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal [SMTP:mcv at wxs.nl] skrev 05. februar 2000 00:55: >The Neolithic > Revolution was the second most important such event in European > history (the most important was the introduction of language --as > we know it-- itself in the Upper Paleolithic, 50-40,000 BP). Exactly how do you know that language as we know it was introduced in the Upper Paleolithic? Modern man has apparently been around for the last 300,000 years, with all the necessary bodily apparatus needed for speech production. Given that his success depended upon group work, I find it rather improbable that language as we know it did not develop much earlier than the Upper Paleolithic. So why should 50,000 BP be the limit? Best regards, Lars Martin Fosse Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114, 0674 Oslo Norway Phone/Fax: +47 22 32 12 19 Email: lmfosse at online.no From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 7 02:42:15 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 21:42:15 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: In a message dated 2/5/00 8:56:07 PM Mountain Standard Time, mcv at wxs.nl writes: >He's saying that "a massive amount of archaeological evidence associated with fundamental technological-economic transformation requires a linguistic change", as it were. Which is true. >> -- not necessarily. What Renfrew desperately wants to establish is that linguistic change (and therefore cultural change) can't happen _without being visible to archaeologists_. Many countries have gone through massive technological-economic changes without a change of language; conversely, many changes of language have not been accompanied by massive technological-economic change. Eg., for just one example, the spread of Slavic. Or of Indo-Iranian into Iran and India, for another, which is definitely post-neolithic. It's probable -- but unprovable -- that a new language/language family entered Europe with agriculture, but there's no evidence whatsoever that it was IE, and much that it wasn't. It would be nice to have a tidy archaeological sequence to associate with the spread of IE languages (incidentally, I'd bet the Corded Ware phenomenon is linked with the Indo-Europeanization of the area between the Rhine delta and Moscow) but the world doesn't arrange itself in so tidy a fashion. From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Sat Feb 5 05:15:36 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 23:15:36 -0600 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: At 08:36 PM 2/3/00 EST, you wrote: >>frank at uiowa.edu writes: ><< 1) what then is the standard reconstruction proposed for Skt. pu:r-, Greek >> and Baltic ? And the prototype meaning assigned to it? >-- *pelh(x), "fort, fortified place"..e. Could you elaborate a bit more in order to explain why the phonologicial shape of the Gk. and Baltic items take precedence over that of the Skt. pu:r-? Are there a general set of rules that show the regular correspondence of Sk. words in to Greek and Baltic , i.e., that there are other examples of the same transformations? >There's a possible cognate in Armenian -- 'k'alak', meaning "city". >>2) is this set considered a good candidate for admission to the (P)IE >>lexicon? Stated differently, does attestation in Sanskrit, Greek and Baltic >>languages suffice for a data set to be considered part of the (P)IE lexicon? >-- a dialect word of the south and east of the PIE world, at least. >There's also *uriien, 'fort', which gives Mycenaean 'rijo', promontory, and >Tocharian 'ri', 'town'. Do these examples imply that there was a loss of the initial plosive in the last example and that one could posit an earlier * or perhaps * for Tocharian? What are the data sources for the reconstruction *uriien? Do you mean to suggest by citing this example that there was a loss of the initial plosive in the case of Tocharian. If so, how is that explained? Is the correspondence regular between Sanskrit and Tocharian with respect to the loss of the initial plosive, i.e., does it occur with other words. Then with respect to the prototype meaning, is the choice of "fort, fortified place" based on the fact that such a location/structure would antedate an urban site such as "town" or "city"; or is there some other basis for this choice? And back to the candidacy of this item for admission into the (P)IE lexicon, does the presence of the various and sundry lexemes that make up Buck's entries under "town" (19.15) and "fortress" (20.35) indicate that it is assumed that there is no recoverable/identifiable (P)IE etynom for the concept "fort, fortified place"? In the case of , et. al. I once read that they believed that the referential object to which it once applied as an Iron Age "hill-fort", although I don't recall the exact citation. Thanks in advance for the info. Roz Frank From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Feb 5 09:37:40 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 10:37:40 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >>frank at uiowa.edu writes: ><< 1) what then is the standard reconstruction proposed for Skt. pu:r-, Greek >> and Baltic ? And the prototype meaning assigned to it? >-- *pelh(x), "fort, fortified place". (JoatSimeon at aol.com): >There's a possible cognate in Armenian -- 'k'alak', meaning "city". This is an Iranian loanword (also found in Georgian and Syriac) < MP /kl'k/ (OI * kala:ka-). An etymological connection with sthl. *pelh- othl. is completely out of the question. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Feb 5 11:21:43 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 12:21:43 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>frank at uiowa.edu writes: ><< 1) what then is the standard reconstruction proposed for Skt. pu:r-, Greek >> and Baltic ? And the prototype meaning assigned to it? >-- *pelh(x), "fort, fortified place". >There's a possible cognate in Armenian -- 'k'alak', meaning "city". Olsen "The Noun in Biblical Armenian", p. 952 [in teh section "words of unknown origin"], quotes a suggestion by Winter to derive k`aLak` from *pwlhs, which is the exact opposite of what I suggested (palatalized *p^). Indeed in Armenian, labialized consonants *tw, *sw and *kw merge as *kw (> ), so why not *pw? On the other hand, the word might simply be another Iranian loan (MP kala:G "fortress"), although Klingenschmitt proposes to derive both from PIE *klh- (Lith. kalnas "mountain"). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Feb 5 12:05:20 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 12:05:20 -0000 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: Miguel wrote: >For instance, I don't think > Benveniste's root-theory allows *i and *u in the V position (or > does it?). It would be nice to have statistics. Forgive my ignorance - I'm puzzled here. *CiC and *CuC roots are plentiful, e.g. *digh goat, *bhidh pot, *k'ik strap, *knid louse; *trus reed, *k'up shoulder, *k'udh dung, *lus louse etc etc. Could you help me understand what you meant here? Peter From edsel at glo.be Sat Feb 5 14:42:22 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 15:42:22 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Friday, February 04, 2000 2:36 AM >> frank at uiowa.edu writes: > << 1) what then is the standard reconstruction proposed for Skt. pu:r-, Greek >> and Baltic ? And the prototype meaning assigned to it? [Ed] And Slavic toponyms like Plzen' (Ger. Pilsen). > -- *pelh(x), "fort, fortified place". > There's a possible cognate in Armenian -- 'k'alak', meaning "city". [Ed] Could Celtic 'briga' (> Gmc. burg) be a cognate? (and what about the Phryges, Bruges?) >> 2) is this set considered a good candidate for admission to the (P)IE >> lexicon? Stated differently, does attestation in Sanskrit, Greek and Baltic >> languages suffice for a data set to be considered part of the (P)IE lexicon? > -- a dialect word of the south and east of the PIE world, at least. > There's also *uriien, 'fort', which gives Mycenaean 'rijo', promontory, and > Tocharian 'ri', 'town'. [Ed] But that exist in a whole series of non-IE lgs.: Basque i/uri (< PB ili), mod. Hebr. 'ir (long form yeru), Akkadian ur (like in Ur-Salimmu = Yeru-shala'im = Jerusalem), (Sumerian??) etc. Maybe 'Ilion' (Troy) is derived from that. So, even though it may have been part of the PIE vocabulary, it is apparently not exclusively IE. A loan? Ed. Selleslagh From varny at cvtci.com.ar Sat Feb 5 13:44:59 2000 From: varny at cvtci.com.ar (Vartan and Nairy Matiossian) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 10:44:59 -0300 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: frank at uiowa.edu writes: > << 1) what then is the standard reconstruction proposed for Skt. pu:r-, Greek >> and Baltic ? And the prototype meaning assigned to it? > -- *pelh(x), "fort, fortified place". JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > There's a possible cognate in Armenian -- 'k'alak', meaning "city". Unfortunately, Arm. k'al'ak' "city" is not IE, it comes from Sem. kalakku (e.g. the Neo-Assyrian city "Kalakku") -- Vartan and Nairy Matiossian Casilla de Correo 2, Sucursal 53 1453 Buenos Aires Argentina From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Feb 5 06:44:24 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 01:44:24 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: fX99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Are you sure it works in your favor? -- of course it does; and note that pretty well every linguist agrees with me. >Following Renfrew, roughly 4000 years separates non-Anatolian PIE -- rather more, actually. More like 6000. >from Mycenaean (1200BC), Sanskrit (1000BC?) and Latin (500BC). How >'differentiated' are those three languages? On a scale of 1 to 10? -- around 2. About as different from each other as the Romance languages today -- in a stage where the similarities leap off the page and where some words and phrases are still mutually comprehensible. Which is to say, with separation somewhere in the 1000 to 2000 years range. The dialects leading to Sanskrit and Greek would have separated sometime in the mid 3rd millenium BCE, with Latin a bit earlier. Try this: the word for "fire" in Sanskrit and Latin: Nom. sing. agnis ignis acc. sing. agnim ignem dative agnibhyas ignibus Latin and Greek still used nearly the same term for their principle god: Juppiter/Zeus Pater. The examples can be multiplied without end. The similarities between, say, Ancient Irish and Latin are also striking -- the Irish of the Ogham inscriptions is an orthodox IE inflected language, without any of the odd features that developed over the next couple of centuries. >And you say there is too little differentiation for Renfrew's scenario to be >true? -- far too little. Enormously too little. >But once again, based on any objective standard at all, what is the measure >of differentiation and how do you apply it against the ancient IE languages >so you know what date is too much and what is just enough? A very specific >question! -- and one which would require you to study the languages concerned for several years before you could understand it. That's the problem when you try to 'reinvent the wheel' in an unfamiliar field without an adequate knowledge base. Short form, even if ALL the IE languages changed as slowly as the MOST conservative IE language known (Lithuanian) Renfrew's date would still be utterly out of the question. And to so suppose is grossly improbable. The basic principle of science is uniformitarianism; in this specific instance, we must assume that linguistic behavior in prehistory covered roughly the same range as it does in historic times. That, of course, is precisely the principle that Renfrew violates. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Feb 5 07:27:40 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 02:27:40 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >As far as I know, the Hittite word for "wheel" is . No relation to >the *kwel->words. >> -- 'hurkis' is derived from PIE *hwergh, and cognate to TocharianA 'warkant' (wheel) and TocharianB 'yerkwanto'. The agreement between Hittite and Tocharian -- very widely separated IE languages -- would suggest PIE status for this word as well. There's a broad overlap in the 4 PIE words for wheel: 1. *kwekwlom -- Germanic, Phrygian, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Tocharian, Balto-slavic, and closely related terms in Celtic This probably referred to the wheels in a two-wheeled cart, given the dual form in Old Irish ('cul', from *kwolo via *kwolos). "The two roundy-roundy things". 2. *Hwergh -- Tocharian, Hittite 3. *dhroghos -- Celtic, Greek, Armenian 4. *roto -- Celtic, Latin, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Indo-Iranian, and possibly Tocharian. So while none of the 4 occurs in all the groups -- one wouldn't expect that, eh? -- every single one occurs in at least _two_ of the groups. Eg., Tocharian and Hittite share cognates derived from *hwergh, Tocharian has derivatives of *kwekwlom and possibly *roto, etc. They're all fairly transparent, too: "the round thing", "the thing that goes round and round", "the runner", and so forth. This is what you'd expect if proto-Indo-European speakers invented the wheel, by the way -- otherwise there should be at least one loan-word for "wheel", one that isn't resolvable into a PIE root. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Feb 5 08:13:53 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 02:13:53 -0600 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I seem to remember we went through this before and that someone --either expert, eloquent or both-- explained that Pama-Nyungan split up about 6,000 years ago or so and may or may not have something to do with an era of technological innovation around that time --e.g. introduction of the dingo, new types of tools/weapons, etc. And there was a suggestion that they may have originally have been an immigrant group from New Guinea or Indonesia or may have been a local group that expanded thanks to the new technology >>. Is it? This is an IE group, but if we take a look beyond our IE nose, >>e.g. to Australia, we find about 70 % covered by speakers of Pama-Nyungan, >>the languages/dialects of which are regarded as very closely related. And >>archeologists now redate the first settlements back to more than 50.000 >>years (for a up-to-date overview see Stringer in Antiquity 73/99:876). Of >>course these must not be the direct predecessors of Pama-Nyungan. >I think you mean "may not" or "cannot", and indeed it is most unlikely that >the common ancestor of Pama-Nyungan dates to the period of the earliest human >occupation of Australia. In fact we have hardly any idea of the time depth of >this family. And "very closely related" is a very misleading way to describe >these languages. They may sometimes be described as closely related, but only >by way of contrast to the other language families in the north and west of >Australia, which are lexically and typologically highly diverse. Consider the >immediate neighbours of Dyirbal, as described by Dixon (1972): Yidin (27% >common vocabulary), Mbabaram (18%), Warungu (47%) and Wargamay (60%). Only the >last shows any structural similarity to Dyirbal, and Dixon is uncertain >whether this is the result of a relatively close genetic relationship or a >long period of contiguity and convergence. All this is within Pama-Nyungan, in >fact within a 100 km radius in one small corner of Queensland. >Ross Clark From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Feb 5 07:29:05 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 02:29:05 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 2/5/00 12:22:51 AM Mountain Standard Time, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: << And in the process they may suggest other locations where an earlier PIE unity occurred. >> -- sigh. "There can be only one." Unity, that is. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Feb 5 07:33:33 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 02:33:33 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 2/5/00 12:22:51 AM Mountain Standard Time, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: << The domesticated horse is now at about 4000BC and horse bones are in the food pits a thousand years before that. >> -- which indicates precisely... nothing at all. Humans and pre-human hominids have been eating horses for more than 400,000 years, for God's sake! Horse bones with butchering markes are older than H. Sapiens Sapiens by a factor of two -- are you going to say we should hold our breaths for evidence than horses were domesticated by the Neanderthals? And Homo Ergaster? There is precisely _one_ indication of horse domestication as early as 4000 BCE; a set of teeth with wear-marks characteristic of a bit. Most of the horse bones recovered from the Ukrainian sites of that date do _not_ show signs of riding or bits; they show signs of butchering marks. Bit wear is extremely distinctive. And teeth are extremely durable. They last better than any other part of the skeleton. The evidence to date is that the horse was domesticated in the Ukraine, around 4000 BCE, on a very small scale. Use of horses as draught/riding animals thereupon spread, rather gradually at first, through the Ukrainian steppe zone, not becoming common for some centuries thereafter. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Feb 5 07:41:22 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 02:41:22 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: And, for example, cattle dairying -- well-attested from the PIE vocabulary, with words for 'to milk' (cows), curds, whey, 'cow rich in milk', butter, etc., is generally dated to the mid-4th millenium BCE. (eg., McCormick, 1992, "Early Faunal Evidence for Dairying", Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 11, 201-209). Note also that the genes for lactose tolerance (ability to digest cow's-milk as an adult) show a distinct drop-off in Mediterranean Europe and the Near East, but are high in northern and eastern Europeans. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Feb 5 07:50:43 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 02:50:43 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: Several distinct types of cloth production also dating to the 4th millenium -- eg., felting -- (see E.J.W. Barber, 1991, Prehistoric Textiles, Princton university press) also have PIE lexical references. Thus we have *pilso, "felt". There are also a number of words relating to weaving in general. But PIE does _not_ have a word for the warp-weighted loom, which was developed in the Danube valley and spread eastwards in the Late Neolithic. The Greek vocabulary for this type of loom is entirely borrowed, for example; none in Indo-Iranian either, etc. Hence PIE probably cannot have been spoken in an area and/or at a time when this technology was known. Hence there can't have been PIE speakers in the Middle Danube towards the end of the Neolithic. One more brick... From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Feb 5 07:52:50 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 02:52:50 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >proto-language at email.msn.com writes: I believe that a comparison of Egyptian r', 'sun' (ideographically written: a circle with >*central dot* [=axle?]) and IE *rot(h)o-, 'wheel', is likely. >> -- this would be interesting, if it weren't for the fact that the Egyptians didn't use wheeled vehicles (or the horse) until very late -- 2nd millenium BCE. And, of course, there's no evidence at all of a genetic relationship between Egyptian (or Afroasiatic) and PIE. From sarima at friesen.net Sat Feb 5 07:55:04 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 23:55:04 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:53 AM 2/4/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >I simply MUST point out what is happening here. >Much of your 'late Neolithic technology' - aside from the wheel - no longer >supports the unity dates they once did and they do not necessarily refute the >neolithic hypothesis regarding PIE. >in the Ukraine, metal smelting appears about 4500BC - hammered metal appears >well before that. The domesticated horse is now at about 4000BC and horse >bones are in the food pits a thousand years before that. Umm, circa 4000 BC is my current best guess for the time of unity. (I currently suspect the Sredny Stog culture of being the basic PIE culture). The horse as food doesn't fit with its place in PIE. > Alot of this >'late' neolithic technology is now arriving in the Ukraine with neolithicism >or just afterwards. >The list of objects that will establish PIE unity in say 3300BC in the >Ukraine is now fast dwindling. 3300 BC is rather late for the unity, IMHO. > Heck, even red ochre graves were identified >in the Bug-Dniestr sites dating before 4500BC. One doesn't expect the core PIE culture to be unrelated to adjacent cultures! And there is little in the use of ochre in burials to match with linguistic evidence. >Now the question becomes - if all of these other objects with any confidence >can only hold a last date of say 4500BC - how can wheeled transport still be >used to preserve PIE unity as much as 1500 years later? Umm, *I* am not talking about 1500 years later! Only about 500. The Neolithic starts at circa 7000 BC over most of eastern Europe. THAT is 2000 years earlier than the 4000 BC date for the combined presence of horses for riding, metal, and wheels,. And it is also important to realize that steppe nomads have always historically been dependent on adjacent agricultural societies to some degree. So even a steppe nomad culture must be deemed Neolithic, as it is almost certainly post-agriculture. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Feb 5 09:14:55 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 04:14:55 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >First, let me say again that 7000BC dates for neolithicization in Europe >beyond the Balkans are off by 1500 years, and for western Europe and the >Ukraine by another 1000 years. -- "The earliest neolithic settlements in southeastern Europe have been dated to around 7000 BCE... by 6000 BCE farming villages with pottery and other Neolithic features had become established throughout SE Europe as far north as the Danube Valley and the Great Hungarian Plain.... by 5300 BCE Bandkeramik settlement had spread along the major river valleys of central Europe, and communities of Bandkeramik farmers were established in eastern France and the Low Countries." Oxford Companion to Archaeology, 1996, p. 214. See also Cunliffe, "The Prehistory of Europe", 1994. -- Farming throughout Greece by 7000 BCE, throughout the Balkans and Hungary by 6000 BCE, and by 5300 BCE farming had reached NW Europe. By which time Renfrew's "PIE" would have been established over an area of hundreds of thousands of square miles for 1700 years... and we still have 4000 years until the first attested IE languages. That's 5700 years, most of which would have to pass with either (a) no linguistic change or (b) perfectly _synchronized_ change over the entire stretch of Europe from the Netherlands to Greece. Or we have to assume a rate of linguistic change more glacial than that of _any_ recorded IE language, over a period longer than all our records put together. 4000 years is a VERY long time in linguistic terms. 4000 years ago was 2000 BCE, when Greek hadn't emerged, and pre-proto-Germanic probably was still mutually comprehensible with pre-proto-Celtic and pre-proto-Balto-Slavic. See what I mean? Virtually all the recorded developments in the IE languages have happened in _half_ that time. Latin turned into French in 1500 years. Vedic Sanskrit turned into Hindi in 3000. >All the diffusion needs to represent linguistically is 'narrow PIE' -- which would have to extend from Holland to Greece by 5300 BCE, and then not change much for thousands of years. >You have a population of speakers sharing strong cultural affinities from >the Ukraine to Holland that culminates about 3500BC -- what on earth do you mean by "culminate"? That area was neolithic all the way by 5000 BCE or so. Earlier, in the western and central European parts. If agriculture was carried by PIE speakers, then they'd have to have been in place for thousands of years by 3500 BCE. Linguistic change never stops. It speeds up, it slows down, but it _never stops_. And thousands of years is long enough for _any_ living language to show massive change. >It is plain to see that as these speakers migrated, their populations grew >exponentially and they cleared and settled areas almost to the extent that >they are settled today from northwestern Europe to the western Ukraine. -- since the population of the entire earth didn't reach 200 million until Roman times, this is a bit much. Most of the European lowland forest zone wasn't cleared until late Bronze Age and Iron Age times. The whole Roman Empire had about 60 million people. And by using "speakers", you're conflating pots and language again. We have no idea what language(s) this area spoke at that time. None. And in the nature of things, we can't know. >Almost all evidence points to the notion that this population of speakers -- "speakers"? You're confusing language and genes. There are areas in Europe which have undergone 5 complete linguistic turnovers in the past 1500 years without much genetic alteration. Hungary, for example -- Dacian/Iranian/Germanic/Turkic/Avar/Slavic/Magyar. Two of those non-Indo-European, at that. >And yet you find it linguistically plausible that the language of this mass >of technically advanced -- Neolithic farmers in scattered hamlets. >speakers -- "speakers" =/= admissable term. You're assuming your conclusion again. >across Europe was completely substituted >without leaving any thing remotely resembling a substrate -- plenty of evidence of substrate influence in many IE languages, particularly in central and western Europe. Less so in Baltic/Slavic territory. Hundreds of words of the basic proto-Germanic vocabulary are not traceable to PIE roots, for instance. Much also in Celtic, some in Italic, considerable in Greek. >that first dispersed from the Ukraine in 3500BC and that did not even bother >to leave a relative behind -- what on earth do you mean? The Ukraine was Indo-European speaking at the earliest historic attestation. Indo-Iranian, to be precise; probably with proto-Slavic and proto-Baltic on the northern/northwestern fringe. Except for some Turkic in the southern parts, it has been IE-speaking territory ever since, too. >in its haste to spread from the Ireland to India in a mere 3000 years. -- incidentally, the spread of Indo-Iranian languages over a much _larger_ area than Europe took place within historic times and is not seriously disputed. If then, why not before? >Not to mention that a large part of the Ukraine had already been >neoliticized when this happened - and most probably by these speakers of the >lost neolithic language of Europe. -- so? The Romano-British were much more numerous than their Anglo-Saxon conquerors, and considerably more culturally advanced. Yet their language disappeared so completely that there are all of 12 Celtic loan-words in Anglo-Saxon when it emerged as a (very conservative West Germanic) written language 300 years later. The genes survived, albeit very mixed (the eastern English are more closely genetically related to the Danes than to the Welsh) but the language did not. The Welsh and Irish speak English now too, you'll note. So do the (largely West African, gentically) Jamaicans. Genes =/= language. >By 3300BC, evidence of a new influx from the east comes into the eastern >fringes of the post Bandkeramik areas show this influx were all also >neolithicized -- nobody has ever disputed that the PIE speakers were a neolithic culture. >You say with definiteness that this rather massive population of European >speakers represented "_some_ language/language family was spread across >Europe by "demic diffusion" in the early Neolithic; but whatever it was, it >wasn't PIE." -- yup. Too early. >Linguistically, you have no a substrate across this vast region to support >such a claim. -- the claim is based on the internal relationships and degree of differentiation of the early IE languages. Substrates have nothing to do with it. Although now that you mention it, proto-Germanic and Greek both show a substantial substrate influence, particularly in vocabulary items having to do with the sea (in the case of proto-Germanic) and the mediterranean flora/fauna and high-culture items (in the case of Greek). The Greek vocabulary for things like olive trees and typical Mediterranean flowers is non-IE, for instance. >Linguistically, you are relying upon many objects developed by this group of >European cultures to date a last possible date for what you consider a >foreign language - PIE. -- nope. >Linguistically, you are changing the languages of a massive group of speakers >across the middle of a continent on the basis that a starting date (narrow >PIE) from the Danube of 5500BC is too early. -- no, 7000 BCE. If PIE spread across Europe from the beginnng of the neolithic, it would have to remain in a unified form _from_ the colonization of Greece (7000 BCE) _through_ the settlement of Central Europe (around 6000 BCE) to the arrival of farming cultures on the Atlantic shore (5300 BCE). The, according to Renfrew, PIE would _already be in place across 2000 miles and hundreds of thousands of square miles_. You can't logically pick and chose a later time and a smaller portion. Either it was the whole sweep of agriculture from Greece to Holland, or it wasn't. Them's the choices. NB: in primitive conditions, a language so widespread quickly splits into dialects and the dialects become languages. So we'd expect to have a whole family of languages derived from the Renfrew-"PIE" with substantial internal differentiation by -- at the very latest -- about 4000 BCE. One group in Greece, another in the Balkans, more in Central Europe, and so forth. You (and Renfrew) have all these people linguistically "freezing in place" whenever it's methodologically convenient for you. That just won't do. >what [PIE] looked like in 5500BC. -- why should we? That's pre-PIE. It's linguistically unrecoverable because we have no descendant languages cognate with PIE (Anatolian possibly excepted), and we have no written records of the period. We can recover PIE by the comparative method because we have plenty of IE languages. We can't recover what came _before_ PIE, and our reconstructed picture of PIE is of the _last_ stage of PIE's development. >it is that it moved eastward out of the Ukraine, carrying clear emblems >of influence imported from the west and south - ceramic agriculture, animal >husbandry, metallurgy. Not the other way around. -- you're completely missing the point. The spread of PIE was the spread of a _language_. Nobody (except, I suppose, Renfrew) ever claimed that the PIE-speakers invented agriculture, ceramics, or animal husbandry. Where did you get the idea that anyone had? They probably domesticated the horse and _possibly_ invented the wheel. Apart from that, most of the neolithic toolkit had been around long before PIE was spoken. There's evidence (the absence of a PIE word for a weighted-web loom) that the PIE speakers were more primitive technologically, in some respects, than their neighbors. >Linguistically, you have this other evidence of proto-Uralic borrowings from >PIE that are dated no later than 4000BC -- nope. Starting at 4000 BCE at the earliest, and continuing on down through much later times, after 2500 BCE. Some of the loan-words in the Finno-Ugrian languages are demonstrably not PIE, but Indo-Iranian (Iranian specifically, at that.) >I must suggest to you that linguistically AND archaeologically your >interpretation has some serious holes in it. -- I, and virtually everyone else acquainted with historical linguistics, must point out that your interpretation is linguistic nonsense. From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Feb 6 03:25:43 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 22:25:43 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: <> In a message dated 2/5/00 3:03:50 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> Just a word about 'any new evidence'. Calibrated carbon-14 dating was not really worked out and applied to many already recovered artifacts until the 60's-70's so that the impact of the information (and arguments about the techniques) were not exactly settled until then. This most definitely DID make a difference in the authoritative dating of Bandkeramik. AND a substantial body of new evidence did enter the picture from a number of different sources, particularly with new access to eastern European findings and sites, after Renfrew's book. This information was particularly relevant to the status of things in the Ukraine during this period. And surprises continue to occur. The evidence of the significant Anatolian influence or migration in Greece just prior to 2000BC I've mentioned not only swung the gates on older migrationist theories, but also raises questions about how some distinctly 'Greek' cultural features got to Greece. This information was just beginning to come in at the time of Renfrew's book. mcv at wxs.nl also wrote: <> There are also quite a few local developments within these areas that fall short of looking like migrations, but definitely can account for a fair degree of differentiation that occurred between those local cultures on a regular basis. mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> Or possibly that that substrate actually reflects earlier IE influences that have not yet been identified. Specifically words like 'sail' which seem to indicate a later rather than an earlier introduction into Germanic. Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 6 15:07:45 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 15:07:45 +0000 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: Ed Selleslagh writes: > After reading Ante Aikio's contributions, I suspect Uralic might begin > to shed 'some' light on this matter. On the Basque side we have the > intriguing matter of a number of suffixes that also pop up in IE > (e.g.-z-ko <> -(s)ko in Slavic, basically with the 'same' meaning and > use). A suffix *<-ko> is commonly posited for PIE, and this developed an extended form *<-s-ko> in some branches, notably Germanic. Basque has a very common suffix <-ko>, and a compound suffix <-z-ko> (phonetic [-sko]). Many years ago, the late Antonio Tovar published a series of articles arguing that the PIE and Basque suffixes were so similar in their behavior that they must derive from a common source, which he took to be some (rather murky) kind of ancient contact. I have criticized this idea rather severely in various places. The problem is that the Basque suffix does not really behave very much like the PIE one. The PIE suffix was a word-forming suffix. It derived chiefly adjectives but also nouns. I have never seen any suggestion that it ever had a syntactic function. The Basque suffix, in great contrast, is primarily a syntactic suffix: it can be added to just about any adverbial constituent, regardless of internal structure, to produce a preposed adjectival modifier. That 'preposed' is significant, since lexical adjectives in Basque are postposed. Basque <-ko> also has two other functions, marginal by comparison. It can derive a preposed adjectival from an N-bar satisfying certain partly obscure conditions. And it can derive nouns from nouns. Now, the Basque suffix does not derive adjectives -- the chief function of the PIE *<-ko>. It does derive nouns, but only marginally. It is overwhelmingly a syntactic morpheme, while the PIE suffix is not. This doesn't look to me like a good case for proposing a common origin. Finally, Basque <-z-ko> is transparently only the instrumental suffix <-z> -- which is adverbial in function -- plus <-ko>. It cannot possibly be identified with the *<-s-ko> found in IE. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Sat Feb 5 07:51:42 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 09:51:42 +0200 Subject: Basic vocabulary borrowing (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: This is a correction to my previous message. The comment below was based on my crude misunderstanding of J. Simeon's message, which I apparently read too hastily. So, my apologies - please ignore the following: > This is irrelevant. .................... most speakers > find it hard to perceive even obvious borrowings as e.g. Finnish pelaa- > 'to play' < Swedish spela, Finnish (s)kaappi < Swed. skåp. Instead: It seems to me that one reason why basic vocabulary is not loaned as easily is not that it's "too basic" but that it's not expressive enough. At least based on my own observations, speakers seem to borrow more or less expressive vocabulary more freely than non-expressive; and when non-expressive vocabulary is loaned it easily becomes expressive (e.g. English place gives Finnish slang /pleissi/ 'a place with some "action" (e.g. a bar, a night club)') So perhaps often when basic vocabulary is replaced it's first borrowed as pejorative / expressive etc. and then later becomes non-expressive, replacing the original term? - Ante From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Feb 5 11:27:14 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 12:27:14 +0100 Subject: basic vocabulary borrowing (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Kinship terms can become subject to borrowing in situations where >intercultural marriages between two language groups are common. This >probably explains the loaning of such words as e.g. Finnish äiti 'mother' >(< Germ.), morsian 'bride' (< Balt.), sisar 'sister' (I can't quite recall >the precise IE source of this one at the moment) without having checked, I'd opt for Baltic (cf. Lith. sesuo, G. sesers) Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Feb 5 13:39:31 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 14:39:31 +0100 Subject: basic vocabulary borrowing (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Ante Aikio wrote: >What is likely to be borrowed and what is not in a given >circumstance depends on many factors. In U languages, the numerals are >largely cognate and there are no known borrowings except for 'seven', >'hundred' and 'thousand'. It has been claimed, though, that the affix -deksan (etc.) found in Finnic words for 8 and 9 is also of IE origin. (I doubt this is true). Permic *das "ten" is obviously of Iranian origin. I can't remeber what the story is on Hungarian . >But even numerals can become cultural >items; e.g. the loan origin of Ob-Ugric/Hungarian *sdptd '7' (< Aryan / >Iranian) and Samoyed *sejpti (< Tocharian?) Tocharian A has and B has . We would expect *septm. to give PToch *s^IptI (*s.a"pta"), which leads to the Toch. A form without much problems (*s^IptI > *s^IpIt > s^pIt). If the Toch. B form went through a stage *s^Iw(I)tI (*-p- > *-w-?, with -kt later by analogy from "8"), that might explain Nenets , Enets . But I can't see how *sejpti (based, I guess, on Nganasan etc.) might derive from Tocharian. The /b/ in the Samoyed forms rather reminds one of Germanic *sibum. >, replacing PU *s4exs4imi '7', As in Permic , Mordvin . Is this also agreed to be the prototype of Finnish ? >(A note on the U numerals: Samoyedic has curiously replaced the U numerals >3-6 with roots of unknown origin; this is perhaps connected with the >strong lexical substrate from an unknown source that seems to be present >in Samoyedic. The U word *wixti '5' is generally considered to survive in >Samoyedic in the meaning '10', but the semantics seem peculiar to me. Does >anyone know any parallels?) You can try to find them at Mark Rosenfelder's numbers list . Without having done that, I'd say that a shift 5 (e.g. "hand [sg.]") ~ 10 (e.g. "hands [du.]") doesn't look semantically very peculiar. Cf. PIE *ok^toh3 as the dual of Avestan "width of four fingers", and the Proto-Kartvelian forms *os1txwo- "4" (< PIE *ok^toh3 "8") and *arwa- "8" (< Akk. arba "4"). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From colkitto at sprint.ca Sun Feb 6 07:50:19 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 02:50:19 -0500 Subject: basic vocabulary borrowing (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidencefrom Uralic linguistics) Message-ID: As for body parts, there is hardly a real "reason" for replacing native words by foreign ones in any circumstance (other than the wish to be considered fashionable, of course). YES, THERE IS (if we consider exactly what is meant by foreign) A word is "borrowed" in a different meaning (cf. Latin cuppa > (Old High) German kop(f)) Later on, a (nativised) kopf is transferred (probably via slang) to become the (unmarked) word for head. The native speakers have not "borrowed" the word for head. there has been an internal semantic shift. But to sophisticated linguists it does look like a borrowing. I know this makes things more complicated, but it's probably the path most of these forms took. Robert Orr From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Feb 5 11:32:52 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 11:32:52 -0000 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: > No. Relationship is an absolute. .... >Genetically related languages were once the same language. Sorry, Bob, I can't agree, and I suspect you're in a minority these days (though I may be wrong!). (a) Unrelated languages do produce offspring - for example, creoles. It has even been suggested that the entire Germanic branch of IE is in fact a creole. I think it is unhelpful to restrict our understanding of relationship to a yes-no either/or. You might have trouble describing a creole without distorting facts to fit your definition. It is ultimately only a matter of which method of description we prefer, but I do believe it is unhelpful to restrict the term "related" to mean "genetically related". Genetically (in your terms), English is equally related to both French and Italian. I find it more helpful to accept a wider use of "related" in such a way that it allows me to indicate that plural forms and a range of other stuff in English actually are "related" to French but not "related" to Italian, and that therefore English has a different relationship to French and Italian, not an identical one (b) The idea that there must be a single language progenitor of daughter languages is widely disputed. Some people accept the idea that a collection of interrelated languages might never have had a single ancestor, but as far back as you care to go were simply a collection of inter-related languages. The language/dialect issue comes up here. We talk of IE "dialects" within PIE, but this is simply terminology. The point is that there is no need whatever for there to have been a single unified PIE language. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Feb 5 11:35:23 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 11:35:23 -0000 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: > After all, when presented with a new language, what's the first thing we do > to determine whether it's IE or not? > We look at the numerals from one to ten, the family relationship terms, and > so forth. Interestingly, these _failed_ to prove convincingly that Hittite was IE! It was the rather obscure -r/-n heteroclite declension that was the final clincher for some people. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Feb 5 11:09:59 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 11:09:59 -0000 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: > I believe English numerals tend to be borrowed into Hind-Urdu... > But please correct me if I'm wrong! You're not wrong. The last time this came up on the list, I checked it with Hindi speakers whom I teach. They knew the Hindi numerals, but agreed that in practice they often used English. They also agreed that this was not a statement, but a confession! The use of English is marked, and might be restricted to more casual areas of discourse, and perhaps to younger speakers. But I hardly had an adequate database to make any firm statements! Peter From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Feb 5 13:03:42 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 08:03:42 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: In a message dated 2/5/00 3:57:31 AM Mountain Standard Time, Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >Sorry, but that's [lexical comparison] not how the fact that there is an IE >family of languages was discovered in the first place. The fact that there is >an IE family of languages was discovered in the first place by looking at >cognate verbal morphology. -- no, sorry, that came slightly later. In 1767, Parson's "Remains of Japhet" demonstrated the close relationship of Irish and Welsh by comparing a list of 1000 vocabulary items and concluding that they were "originally the same", ie., derived from a common ancestor. (What we'd call Proto-Celtic; the terminology hadn't evolved then, of course.) He then compared Celtic, Greek, Latin and the Romance languages, the Germanic languages, Slavic, Indo-Aryan and Iranian -- using a list of the basic numerals, initially, on the basis that these were relatively stable items of vocabulary. ("Numbers being convenient to every nation, their names were most likely to continue nearly the same, even though other parts of languages might be liable to change and alteration", to quote. A perfectly reasonable statement.) Parsons then concluded _from this comparison of the numerals_ that all these languages were related and descended from a common ancestor. And the resemblance does leap out of the page at you when you put the numerals 1-10 in those languages side-by-side. He then listed the numerals in Turkish, Hebrew, Malay and Chinese, to show examples of unrelated languages. If that isn't discovering the existance of the IE group of languages, what is? Granted Parsons is somewhat obscure, and his book unreadable and full of assorted credulities and unsupported assertions, in this aspect he was entirely correct. Sir William Jones usually gets the credit for discovering IE, and he did quote the "forms of grammar" -- verbal morphology, perhaps, although I think he had the declension of the noun in Sanskrit and Latin in mind. However, he also mentions the "roots of verbs"; ie., the lexical items themselves. Then we have Rasmus Rask, who pointed out the uniformity of sound shifts which allowed the transformation of words in one IE language into another -- again, a reliance on -vocabulary-. And the actual term "Indo-European" derives from a review by Thomas Young in 1813 of Adelung's "Mithridates", based on comparisons of translations of the Lord's Prayer in a number of languages. So the initial discovery of Indo-European was produced by straightforward comparison of lexical items. That made it obvious, in a straightforward common-sense way, that the languages were related. Grammatical analysis followed. From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Feb 5 14:46:53 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 15:46:53 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Ante Aikio wrote: >On Mon, 24 Jan 2000, Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >[snip] >> We need very specific evidence to tell whether Anatolian had separated >> from the rest or not by the time of the oldest loans in Uralic >[snip] >This popped into my mind. The PU word for 'name', *nimi-, shows curious >variation: the Mordvin and Mari forms show and irregular *l- (< PU >*limi-). *nimi has been considered an IE loan (< PIE *nmen-). Now as far >as I know, Hittite shows irregular initial l- in the word for 'name', but >the other IE languages have uniformy *n-. This might be pure speculation, >but do you think there is any chance of Mordvin-Mari *limi- instead of >regular *nimi- resulting from Pre-Anatolian influence or even being a >separate loan from Pre-Anatolian? (If I recall correclty, Koivulehto may >have suggested something like this, but I can't recall the exact source >right now.) Of course, the changes might be coincidental, but this would >seem a bit weird since both of them are irregular, as far as I >understand. But then again, there are a couple of words in Mordvin with a >dialectal alteration between initial n- and l-, but these seem to be >relatively late descriptive formations. This word is sometimes seen as supportive of a PIE ~ Uralic genetic link, but it rather looks like a borrowing from IE into Uralic. The IE prototype contains two laryngeals (*h1neh3- or *h3neh3-) and the abstract suffix *-men [*], none of which finds expression in the Uralic word. Hittite has been dissimilated, as is not totally unexpected in a word containg only nasal consonants. Uralic *nimi has only two of them, but I believe (my Proto-Uralic is not that good) that the genitive case would add another -n-. Dissimilation would be a natural thing to happen. I don't think Mordvin-Mari necessarily offers any evidence of Uralic-Anatolian contacts. [*] Zhpu zber sha gb qrevir *u1abu3-zra < *?nan:xh-zra "gung juvpu vf zr" . ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From sarima at friesen.net Sat Feb 5 19:24:17 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 11:24:17 -0800 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <9e.b39033.25cc82b7@aol.com> Message-ID: At 02:29 PM 2/4/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- catastrophe is the norm of history. Eg., the rise of the Zulu kingdom >(due to purely indigenous developments) killed half the population of South >Africa, caused other upheavals like the Kololo migration which changed the >language of the Upper Zambezi to a Sotho dialect from 1000 miles southwards, >and sent Nguni-speaking war bands marauding as far north as Lake Victoria -- >all within a single generation, all on foot, ... These incidents bring up one source of evidence for past population movements that I think make it clear this has been happening in the Americas for a *very* long time. The sequences above resulted in a scrambling or intertwining of languages from disparate language families. A look at the map of the distribution of language families in the Americas, even *after* backing out the changes attributable to European incursions, is very informative in this regard. Most language families are so scattered and disjoint in distribution as to defy any simple analysis. This is especially true in South America, but even in NA, the presence of relatives of the Algonquian family near the *west* coast (Yurok and Wiyot), the odd distribution of Uto-Azrecan, and the existence of broad areas where "no one family is dominant" are clear signs of major pre-colonial movements. For instance, I suspect that the spread of the Siouan languages (including the Iowa, Mandan, and the Kansa-Omaha group) to their earliest historical locations in the Wisconsin-Indiana-Missouri area relate to the break-up of the Hopewell and/or Adena cultures. (The Mississippian Culture may be associated with the Muskogean or Caddoan family). >Not to mention that the Germanics had been expanding at the expense of >Celtic-speakers for centuries before the Romans came along; as a matter of >fact, it was Caesar who forced them out of Gaul and back across the Rhine. >What's now Southern Germany and the German-speaking parts of Switzerland was >once Celtic-speaking territory. In fact I think this area includes the most likely Celtic homeland. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Fri Feb 4 16:21:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 16:21:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: HH>radically >>has already been found out >>all of them have failed HH>>>this has not been succesful AA>I fail to see the point I hope somebody does see the point.. HJH From colkitto at sprint.ca Sun Feb 6 07:04:26 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 02:04:26 -0500 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: Actually, the problems with "wheel" are much greater than we might suspect. In "Guns, Germs, and Steel", which every linguist should read, Jared Diamond points out that the wheel was invented all over the world, it was only in Eurasia that it really became part of the lifestyle (availability of large domesticable animals which could pull loads), as opposed to a curio or a toy. Therefore linguistically the concept might go back much further than is commonly believed, and it should be reconsidered from the point of view of dating Indo-European. On a lighter note, what are we to do with Russian glagol ("verb") < *gol-gol? Sometimes wheels can be used as pedagogical devices for teaching verbs, etc. - any connection? Robert Orr From mclasutt at brigham.net Sun Feb 6 20:05:57 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 13:05:57 -0700 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > I'm not beginning to understand ? Serbocroatian borrowed its word for > "excrement" (balega) from Roumanian, and come to think of the English terms > /faeces/, /manure/ or the gloss above. Surely, "high value" cannot really > lurk behind the motivation for borrowing ? This would be due to avoidance. Reproductive body parts and elimination functions are generally subject to very high degrees of euphemism, conversion, and borrowing. Our (English's, since that's our common language) 'polite' words penis, vagina, eliminate, excrement, urine, and urinate are ALL borrowed. There are only a few dozen words of Karankawa recorded from the coast of Texas, but one of those words is their word for 'penis'--it's a borrowing of Comanche wya (y is barred i) 'penis', which is itself a conversion of the word for 'arrow', replacing an older .... 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 Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Sat Feb 5 10:10:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 10:10:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: RW>Either two (or more) languages are related or they are not. This is RW>the basic hypothesis of historical linguistics. .. is it? Nice to learn indeed. You will find defenders for or against relationships between any two languages. You can argue about the degrees and ways, about significance or chance resemblances. But you can't prove unrelatedness. We had that discussion already. Perhaps You should read Anttila 89:320.. RW>This is totally irrelevant You mean /you/ do not see the point. You might have missed that my ancestor example referred not to languages but to speakers. RW>Languages do not need a mommy language .. really? RW>But two genetically related languages have only one common ancestor, .. let me take an Indo-European example, e.g. Italian and French. Superficially seen they only have one ancestor: Latin. But this is only the dominant ancestor. If we look at e.g. French it has a lot of strata which can be called its fathers: The languages spoken by the pre-celtic cultures, the Celts themselves; later all the Germanic invaders not perfectly succeeding in learning the current states of that language. Anttila (and others) cite languages where you cannot even decide whether they should be named after their mother or their father. From mclasutt at brigham.net Sun Feb 6 20:00:20 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 13:00:20 -0700 Subject: Numbers as "Core Vocabulary" (was IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Numbers are one of the very WORST things to look at in order to make even a preliminary decision about relationship. The main problem with numbers (other than two and three) are that in the majority of hunter-gatherer societies, they are intimately tied to the way that fingers are used in counting. Throughout Native North America there are variants of systems like this: 'one' = 'finger'; 'two' = two; 'three' = 'one down' (i.e., one finger besides the thumb is still not raised); 'four' = 'all up'; 'five' = 'open', 'palm' or 'hand'; 'six' = 'two threes'; 'seven' = 'five + two'; 'eight' = 'two palms'; 'nine' = 'one missing'; 'ten' = 'whole'. There are variations on this including whether one raises fingers to count or lowers them, whether and when the thumbs are included, whether the count starts on the right hand or on the left, etc. As this number/finger systems starts to break down, other words can be borrowed or developed internally to fill the gaps, but the very unstable nature of counting means that number words should NOT be included in any list of "core vocabulary". 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 X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Feb 6 04:05:22 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 23:05:22 EST Subject: Uralic, PIE and motivatited borrowings. Message-ID: Someone wrote: <<.. of course that is correct; so nothing can be generalized. The cases you cited seem to be due to situations where water is quite precious.>> In a message dated 2/5/00 6:17:35 AM, Georg at home.ivm.de replied: <> I think my original question about why anyone would need to borrow a word for water was meant to carry a little irony with it. Ante Aikio seems to have said that these PIE borrowings made up something like 10-17% of the words recovered from the period. Words like 'water' and 'bring' individually may not seem to demonstrate much. But a list of a lot of basic words - and as high a number as one out of six would seem to say something a little more. The 'motivation' might be to use someone else's language often but without adopting it - so that a fair number of those words logically become habit among these native p-Uralic speakers. This also would suggest regular contact and enough to talk about to make the borrowings sooner or later feel natural. To see it as such suggests a stage of assimilation - like NY street Spanish - where you switch languages on the basis of not only the listener but also on the basis of subject - so that the word eventually continues to be used among native speakers alone. I also am reminded of Rick Mc Callister's observation: <> An extensive trade in goods might encourage a specific set of words borrowed without total bi-lingualism or conversion to the other language. Also, I'm reminded of Andrew Sheratt's newer theory that the large vats of the Bandkeramik were perhaps meant to hold malted beverage - a possible by-product of agriculturalism and a possible tool of assimilation. Do these borrowed words - 'water' (drink?) and 'bring' (six-pack?) possibly look like they may reflect this kind of regular contact and 'motivated' borrowing? Perhaps these PIE borrowings can be made to yield some coherent picture when taken together rather than one at a time. Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Feb 5 09:16:15 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 04:16:15 EST Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Actually, what Renfrew does is associate the original spread of IE languages >in Europe with PARTICULAR CULTURAL REMAINS (assemblages) -- yes, and without any evidence for doing so. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Feb 5 09:21:32 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 04:21:32 EST Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >@4900BC - Migration spreads 'Narrow PIE' -- 5300 BC for the spread of agriculture to the Atlantic, according to my sources (Cunliffe, Hodder), but what's half a millenium between friends? >@3300BC - Wide PIE disperses, speakers leave the Ukraine >@ between 3000 and 2000BC - an early IE language arrives in Italy. -- actually, most would say that Italic enters Italy rather later than that, sometime after 2000 BCE. Early Urnfield, perhaps. >@ between 2000 and 1500BC - perhaps a dialect becomes Pre-Latin >@ between 1500 and 1000BC - perhaps a dialect becomes proto-Latin >@ between 1000 and 300BC - a dialect becomes early Latin -- 500 for early Latin. 776 is the traditonal date of UAC. >Perhaps more importantly, inscriptions appearing in >Latin, on the US Dollar, on religious objects and at the end of e-mail >messages (but not on ogham sticks) show NO CHANGE IN THE LANGUAGE at all >1800 years later! -- this is a complete farce. Latin has been a dead language for 1500 years, preserved in fossilized written form. It's as irrelevant as Sumerograms in Akkadian. From sarima at friesen.net Sat Feb 5 19:00:16 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 11:00:16 -0800 Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario In-Reply-To: <73.f3d36e.25cbb926@aol.com> Message-ID: At 12:09 AM 2/4/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Here's a rough chronology of that cultural evidence - very rough now - that >may help straighten this out with regard to Celtic: >@7000BC - farming in Anatolia and southern Greece (cultural uniformities not >yet visible) >@6500 - 5400BC - the neolithic culture associated with Balkan-Anatolian >painted ware develops and reaches the Danube. >@5400BC - early stages of 'Bandkeramik'; beginning of expansion east and >northwest; beginnings of C-T in the western Ukraine >@4900BC - early 'Bandkeramik' reaches Holland; evidence for regular trade >contacts with the Danube - extremely small populations, few settlements, >'remarkable uniformity' in remains evidenced >@4600BC - expansion beyond the early narrow Bandkeramik corridor north of the >Alps and northwestern Europe >@4200BC - pollen evidence shows first extensive clearances of land in >peripheral areas, exponential growth in populations and settlements; >differentiation in local cultures >@4000BC - megalithic period begins, evidence of metallurgy (smelting) has >expanded from the Balkans to Denmark, northern Italy and the Ukraine; >beginnings of the secondary products revolution; beaker and corded ware >cultures begin to appear >By 4000BC, there is enough differentiation between regional expressions of >Bandkeramik to suggest that the former cultural unities are giving way to >local identities in western Europe and north of the Alps. Let's see, cultural unity maintained over much of Europe from 4900 BC to ca. 4000 BC. I don't believe it! Even 900 years is too long for maintenance of unity over that scale sans motor vehicles. The fact that the Bandkeramik culture *appears* uniform over this span is almost certainly an illusion due to lack of access to more distinctive sorts of artifacts (clothing, jewelry, paintings, etc.). In fact it is the changes at the 4200 and/or 4000 BC levels that are most likely associated with the spread of PIE. >@5500BC - 'Wide PIE' splits into Anatolian and "narrow PIE" >@4900BC - Migration spreads 'Narrow PIE' >@4600BC - A north western European version of [narrow PIE] arises >@4000BC - An "early IE language" develops in parts of western Europe and >north of the Alps. >@3500BC - Local differentiation in this 'early IE language' begins This is even worse. You now have local differentiation delaying for over well 1000 years!!!! That is absurd. Given normal rates of language change, this should have happened well before 4000 BC, probably by 4400 or 4500 BC (within your "Narrow PIE"). And an extra time depth of 600 years from the branching off of Anatolian and the rest of PIE would imply a *far* more differentiated Anatolian by its attestation ca. 1500 BC. That's a 4000 year time depth. That should make Anatolian about as distinct from Sanskrit as Farsi is from Hindi! -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Feb 5 10:52:27 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 10:52:27 -0000 Subject: Frisian Message-ID: >, which extends the scope of the > tribe, if not the language, into modern Germany. Pardon me, but surely Frisian (the language) _does_ extend into modern Germany - it lies mostly along the region from Denmark - Germany - Netherlands. Specifically, on the mainland East Frisian is found in Oldenburg (east of Kiel), North Frisian overlaps the Denmark-Germany border, and West Frisian is found entirely within Germany, (although also on the islands along that remarkable coast, some of which are claimed by the Netherlands). Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Feb 5 12:22:06 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 12:22:06 -0000 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: It is clear that the augment was originally separate, an adverb, and not a necessary and integral part of the verb, as it later became. Homer and the RV both preserve forms without augment that would later require it, and prosodic features are certainly a factor in the choice, but these are syllabic, not accentual, in both Homer and RV. I wish to ask: (a) what has the fact that sigmatic aorists have an accent before the sigma got to do with the presence or absence of augment? I see no connection. I also seem to remember that the Greek pattern of accentuation in verbs is a development within Greek - RV keeps the accent further back. (b) where is the evidence on the correlation mentioned between asigmatic aorists and absence of augment? Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Feb 5 11:04:03 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 11:04:03 -0000 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: >. According to Bybee et > >al (The evolution of grammar), unmarked past vs marked present is > >unknown in extant languages. This must surely be wrong - or at least disputable! Classical Hebrew has an unmarked tense-form whose natural and commonest tense meaning is the past. I believe Arabic, both classical and modern, has a similar structure. Peter From rao.3 at osu.edu Mon Feb 7 11:05:05 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2000 06:05:05 -0500 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2000 6:43 PM > "Vidhyanath Rao" wrote: >> There is an interesting typological problem here. According to Bybee et al >> (The evolution of grammar), unmarked past vs marked present is unknown in >> extant languages. This makes the usual classification of forms in Hittite >> (and PIE) quite unusual. I remember asking about this before. Miguel >> suggested Akkadian as another such example, quoting Lipinski to argue that >> iprus was preterite, iparras was present. But in `Outline', Lipinski >> explicitely assigns iparras to imperfective (putting present-future in >> quotation marks). So the anamoly still unexplained. > Still, the unmarked form is a simple past, while the marked forms > are the imperfective ("durative", "present-future") with > geminated C2, and the perfect (CtCC [iptaras], with infix -t-). > Such a system is potentially very close to one with unmarked past > vs. marked present (all it takes is the loss of the perfect). Is it s a simple past or narrative past? [zero forms do survive as subsequent forms even when they have been ousted from isolated sentences, conversation etc.] First: If something was imperfective rather than present/past, it had a role in past imperfective. So the loss of perfect(ive) can only lead to a perfective limited to past vs an imperfective. For what you propose happened, the imperfective must have split into a past imperfective and non-past imperfective and both the perfect and past imperfective must be lost while the non-past imperfective survived. Show me an unmistakable example. Secondly. the seeming simplicity does not take into account the fact that losses are not random, but display definite preferences. Perfect tends to oust past/perfective rather than the other way around. More clearly marked forms oust the unmarked forms rather than the other way around. [Both of these, I thought, were old and generally accepted. Didn't Kurylowicz put this in his methodological chapters in one of his books?] Isn't the whole point of typological studies that we should propose more likely alternatives over positing a string of unlikely events? From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Feb 6 02:23:50 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 21:23:50 EST Subject: Indo-Iranian Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: << Though, would archaicity of language *alone* >*really* justify such a drastic readjustment of historical dates ? >> -- perhaps not alone, but it's pretty startling. The Rig-Veda is conventionally dated before 1000 BCE, usually well before, and you get correspondences like (in Sanskrit - S, Avestan - Av and Proto-Indo-Iranian, PII): S tam amavantam yajatam Av taem amavantaem yazataem PII *tam amavantam yajatam suram dhamasu savistham suraem damohu saevistaem *curam dhamasu cavistham mitram yajai hotrabhyah mithram yazai zaothrabyo *mitram yajai jhaurabhyas From rao.3 at osu.edu Mon Feb 7 10:52:01 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2000 05:52:01 -0500 Subject: Indo-Iranian Message-ID: > The Proto-Indo-Iranian phonetic values of the IE palatals thus were > [ts'], [dz'], [dz'h], or, in a simpler notation *c', *j', *j'h with an > acute accent on the affricate to indicate prepalatal position (as > opposed to the hacek on *c^, *j^, *j^h denoting a more > central palatal position of the younger palatals). Is it correct to take this to be reason why *k'/g'/gh'+*t becomes s.t. (retroflex) in Sanskrit but *k/kw +*t etc become kt? Does this also have something to do with the peculiarities of Sanskrit ch (usually described as aspirated c)? It seems that in some dialects it was pronounced as cs' (ch is written cs' consistently in some manuscript groups). Also in sandhi, t+s' becomes cch (the tradition followed in printed editions, but not universal in manuscripts) and according to the grammarians, in some dialects, s' became ch after any stop, but in some others it never happened. People have argued for the last 100+ years about which is older. [The usual explanation for ch is sk' -> k's -> ks. -> ch, the last a ``prakritism''. I find it hard to understand how other ks. escaped this fate.] BTW, PIE morpheme final *k' becomes k when followed by s. (from *s) in several cases, the most common being from *drek' (ta:dr.k, adra:ks.i:t) etc, in some others it seems to change in extant texts (RV viks.u vs vit.s.u from Panini/upanishads on). ---- Returning to the general questions: How widespread is the merger of ruki s + *t with *k'+t etc, in particular in Nuristani, and what happens there to tk'? I am also curious about one objection raised by Sihler to the retention of occlusion in Nuristani. This is the assimilation seen in Sans. s'as'a etc, which is found in Nuristani as well. Hamp's reply to Sihler does not seem to address this. [I thought that this can be explained as Indic influence combined with mapping based on subconcious awareness of sound equilances. But the latter seems to be strongly rejected, to judge by another thread in this list.] --- From sarima at friesen.net Sun Feb 6 06:05:24 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 22:05:24 -0800 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 06:16 PM 2/4/00 +0100, Stefan Georg wrote: >>>Wrong. Language is not a biological phenomenon, but a cognitive one. >>Cognition is a biological process. Ergo, so is language. >Language is a social phenomenon, which humans have been able to develop and >are able to use and process for purposes intimately connected with social >interaction, because they are furnished with certain cognitive abilities; >which they are, because their physis meets certain biological >prerequisites. The biological substratum furnishes the ability to develop, >use and change the tool, it doesn't determine its shape. I think you misunderstand my point. I am not saying language is biologically *determined*, I am saying it operates under the rules of biological systems. Sociality itself evolved to because it provides certain biological advantages, and social interactions among humans are very much motivated by basic biological drives. In this context I was really only pointing out that language "suffers" from one of the main issues I see in all biological studies: fuzzy, imprecise boundaries. There is no precise way to distinguish one language from another. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Sun Feb 6 06:20:42 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 22:20:42 -0800 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:26 PM 2/4/00 -0700, Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote: >But prokaryotes are EXTREMELY simple creatures. Language is not simple. That is beside the point. The presence of lateral transmission of genes confuses cladistic analyses. Similarly interaction between languages in contact has the potential to confuse cladistic analysis of languages. Complexity does not enter into the issue. [As an aside, even the simplest known prokaryote is probably more complex in some measures than any human language] >languages, the result was a completely "fertile" offspring--Tok Pisin. You >mention that a lion and a leopard can interbreed, yet is the offspring >fertile? Yes. > Or even capable of surviving to adulthood? Yes. > The only instances of >cross-species breeding among complex organisms in any case are man-caused >and artificial. Incorrect. Interspecifc hybrids are quite common in nature, if one looks carefully enough. The oak example is particularly interesting. There are fossils of hybrid oaks from over a million years ago - hybrids between two species that are still producing hybrids today! (I believe this case was scarlet and black oaks). But there are hybrid zones between species in many parts of the world. There is a species of butterfly in the SW deserts that is absorbing a closely related species. But even then, this level of detail is less important than the simple point that there are fewer unique factors in historical linguistics than you believe. Of course NO analogy stands up to minute scrutiny. I do not intend this analogy to be carried to such extremes. The main point is that it is foolish to reject the accumulated wisdom of biology just because of some perceived differences in the problems being faced. Now, it is true that biologists have not yet fully dealt with the issue of cross-specific gene transfer in analyzing phylogenies,, since its importance has only recently been discovered. Thus it is quite possible that in this area linguists are actually ahead of the game. > While cross-species permanent genetic influence is only >found in very limited circumstances among very simple creatures It is only found *routinely* in the relatively simple prokaryotes. But it is not exactly rare even in land animals and flowering plants. The case of the absorption of one butterfly species by its cousin is a rather flagrant case of cross-species genetic influence. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Feb 6 06:25:46 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 06:25:46 -0000 Subject: "is the same as" Message-ID: Dear Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stefan Georg" Sent: Friday, February 04, 2000 5:16 PM >>Wrong. Language is not a biological phenomenon, but a cognitive one. >Cognition is a biological process. Ergo, so is language. [SG wrote] Language is a social phenomenon, which humans have been able to develop and are able to use and process for purposes intimately connected with social interaction, because they are furnished with certain cognitive abilities; which they are, because their physis meets certain biological prerequisites. The biological substratum furnishes the ability to develop, use and change the tool, it doesn't determine its shape. [PR] I am sure that many listmembers, recently trained under the social theories of more recent times, will be unable and unwilling to accept the following comments at face value however, there may be others who have yet to decide these issues; and it is for them that I write. Many linguists continue to maintain positions regarding the relationship of biological facts and language that are really quite antiquated; and were originated in the days when brilliants like Ashley Montague solemnly assured us that humans had only one instinct: fear of falling, a weakened version of Marxist "scientific" theory. Since then, Western science has determined that many human behavioral characteristics are biologically based, i.e. inherited through genetic transfer: e.g. schizophrenia, homosexuality, manic-depression, sociopathy; and, though disputed by socially hyper-aware apologists, intelligence --- to name just a few of significance. It is fatuous in the extreme to believe that genes, which control such complex behavioral assemblages, are *strangely* without any affect whatsoever on language --- especially, since even true believers must admit the biological basis of language ability. Similarly, I find it incredible that otherwise highly analytical thinkers can fail to acknowledge that genetics plays an important part in phonological development and change. Any objective non-linguist would, on the basis of common sense alone, agree that if the ratio of tongue mass to oral cavity or lingual mobility were genetically altered, it would affect phoneme production --- but, you will see, many linguists will dispute so simple and straightforward a proposition --- vehemently. We all know that biology-based theories have been misued in the recent past to buttress political objectives but a doctrinaire insistence on the total lack of influence of genetic factors on language is truly throwing out the baby with the bathwater. And it is high time that some linguists modernize their relationship with biology and genetics. 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 mclasutt at brigham.net Sun Feb 6 20:36:15 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 13:36:15 -0700 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Actually, the analogy I used in my last post didn't exactly correlate with the argument being made. A better analogy is that since a few Australians know the Star Spangled Banner and all Americans know the Star Spangled Banner, then all Americans are Australians! That's what relating linguistic change (Americans) to biological change (Australians) is really like. 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 Sun Feb 6 14:16:49 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 14:16:49 +0000 Subject: SV: Indo-Hittite Message-ID: Stanley Friesen writes: [Most of his posting was devoted to a critique of the UPenn work. Since I am not defending that work, I won't try to reply here. But there was one point that startled me.] [LT] > >For one thing, the biologists have a lot more material to work with than > >we do. They have genes, but we don't. They have fossils, but we mostly > >don't. > These are relatively minor points. In many cases neither has been > available to biologists either. I am simply staggered to see genes and fossils dismissed as "minor points". If these are your idea of minor points, what would you consider to be major points? ;-) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 6 15:13:38 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 15:13:38 +0000 Subject: Old Irish Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister writes: > I throw out some possibilities > Is it possible that WRITTEN Old Irish was NOT the direct ancestor > of Gaelic? i.e that it held the same relationship to Gaeilge and Gaidhlig > that Classical Latin held to Romance? > Is it possible that WRITTEN Old Irish was only a literary language? > Is it possible that WRITTEN Old Irish was the language of an elite > of Briton or Gaulish origin and did not represent the speech of the > majority? Don't know. But a philologist colleague did suggest to me once, years ago, that literary Old Irish might have been to a significant extent an artificial creation of the scribes, who delighted in introducing and maintaining every possible complication, producing as a result something which did not represent ordinary speech at any time in history. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 6 15:43:16 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 15:43:16 +0000 Subject: Turkic Message-ID: Hans Holm writes: > JS>Observers as late as the 4th century CE said that the Gallic-Celtic of > JS>Lyon, in the Rhone valley, was mutually comprehensible with that of the > JS>Galatians of Anatolia (who arrived from the Balkans about 270 BCE). > .. "mutually comprehensible" here should be seen quite relative. > I remember a parallel: > Most scholars would regard the branches of Turcic as different languages, > wouldn't they? > In spite of that, in a recent TV-film, a native speaker of Turcish > presented himself talking to people of different Turcic languages (e.g. > Uighur) on a bus-tour in central Asia with only little difficulties. But > that seemed to be a very rudimental 'small' talk. > And in such a sense the above cited "observer" could (should?) be > understood. Indeed. Uyghur is one of the most divergent Turkic languages, and a glance through a comparative vocabulary of the Turkic languages reveals a very modest proportion of shared vocabulary between Turkish and Uyghur. It is inconceivable that speakers of the two could communicate at anything beyond the most rudimentary level, if even that. I doubt that speakers could get much beyond the stage of smiling, nodding, pointing, and trying to guess what the other guy might be saying. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mclasutt at brigham.net Sun Feb 6 20:31:11 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 13:31:11 -0700 Subject: Re Personal pronouns In-Reply-To: <003001bf6f3d$19dd87a0$219f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: > [JM wrote] > > It is. Larry's quite clear in his explanation why it is so. > [Pat Ryan] > I think you are coming into this discussion a bit late to be able > to intuit the point I am trying to make, whether correctly or not. > But, I will give you the benefit of the doubt; and ask, before I answer, > "why it is so" refers to what point Larry is making? I'm not "coming in...late". I've been reading it all along and made another post earlier mentioning that all the intro textbooks in syntax use Larry's distinctions and Larry's methodology to arrive at the same conclusion. Larry is using standard linguistic methodology to define "pronoun" and "determiner". Just because I haven't been constantly flooding the "mailwaves" with messages doesn't mean (as you may be implying) that I don't know what you're writing about. You questioned Larry about how many linguists actually agree with this position. I'm answering as a linguist who does. However, I'm afraid that you're using a methodology to define linguistic terms that linguists don't use. You're using imprecise impressionistic methodology to say that, X means the same thing as Y, so therefore X is structurally the same thing as Y. Larry is generally saying that X does, indeed, mean the same thing as Y, but that does not mean that it's structurally the same. Semantically, "I run" is the same thing as "I'm a runner" (either could equally well answer the question, "What is your sport here at the Olympics?"). Yet no one would say that 'a runner' is a verb. Larry is doing what the vast majority of linguists do. He is defining grammatical categories not by meaning, but by structure. "Her" is a demonstrative because it passes all the structural tests of a determiner, but not all the structural tests of a pronoun. You may disagree if you wish, but you'd be on the opposite side of the fence from most linguists. 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 Mon Feb 7 12:29:38 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2000 12:29:38 +0000 Subject: language and biology Message-ID: Stanley Friesen writes: > Cognition is a biological process. Ergo, so is language. Sure. But the biological aspects of language, important though they may be, are not the subject matter of historical linguistics. Historical linguistics, by definition, deals with language change. And language change does not result from biological change: it results from social factors. I speak differently from my parents, and my young nieces speak differently from me. That's not for any biological reason at all: it's only the result of growing up in different social circumstances. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From jer at cphling.dk Sat Feb 5 15:49:50 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 16:49:50 +0100 Subject: Basque * 'round' In-Reply-To: <006b01bf6d7b$a3aea540$eb02703e@edsel> Message-ID: On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: [...] >>> What I meant was this (I'm sorry for having been so elliptic), and you may >>> agree or not: *kwekwlo (or *kwekulo) looks to me like a reduplicated form, >>> probably inspired by the reconstruction from Grk. kyklos. Indeed, it is the >>> logical thing to assume if you try to reconstruct from Germanic (Eng. >>> wheel, or Du. wiel < hwi:l- < *kwelo), and we know the Old Greek tendency >>> to reduplication and insertion of quasi-dummy syllables for basically >>> 'prosodic' reasons, like in the sigmatic aorist etc. So, it is not >>> unreasonable to assume (no hard evidence!!) that *kwelo gave rise to a >>> Basque re-interpretation *bel-, via some intermediate (most likely IE) >>> stage *(h)wel-. > [Larry Trask objected, i.a.:] >> Also, what has happened to the final vowel of the PIE form? I don't think >> * was a PIE word-form, and Basque does not normally lose final vowels >> in borrowed words. > [Selleslagh countered:] > That could be a problem, but not necessarily insurmountable. After all, my > guess was that it would be a very ancient loan word, from an unidentified IE > language. [...] Maybe the geographical position of the donor language can be narrowed down, for a word of the same shape found its way into Northern Europe in the specialized meaning of 'car' (cf. "wheels"). I'm thinking of course of Dan.-Norw.-Swed. bil 'car', which must be very old given the assimilation of the nominative marker in Icelandic bi:ll (from *bi:l-R pointing to PGmc. *bi:l-az). Since Eng. car _is_ Celtic, it is nice now also to have a Celtic-looking etymon for Nordic bil and a viable alternative to the fanciful derivation from the suffix (!) part of automobile. Any good Celtic etymon for German Auto? Jens From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 6 13:33:08 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 13:33:08 +0000 Subject: Basque Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister writes: > There's the possibility that Lusitanian may have been non-Celtic > and to get from Central Europe to W. Iberia, it presumedly would have been > in contact with Basque, correct? Presumably, yes, though not necessarily for any great length of time. > True, not too much is known about Lusitanian and it does seem > similar to Celtic and Italic Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Feb 6 06:30:10 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 00:30:10 -0600 Subject: Basque In-Reply-To: <200002041810.p589@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: >No problem to change it a little: >> What about being 'bil' a loan from Gaulish? >> PIE *kwel- > Cel *kwi:l- > Gaul *pi:l > ! > bask. bil >> cf PIE *penque > Cel *kwinkwe > Gaul *pimpetos (ordinal) >1) Regarding the semantics: > Remember that the Celts were famous for their cartwright-technique. >2) Regarding the phonetics: loans are often changed to the next native sound > available. Listen to a Bavarian trying to spell "German"! He most times > will change the [dzh-]>[tsh-] (cave any Bav. reading here!). I have some /tc^@m at n/ friends :> > Of course the i-prefixed verbform is an argument /against/ borrowing from > Celtic. Maybe, maybe not. The prefix could have been added after borrowing --but ask a specialist in Basque, don't take my word on it Risking the wrath of Larry Trask :> (who unlike me, has a reputation in linguistics to maintain); you may wish to consider the following notes (keeping in mind that any errors in copying are my own) see Basque ekarri "to bring" Basque ekarri; < Pre-Basque *e-kaR-i [lt/B] PN263 *kar- "to twist, to turn, to wind" [b/k], see IE *(s)ker- "to jump, to move in circles"? [p/IE] maybe "to turn > to return s.t. > to bring s.t." [mcv] Celtic carru, carricare, see Basque ekarri "bring, carry"; [wje] carry English and Basque ekarri [rmcc] Eng. carry is of French-Romance origin: Latin carrus, carruca = cart, carriage. My Latin dictionary says both are of Gallic origin. see Fr. charrier. Original meaning: transport by cart. [es] carpentum "two-wheeled wagon" Gaulish > Spanish carpintero "carpenter" [abi 4], French charpentier "carpenter" [wde 188-89]; < ? carru [rmcc] carru Gaulish "cart" > Spanish carro "cart" [abi 4]; char artisan term French; from Gaulish [cb62: 13] carro "car, cart" Spanish/Portuguese; from Celtic [jng]; carrum Celtic > French char "cart" [mh 241] carruca Gaulish > French charrue [wje 188-89]; charrue agricultural word French; from Gaulish [cb62: 13] carrum Romance < Celtic [wje 183] carrus "cart" Latin; from Celtic [nv 75-76] carrus Italian < Celtic [bm66: 25] carrus "4-wheeled covered wagon" Latin; from Celtic [lrp 53]; carro Spanish; from Celtic [rks 12-13] etorri "to come" Basque; < Pre-Basque *e-toR-i [lt/B] PN149 *tyar- "to advance to or toward an end or a goal; to attain or achieve a goal, to reach, to come to, to arrive at; to master, to become master of" [b/k; mcv] see Gaelic tar "come" [rmcc] tar, tair "come, get", plural tagaigí Gaelic; tagann "comes", tiocfaidh "will come", thiofadh "would come" see Basque etorri "to come" [rmcc] e-torr-i; root torr Basque [es] see IE *ter@, tr@, tra@ > trâ "to cross over, pass through, overcome"; Germanic *thur-ila > Old English thyr(e)l, thy:rel "hole < boring through"; Old English thurh, thuruh "thorough, through" < IE *tr at -kwe; Greek -tar "overcoming"; see Latin trans "across, over, beyond, through" < ? *trâre "to cross over"; Latin trux < truc- "overcoming, powerful" < IE *tru-k-; Iranian thrâya "to protect" < *trâ-yo [cw] see IE *tragh-, *dhragh- "to draw, pull, move"; IE dhreg- "to draw, glide" [cw]; i.e. "to make pass through/over" [rmcc] see IE *ter- base of derivatives for "peg, post, boundaries, marker, goal"; see Latin terminus "boundary marker" < IE *ter-men [cw] i.e. "thing to be passed" [rmcc] see IE *dhers- "to venture, be bold" [cw} i.e. "to pass a limit" [rmcc] see IE *der-, *dr- "to run, walk, step" [cw] see IE *dhregh ":to run" [cw] see IE *dhwer- "door, doorway" [cw]; i.e. "thing passed through/over" [rmcc] Abbreviations supplied upon request From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Feb 6 14:32:04 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 15:32:04 +0100 Subject: Hualde's view In-Reply-To: Message-ID: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote: >[quote from Hualde] >> (b) because the assimilation rule tends to apply only >> in restricted phrasal contexts. BUT assuming that this assimilation applied >> more frequently in the past (as Michelena also assumes) it stands to >> reason that if and , and , and so on for lots >> of plosive-initial words, are variants of the same word in different >> phonological context, this would inevitably lead towards a merger of the >> voiced and voiceless oral stops in morpheme- and word-initial position >> (where the alternation is found) but not morpheme-internally. End of the >> story. The more complicated Martinet-Michelena hypothesis (which in >> addition requires an unexplained transformation from ancient to modern >> Basque) is, in my view, simply not needed and has no serious evidence in >> its favor. Thanks for allowing me to clarify my position. >First, I query that word "unexplained". The standard account holds that >the explanation was mainly Romance influence. This influence led to the >introduction of contrasts like 'wharf, quay' (a loan) and >'material' (a native word), and 'pair' (a loan) and 'slug' >(zool.) (and other senses) (native). This doesn't look to me like the >absence of an explanation -- though of course no one is obliged to buy >this explanation. I think Hualde's "unexplained (transformation)" refers to the change from Pre-Basque lenis-fortis to Modern Basque voiced-voiceless [stops] / fricative-affricate [sibilants], in *all* positions, not just initial. But since this is a natural change (one can compare Dutch, which now has pure voiced-voiceless contrasts in its stop system, as opposed to general Germanic fortis(aspirated) - lenis(unaspirated)), I'm not sure what kind of explanation would be required. >Second, why is this version less "complicated" than Michelena's? >Michelena posits a Pre-Basque with no initial voicing contrast, developing >under Romance influence into modern Basque, with initial voicing contrasts. >Hualde appears here to be proposing a Pre-Pre-Basque with initial >voicing contrasts, followed by a "merger" resulting in a Pre-Basque with no >initial voicing contrasts, followed by modern Basque, once again with initial >voicing contrasts. This is simpler? I'm afraid that if Hualde is serious about the "merger", his explanation is not only not simpler, but leaves more things unexplained. In the first place, there are a good many indications that Pre-Pre-Basque initial **p-, **t- and **k- had simply been dropped (sometimes leaving an aspiration), as in the well-known cases of *karr- > harri "stone", Aquitanian Talsc- ~ Halsc-, morpheme variants such as -tegi ~ -egi "house, place" (maybe connected to Bq. etxe "house" < teg(i) + -xe (dim.)), etc. But one can dispute or dismiss this evidence. More seriously, a merger of voiced/unvoiced segments in initial position, while in itself acceptable for the cases of **k-/**g- > *g-, **p-/**b- > *b-, and (not sure how Hualde wants to interpret these) **ts-/*s- > *z-, *ts'-/*s'- > *s-, leads to more problems than Mitxelena's account already has in the case of supposed **t-/**d- > *d-. The problem is that there are no Pre-Basque words beginning with *d-. Hualde's merger doubles the problem of the missing initial dental, and fails to explain the superabundance of vowel-initial words. Another fact which contradicts the merger of voiced ~ voicedless stops in morpheme initial position is the phonological make-up of verbal roots, which can start with contrasting b-, d-, t-, g- and k- (e-man (*e-ban), e-dan, e-torr-i, e-gin, e-karr-i) [only *p- seems to missing, except as a variant of *b, as in ipini ~ ibeni "to put"]. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Feb 6 06:49:50 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 00:49:50 -0600 Subject: Hualde's view In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] >In the quoted passage, Hualde elaborates somewhat on his views, but the >fundamental point remains the same. In Michelena's view, Pre-Basque >permitted only a single labial plosive word-initially, */b-/. This */b-/ >develops regularly into modern /b-/, except in circumstances in which it >becomes /m-/. Similar remarks apply to the other plosives. >As far as I can see, Hualde agrees in not recognizing a "robust" (his word) >contrast between */b-/ and */p-/ in initial position in Pre-Basque, though >his view of the phonetics is different from Michelena's. [snip] How would pre-Basque have dealt with /m/ from other sources? Always as /b/? Could /m/ have been an allophone of /b/? Following Theo Vennemann's work, with some feedback from Roz and Ed, I've put together a list [still quite incomplete] of etyma with the form *mar-/bar- etc. that seem to share the meaning "soft, smear(able)" --mainly from the Pyrenees area. These may well turn out to be from different roots. They may be from IE or an unknown substrate. Roz felt that the Basque forms were not native. Any errors in copying, of course, are my own *mar-/*mer-/*mard-/*merd- "soft, smear" [rmcc]; possibly *bar/*bard- [rmcc] see IE *(s)mer- "grease, fat" (Pokorny smeru-); Germanic **smerwa "grease, fat" < IE *smer-wo-; OHG smero "fat" > German Schmiere "grease"; Germanic *smerwjan > OE smierwan, smerian > English smear; OHG smirwen, smerian > German schmieren "to smear"; possible Italic *merulla > Latin medulla "marrow" [cw]; see Latin merda "feces" [rmcc]; no known etymology [Ernout & Meillet 1932:578; cit. rf]; sometimes linked [by others] to Lithuanian smirdziu, smirdeti, v. sl. smruzdo, smrudeti 'puer'; see Gothic smarna 'Greek word' 'qui ne rend compte du d." [Ernout & Meillet 1932:578; cit. rf] *mardo "fat, soft" Basque [rf]; loanword or < *bard-? [rmcc] see Basque marda 'panza'; 'panzudo'; cuajo del ganado/caillette des animaux ruminants; estomago" [rf] see Basque mardo 'blando, suave'; robusto, rollizo' [rf] see Basque mardoera 'grosor' see Basque mardul 'robusto, rollizo, lozano, sustancioso' [rf] see Basque marduldu 'engordar/engraisser' [rf] *mard-an- "fat thing, soft thing" [rmcc] > Aragonés mardano, Spanish marrano "pig", Catalán mardà, marrà "ram" [wje 179] *mard-, *mart- "swamp" [rmcc] mart- "swamp, pond, pool" mart-, mart-in "swamp/pond/puddle thing" [rmcc] > "pond bird, swamp bird, puddle bird" [rmcc, tv] > Basque, English, French, German martin, Spanish martín --used in various bird names, i.e. "pond bird, swamp bird, puddle bird", note Basque /m/ < /b/ [tv96: 132]; Basque loanword [rf]; -in < ? diminutive [rmcc] *mard- > *bard "mud, swamp, pond" [rmcc]; note /m/ < > /b/ occurs in Celtic [rmcc] bardo Aragonese, Gascón bard, Spanish barro "mud"; pre-Latin substrate [bc 239, wje 179]; Basque loanwords having to do with "mud" [rf?] see Basque dialectal bartale "mudhole, mud puddle" [tv96: 134]; Basque loanword [rf] see Basque dialectal parta "pool, puddle, swamp" [tv96: 134]; Basque loanword [rf] see Basque barta, bartha "mud, muck" [tv96: 134], Basque loanword [rf] see Basque parta "thick mud, mud puddle, pool, swamp" [tv96: 134]; Basque loanword [rf] bartale "revolcarse" [Azkue ; cit. rf]; Basque loanword [rf] barta 'bone,fange'; non-native [Lande]; see rom. *bartia > *baltsa > balsa "soft, swamp" see Spanish balsa, Aragonese basa, Portuguese balsa "swamp, thicket" [rmcc]; link to balsa tree? [rmcc] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Feb 6 06:17:56 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 00:17:56 -0600 Subject: Lusitanian/Celtic/Italic [was Basque ] In-Reply-To: <20000204192947.9737.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: Yes, the /p/ problem does distinguish it from Celtic I've also seen the theory that it was cognate with Celtic and Italic as a member of a W IE branch Ed Selleslagh has floated the idea that it might be Q-Italic For me, this rasises the question of the validity of Italic as a group. If Lusitanian were Q-Celtic, that would imply either 1: the split between P- & Q-Italic occured before Italic entered Europe 2: P- & Q-Italic are actually different branches of Western IE and that the resemblances in phonology and lexicon are actually due to adstrate and common substrate Q-Celtic does seem to be in a peculiar little spot on the lower Tiber that would seem to be prime real estate for interlopers But, given that my knowledge of the linguistics issues are minimal, I'd like to hear from those who do know what they're talking about :> >The big problem with accepting Lusitanian as Celtic is that Lusitanian >preserves the PIE -P- (lost by Celtic) in the word Porcom (Celtic *Orco- >"pig" note British Orcades "Pig-land"). >It is possible that Lusitanian may be a late survival of a type of >Proto-Celtic, however. From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Mon Feb 7 14:44:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2000 14:44:00 GMT Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: RC>very closely related" is extremely misleading. They could be considered RC>closely related only by contrast to the highly diverse (lexically and RC>typologically) other families of the north and west of Australia. RC>Consider just the immediate neighbours of Dyirbal, as described by RC>Dixon: Yidin (27% shared vocabulary), Mbabaram (18%), Warungu (47%), RC>Wargamay (60%) .. misleading are such percentages, if taken as representing proportional genealogical relationship. Direct genealogical relationship means that two daughter-languages directly stem from the same mother language. Replacements, even severe and/or quite different ones, taking place after that split, have no influence on the notice. Thus, two languages with a smaller number of retained common lexemes may be related closer than others with higher percentages. I shall try to make this clearer in the near future. (BTW, you signed with my Footer.) Mit freundlichen Grüßen Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover Tel=FAX x49-511-9585714. From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 8 13:30:07 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 14:30:07 +0100 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>As far as I know, the Hittite word for "wheel" is . No relation to >>the *kwel->words. >> >-- 'hurkis' is derived from PIE *hwergh, and cognate to TocharianA 'warkant' >(wheel) and TocharianB 'yerkwanto'. >The agreement between Hittite and Tocharian -- very widely separated IE >languages -- would suggest PIE status for this word as well. Only for the root, strictly speaking. The words are formed quite differently (Hitt. *HwrK-is, Toch *HwerK-ontos). It does seem to indicate that this (*hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-?) was the preferred word for "to turn, to roll" at quite an early stage. >There's a broad overlap in the 4 PIE words for wheel: >1. *kwekwlom -- Germanic, Phrygian, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Tocharian, >Balto-slavic, and closely related terms in Celtic >This probably referred to the wheels in a two-wheeled cart, given the dual >form in Old Irish ('cul', from *kwolo via *kwolos). "The two roundy-roundy >things". >2. *Hwergh -- Tocharian, Hittite >3. *dhroghos -- Celtic, Greek, Armenian >4. *roto -- Celtic, Latin, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Indo-Iranian, >and possibly Tocharian. >So while none of the 4 occurs in all the groups -- one wouldn't expect that, >eh? -- Well no, but it does mean one has to be careful with phrases like "the IE word for wheel" or the sound changes affecting it. Which one? >every single one occurs in at least _two_ of the groups. Eg., >Tocharian and Hittite share cognates derived from *hwergh, Tocharian has >derivatives of *kwekwlom and possibly *roto, etc. >They're all fairly transparent, too: "the round thing", "the thing that goes >round and round", "the runner", and so forth. >This is what you'd expect if proto-Indo-European speakers invented the wheel, >by the way -- otherwise there should be at least one loan-word for "wheel", >one that isn't resolvable into a PIE root. Wait a minute. PIE-speakers invented the wheel? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From edsel at glo.be Tue Feb 8 15:44:21 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 16:44:21 +0100 Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Saturday, February 05, 2000 8:27 AM [snip] > There's a broad overlap in the 4 PIE words for wheel: > 1. *kwekwlom -- Germanic, Phrygian, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Tocharian, > Balto-slavic, and closely related terms in Celtic > This probably referred to the wheels in a two-wheeled cart, given the dual > form in Old Irish ('cul', from *kwolo via *kwolos). "The two roundy-roundy > things". > 2. *Hwergh -- Tocharian, Hittite > 3. *dhroghos -- Celtic, Greek, Armenian > 4. *roto -- Celtic, Latin, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Indo-Iranian, > and possibly Tocharian. > So while none of the 4 occurs in all the groups -- one wouldn't expect that, > eh? -- every single one occurs in at least _two_ of the groups. Eg., > Tocharian and Hittite share cognates derived from *hwergh, Tocharian has > derivatives of *kwekwlom and possibly *roto, etc. > They're all fairly transparent, too: "the round thing", "the thing that goes > round and round", "the runner", and so forth. > This is what you'd expect if proto-Indo-European speakers invented the wheel, > by the way -- otherwise there should be at least one loan-word for "wheel", > one that isn't resolvable into a PIE root. [Ed Selleslagh] Why? This is based on the hypothesis that some IE speakers would have preferred to use a foreign word over a descriptive IE word, if they hadn't invented the wheel. And that's just a hypothesis, although not an unlikely one. But that's not the problem here (BTW I tend to believe that IE speakers invented the wheel) in the ungoing discussion. The question is whether the IE words used indicate that the wheel was invented before PIE split up. I would say they don't: otherwise all or most groups would have used the same word (quod non), quite the contrary: they all use a limited number of existing simple descriptive words any moron in any language group might have thought of, and not even the same ones. (Looks a bit like the "original" names invented for the 'roundabouts' and 'flyovers' that are so popular among UK traffic planners). In other words, I find it unlikely that the spread of IE and the spread of the (probably IE) wheel technology need any synchronism to explain the observed facts. The languages (and the four most obvious descriptive words for wheel and chariot) could have spread long before the wheel. That would explain the groupwise use of different terms (plus carry-over through diffusion, Sprachbund,...from one group to the neighboring ones, leading to re-convergence in more limited IE areas). I'm afraid this isn't very different from the hotly contested link between the spread of agriculture and IE languages. Ed Selleslagh. From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Feb 11 06:37:25 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 01:37:25 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 2/8/00 4:20:02 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: <> This is interesting. 2000yrs from modern Romance language back to Latin? 2000 yrs from Myceanaean, Sanskrit and Latin back to what? PIE? Not likely. Because even if Mycenean, Sanskrit and Latin were as 'undifferentiated' as is claimed above, this group hardly represents the full range of differences that emerge out of the darkness of 4000 years, are they? Do the similarities between Latin and Hittite 'leap off the page" as you say? (Please recall how long it took for relationship to even be detected.) And what does Hittite (for starters) add to the total 'differentiation' between the first attested PIE languages? If 2000 years separates Latin and Sanskrit, Hittite should certainly add another 2000 years, wouldn't you say? That would put you at (1000BC minus 2000 minus 2000 more) 5000BC. And of course, the differentiation between the languages above and Tocharian, Luwian, the undecipherable Thracian, Albanian and Celtiberian should send your date of dispersal hurtling back to that magic 7000BC you've mentioned so frequently. Or do all these languages decline with only a change in the initial vowel and do they all have the same name for their principle god - thus justifying a 2000 year separation between all of them. JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> BTW, would you know if appears in Mycenaean? Or when the phrase first appears in Greek? Regards, Steve Long From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Wed Feb 9 16:57:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 16:57:00 GMT Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >Hittite and Tocharian -- very widely separated IE languages .. interesting! Ringe's and my own computations come out with the contrary. (cf. TWarnow PNAS 94:6585ff; Holm forthcoming JQL.) Mit freundlichen Grüßen Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover Tel=FAX x49-511-9585714. From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 8 04:18:36 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 05:18:36 +0100 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: <13.ff6942.25cd291e@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >So this appears to be a different word for horse - coming from a different >(?) root than *ekwos - with the sense "mover, self-mover, something that >propels?" (I think.) Yes. Or simply "the swift one", as may have been the semantics of *ek^wos itself (*ok^us "fast"). >I assume that *g^hei has not been suggested as >*ekwos or vice versa Indeed not. >(that >may be a mistake) so this suggests that the two words may reflect different >'traditions'. And the traditions possibly conflicted in Armenian or at least >the outcome was that both words appear and either the *ekwos word was applied >to donkey first or the *g^hei word was applied to horse first? And the other >was applied by default? >Does this make sense? And if it does, could it be possible that ji<*g^hei >reflects a more native PIE word for horse or equid than *ekwos - which does >not necessarily show known PIE roots (that's my understanding at least)? Not necessarily so (see above). Skt. haya-, Arm. jio- clearly represent a much more recent "tradition" than *ek^wos (Skt. as'va- "horse", Arm. e_s^ "donkey"). If we look in C.D. Buck's dictionary, we see that *ek^wos, though widespread, has been replaced with more recent terms in many IE languages (this is a perfectly normal process). ModGr. has "< irrational, non-human" (military term: the army's personnel consisted of humans and horses). Romance has generalized *caballu, which may be connected with Russ. "mare" and Slavic "horse" (if < *kobnj-). Semantics unknown (I suspect *kop(h)- "hoof" may have something to do with it). Not necessarily an old word, not necessarily recent. Germanic hross ~ horse from a word meaning "to run" or "to jump". German/Dutch paard ~ Pferd, from Celto-Latin para-vere:dus "post horse". Celtic-Germanic *marko- "horse". This might qualify as ancient, in the neighbourhood of *ek^wos. Lithuanian arklys < "plow horse", Baltic z^irgas, zirgs "wide-stepper" [similarly, from "ambler", maybe the Basque word for "horse" < IE *del-, German Zelter "ambler", thieldo- "Cantabrian ambling horse (Pliny)"], Russ. loshad' < Turkic, Skt./Arm. haya-/jio- "horse". All these words, with the [just] possible exceptions of *marko- and *kab-, are more recent terms than *ek^wos, which is undoubtedly the common PIE word for "horse". >Also mcv at wxs.nl wrote: ><> >Would this suggest that onus/asinus are not from PIE and that the occurence >of 'ass' in IE languages happens late? Yes. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From rao.3 at osu.edu Fri Feb 11 21:42:34 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 16:42:34 -0500 Subject: Horses Message-ID: wrote: To: Sent: Saturday, February 05, 2000 2:19 AM > I assume that *g^hei has not been suggested as >*ekwos or vice versa > (that may be a mistake) so this suggests that the two words may > reflect different 'traditions'. And the traditions possibly > conflicted in Armenian or at least the outcome was that both words > appear and either the *ekwos word was applied to donkey first or > the *g^hei word was applied to horse first? And the other was > applied by default? In Sanskrit, the difference seems to be everyday name versus poetic language. There is an example that I cant place at the moment, but goes something like `` ... bhu:tva: deva:n avahat, ..., as'vo bhu:tva: manus.ya:n''. `... becoming as'va he (carried) men.' Look up papers that refer to ``language of gods vs language of men''. If this was the original difference, Armenian shift may simply have been ``ek^wo -> low-prestige horse -> donkey''. [BTW, why do we cite most words in stem form but some, like ek^wos, in what seems to be the nominative?] From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Sat Feb 12 10:01:22 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2000 12:01:22 +0200 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: <008201bf6fed$c3687b80$c502703e@edsel> Message-ID: > [Ed] > Note that in Basque, 'zezen' means 'bull'. At least it has four legs ;-) > Coincidence? Another loan cum semantic shift? Or did these words originally > mean 'big four-legged domesticated animal' or 'head of cattle' or something > of that kind? > Ed. Selleslagh For parallels, there's Finnish lehmä 'cow' = Mordvin l'iSme 'horse'. - Ante Aikio From rao.3 at osu.edu Fri Feb 11 21:41:50 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 16:41:50 -0500 Subject: Horses in War Message-ID: > Homer tells us precisely what happens when chariots cross a ditch: > ".... the hosts of Troy, whom the digged trench held back against > their will. And in the trench many pairs of swift horses, drawers > of chariots, brake the pole at the end, and left the chariots of > their lords...." Iliad 16.369 (et seq) There is a modern eye-witness account of what might happen when a 2nd m. BCE chariot tries to jump a ditch. This is in footnote 10 on p. 40 in Spruytte, Ancient Harness Systems. During experiments with a reconstructed copy of the chariot found in Tut's tomb, the horses took fright for some unknown reason and took off at high speed. The alarmed driver jumped to safety. The horses came to a deep ditch about 1.30 m wide, jumped and landed on the other side. The pole broke, but [the point of the story] the yoke and the neck forks stayed put on the horses' necks, though the right fork turned to be cracked on inspection. [It doesn't say where the pole broke.] From colkitto at sprint.ca Tue Feb 8 05:57:07 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 00:57:07 -0500 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >JoatSimeon at aol.com >In a message dated 2/4/00 12:17:35 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >><<>I don't believe that any current theory is that Greek and Sanskrit >>managed to split-off from PIE in the Ukraine and went their separate ways >>sharing innovations that are not found in PIE. >-- that is precisely the current consensus theory. Both Greek and Sanskrit >(and Armenian and Phyrgian) belonged to an east-central group of dialects >within PIE. They lost contact sometime in the course of Indo-Iranian's >spread to the east and pre-Greek's movement south. This accounts >parsimoniously for all the observable linguistic data.>> My own impression that this theory, as far as Greek and Sanskrit go, goes back to Sir William Jones. From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 8 06:49:53 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 07:49:53 +0100 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000205222118.00996db0@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: Stanley Friesen wrote: >At 12:55 AM 2/5/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >>That's not at all what Renfrew says. He's saying that "a >>massive amount of archaeological evidence associated with >>fundamental technological-economic transformation requires a >>linguistic change", as it were. Which is true. The Neolithic >>Revolution was the second most important such event in European >>history (the most important was the introduction of language --as >>we know it-- itself in the Upper Paleolithic, 50-40,000 BP). >I think that date is rather too late. That is more likely the date at >which language was introduced into Europe. That's why I said "in European history". >How much earlier language was >invented is unclear, but it could be as long ago as 200,000 years ago, with >the first appearance of anatomically modern humans in Africa. >The Upper Paleolithic (or its equivalent) begins earlier,and more >gradually, outside of Europe. True. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu Tue Feb 8 17:54:11 2000 From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 11:54:11 -0600 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >As far as the consensus goes - where do you find evidence of this consensus? >(I mean apart from Mallory.) Is there a specific poll that was taken or is >it something that's reflected in a count of recent papers on the subject? > Steve Long On the Greek-Armenian-Indo-Iranian branch, the major evidence is at least as early as Antoine Meillet (The IE Dialects and an update to the Introduction) and as late as Gamkrelidze and Ivanov's IE and IEeans (trsl. 1995). I don't recall major arguments refuting Meillet and G & I, while they give major linguistic arguments in favor of this branch (but in the Ukraine?). The problem that I see is that, while people seem to accept this view, they somehow don't always internalize the implications. As a result, someone who purports to agree with Meillet will still reconstruct PIE on the basis of shared features between Greek, Sanskrit, and Avestan that Latin, Anatolian, and Germanic don't share. So the consensus may be more by default than by reasoned application. It would be nice if people would take a position on the basis of the particular arguments then work with the implications. Carol Justus >JoatSimeon at aol.com >In a message dated 2/4/00 12:17:35 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: ><<>I don't believe that any current theory is that Greek and Sanskrit managed >>to split-off from PIE in the Ukraine and went their separate ways sharing >>innovations that are not found in PIE. >-- that is precisely the current consensus theory. Both Greek and Sanskrit >(and Armenian and Phyrgian) belonged to an east-central group of dialects >within PIE. They lost contact sometime in the course of Indo-Iranian's >spread to the east and pre-Greek's movement south. This accounts >parsimoniously for all the observable linguistic data.>> >Now this is interesting. And it actually gets back to the subject of the >thread. >So you are saying a proto-language of Greek, Sanskrit, Armenian and Phrygian >was located in the Ukraine? And this language was not PIE or even narrow PIE. >What dates would you put on that language? Would you have any notion of how >that group of speakers would correlate with archaeologically? >What shared attributes would you suggest uniquely group those four languages >as opposed to other IE languages? >Regards, >Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 8 21:14:51 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 16:14:51 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Might this apparent conflict with your information suggest that you might >want to get more familiar with the subject matter? -- "The earliest Neolithic settlements in southeastern Europe have been dated to around 7000 BCE... by 6000 BCE, farming villages with pottery and other Neolithic features had become established throughout southeastern Europe as far north as the Danube valley and the Great Hungarian Plain." -- Oxford Companion to Archaeology, Brian W. Fagan, ed., p. 215. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 8 21:17:16 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 16:17:16 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: In a message dated 2/7/00 9:11:47 PM Mountain Standard Time, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >However, core analysis of pollen deposits indicating forest clearance and the >growth of domesticated plants have not yielded dates in France earlier than I >believe 4600BC. >> -- "By 5300 BCE Banderkeramik settlement had spread along the major river valleys of central Europe, and communities of Banderkeramik farmers were established in eastern France and the Low Countries." Oxford Companion to Archaeology, p. 215 From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 8 21:19:47 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 16:19:47 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: In a message dated 2/7/00 9:33:02 PM Mountain Standard Time, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: << Let me suggest a date of @4500BC for the functional final unity of non-Anatolian 'narrow PIE' and located it at that time stretching from Holland across north central in a 6 degree lat band to the upper Dniestr, Dnieper and Bug - the extent of the Bandkeramik culture. >> -- Renfrew specifically hypothesizes that IE entered Europe _from_ Anatolia at the time of the _first_ introduction of agriculture into SE Europe, which is dated to 7000 BCE. This means that, according to you, PIE must have retained _complete linguistic unity for 3500 years_ (minimum). From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 8 21:21:25 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 16:21:25 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: << And not a paragraph before that you say 'You do not GET uniform languages over large areas.' >> -- now you're descending to selective quotation. You do not GET uniform languages over large areas for a long period. If you find a large, linguistically uniform area, it's a certain indication of a _recent spread_ of the language in question. This is a truism found in any textbook. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 8 21:23:20 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 16:23:20 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Not 'the introduction of agriculture as such' -- yup. Renfrew says PIE spread through Europe with agriculture. This process begins in 7000 BCE, and reaches as far as the Low Countries well before 5000 BCE. Now, are you saying that this process spread Indo-European or not? Yes or no? From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 8 21:25:44 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 16:25:44 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >So you are saying a proto-language of Greek, Sanskrit, Armenian and Phrygian >was located in the Ukraine? And this language was not PIE or even narrow >PIE. -- in an area spanning the Ukraine, possibly into the northern Balkans at some point. >What dates would you put on that language? -- "dialect continuum". Dates? "After 3000 BCE, before 2000 BCE". >Would you have any notion of how that group of speakers would correlate with >archaeologically? -- languages are not pots. There's usually no way to make a one-to-one correlation between material culture and language. From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Mon Feb 7 16:22:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2000 16:22:00 GMT Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: MCV>was the introduction of language --as we know it-- itself in the MCV>Upper Paleolithic, 50-40,000 BP). .. that's the - in the moment - most likely assumption. 'Knowledge' - C'est une autre chose... Mit freundlichen Grüßen Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover Tel=FAX x49-511-9585714. From sarima at friesen.net Thu Feb 10 15:36:40 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 07:36:40 -0800 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) In-Reply-To: <9d.170d8ea.25cd1229@aol.com> Message-ID: At 12:42 AM 2/5/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Yes. SORRY. But yes. Not 'the introduction of agriculture as such' - The >term 'middle neolithic' as applied to Europe as a whole (not locally) >encompasses my 4500-4000BC date. For some reason you are calling the whole >process 'early neolithic'. Neolithic is basically a distinction from >mesolithic. Early neolithic in Europe as a whole generally denotes the >period before 5000BC. Locally the term is sometimes used when different >sub-periods can be identified. But in terms of Europe, farming 'as such' is >also being introduced in the late neolithic and in some areas even in the >'European iron age.' This is a different use of the terms than I am familiar with. I guess I have not often come across their use for "Europe as a whole". But this still doesn't change the basic facts: the agricultural revolution is too old, and took too long to spread over Europe, for it to be associated with PIE. Whether one uses local terminology or pan-European terminology does not change this fact. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Wed Feb 9 16:16:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 16:16:00 GMT Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >by 7000 BCE >about 5800BC ..before beating your heads, _please_ cite those dates _always_ with the degree of exactness = kind of calibration. Every specialist knows that; linguists normally do not. Unfortunately many works in the field do not mention these facts either. And this /may/ easily solve the difference. Mit freundlichen Grüßen Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover Tel=FAX x49-511-9585714. From rao.3 at osu.edu Fri Feb 11 21:42:09 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 16:42:09 -0500 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: wrote: > ... conversely, many changes of language have not > been accompanied by massive technological-economic change. > > Eg., for just one example, the spread of Slavic. Or of Indo-Iranian > into Iran and India, for another, which is definitely post-neolithic. We must be careful to distinguish between entry of a language into a new area and its spread. English entered India in 18th c, but its spread is connected to urbanization and industrialization of last 30-40 years (subsequent to the departure of the British). Now, there was significant change in social organization in North India during the ``Second Urbanization'' (urbanization of Ganga valley), from 700 BCE to 300BCE (I am not sure of technological change). Interestingly, either Burrow or Kuiper date the majority of the influx of non-IE words in Sanskrit to about this period. It is not so clear to me that languages change without significant change in social/economic organization. Even in the cases where gradual change in language is occuring due to elite dominance (an example in Afghanistan described by Barth is often cited) , it seems to be due to shift from one social group to another organized very differently. This can occur without technological change. But I will leave it archaeologists to fight out if this can occur without traceable records. From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Tue Feb 8 06:23:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 06:23:00 GMT Subject: Balkan Kurgans Message-ID: A question to the professional archeologists reading here: In JIES 21-3,4/Fall/Winter 1993:207214, I found an article 'Silver in the Yamna (Pit-grave) Culture in the Balkans'. Though silver cannot speak - is there any evidence pro or contra an (Pre-)Indo-European community there??? Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From spalviai at mappi.helsinki.fi Tue Feb 8 16:56:35 2000 From: spalviai at mappi.helsinki.fi (spalviai at mappi.helsinki.fi) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 18:56:35 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear IE-listers, here are few additions I would like to make to the bibliography Ante Aikio suggested a while ago: probably the most accessible article by Jorma Koivulehto on the representation of IE laryngeals in Uralic can be found in Bammesberger, Alfred (ed.) 1988. Laryngaltheorie und die Rekonstruktion des indogermanischen Laut- und Formensystems. Heidelberg : Carl Winter Universitätsverlag. I also want to remind that the Festschrift for Jorma Koivulehto has appeared quite recently. It contains all his most important articles in German. Jorma Koivulehto 1999. Verba mutuata. Quae vestigia antiquissimi cum Germanis aliisque Indo-Europaeis contactus in linguis Fennicis reliquerint. Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne 237. Helsinki : Finno-Ugrian Society. http://www.helsinki.fi/jarj/sus/sust.html#237 Best regards, Santeri Palviainen Univ. of Helsinki From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 8 20:46:12 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 21:46:12 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <015701bf6fd3$b758dca0$8c9201d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: "petegray" wrote: >(a) Unrelated languages do produce offspring - for example, creoles. But creolization has nothing to do per se with language mixing. >It has >even been suggested that the entire Germanic branch of IE is in fact a >creole. Give me one good reason. Sounds like linguistics by fashion. >Genetically (in your terms), English is equally >related to both French and Italian. I find it more helpful to accept a >wider use of "related" in such a way that it allows me to indicate that >plural forms and a range of other stuff in English actually are "related" to >French but not "related" to Italian, and that therefore English has a >different relationship to French and Italian, not an identical one There's a range of other stuff allright, but no plurals. >(b) The idea that there must be a single language progenitor of daughter >languages is widely disputed. Some people accept the idea that a >collection of interrelated languages might never have had a single ancestor, >but as far back as you care to go were simply a collection of inter-related >languages. The language/dialect issue comes up here. We talk of IE >"dialects" within PIE, but this is simply terminology. The point is that >there is no need whatever for there to have been a single unified PIE >language. Nevertheless, there certainly was a PIE. Now define "single" and "unified". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 8 22:54:46 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 17:54:46 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >petegray at btinternet.com writes: >Interestingly, these _failed_ to prove convincingly that Hittite was IE! >It was the rather obscure -r/-n heteroclite declension that was the final >clincher for some people. -- the first indication that Hittite was IE was a lexical term -- the word for "water", specifically. ("watar") If you look through a basic vocabulary list, say: PIE Hittite English *uet wett year *doru taru tree *iugom yukan yoke *neuo newas new *ueuok wewakk demand *uedor witar waters *esti es be *genu genu knee -- you get, to put it mildly, a very strong indication. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 9 00:45:34 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 19:45:34 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >sarima at friesen.net writes: >>joatsimeon at aol.com writes >>Not to mention that the Germanics had been expanding at the expense of >>Celtic-speakers for centuries before the Romans came along; as a matter of >>fact, it was Caesar who forced them out of Gaul and back across the Rhine. >>What's now Southern Germany and the German-speaking parts of Switzerland >>was once Celtic-speaking territory. >In fact I think this area includes the most likely Celtic homeland. -- I'd agree with you there; somewhere on the Upper Danube, probably. Or at least between Austria and Alsace. From colkitto at sprint.ca Wed Feb 9 02:02:31 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 21:02:31 -0500 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: Scottish Gaelic borrowed the numerals for year dates from English; it startles non-Gaelic speakers when they hear, e.g., "1967" (God, that was a long time ago!) in the mddle of a flood of Gaelic. >> I believe English numerals tend to be borrowed into Hind-Urdu... >> But please correct me if I'm wrong! >You're not wrong. The last time this came up on the list, I checked it with >Hindi speakers whom I teach. They knew the Hindi numerals, but agreed that >in practice they often used English. They also agreed that this was not a >statement, but a confession! The use of English is marked, and might be >restricted to more casual areas of discourse, and perhaps to younger >speakers. But I hardly had an adequate database to make any firm >statements! >Peter From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Wed Feb 9 08:58:09 2000 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 09:58:09 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >So the initial discovery of Indo-European was produced by straightforward >comparison of lexical items. That made it obvious, in a straightforward >common-sense way, that the languages were related. Grammatical analysis >followed. All this is true, and a few names could be added to this (Sassetti comparing Sanskrit and Italian words in a remarkably "correct" way back in (was it) the 16th century and some others). There is Strahlenberg comparing words and only words in several Eurasian languages back in 1720 arriving at some quite viable groupings of languages (IE not among them) aso. Back in Leibniz' times it was quite fashionable in the German writing world (I don't blame this on Leibniz' personally) to talk of a common origin of German and Persian due to some common words (some comparisons of which have stood the test of time) aso. It is legitimate and interesting to look for the "first" people to suspect that something is going on between the languages of the Old World, and it is quite natural that every name me may be able to pin down in the prehistory of IE (and general) complx. was mainly concerned with words. But any name on such a pre-1816 list of "pre-IEists" will be the name of an isolated genius, guessing the right thing, or having had the right idea of (parts of) the IE family avant la parole. However, all these bright people have not been able to demonstrate the genetic affinity of IE in a way which convinced their contemporaries to the effect that the need for a new academic discipline was felt. To show that not only "something fishy is going on with some languages of the Old World" (this need not have interested anybody in the first place in pre-enlightenment times, for the dogma of the dispersal of an original tongue due to the events which led to the Babylonians abandon their ambitious tower project was known to every single person in Europe, literate or illiterate), but that something which was going on there, something *specific*, and altogether *unexpected*, could be *explored* with scientific methods (methods yet to develop, of course) to the end of better understanding why the languages we find are the way they are marks the beginning of IE (and general) complx as a scientific discipline. And this beginning dates from Bopp's "Conjugationssystem", not from Jones' brilliantly formulated observation, and not from any one of his predecessors. Trying to think up an analogy I might mention electricity, which was basically known (very basically) to the Ancient Greeks, and every history of science will have to mention this fact, but it will also have to mention that systematic investigation of the phenomenon and everything which goes with it started considerably later (say, with Franklin, but please call me whatever name you think appropriate for someone who knows so little on the history of physics as I do ...). So, if you agree that there is a qualitative difference between "first guesses" and the foundation of a new science, which soon developed into an academic discipline, because the kind of evidence brought forward convinced enough people in the learned world that it can and should exist, and which existed and was practised for almost two centuries up to the present day, you should, imho, also accept that the observation of remarkably parallel morphological paradigms in geographically widely apart languages is the point in time we are looking for when we want to determine "when it all began" (i.e. IE lx. "as we know it"). So, Parson was certainly, in a way, on the right track (and so was Sassetti before him, and others have been, too), but neither he nor anyone else before Bopp was able to put IE complx on the agenda of urgent and solvable tasks. Word comparisons simply couldn't do the job, since they have been around for centuries (mainly as shots in the dark, which nevertheless sometimes may have hit the bull's eye) without impressing too many people, let alone set a whole new science into motion. The Conjugationssystem did, and from there on the new thing kept moving until today. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg home: Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-691332+ Georg at home.ivm.de work: http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/vtw/Georg/Georg.html From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Wed Feb 9 12:02:43 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 14:02:43 +0200 Subject: basic vocabulary borrowing (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: <8s7o9scv0nthjnjchipfgievibbrhmuugg@4ax.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 5 Feb 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > Ante Aikio wrote: >> What is likely to be borrowed and what is not in a given >> circumstance depends on many factors. In U languages, the numerals are >> largely cognate and there are no known borrowings except for 'seven', >> 'hundred' and 'thousand'. > It has been claimed, though, that the affix -deksan (etc.) found > in Finnic words for 8 and 9 is also of IE origin. (I doubt this > is true). Permic *das "ten" is obviously of Iranian origin. I > can't remeber what the story is on Hungarian . Well, I actually forgot about 'ten'. The Hungarian word is also an Iranian loan. Concerning the affix *-teksä(n), this explanation has been recently revived: it has been argued that it is a loan from Proto-Iranian *detsa. The phonetics are flawless; there are other examples of U *ks < Iranian *ts (The cluster *ts was illegal in U, hence the substitution). This explanation seems more plausible to me at least than the previous rather fabricated theory that Finnish kahdeksan and yhdeksän developed from *kakta e-k-sä-n 'two do not exist' (i.e., "two are missing from ten") and *ükti e-k-sä-n. >> But even numerals can become cultural >> items; e.g. the loan origin of Ob-Ugric/Hungarian *säptä '7' (< Aryan / >> Iranian) and Samoyed *sejpti (< Tocharian?) > Tocharian A has and B has . We would expect > *septm. to give PToch *s^IptI (*s.a"pta"), which leads to the > Toch. A form without much problems (*s^IptI > *s^IpIt > s^pIt). > If the Toch. B form went through a stage *s^Iw(I)tI (*-p- > > *-w-?, with -kt later by analogy from "8"), that might > explain Nenets , Enets . But I can't see how > *sejpti (based, I guess, on Nganasan etc.) might derive > from Tocharian. The /b/ in the Samoyed forms rather reminds one > of Germanic *sibum. I have to correct myself a bit. The Proto-Samoyed reconstruction should be *sejTwE (where *T = *k or *t; *E = schwa) - this accounts for all the Samoyed forms. The idea of borrowing from Proto-Tocharian originally derives from Juha Janhunen, and it seems phonetically problematic, to say the least. In addition to the *j, which is hard to account for, one has to assume an irregular metathesis *pt > *tw in Proto-Samoyed. >> , replacing PU *s´exs´imi '7', > As in Permic , Mordvin . Is this also agreed to be > the prototype of Finnish ? My reconstruction *s´exs´imi is a bit problematic. It should rather be *s´Vs´imV (the first syllable vowel cannot be reliably reconstructed, but at any rate it was a front vowel). There is very little evidence for my *-ex- here, although it would account for the vowel relation between Saami and Mordvin rather nicely. The Finnish word is irregular. -än is clearly due to analogy of kahdeksan and yhdeksän, while -its- (pro -s-) is difficult to account for. If one assumes that the diphtong -ei- in Finnish is not secondary (although the other cognates show no evidence in support for this), it might even be possible to link Samoyed *seyTwE here. *w might be the irregulary weakened reflex of PU *m, thus something like PU *s´Vjsimi > *s´ejsEmE > *sejtEwE > *sejtwE (U *s´, *s > Samoyed *s, *t are regular developments). In this case one would have to assume sporadic assimilation *js > *(j)s´ in the other branches of Uralic. This is of course quite irregular, but hardly more than the proposed IE loan etymology. Ante Aikio From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 10 04:20:11 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 23:20:11 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >mclasutt at brigham.net writes: >This would be due to avoidance. Reproductive body parts and elimination >functions are generally subject to very high degrees of euphemism, >> -- yup. The same with objects which are the subject of fear and avoidance -- "wolf" and "bear", for instance. ("The Outlaw" and "The Brown One", respectively). From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 10 04:23:49 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 23:23:49 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de writes: >let me take an Indo-European example, e.g. Italian and French. Superficially >seen they only have one ancestor: Latin. But this is only the dominant >ancestor. >If we look at e.g. French it has a lot of strata which can be called its >fathers: -- nope. It has some substrate influence from Celtic, and some loan-words; ditto from Frankish. But that does not alter its status as a Romance language one iota. If you took all the non-Romance elements out of French, it wouldn't make that much difference. If, on the other hand, you took out all the elements derived from Latin, it would cease to exist. Run it backwards, and it becomes Latin, not a Celtic or Germanic language. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 10 04:25:17 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 23:25:17 EST Subject: Numbers as "Core Vocabulary" (was IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic ... Message-ID: >mclasutt at brigham.net writes: >Numbers are one of the very WORST things to look at in order to make even a >preliminary decision about relationship. -- they work fine with the Indo-European languages; in fact, they were crucial to the discovery of the IE family itself. They work fairly well with Semitic, too. From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Thu Feb 10 10:51:25 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 12:51:25 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 5 Feb 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > This word is sometimes seen as supportive of a PIE ~ Uralic > genetic link, but it rather looks like a borrowing from IE into > Uralic. The IE prototype contains two laryngeals (*h1neh3- or > *h3neh3-) and the abstract suffix *-men [*], none of which finds > expression in the Uralic word. Actually, the lack of reflex of medial *h3 is a bit problematic. One would expect borrowing from IE *Hneh3men- to give PU *nexmi / *nixmi. But I've seen such reconstructs as IE *nmen-, based (at least) on Slavic, as far as I understand. Is this reconstruct valid? It would account nicely for PU *nimi. > Hittite has been dissimilated, as is not totally > unexpected in a word containg only nasal consonants. Uralic > *nimi has only two of them, but I believe (my Proto-Uralic is not > that good) that the genitive case would add another -n-. > Dissimilation would be a natural thing to happen. I don't think > Mordvin-Mari necessarily offers any evidence of Uralic-Anatolian > contacts. Yes, since this is an isolated case, sporadic dissimilation seems more probable than Anatolian influence. I didn't think of the genitive; it really is PU *nimi-n with three nasals. There are also lots of other suffixes with nasal consonants, at least accusative *nimi-m, lative *nimi-N, locative *nimi-nä, and sing. 1p px *nimi-mi 'my name'. Ante Aikio From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Thu Feb 10 21:02:29 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 23:02:29 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <200002051210.p728@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: On Sat, 5 Feb 2000, Hans Holm wrote: > RW>Either two (or more) languages are related or they are not. This is > RW>the basic hypothesis of historical linguistics. > .. is it? Nice to learn indeed. Well, better late than never ... > You will find defenders for or against relationships between any two > languages. You can argue about the degrees and ways, about significance or > chance resemblances. But you can't prove unrelatedness. We had that > discussion already. Perhaps You should read Anttila 89:320.. Indeed, one cannot prove unrelatedness, but without a historical record, one can not prove relatedness either. One can only amass enough evidence to show that it is inconceiveable that certain languages are not related. But if you have actually read Anttila 89:320, you will know that he says there "'Related' in linguistics means 'relatable'." So when I say that languages are either related or they are not, that means that languages can either be shown to be related ('are relatable') or they cannot. This simply means that if languages cannot be shown to be related, they must be considered unrelated. Now it is not impossible that all languages are ultimately related, which, if true, would mean that there is no such thing as unrelated languages and the "or not" becomes meaningless. But since there is no way, with present methodology, to prove this pro or con, one cannot deny the possibility of unrelated languages. So when a linguist says that certain languages are unrelated this means only that there is no (or insufficient) evidence to show relatedness. And if you want to use Anttila 89 as a source then you should read the heading of the chapter that you are quoting from, which says in part: "... typological classification is never perfect or absolute. This contrasts with the absolute nature of genealogical classification." (ibid. 310) So there may be distantly related language, but there are no slightly related languages. Languages are either related or they are not. Perhaps you should read Anttila 89:300. Start with the part where he says: "'Related' is a technical term, exactly like the equivalent 'cognate', meaning that the items were once identical." This is the criterion of genetic relatedness in historical linguistics. If you find this impenetrable, the same concept is explained is slightly different terms in Anttila 89:318: "Those languages that represent outcomes of one and the same proto-language are grouped into a family." This means that related languages (those that form a family) are variant outcomes of a single language. > RW>This is totally irrelevant > You mean /you/ do not see the point. Yes, that is what irrelevant means. Perhaps someone who does see the point can explain it to me. > You might have missed that my ancestor example referred not to languages > but to speakers. Which is precisely what makes it irrelevant. The genetic relatedness (or lack of it) of the speakers of a language has no bearing on the genetic relatedness of languages. The ability to learn and use language (the language acquisition device if you prefer) is genetic and inherited, but there is no genetic disposition to learn any particular language. Any normal human child, regardless of its genetic background, placed in any linguistic environment will learn the language(s) of that environment. > RW>Languages do not need a mommy language > .. really? > RW>But two genetically related languages have only one common ancestor, > .. let me take an Indo-European example, e.g. Italian and French. > Superficially seen they only have one ancestor: Latin. But this is only > the dominant ancestor. > If we look at e.g. French it has a lot of strata which can be called its > fathers: The languages spoken by the pre-celtic cultures, the Celts > themselves; later all the Germanic invaders not perfectly succeeding in > learning the current states of that language. Anttila (and others) cite > languages where you cannot even decide whether they should be named after > their mother or their father. Ah, well, it is a wise child that knows his own father. Substratum, adstratum, and superstratum languages can certainly influence the outcome of a language's development, but that does not necessarily make them genetically related. Latin had considerable influence on English, but that does not mean that English is descended from Latin; Latin had considerable influence on Basque, but that does not mean that Basque is related to Latin. Sumerian had considerable influence on Akkadian, but that does not mean that Akkadian is related to Sumerian. My professors in grad school had considerable influence on my later life, but that does not mean that they are related to me. Convergence (and even mixture) do not make for genetic relationships. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Fri Feb 11 07:42:12 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 09:42:12 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <015701bf6fd3$b758dca0$8c9201d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Sat, 5 Feb 2000, petegray wrote: > (a) Unrelated languages do produce offspring - for example, creoles. It has > even been suggested that the entire Germanic branch of IE is in fact a > creole. I think it is unhelpful to restrict our understanding of > relationship to a yes-no either/or. You might have trouble describing a > creole without distorting facts to fit your definition. Creoles are a well-known exception. Some maintain that creoles have multiple genetic ancestors, but it can be argued that creoles are not in fact "genetically" related to any language (this view is taken by e.g. Thomason & Kaufmann in their book Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics). And because of this the comparative method is not applicable to creoles. Since the comparative method is applicable to Germanic, Germanic is not a creole - and note that if it was, it wouldn't even be an IE language branch in the first place. > It is ultimately only a matter of which method of description we prefer, but > I do believe it is unhelpful to restrict the term "related" to mean > "genetically related". Genetically (in your terms), English is equally > related to both French and Italian. I find it more helpful to accept a > wider use of "related" in such a way that it allows me to indicate that > plural forms and a range of other stuff in English actually are "related" to > French but not "related" to Italian, and that therefore English has a > different relationship to French and Italian, not an identical one This is not really a matter of preferration. It is the basic assumption of historical linguistics that there is a qualitative difference between borrowing and inheritance. Even extensive borrowing has no implication on genetic connections (if it did, e.g. Saami and Finnish would rather be Indo-European than Uralic). This assumption is also the basis of the comparative method - if it is rejected, the method is inapplicable and there is no way to study historical linguistics. Ante Aikio From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 8 09:11:22 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 10:11:22 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <015a01bf6fd3$ba10a9a0$8c9201d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: "petegray" wrote: >Miguel wrote: >>For instance, I don't think >> Benveniste's root-theory allows *i and *u in the V position (or >> does it?). It would be nice to have statistics. >Forgive my ignorance - I'm puzzled here. *CiC and *CuC roots are >plentiful, e.g. *digh goat, *bhidh pot, *k'ik strap, *knid louse; *trus >reed, *k'up shoulder, *k'udh dung, *lus louse etc etc. >Could you help me understand what you meant here? Compare the number of Ce-/Co-roots (e.g. in Pokorny) with the number of Ci-/Cu-roots. I guesstimate the difference is a factor 10 or so. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 8 09:22:27 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 10:22:27 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <008101bf6fed$c3148f20$c502703e@edsel> Message-ID: "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >> << 1) what then is the standard reconstruction proposed for Skt. pu:r-, >> Greek and Baltic ? And the prototype meaning assigned to it? >[Ed] >And Slavic toponyms like Plzen' (Ger. Pilsen). What about -zen^? >Could Celtic 'briga' (> Gmc. burg) be a cognate? (and what about the Phryges, >Bruges?) [AFAIK, Gmc. is not a Celtic loanword.] No, *pelH- != *bhergh-. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 8 09:45:10 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 10:45:10 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.20000204221740.00712818@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu> Message-ID: roslyn frank wrote: >At 08:36 PM 2/3/00 EST, you wrote: >>>frank at uiowa.edu writes: >><< 1) what then is the standard reconstruction proposed for Skt. pu:r-, Greek >>> and Baltic ? And the prototype meaning assigned to it? >>-- *pelh(x), "fort, fortified place"..e. >Could you elaborate a bit more in order to explain why the phonologicial >shape of the Gk. and Baltic items take precedence over that of the Skt. >pu:r-? *pelH- is just the root. The actual word here is *pl.H-is (*pl.H-s for Sanskrit). It's not a question of precedence, merely soundlaws. The correspondences are exact. Skt. pu:r < pu:l < *pl.H(s) Skt. purih. < *pulis < *pl.=His Grk. polis < *pl.=His Lith. pilis < *pl.=His (syllabic *-l.- > -ur- in Skt., -ol- in Grk., -il- in Baltic) (long syllabic *-l.:- (<*-l.H-) > -u:r- in Skt.) >>There's also *uriien, 'fort', which gives Mycenaean 'rijo', promontory, and >>Tocharian 'ri', 'town'. >Do these examples imply that there was a loss of the initial plosive in the >last example and that one could posit an earlier * or perhaps * >for Tocharian? The initial was *w- (not a plosive). *wr- > Toch. r- (cf. English). I thought it was *wriya: (Thracian "city"). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 8 21:30:09 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 16:30:09 EST Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: In a message dated 2/8/00 12:05:29 AM Mountain Standard Time, roz-frank at uiowa.edu writes: << Could you elaborate a bit more in order to explain why the phonologicial shape of the Gk. and Baltic items take precedence over that of the Skt. pu:r-? >> -- it's a standard shift in Indo-Iranian, as far as I know. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 8 21:33:49 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 16:33:49 EST Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: >frank at uiowa.edu writes: >What are the data sources for the reconstruction *uriien? -- *uri, if you want the root. There are cognates in Thracian (from place-names, mostly), Mycenaean Greek, and Tocharian. >Do you mean to suggest by citing this example that there was a loss of the >initial plosive in the case of Tocharian. -- my ignorance of Tocharian is profound and deep. I have no idea. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 8 21:38:17 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 16:38:17 EST Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: >roz-frank at uiowa.edu writes: >Then with respect to the prototype meaning, is the choice of "fort, >fortified place" based on the fact that such a location/structure would >antedate an urban site such as "town" or "city"; or is there some other >basis for this choice? -- the Greek meaning is "city", but this retains traces of an earlier semantic association with "fortified place" or "enclosure"; eg., the continued use of "acropolis" for "citadel", as in the central, usually elevated, redoubt of a city. The Baltic and Indo-Iranian examples both refer specifically to a fortified enclosure (or sometimes to the wall of an enclosure); and since PIE speakers presumably didn't have cities, but probably did have fortified enclosures or settlements, the original meaning would have been "fort". Therefore it seems more sensible to posit a transferance from "fort" to "fortified city" to "city" in Greek and Armenian rather than vice versa. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 8 21:43:29 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 16:43:29 EST Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: >frank at uiowa.edu writes: >In the case of , et. al. I once read that they believed that the >referential object to which it once applied as an Iron Age "hill-fort", >although I don't recall the exact citation. -- *bergh. There are derivatives in the Germanic language (eg., OHG burg, 'fort', or Gothic baurgs, 'city, town'. Homeric Greek (I think -- possible spelling error) burghos, and definitely Armenian burgn. There's also a series of related terms with meanings like "hard" or "strong"; Old Latin fortus/Lating fortis, Sanskrit brmhati ("fortifies"), and Tocharian prakar 'hard, solid'. I think it's fairly obvious how meaning would shift back and forth here, since a defensive fortified wall was virtually a defining characteristic of a city in ancient times. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 8 21:44:28 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 16:44:28 EST Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >This is an Iranian loanword (also found in Georgian and Syriac) < MP /kl'k/ >(OI * kala:ka-). >> -- ah, I didn't know that. Thanks. From sarima at friesen.net Thu Feb 10 15:44:49 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 07:44:49 -0800 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.20000204221740.00712818@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu> Message-ID: At 11:15 PM 2/4/00 -0600, roslyn frank wrote: >Could you elaborate a bit more in order to explain why the phonologicial >shape of the Gk. and Baltic items take precedence over that of the Skt. >pu:r-? >Are there a general set of rules that show the regular correspondence of >Sk. words in to Greek and Baltic , i.e., that there >are other examples of the same transformations? Skt u:r regularly corresponds to a PIE vocalic resonant followed by a laryngeal. Skt mixes PIE 'l' and 'r', so one has to go elsewhere to find which is original. Baltic also regularly derives from a vocalic resonant. Between these two we reconstruct PIE *plh- (where the 'l' is the "vowel"). The Greek shows o-grade instead of zero-grade, leading to *p(o)lh. Based only on these examples, I see no trace of e-grade, but that may be due to the incompleteness of the list. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Thu Feb 10 15:46:17 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 07:46:17 -0800 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <015a01bf6fd3$ba10a9a0$8c9201d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: At 12:05 PM 2/5/00 +0000, petegray wrote: >Miguel wrote: >>For instance, I don't think >> Benveniste's root-theory allows *i and *u in the V position (or >> does it?). It would be nice to have statistics. >Forgive my ignorance - I'm puzzled here. *CiC and *CuC roots are >plentiful, e.g. *digh goat, *bhidh pot, *k'ik strap, *knid louse; *trus >reed, *k'up shoulder, *k'udh dung, *lus louse etc etc. >Could you help me understand what you meant here? Benveniste considers all of these to be zero-grades of "full" roots. I think this is over-reaching. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From lmfosse at online.no Tue Feb 8 13:54:32 2000 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 14:54:32 +0100 Subject: SV: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com [SMTP:JoatSimeon at aol.com] skrev 05. februar 2000 08:41: > And, for example, cattle dairying -- well-attested from the PIE vocabulary, > with words for 'to milk' (cows), curds, whey, 'cow rich in milk', butter, > etc., is generally dated to the mid-4th millenium BCE. (eg., McCormick, 1992, > "Early Faunal Evidence for Dairying", Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 11, > 201-209). > Note also that the genes for lactose tolerance (ability to digest cow's-milk > as an adult) show a distinct drop-off in Mediterranean Europe and the Near > East, but are high in northern and eastern Europeans. This seems to me to be an interesting observation. Have you got any bibliographic references on lactose tolerance? Also: are there any data on lactose tolerance in India? 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 lmfosse at online.no Tue Feb 8 14:53:41 2000 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 15:53:41 +0100 Subject: SV: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com [SMTP:JoatSimeon at aol.com] skrev 05. februar 2000 08:51: > But PIE does _not_ have a word for the warp-weighted loom, which was > developed in the Danube valley and spread eastwards in the Late Neolithic. > The Greek vocabulary for this type of loom is entirely borrowed, for example; > none in Indo-Iranian either, etc. > Hence PIE probably cannot have been spoken in an area and/or at a time when > this technology was known. Hence there can't have been PIE speakers in the > Middle Danube towards the end of the Neolithic. One more brick... There is a logical glitch here: The non-existence of a certain word in this context is non-conclusive. And the appearance of a certain kind of technology in a certain place does not prove that it was developed there. Hence, your statement is too strong. It should rather be something like: "Hence at the present state of the evidence, it seems unlikely that there were PIE speakers in the Middle Danube towards the end of the Neolithic." Sorry about the nitpicking. If not a brick, possibly a bricklet... :-) Best regards, Lars Martin Fosse Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114, 0674 Oslo Norway Phone/Fax: +47 22 32 12 19 Email: lmfosse at online.no From edsel at glo.be Tue Feb 8 16:48:22 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 17:48:22 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stanley Friesen" Sent: Saturday, February 05, 2000 8:55 AM > At 12:53 AM 2/4/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >> I simply MUST point out what is happening here. >> Much of your 'late Neolithic technology' - aside from the wheel - no longer >> supports the unity dates they once did and they do not necessarily refute >> the neolithic hypothesis regarding PIE. >> in the Ukraine, metal smelting appears about 4500BC - hammered metal appears >> well before that. The domesticated horse is now at about 4000BC and horse >> bones are in the food pits a thousand years before that. > Umm, circa 4000 BC is my current best guess for the time of unity. (I > currently suspect the Sredny Stog culture of being the basic PIE culture). > The horse as food doesn't fit with its place in PIE. [snip] [Ed] They were sacrificed though: see e.g. G. Dumézil (La religion romaine archaïque) : Equus October in Rome, As'vamedha in India. (note also Brahman <> Flamen). Usually (I don't know in this case) at least parts of sacrificed animals were eaten. Ed. Selleslagh From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 8 17:09:06 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 18:09:06 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <37.ef27c0.25cd440f@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >4000 years is a VERY long time in linguistic terms. 4000 years ago was 2000 >BCE, when Greek hadn't emerged, and pre-proto-Germanic probably was still >mutually comprehensible with pre-proto-Celtic and pre-proto-Balto-Slavic. ? >>And yet you find it linguistically plausible that the language of this mass >>of technically advanced >-- Neolithic farmers in scattered hamlets. >>speakers >-- "speakers" =/= admissable term. You're assuming your conclusion again. >>across Europe was completely substituted >>without leaving any thing remotely resembling a substrate >-- plenty of evidence of substrate influence in many IE languages, >particularly in central and western Europe. Less so in Baltic/Slavic >territory. Important point, I think. Since Germanic and Balto-Slavic (as far as they're traceable to the "Corded Ware" cultural area) both developed on a TRB substrate (c.q. out of a TRB substrate), it is strange that none of the Germanic substrate words appear in Balto-Slavic. On the other hand, western TRB did have quite a different substrate (the sedentary Ertebolle-Ellerbek group) than eastern TRB (which extended into sparsely populated areas). >>that first dispersed from the Ukraine in 3500BC and that did not even bother >>to leave a relative behind >-- what on earth do you mean? >The Ukraine was Indo-European speaking at the earliest historic attestation. >Indo-Iranian, to be precise; The Scythians were intrusive. As far as we can tell, the leftover relative may have been Cimmerian (nothing is known about the language, although it is presumed IE). >-- incidentally, the spread of Indo-Iranian languages over a much _larger_ >area than Europe took place within historic times and is not seriously >disputed. If then, why not before? Probably because there'a a historic postcedent (the spread of Turkic) in the same area (the Central Asian-Ukrainian(-Hungarian) steppe zone). Nothing of the sort is known to have happened in the North European temperate forest area. >>Not to mention that a large part of the Ukraine had already been >>neoliticized when this happened - and most probably by these speakers of the >>lost neolithic language of Europe. >-- so? Well, that would make Mallory's "Proto-IE'ans" the descendants of Renfrew's "Proto-IE'ans". >>Linguistically, you are changing the languages of a massive group of speakers >>across the middle of a continent on the basis that a starting date (narrow >>PIE) from the Danube of 5500BC is too early. >-- no, 7000 BCE. >If PIE spread across Europe from the beginnng of the neolithic, it would have >to remain in a unified form _from_ the colonization of Greece (7000 BCE) >_through_ the settlement of Central Europe (around 6000 BCE) to the arrival >of farming cultures on the Atlantic shore (5300 BCE). >The, according to Renfrew, PIE would _already be in place across 2000 miles >and hundreds of thousands of square miles_. >You can't logically pick and chose a later time and a smaller portion. >Either it was the whole sweep of agriculture from Greece to Holland, or it >wasn't. Them's the choices. No they ain't. The problem with IE homeland problem is that there are so many choices to choose from (Starcevo? LBK? Sredny Stog? Tripolye? Catal Hu"yu"k? Halafian? Indus Valley?). You can't just limit the choices to "The Truth" and "Renfrew". Intuitions about how long the IE languages had been diverging when they are first attested c. 1500 BC, can't pin anything down to a higher degree of confidence than "give or take a millennium or two". The study of the proto-lexicon doesn't offer much more certainty either: absence says nothing (what the hell is a weighted-web loom anyway?), and presence of an item must remain subject to the effects of semantic drift and/or new archaeological findings/datings. Moreover, the boundaries of what we call "PIE" in space and time are almost by definition not very well defined. It is perfectly possible that Renfrew has correctly identified the "PIE" homeland (only it's really some Pre-PIE homeland) and so has Gimbutas (only it's some post-PIE homeland), but that as a matter fact Diakonov's homeland (the Balkans in the 5th mill. BCE) is the "real" PIE homeland. Or maybe they're all wrong. Take your pick. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From edsel at glo.be Tue Feb 8 17:24:54 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 18:24:54 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Sunday, February 06, 2000 4:07 PM > Ed Selleslagh writes: >> After reading Ante Aikio's contributions, I suspect Uralic might begin >> to shed 'some' light on this matter. On the Basque side we have the >> intriguing matter of a number of suffixes that also pop up in IE >> (e.g.-z-ko <> -(s)ko in Slavic, basically with the 'same' meaning and >> use). > A suffix *<-ko> is commonly posited for PIE, and this developed an > extended form *<-s-ko> in some branches, notably Germanic. Basque > has a very common suffix <-ko>, and a compound suffix <-z-ko> (phonetic > [-sko]). > Many years ago, the late Antonio Tovar published a series of articles > arguing that the PIE and Basque suffixes were so similar in their behavior > that they must derive from a common source, which he took to be some > (rather murky) kind of ancient contact. > I have criticized this idea rather severely in various places. The > problem is that the Basque suffix does not really behave very much like > the PIE one. > The PIE suffix was a word-forming suffix. It derived chiefly adjectives > but also nouns. I have never seen any suggestion that it ever had > a syntactic function. > The Basque suffix, in great contrast, is primarily a syntactic suffix: > it can be added to just about any adverbial constituent, regardless of > internal structure, to produce a preposed adjectival modifier. That > 'preposed' is significant, since lexical adjectives in Basque are > postposed. > Basque <-ko> also has two other functions, marginal by comparison. > It can derive a preposed adjectival from an N-bar satisfying certain > partly obscure conditions. And it can derive nouns from nouns. > Now, the Basque suffix does not derive adjectives -- the chief function > of the PIE *<-ko>. It does derive nouns, but only marginally. It is > overwhelmingly a syntactic morpheme, while the PIE suffix is not. > This doesn't look to me like a good case for proposing a common origin. > Finally, Basque <-z-ko> is transparently only the instrumental suffix > <-z> -- which is adverbial in function -- plus <-ko>. It cannot possibly > be identified with the *<-s-ko> found in IE. > Larry Trask [Ed] Apparently, you took my "basically with the 'same' meaning and use" a far too literally. IE languages are flecting, Basque is agglutinating and basically suffixing, so the use and grammatical or syntactic functions of suffixes can hardly be identical. However, the general meaning conveyed by suffixing a word with -ko is very, very similar. Even the often rather subtle difference between -ko and -zko, on the one hand, and -ko and -sko on the other is often similar. Of course, supposing there is some common origin, both very different language types would have incorporated these suffixes in different ways, compatible with their idiosyncratic typology. Ed. From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Wed Feb 9 00:57:43 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 18:57:43 -0600 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: At 02:50 AM 2/5/00 EST, Joat Simeon wrote: >Several distinct types of cloth production also dating to the 4th millenium >-- eg., felting -- (see E.J.W. Barber, 1991, Prehistoric Textiles, Princton >university press) also have PIE lexical references. Thus we have *pilso, >"felt". There are also a number of words relating to weaving in general. >But PIE does _not_ have a word for the warp-weighted loom, which was >developed in the Danube valley and spread eastwards in the Late Neolithic. >The Greek vocabulary for this type of loom is entirely borrowed, for example; >none in Indo-Iranian either, etc. Could you expand on this last point? >Hence PIE probably cannot have been spoken in an area and/or at a time when >this technology was known. Hence there can't have been PIE speakers in the >Middle Danube towards the end of the Neolithic. One more brick... Isn't there an assumption here that all such lexical items if they once existed in PIE would have been transmitted integrally into the daughter languages and down to us...? And or that whatever the word was for such a loom if it did exist, would have remained in its original semantic niche and still mean today something like "loom"? And before reaching the conclusion that there was no such item in the PIE lexicon, wouldn't one need to look at the words used to refer to such looms in other languages, i.e., in traditional cultures in other parts of the world where the similar warp-weighted looms might still be in use or have been until recently, in order to see the cognitive structures of the expressions used to refer to such devices? Also, just how old are warp-weighted looms? Are you referring to hand-held portable ones or upright stationary ones? Is there something unique about the one invented in the Danube that would mitigate against the independent development of similar devices in other parts of Europe, for example? Roz Frank From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Feb 9 07:34:28 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 07:34:28 -0000 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: Dear Joat and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Saturday, February 05, 2000 7:52 AM > >proto-language at email.msn.com writes: > basis, I believe that a comparison of Egyptian r', 'sun' (ideographically > written: a circle with >*central dot* [=axle?]) and IE *rot(h)o-, 'wheel', is > likely. >> [JS wrote] > -- this would be interesting, if it weren't for the fact that the Egyptians > didn't use wheeled vehicles (or the horse) until very late -- 2nd millenium > BCE. And, of course, there's no evidence at all of a genetic relationship > between Egyptian (or Afroasiatic) and PIE. Of course, the mere existence of our sister-list (Nostratic) suggests that some people at some time have thought that there was some evidence of such a relationship. The minimal components of Nostratic are PIE and AA. In addition to the many books which have been written to describe such a relationship, there may be some small interest in viewing the material at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/comparison.AFRASIAN.3.htm 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 X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Feb 10 01:35:46 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 20:35:46 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 2/8/00 7:45:50 AM, you wrote: <<<< The domesticated horse is now at about 4000BC and horse bones are in the food pits a thousand years before that. >> -- which indicates precisely... nothing at all.>> It indicates that the horse would be an rather unlikely candidate for a dating of PIE unity in the Ukraine later than 4000BC. It may indicate that the horse would a somewhat unlikely candidate for dating PIE unity - anywhere the wild horse is found - after 5000BC. <. Very well, then. This makes the horse an unlikely candidate for dating PIE unity after 400,000BC. <> And of course the evidence to date is that livestock domestication accompanied the rest of agriculture into the Ukraine at 4500BC or earlier. So the it is reasonable to attribute the spread of domestication technology into the Ukraine to the diffusion of agriculture at or before the time. Regards, Steve Long From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Wed Feb 9 17:00:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 17:00:00 GMT Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >There is precisely _one_ indication of horse domestication as early as >4000 BCE; a set of teeth with wear-marks characteristic of a bit. .. would you please give the exact source? I only know sredny rog. Mit freundlichen Grüßen Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover Tel=FAX x49-511-9585714. From sarima at friesen.net Fri Feb 11 15:29:28 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 07:29:28 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 02:50 AM 2/5/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Several distinct types of cloth production also dating to the 4th millenium >-- eg., felting -- (see E.J.W. Barber, 1991, Prehistoric Textiles, Princton >university press) also have PIE lexical references. Thus we have *pilso, >"felt". There are also a number of words relating to weaving in general. I am generally somewhat skeptical about archaeological evidence relating to cloth. It is so very perishable that it need not be attested any time near its origin. >But PIE does _not_ have a word for the warp-weighted loom, which was >developed in the Danube valley and spread eastwards in the Late Neolithic. This, however, is somewhat different matter, as such a loom is less perishable. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Wed Feb 9 11:11:55 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 13:11:55 +0200 Subject: basic vocabulary borrowing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > sisar 'sister' (I can't quite recall > >the precise IE source of this one at the moment) > without having checked, I'd opt for Baltic (cf. Lith. sesuo, G. sesers) Yes, that was it. Thanks. -Ante From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Thu Feb 10 15:45:40 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 17:45:40 +0200 Subject: basic vocabulary borrowing In-Reply-To: <008201bf7076$d1b33de0$f2896395@roborr.uottawa.ca> Message-ID: (I wrote:) > As for body parts, there is hardly a real "reason" for replacing native > words by foreign ones in any circumstance (other than the wish to be > considered fashionable, of course). (Robert Orr replied:) > YES, THERE IS (if we consider exactly what is meant by foreign) > A word is "borrowed" in a different meaning (cf. Latin cuppa > (Old High) > German kop(f)) > Later on, a (nativised) kopf is transferred (probably via slang) to become > the (unmarked) word for head. > The native speakers have not "borrowed" the word for head. there has been > an internal semantic shift. > But to sophisticated linguists it does look like a borrowing. Yes, but this is not the type of case I had in mind, since the loan original does not mean 'head'. > I know this makes things more complicated, but it's probably the path most > of these forms took. This is certainly true in some cases, as e.g. Kopf. But if the loan original has identical meaning (e.g. Proto-Finnic *onc´c´a 'forehead' < Germanic *anthja- id.) this type of explanation is hardly applicable. Rather, it seems that the speakers just chose to replace the native word with a loan word. Ante Aikio From emibianchi at infinito.it Wed Feb 9 16:40:29 2000 From: emibianchi at infinito.it (Emiliano Bianchi) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 17:40:29 +0100 Subject: Augment i and DhAtupAThas Message-ID: Dear Sirs, I'm working on a research about the union-vowel (or augment) "i" of the Sanskrit verb. For that reason I need to know which roots of the words are, according to the Indian grammarians, seT, aniT or veT. I don't want to refer to the lists reported on the most important Western grammars: I better wish to have first-hand datas from hindU grammarians, mainly from DhAtupAThas of the different grammar schools. As for PAN, I don't have any problem because the difference is clearly put in evidence by a particular anubandha. I wonder if also the other Dh.P's (the non-PANinlya-s ones, mainly), have this information. Pasule's synopsis (1955) lacks that data, reported in Hill & Harrison (1991) instead, in which I also read that Jainendra-Dh.P. contains this information (Devanandin himself created a perfect anubandha). What about the other Dh.P.'s? I would be grateful if you could also suggest me some Western works on that subject. Thank you in advance Emiliano Bianchi, Studente dell'Universita' degli Studi di Milano From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Feb 9 17:38:54 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 17:38:54 +0000 Subject: reality of PIE Message-ID: Pete Gray writes: [quoting] > > No. Relationship is an absolute. .... > >Genetically related languages were once the same language. > Sorry, Bob, I can't agree, and I suspect you're in a minority these days > (though I may be wrong!). You are, I'm afraid. The statement above is true not just because all linguists believe it: it is true by definition. Languages which do not descend from a common ancestor are not genetically related. > (a) Unrelated languages do produce offspring - for example, creoles. Yes, but this observation is not a counterexample to the statement above. > It has > even been suggested that the entire Germanic branch of IE is in fact a > creole. Perhaps it has, but Proto-Germanic, with its stunningly complex nominal and adjectival morphology, looks nothing like a creole. But it looks for all the world like a daughter of PIE. > I think it is unhelpful to restrict our understanding of > relationship to a yes-no either/or. You might have trouble describing a > creole without distorting facts to fit your definition. Not true, I'm afraid. > It is ultimately only a matter of which method of description we prefer, but > I do believe it is unhelpful to restrict the term "related" to mean > "genetically related". And I'd say that extending the label 'related' to any and all languages between which we can find any kind of connection whatsoever would be a very bad idea. To do so would be to replace clear and important distinctions with an absence of distinctions. > Genetically (in your terms), English is equally > related to both French and Italian. "Genetically", in *everybody's* terms. > I find it more helpful to accept a > wider use of "related" in such a way that it allows me to indicate that > plural forms and a range of other stuff in English actually are "related" to > French but not "related" to Italian, Sorry. I don't think the English plural is historically cognate with the French plural, but I don't have my IE notes handy. Can an IEist confirm or deny this? And what range of other stuff? Apart from borrowed vocabulary, I mean. > and that therefore English has a > different relationship to French and Italian, not an identical one We already have a perfectly adequate vocabulary to describe this state of affairs: English has borrowed a lot more words from French than from Italian. Or, to put it more formally, the influence of French upon the English lexicon has been vastly greater than that of Italian. This statement is both fully adequate and completely explicit. What is the point of inventing non-existent "relationships", and confusing these with genetic links? > (b) The idea that there must be a single language progenitor of daughter > languages is widely disputed. Really? By whom? > Some people accept the idea that a > collection of interrelated languages might never have had a single ancestor, > but as far back as you care to go were simply a collection of inter-related > languages. OK; let's have some specifics. Who has proposed this, and for what languages, and on the basis of what evidence? > The language/dialect issue comes up here. We talk of IE > "dialects" within PIE, but this is simply terminology. The point is that > there is no need whatever for there to have been a single unified PIE > language. Yes, there is. Without a tolerably unified PIE we cannot account for the observed data in the daughter languages. The IE languages do not merely exhibit miscellaneous and unsystematic collections of broadly shared features. They all derive from a largely reconstructible common ancestor in a highly orderly manner. And this is simply not consistent with the non-existence of PIE. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Feb 10 02:54:36 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 21:54:36 EST Subject: Archaeologists Message-ID: To the IE list: I must apologize for the accidental inclusion of the abstract by Maximilian O. Baldia in my prior post under this subject. Any relevance to the subject was unintended. I had copied and pasted a different quote from another file and then deleted it, but failed to see the abstract had been carried along. Steve Long From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Thu Feb 10 08:34:05 2000 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 09:34:05 +0100 Subject: Frisian In-Reply-To: <015401bf6fd3$b4bb0040$8c9201d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: >>, which extends the scope of the >> tribe, if not the language, into modern Germany. >Pardon me, but surely Frisian (the language) _does_ extend into modern >Germany - it lies mostly along the region from Denmark - Germany - >Netherlands. Specifically, on the mainland East Frisian is found in >Oldenburg (east of Kiel), North Frisian overlaps the Denmark-Germany border, >and West Frisian is found entirely within Germany, (although also on the >islands along that remarkable coast, some of which are claimed by the >Netherlands). >Peter Pardon *me*, but I feel some details need a little adjustment here: East Frisian is found in the region of Oldenburg (confined to a small bunch of villages in the subregion called Saterland, and severely endangered there; it has died out in most of the historical region of Ostfriesland including the islands). Anyone trying to find this on the map should *not* look east of Kiel, since s/he'll find little more than the Baltic Sea there. The Oldenburg region is in the far *west*, bordering on The Netherlands. For North Frisian you are right, though as far as I know the language is largely confined to the islands (Sylt, Amrum, Foehr) there, but on West Frisian I have to correct you again. It is *not at all* in Germany, but *found entirely* within The Netherlands, where it enjoys official status in the province of Friesland. Everything else you say is OK. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg home: Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-691332+ Georg at home.ivm.de work: http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/vtw/Georg/Georg.html From edsel at glo.be Thu Feb 10 10:20:50 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 11:20:50 +0100 Subject: Frisian Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Saturday, February 05, 2000 11:52 AM >>, which extends the scope of the >> tribe, if not the language, into modern Germany. > Pardon me, but surely Frisian (the language) _does_ extend into modern > Germany - it lies mostly along the region from Denmark - Germany - > Netherlands. Specifically, on the mainland East Frisian is found in > Oldenburg (east of Kiel), North Frisian overlaps the Denmark-Germany border, > and West Frisian is found entirely within Germany, (although also on the > islands along that remarkable coast, some of which are claimed by the > Netherlands). > Peter [Ed] Aren't you overlooking mainland Friesland in the Netherlands? Apart from that, you're absolutely right of course. What do you mean by 'claimed by the Netherlands'? As far as I know, there are no longer (since 1958) any territorial disputes among the countries of the European Union, especially among the 6 founding members (BeNeLux, Germany, France and Italy). Ed. Selleslagh From maxdashu at LanMinds.Com Sat Feb 12 04:39:03 2000 From: maxdashu at LanMinds.Com (Max Dashu) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 20:39:03 -0800 Subject: Frisian In-Reply-To: <015401bf6fd3$b4bb0040$8c9201d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: >surely Frisian (the language) _does_ extend into modern >Germany - it lies mostly along the region from Denmark - Germany - >Netherlands. Specifically, on the mainland East Frisian is found in >Oldenburg (east of Kiel) You mean still today it is spoken there? Just to be sure. This touches directly on my original reason for inquiring about how far Frisian extended in medieval times. I'm interested in the Stedinger rebels of the Oldenburg region, which seem to have been Frisian speakers according to my best information. Max Dashu Suppressed Histories Archives 30 Years of International Women's Studies 1970-2000 From edsel at glo.be Thu Feb 10 10:37:17 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 11:37:17 +0100 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Saturday, February 05, 2000 1:22 PM > It is clear that the augment was originally separate, an adverb, and not a > necessary and integral part of the verb, as it later became. Homer and the > RV both preserve forms without augment that would later require it, and > prosodic features are certainly a factor in the choice, but these are > syllabic, not accentual, in both Homer and RV. > I wish to ask: > (a) what has the fact that sigmatic aorists have an accent before the sigma > got to do with the presence or absence of augment? I see no connection. I > also seem to remember that the Greek pattern of accentuation in verbs is a > development within Greek - RV keeps the accent further back. > (b) where is the evidence on the correlation mentioned between asigmatic > aorists and absence of augment? > Peter [Ed] I guess this refers to an older mail of mine, which was already refuted (in part) by others. The main problem stemmed from the fact that I was thinking of modern Greek: ad a) in m.Grk. the accent is normally on the augment of sigmatic aorists, if present (depending on the person): gráphô, égrapsa. The aorist with augment has a definite prosodic scheme TA-ta-ta (esdrújula, for the Hispanists). ad b) this was largely erroneous: a number of asigmatic aorists don't have an augment. Those that have one, follow the scheme sub a). Sorry for the confusion I caused. Ed. Selleslagh From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Feb 10 13:47:21 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 14:47:21 +0100 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) In-Reply-To: <002601bf715b$43293580$7d72fe8c@lucent.com> Message-ID: "Vidhyanath Rao" wrote: >From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" >> Still, the unmarked form is a simple past, while the marked forms >> are the imperfective ("durative", "present-future") with >> geminated C2, and the perfect (CtCC [iptaras], with infix -t-). >> Such a system is potentially very close to one with unmarked past >> vs. marked present (all it takes is the loss of the perfect). >Is it s a simple past or narrative past? [zero forms do survive as >subsequent forms even when they have been ousted from isolated >sentences, conversation etc.] I don't know much about Akkadian syntax, but what I gather is: The preterite (iprus) is the unmarked narrative past. The perfect (iptaras) is less frequent. According to Lipin'ski it denotes "that a state is produced in someone or in something, whether it be caused by another or by himself/itself". The -t- infix in other Semitic languages (as well as in Akkadian modal forms) denotes a reflexive (Ugaritic yr-t-HS "he washed himself", preterite with t-infix). I don't know to what extent the imperfective (iparras, "present/future") was used in past tense contexts. Judging by its traditional name, not often. There is also the Akkadian stative (paris), which is is the normal perfective / past tense in other Semitic languages (having ousted the preterite), but which in Akkadian is a true stative, i.e. a verbal adjective (paris "he is separate"(?)). Campbell ("Compendium of the World's Languages") says: "Instead of the typical Semitic division into perfective and imperfective aspects, Akkadian has an idiosyncratic quadruple segmentation which corresponds broadly to a present/ preterite/perfect system, with the fourth memeber acting as a kind of stative". Diakonov (in EB), contrary to Lipin'ski, seems to say that the preterite was in origin a perfective (opposed to the iparras imperfective). "Later a new "perfect" with an infixed -ta- in the stem developed". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Feb 10 14:10:39 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 15:10:39 +0100 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) In-Reply-To: <002601bf715b$43293580$7d72fe8c@lucent.com> Message-ID: "Vidhyanath Rao" wrote: >>> There is an interesting typological problem here. According to Bybee et al >>> (The evolution of grammar), unmarked past vs marked present is unknown in >>> extant languages. This makes the usual classification of forms in Hittite >>> (and PIE) quite unusual. Come to think of it, Hittite (unlike Akkadian) is quite clear. The forms without -i are past tense, those with -i present. There is no way around that. Bybee et al. are wrong (or rather, their universal is merely a tendency). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From r.clark at auckland.ac.nz Fri Feb 11 02:33:35 2000 From: r.clark at auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 15:33:35 +1300 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: It is also a feature of Bickerton's prototypical Creole verb system: an unmarked non-stative verb is interpreted as past; to make a present you add the non-punctual aspect marker. Of course the extent to which this is realized in actual languages remains debatable. Ross Clark >>> "petegray" 02/06 12:04 AM >>> >. According to Bybee et > >al (The evolution of grammar), unmarked past vs marked present is > >unknown in extant languages. This must surely be wrong - or at least disputable! Classical Hebrew has an unmarked tense-form whose natural and commonest tense meaning is the past. I believe Arabic, both classical and modern, has a similar structure. Peter From rao.3 at osu.edu Fri Feb 11 21:42:59 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 16:42:59 -0500 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: "petegray" wrote > >. According to Bybee et > > >al (The evolution of grammar), unmarked past vs marked > > > present is unknown in extant languages. To be precise, I should have said zero past vs non-zero present. Cases where both past and present carry special markings (equipollent oppositions) are fairly common. > This must surely be wrong - or at least disputable! Classical > Hebrew has an unmarked tense-form whose natural and > commonest tense meaning is the past. I believe Arabic, both > classical and modern, has a similar structure. Arabic has a perfective vs imperfective opposition. That the perfective is most often translated by English past is irrelevant. The difference is that when a language has a perfective vs imperfective contrast (but without explicitely marked tense) , the latter is used amid a narratives in perfectives to denote incomplete or background events and to denote habituals including past habituals. A present (or non-past) is not used that way, but depends purely on the time of the event. Defining tense and aspect this way (which goes back to Comrie, though Bybee et al prefer the slightly modified version of Dahl), zero perfective is not uncommon, zero imperfective is seems to be less common (though, through the accidents history, are more familar), both poles non-zero is widespread, but zero past is unknown. From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Thu Feb 10 11:50:32 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 13:50:32 +0200 Subject: Uralic, PIE and motivatited borrowings. In-Reply-To: <43.99586e.25ce4d02@aol.com> Message-ID: (Steve Long wrote:) [snip] > Also, I'm reminded of Andrew Sheratt's newer theory that the large vats of > the Bandkeramik were perhaps meant to hold malted beverage - a possible > by-product of agriculturalism and a possible tool of assimilation. Do these > borrowed words - 'water' (drink?) and 'bring' (six-pack?) possibly look like > they may reflect this kind of regular contact and 'motivated' borrowing? Speaking of alcoholic beverages, it is interesting that also PU *juxi- 'drink' might be an IE loan (*g´uH- 'pour'; semantic parallels have been pointed out). I also seem to recall that some researchers have proposed that the early spread of agriculture had (at least in some areas) more to do with brewing than food production. But still, connecting 'water', 'drink' and 'bring' with prehistoric alcohol trade is of course quite hypothetical... :) But at any rate, some items in the borrowed vocabulary point quite clearly to trade (see e.g. *mexi- and *wosa- below). > Perhaps these PIE borrowings can be made to yield some coherent picture when > taken together rather than one at a time. I'll present a list of the most convincing PIE > PU loans below. Most are from Koivulehto, but there are a couple of unpublished ones that will appear in a forthcoming article of mine. A note on the reconstructions: PU *d is a voiced dental spirant; *x was probably a voiced velar fricative. PU: PIE: -- ---- *(x)aja- 'drive' *(H)ag´- *kaja- 'sun, dawn' *kay- 'heat' *kelki- 'must, have to' *skelH- / *sklH- id. *kerä- 'bunch; collect' *ger- 'collect etc.' *koki- 'see, find' *Hokw- 'see' *kosi- 'cough' *kwa:s- id. *kota- 'hut, house' *kot- 'Wohnraum' *kulki- 'wander, go, flow' *kwelH- 'wander etc.' *käl(x)i-w- *brother/sister-in-law' *glHi- id. *käwdi- 'rope' *Haw-dh- 'flechten, binden' (cf Armenian z-aud 'Band', Old Norse vádhr 'Seil, Schnur') *meti- 'honey' *medhu- id. *mexi- 'sell, give' *mey-gw- 'exchange' *mos´ki- 'wash' *mozg- id. *nimi 'name' ?*nmen id. *näxi- 'woman, wife' *gwnaH- 'woman' *orpa(s)- 'orphan' *orbho(s)- id. *pel(x)i- 'fear' *pelH- 'frightening etc.' *pexi- 'cook' *bheH- 'roast etc.' *pitä- 'attach, hold, bind' *ped- 'fassen' ?*pow(x)i- / *poxi- / *puxi- 'tree' (reconstruction problematic) *bhowH- 'grow' (with derivatives meaning 'tree') *pun(x)a- 'plait' *(s)pn(H)- id. *pur(x)a- 'drill' *bhr(H)- id. *pärtä- 'board' *bhrdho- id. *s´ada- 'rain, fall' *k´ad- id. *s´alka- 'pole, rod' *g´halgho- id. *s´ola- 'gut' *k´olo- (> Greek kólon; IE root *k´el- 'cover') *suxi- 'row' *suH- 'put in motion' *syxni- 'vein, sinew' *sHi-nu- id. *teki- 'put, do' *dheH- id. *toxi- 'bring, give, sell' *doH- 'give' *tuxli- 'feather, wing; wind; mood; to blow' *dhuH-li- (< *dhewH- 'stieben, wirbeln, wehen, blasen usw.') *weti- 'water' *wed- id. *wetä- 'pull, lead' *wedh- 'lead' *wixi- 'take (somewhere)' *weg´h- *wosa- 'merchandise' *wos- id. The list contains 35 words, which is at least 10% of the reconstructed PU vocabulary. The loans seems to have a slightly western distribution: e.g. 31 of them are present in Finnic, while only 19 appear in Samoyed. This suggests that the contacts were even at the Proto-Language stage more intensive in the western area than in the eastern (I recall Steve Long asking if / suggesting that the direction of loaning would not have been South > North but rather West > East). The western part of the early (P)U language area seems to have had more intensive contact with Indo-Europeans, but there are also some independent IE loans in Samoyed, too. This points towards multiple contact points between Uralians and Indo-Europeans at an early stage, both in the east (Southern Urals??) and the west (Volga?). I will get back on this (and the linked question of the location of U Urheimat) in more detail later. (A note: perhaps at least two of the loans might be pre-PIE, because they show PU front *ä as a substituent of IE *a adjacent to *h2 (*gwneh2- / *gwnah2- > U *näxi-, *h2ewdh- / *h2awdh- > U *käwdi-). Could this reflect some intermediate stage (*ä??) of the change *h2eh2 > *h2ah2?) Ante Aikio From stevegus at aye.net Thu Feb 10 13:29:40 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 08:29:40 -0500 Subject: Old Irish Message-ID: Larry Trask writes: > Don't know. But a philologist colleague did suggest to me once, years > ago, that literary Old Irish might have been to a significant extent an > artificial creation of the scribes, who delighted in introducing and > maintaining every possible complication, producing as a result something > which did not represent ordinary speech at any time in history. I know that literary Irish (and continental missionary Irish) monks delighted in a strange Latin jargon they called 'Hisperica famina," which actually meant 'Irish speech.' (Famina for 'speech' is an interesting bit of etymologising in itself.) They mixed up archaic or newly coined Latin words with bits of Greek and Hebrew. This flourished in around the sixth century --- about the time of the earliest OIr. glosses, if I remember rightly. St. Columba's -Altus prosator- is one of the best known, if relatively less extreme, examples of the style. -- Sella fictili sedeo Versiculos dum facio. From jrader at m-w.com Thu Feb 10 14:59:24 2000 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 14:59:24 +0000 Subject: Old Irish Message-ID: Are you either of you even halfway serious? The transition between Old Irish and Middle Irish and between Middle Irish and Early Modern Irish is abundantly, if at times confusingly documented, because so many late 7th-9th-century texts were transmitted in much later copies, and various strata of the language are readily apparent. The stages in the breakdown of the Old Irish verbal system, which is the principal gulf dividing Old Irish from Modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic, are not hard to describe. The transition from Old to Modern Irish is far better documented than, say, the transition from Latin to Old French. Recall that the canonical Old Irish texts, i.e., those whose manuscripts date from before ca. 900, are principally glosses and commentaries in the margins of Latin manuscripts. Though the source of these commentaries is a complex issue about which I have no expertise, there is unquestionably an extemporaneous quality to them; they are not some kind of literary exercise and there is little doubt they reflect the speech of the scribes. Very likely this speech had undergone some dialect leveling, because members of monastic communities were drawn from different areas of Ireland, but the idea that this language is either completely artificial or the vestige of some foreign elite is not plausible. The complexity of Old Irish has been exaggerated because the great majority of people who study it have European languages as their sole point of comparison. True, there is a remarkable degree of opacity in certain morphological relationships, as between prototonic and deuterotonic verb forms, for example, but I'm sure parallels could be found in other languages with lots of morphology that have undergone significant phonological change. There is a remarkable degree of opacity in the verbal paradigms of Arikara (a Caddoan language of the U.S. Great Plains), not to mention the possessed forms of kinship terms and others areas of its morphology. But I don't think anyone has ever proposed that Arikara was altered by its speakers to make it as complex as possible. Jim Rader > Rick Mc Callister writes: >> I throw out some possibilities >> Is it possible that WRITTEN Old Irish was NOT the direct ancestor >> of Gaelic? i.e that it held the same relationship to Gaeilge and Gaidhlig >> that Classical Latin held to Romance? >> Is it possible that WRITTEN Old Irish was only a literary language? >> Is it possible that WRITTEN Old Irish was the language of an elite >> of Briton or Gaulish origin and did not represent the speech of the >> majority? > Don't know. But a philologist colleague did suggest to me once, years > ago, that literary Old Irish might have been to a significant extent an > artificial creation of the scribes, who delighted in introducing and > maintaining every possible complication, producing as a result something > which did not represent ordinary speech at any time in history. > Larry Trask From michalov at uiuc.edu Thu Feb 10 14:43:11 2000 From: michalov at uiuc.edu (Peter A. Michalove) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 08:43:11 -0600 Subject: Numbers as "Core Vocabulary" (was IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dr. McLaughlin is quite right that numerals are often unstable lexemes, despite popular belief. In addition to the issues he points out about counting systems, there's another factor that frequently leads to the replacement (by borrowing) of numerals. One of the activities that leads to language contact and bilingualism is trade. Of course, trade is an activity in which the numerals are essential, and one must know the numerals of one's trading partners. Therefore numerals are often subject to borrowing (others have cited several examples on this list), and the case of Indo-European, where the numeral system is well preserved throughout almost all of the family, has probably acted as a misleading example At 01:00 PM 2/6/00 -0700, you wrote: >Numbers are one of the very WORST things to look at in order to make even a >preliminary decision about relationship. The main problem with numbers >(other than two and three) are that in the majority of hunter-gatherer >societies, they are intimately tied to the way that fingers are used in >counting. Throughout Native North America there are variants of systems >like this: 'one' = 'finger'; 'two' = two; 'three' = 'one down' (i.e., one >finger besides the thumb is still not raised); 'four' = 'all up'; 'five' = >'open', 'palm' or 'hand'; 'six' = 'two threes'; 'seven' = 'five + two'; >'eight' = 'two palms'; 'nine' = 'one missing'; 'ten' = 'whole'. There are >variations on this including whether one raises fingers to count or lowers >them, whether and when the thumbs are included, whether the count starts on >the right hand or on the left, etc. As this number/finger systems starts to >break down, other words can be borrowed or developed internally to fill the >gaps, but the very unstable nature of counting means that number words >should NOT be included in any list of "core vocabulary". >John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. >Assistant Professor >mclasutt at brigham.net Peter A. Michalove michalov at uiuc.edu Phone: (217) 333-7633 Fax: (217) 244-4019 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Foreign Languages Building Business Office 3072D Foreign Languages Building (MC-178) 707 South Mathews Avenue Urbana, IL 61801-3675 USA From mclasutt at brigham.net Thu Feb 10 16:14:07 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 09:14:07 -0700 Subject: Re Personal pronouns--typo In-Reply-To: Message-ID: OOPs, typo: > He is > defining grammatical categories not by meaning, but by structure. > "Her" is > a demonstrative because it passes all the structural tests of a > determiner, > but not all the structural tests of a pronoun. Change 'demonstrative' to 'determiner'. 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 Thu Feb 10 16:42:21 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 09:42:21 -0700 Subject: About an IE database In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: Direct replies to Prof. Herzenberg may be sent to his e-mail address, herzenbg at lgg.usr.pu.ru . --rma ] I-E List, I received the request at the bottom of this post and Prof. Herzenberg asked me to forward it to the list. Immediately below is my response to him. John McLaughlin Prof. Herzenberg, I'm sorry to be responding so late. The first part of February has been very, very busy for me. I'll forward your message to the list as a whole. US funding is probably best sought through either the National Science Foundation (www.nsf.gov) or the National Endowment for the Humanities (www.neh.gov). You will need an academic tie in the United States, but with all the Indo-Europeanists on the list, perhaps someone who specializes in Indo-European would be interested in serving in that capacity. (My own interests are only peripherally Indo-European, but if all else fails, I'd be willing to entertain the possibility.) I would think that some U.S. Indo-Europeanist would be happy to help you since you have student assistants ready to hand (a situation we don't always enjoy in the United States). I may occasionally be a little late in responding, but I'd be happy to offer any experience and/or advice on developing the proposal. 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) > -----Original Message----- > From: Leonard G. Herzenberg [mailto:herzenbg at lgg.usr.pu.ru] > Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2000 1:39 PM > To: mclasutt at brigham.net > Subject: About an IE database > Dear colleague, > I am Leonhard Herzenberg (Guertsenberg in my Russian passport), > Professor at the Department for Linguistics, University of Saint- > Petersburg, Russia. My narrow field of research and teaching > is Iranian and Indoeuropean Comparative Linguistics; I am also > greatly interested in compiling an etymological database of Indo- > European, its supposed base being Pokorny and reviews of it; the > ideal issue would be an Internet database to which permanent con- > tributions would keep it up-to-date. > To arrange that funding is needed, as well as connection to > some foreign institution. There is a special point: I envisage > that my students would happily introduce data for a reward > which would be considerably lower than abroad. Strangely > enough I have about thirty students here, who are engaged > in IE studies, and at least half a dozen are very knowledgeable > and ripe for a work of this kind. Of course, I am ready to > supply everybody who is interested with details. > Could you also help me to post this message on the general > list? > Thank you so very much for attention, > ever truly yours > Leonhard Herzenberg > > phone +7 812 233 27 62 From Georg at home.ivm.de Thu Feb 10 17:37:05 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 18:37:05 +0100 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000205220057.009a2b50@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: >>Language is a social phenomenon, which humans have been able to develop and >>are able to use and process for purposes intimately connected with social >>interaction, because they are furnished with certain cognitive abilities; >>which they are, because their physis meets certain biological >>prerequisites. The biological substratum furnishes the ability to develop, >>use and change the tool, it doesn't determine its shape. >I think you misunderstand my point. Yes, maybe I did. > I am not saying language is >biologically *determined*, I'm glad you aren't ;-) > I am saying it operates under the rules of >biological systems. Sociality itself evolved to because it provides >certain biological advantages, and social interactions among humans are >very much motivated by basic biological drives. I can accept that. >In this context I was really only pointing out that language "suffers" from >one of the main issues I see in all biological studies: fuzzy, imprecise >boundaries. There is no precise way to distinguish one language from another. True, thanks for the clarification. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From Georg at home.ivm.de Thu Feb 10 18:38:22 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 19:38:22 +0100 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: <001901bf706b$01c0fe20$b99f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: I somehow knew, mi Patrici, that you'd not let this opportunity pass to let us know where you stand. However, you make any reasonable discussion on this - which may be a thread alien to the objects of this list anyway - at least, say, difficult, since you have peppered your remarks with a neat characteristic of anyone who might take a somewhat different position. So, if it so pleases you, I am, using your words "doctrinaire", a "socially hyper-aware apologist" and things like that. I don't take offence. I only feel a little bit offended by the insinuation that I (or other readers of this list) may not follow you because we are "recently trained under the social theories of more recent times", which I can only take as meaning that we simply do not use our own brains but prefer to have them washed by others, which I, care amice, would rather not like to see repeated here. What all this is, dear Pat, is commonly called "immunization", by which you'll always end up on the right side, knowing that my objections will be the ones of those whom I allowed to brainwash me (or, who knows, who may even be paying me). This is not how it works, though. I pass in (near - ;-) silence over your snide against Ashley Montagu (or the allegation - implicit, of course - that I may be one of his cronies). I'll just say so much that few if any Marxists of my acquaintance (the M.-word does not sound as dirty over here as you may hope) would readily admit that he's one of them, but this need not detain us further. >Since then, Western science has determined that many human behavioral >characteristics are biologically based, i.e. inherited through genetic >transfer: e.g. schizophrenia, homosexuality, manic-depression, sociopathy; >and, though disputed by socially hyper-aware apologists, intelligence --- to >name just a few of significance. I'm sorry, but I contest that "Western Science" has "determined" such things ("Wild Western science", maybe [I wonder whether this snide will make it to the list ;-]). If you are referring to literature of the kind of the "Bell Curve", well, mwe can stop here, since we would then have to discuss who is sponsoring this kind of "research" and to which ends it is *meant* to be used by its originarors. But we should not, since our moderater will quickly pull the plug on this, since we should not endulge too much, if at all, in statements of a political nature. The whole business of reducing, as you name it yourself below, "complex behavioral assemblages" to the biological substrate we inherit physically is, in my humble opinion, mostly disinformation. The very simple reason for this is that some of these "behavioral assemblages" are exactly what they are, and, by this virtue, *constructs*. If I find you to be a "sociopath", which I, heaven forbid, don't, I'm applying my *construct* of, say, sociopathy with my *construct* of Pat Ryan, both of which may or may not have some (or much) resemblance to *your* construct of these things. That, e.g., homosexuality - you mention this example yourself - is equally such a construct becomes fairly obvious from the cultural history of this kind of behaviour. It is mostly frowned upon in modern societies, but we know that this attitude comes and goes in the history of mankind. I won't go into the details of the role of conventionalized homosexual practices in (mostly) Greek and (partly) Roman antiquity, but the very fact that what most people today think they possess an insurmountable "instinct" against was once part of the culture (Greece) or a superchic de-rigeur-behaviour in the leisure class (Rome) bespeaks that this, like any other "complex behavioral assemblage", is an artefact of human culture. Many societies, e.g. in Papua-Newguinea, know forms of ritualized homosexuality appropriate for certain ages, or part of certain rites-de-passage, without this meaning that those people have a "genetic disposition" for the same sex. They haven't, and they frown upon h-ty much the same way a lot of people in the Northern hemisphere do, if they find certain cultural requirements violated in connection with it. What is OK in one culture may be anathema in the next one, and, lest you take this as speaking in favour of a "genetic predisposition" of different cultures for this or that kind of behaviour or evaluation of behaviour, these things are also subject to *change*. I know some communities where not beating one's wife is regarded as sociopathic behaviour, and others where the opposite holds. But I also know (both from history and from personal experience, of course)people and even communities where attitudes towards social behaviour have changed, to the better or worse, but changed they have, and change they will, which they could not do if they were so deeply intrenched in our physis as you or your unnamed "Western Scientists" seem to believe. Heaven, even *you* may become a linguist one day, I'm absolutely certain that nothing in your genes stands in the way of this, believe me, there *is* hope ! ;-) Tu sum up this passage: the very reason why I take the assumption that genes may "control" such "complex behavioral assemblages", or more precisely, that any "Western Scientist" is able to say anything meaningful on this interdependence is that first of all we would need an operational definition of any one of these complexes, which is, of course, impossible. Even if most members of a village community agree that one of its members is "socially difficult", this is nothing more than a cultural construct, certainly nothing which could be determined objectively. In the next community round the corner, this person could be a pillar of the community. >It is fatuous in the extreme to believe that genes, which control such >complex behavioral assemblages, are *strangely* without any affect >whatsoever on language --- especially, since even true believers must admit >the biological basis of language ability. We could give this discussion a healthy turn back into the direction of linguistics, if you could name a few properties of some given language(s), which you are unable to explain otherwise than as the result of some kind of genetic predisposition ("mutation") of its speakers. And, no, I don't deny that in order to have language we first have to have a brain, and that brains are biological things. Since > >Similarly, I find it incredible that otherwise highly analytical thinkers >can fail to acknowledge that genetics plays an important part in >phonological development and change. I fail to, and, I'm afraid, you'll have to continue to find this incredible (though I won'*t object if you'll continue to think that I'm a highly analytic thinker; never argue with hard facts ;-) >Any objective non-linguist would, on the basis of common sense alone, agree >that if the ratio of tongue mass to oral cavity or lingual mobility were >genetically altered, it would affect phoneme production --- but, you will >see, many linguists will dispute so simple and straightforward a >proposition --- vehemently. Well, OK, here we seem to be at least in the vicinity of a concrete example. Pat, which features of exactly which extant phonological systems betray a direct correlation to the ratio you mentioned ? I've never heard about this in my entire life, and I'm eager to see what you have in mind here. >And it is high time that some linguists modernize >their relationship with biology and genetics. Modernize ... hmmm, let's see, who's modern here, but, lt's see some linguistic data and your biological explanation for them. Stefan Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 10 21:54:11 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 16:54:11 EST Subject: "is the same as" Message-ID: >proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) >I am sure that many listmembers, recently trained under the social theories >of more recent times, will be unable and unwilling to accept the following >comments at face value however, there may be others who have yet to decide >these issues; and it is for them that I write. -- this is a gross insult, as well as rhetorically dishonest ("some people are close-minded and ideologically blinded to the truth, and so will disagree with me") and I protest to the list moderator. Is this a moderated list, or not? >Similarly, I find it incredible that otherwise highly analytical thinkers >can fail to acknowledge that genetics plays an important part in >phonological development and change. -- hardly, since it's illogical. Human beings are strikingly uniform genetically (compared to other widespread large mammals) and judging by what evidence we have have changed little since the emergence of behaviorally modern h. sapiens sapiens. Therefore while the capacity to develop language is (tautologically) biological in basis, all change and variation in language must be due to cultural/cognitive factors. Mr. Ryan is apparently also unaware of the latest research in neurology, which shows that cognition itself affects the physical structure of the brain, throughout life, by causing the development and linkage of new neurons and neuron networks. Which is to say, the "wiring" itself is constantly being affected by mental processes, as well as vice versa. Reductionism is both incorrect and passe. From colkitto at sprint.ca Fri Feb 11 05:16:09 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 00:16:09 -0500 Subject: "is the same as" Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: The following is quoted from a posting by Stanley Friesen, made on Sat, 05 Feb 2000 22:05:24 -0800. --rma ] >In this context I was really only pointing out that language "suffers" from >one of the main issues I see in all biological studies: fuzzy, imprecise >boundaries. There is no precise way to distinguish one language from another. What is the problem with so-called "fuzzy" thinking? Is this a manifestation of "physics envy"? Robert Orr >May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From mclasutt at brigham.net Fri Feb 11 05:58:29 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 22:58:29 -0700 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000205220538.00996160@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: It sounds like biologists are starting to discover that biology works, in some limited ways, like language. If that's the case, linguists have known how language change works for an awfully long time and biologists are just beginning to discover how species influence one another. I think that you should drop the "language change is like biological change" and instead say that "biological change is like language change". There's a fundamental difference in the statement. If influence from one species to another is not universal and is just being discovered, but influence from one language to another IS universal and has been known and described for over a century (at least), then the latter statement is far more accurate than the former. How arrogant to try and equate linguistics to biology when linguistics has the prior claim and the linguistic facts apply in ALL cases! 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 Fri Feb 11 06:01:00 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 23:01:00 -0700 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: <001901bf706b$01c0fe20$b99f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: I am in full agreement with Prof. McLaughlin's suggestion, and will post no further discussion of this sidebar topic. --rma ] Pat, You're coming very close to your past racist claims that got you exiled from other lists. The list is more active with you involved, even though your linguistic ideas are sometimes very controversial and we don't always agree. But the genetic/racial approach to language change that you espouse will probably not be tolerated by the moderator once the rest of us start the vehement attacks on what we know is rubbish. If you want to pursue this with other list members that you might think are interested, you should do it off-line. Please! 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 friesen.net Fri Feb 11 15:45:44 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 07:45:44 -0800 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 01:36 PM 2/6/00 -0700, Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote: >Actually, the analogy I used in my last post didn't exactly correlate with >the argument being made. A better analogy is that since a few Australians >know the Star Spangled Banner and all Americans know the Star Spangled >Banner, then all Americans are Australians! That's what relating linguistic >change (Americans) to biological change (Australians) is really like. Umm, this also misunderstands what I was trying to say! I *never* intended to imply in any way shape or form that language change is tied to genetic change!!! What I was suggesting is that language change *operates*in a manner that is *similar* to genetic change. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From Georg at home.ivm.de Thu Feb 10 19:00:46 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 20:00:46 +0100 Subject: Turkic In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Indeed. Uyghur is one of the most divergent Turkic languages, and a >glance through a comparative vocabulary of the Turkic languages reveals >a very modest proportion of shared vocabulary between Turkish and Uyghur. >It is inconceivable that speakers of the two could communicate at anything >beyond the most rudimentary level, if even that. I doubt that speakers >could get much beyond the stage of smiling, nodding, pointing, and trying >to guess what the other guy might be saying. Well, this isn't "Altainet", but, while Larry is right that the degree of "mutual intelligibility" of the Turkic languages is often overemphasized, the scene depicted is not as inconceivable as it may seem. Provided, both speakers are educated to some degree (which implies that they'll know more words than the average peasant, including some literary and specialized registers of their language, which usually are characterized by marginal vocabulary on the one hand, and by a larger amount of Arabo-Persian cultural "chic" words on the other), and given further that they'll have some time to acclimatize (i.e. one of them had some time to adjust to the language of the other by, say, travelling in the other's country) and further the goal-oriented awareness that speaking fast, over-idiomatic and using only the dialect of ones home-village will not help, they *will* pretty soon be able to communicate, if not perfectly, but considerably beyond the smiling-nodding-pointing stage. Enough to make an appointment at a certain place and time and say whether they do or don't like the food and a bit more as well. Whether they'll be able to discuss the question of mutual intelligibility of the Turkic languages and the reasons for its limits in a very sophisticated way is of course a different cup of tea. "Uyghur" is, for the record, not really one of the most divergent languages of the family, it is fairly mainstream, the really odd-one-out is Chuvash on the Volga (which is completely unintelligible to any speaker of the other languages) or Yakut. I once taught a Yakut class which was attended, curiously enough, by one speaker of Ottoman Turkish and another one of, well, Yakut. Needless to say, comparing the languages was fun and educational for all of us, and, though these two languages are *really* wide apart the Ottoman speaker started soon to make up Yakut words and forms of herself, applying some fairly straightforward (but sometimes drastically surface-changing) sound-laws (without me having even introduced the notion). Well, I pointed them to these sound-laws, but a speaker of Ottoman and one of Uyghur will find out themselves after some time. They won't start writing poems in the other language soon, though. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Fri Feb 11 18:10:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 18:10:00 GMT Subject: Turkic Message-ID: LT>I doubt that speakers could get much beyond the stage of smiling, LT>nodding, pointing, and trying to guess what the other guy might be LT>saying. .. I wouold agree, so the film really startled me. Mit freundlichen Grüßen Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover Tel=FAX x49-511-9585714. From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Feb 10 21:54:11 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 16:54:11 EST Subject: Bandkeramik and non-Anatolian PIE Message-ID: I wrote in part: <> I'm going to be a gentleman about this and presume you overlooked a very important point I've tried to make. And that you edited out. I've often used the term non-Anatolian and 'narrow' PIE to describe PIE after its separation from Hittite and the other Anatolian languages. This is rather orthodox linguistics. I do this because the archaeological evidence draws a very distinctive line between the "Anatolian-Balkan painted ware' culture of 7000-5000BC and the Bandkeramik culture of the Danube that appears clearly about 5500BC. Anatolian-Balkan painted ware cultures originate in Anatolia and do extend beyond the Balkans in their final forms. I am HERE identifying it with the first branch-off from "wide PIE" - Hittite, Luwian, etc. That is what I wrote and you seem to disregard for no apparent reason. Bandkeramik or Linear pottery culture represents very distinctive practices and material remains. The cookie cutter settlements often described in the literature do not show up until about 5500BC. Bandkeramik may have evolved out of the Anatolian culture, but the differences in time and material evidence are large and clear. So I'm connecting Bandkeramik with post-Anatolian PIE -'narrow PIE'. I'm sure as an expert linguist you are familiar with the concept. PLEASE DON"T insist Bandkeramik dates to 7000BC. You may be an expert linguist, but this dating is not subject to linguistic argument. IF you know of specific evidence that gives Bankeramik assemblages a 7000BC date, please post them. Otherwise, please consider that you may be giving very misleading information to the members of this list. On this basis, I wrote the following (unedited): <> Now, I'm going to ask a courtesy here. If you do not understand the connection I'm making between Bandkeramik and non-Anatolian PIE, please address that fact. If you disagree with that connection is consistent with Renfrew, give some specific and supportable reasons. Otherwise your one-line, unexplained contradictions seem to me to be more appropriate to a pro football message board than any list with scholarly objectives. I won't address here your apparent claim that Myceanaean and Latin are almost identical languages (2 on a scale of 1-10 - a 1 score being I presume identical). But I will mention that I did not ask you to score your perception of the difference between Hittite and Latin. And the reason for that was because - aside from my trying to be fair - I was being consistent with the subject - which was POST-ANATOLIAN PIE. Though I'm sure that you also probably find Hittite and Latin 'linguistically' just more slices from the same white bread loaf, at least pay some mind to the fact that I did not present you with that particular comparison for a reason. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Feb 11 05:44:05 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 00:44:05 EST Subject: The degree of differentiation Message-ID: In a message dated 2/4/00 8:15:15 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> I'm still waiting for you to tell us how you measure this critical and all important "degree of differentiation," that "we" are using with such thorough confidence. Ah, if only carbon 14 and nitrogen isotopes could yield such precision. Do you count the number of vowel changes in the word for fire and multiply them by 500 years or something like that? Or is a laser involved? In a message dated 2/8/00 4:20:02 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> Let's be clear about this. What you have consistently offered has had very little or nothing to do with the principles of science. I can't speak for Colin Renfrew, but let me say on my own that you've shown absolutely nothing about how you supposedly measure linguistic behavior in historic times BUT you have insisted to a fare-thee-well that you somehow magically know how much time it takes for languages to differentiate in prehistoric times. This is not science. This is hoodoo. No, I change my mind. I now feel that your evaluations of "degree of differentiation" in languages should be promptly gathered and sent to the Journal of Irreproducible Results, where I'm sure many others will learn to apply your precision methods to calculate such matters as the time of separation between Dutch and Flemish scientifically demanded by your precision "degree of differentiation" formula. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Feb 11 06:34:12 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 01:34:12 EST Subject: Celtic's rate of differentiation Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 2/2/00 12:43:52 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- developing FROM WHAT? From PIE? Is PIE supposed to have been around in 250 BCE for the Celtic languages to develop from?>>. You have no problem with proto-Latin arising among the other Italic languages before 500BC, wiping out those other languages and giving rise to modern Romance languages 2500 years later. But you do have a problem with proto-Celtic arising among related languages before 800BC, wiping out those related languages and giving rise to the Celtic languages 1000 years later. Does that make any sense? And now who's the one who isn't applying a 'scientific' uniformity to prehistoric languages. Obviously, a lot could have gone on between Renfrew's 'an early indo-european language' and the rise of an identifiable Celtic. There could have been plenty of languages and dialects that developed in between. I don't think I need to tell you that the chances are that any IE languages in 4000BC wouldn't have had writing - but as you say with migrations - it doesn't mean they weren't there. There may have been many ancestor languages that preceeded Celtic before Celtic arose. THERE IS NOTHING THAT SAYS THAT A STRING OF ANCESTRAL LANGUAGES CAN'T SEPARATE NON-ANATOLIAN PIE FROM CELTIC. The only thing that prevents it is your "degree of differentiation" calculator. Which we are still waiting to see. <> Nobody said anything about the languages staying uniform over any great period of time. You are simply not comprehending that there is no requirement that Celtic come directly out of PIE - any more than that modern Greek came directly out of PIE. <> NOT DIFFERENTIATED ENOUGH? HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT? Oh, I forget the amazing "degree of differentiation = separation in years" calculator. What a boon that will be to historical science. Are you going to have it co-calibrated with tree rings? Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Feb 11 07:02:18 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 02:02:18 EST Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: I wrote: <> I disagree. Actually, Renfrew's evidence is still rather compelling. Although I am willing to reserve judgment until you unveil the amazing "rate of differentiation" machine - which I understand will place PIE in a small village in the Ukraine about 3000BC, where four different words for the wheel would be divied up among the departing IEian children, just before they marched off to change the language of Europe and half of Asia. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Feb 11 09:33:06 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 04:33:06 EST Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: I wrote: >By 4000BC, there is enough differentiation between regional expressions of >Bandkeramik to suggest that the former cultural unities are giving way to >local identities in western Europe and north of the Alps In a message dated 2/10/00 1:27:28 AM, sarima at friesen.net wrote: <> I perhaps am not phrasing that correctly. Bandkeramik is going through changes throughout this period and there is also quite a bit of local variation arising. There's a neat website by the Institut für Ur- und Frühgeschichte Erlangen and Wolfgang Weißmüller called Middle Europe (north of the alps) from 5500 to 780 BC (http://www.uf.uni-erlangen.de/karten/karten. html). You'll see there maps showing the different 'technocomplexes" in an abstract kind of geographical positioning at different periods. You'll also see by looking at the maps how local variations started popping up and increasing, so that that the last complex called Bandkeramik (Stichbandkeramik) on the maps has kind of been eaten away by 4200BC and is gone in the next map. Nothing like this sort of uniformity again appears on those maps all the way to the last one at 780BC. What the maps don't show is the population changes. So that you don't see how the population and number of settlement tremendously increases and in themselves create a very distinct sudden increase in variation. You must remember that at the beginning and for a while we are dealing witha very small number of settlements with small numbers of settlers - so there just isn't much to vary. Somewhat parallel is the English colonization of the American Atlantic coast. In @1615, you have few settlements and less than perhaps 500 colonists that are uniformally English in their practices and physical remains. As time goes on, the English/european character of the colonies doesn't change much at all for a century and a half, but then when change comes it accelerates very rapidly. Farming techniques, trades and materials take on a distinctly American look and character, and then begin to get quite regional. Of course we have no parallel for the population growth and cultural changes of modern times - but if you look at those 400 years you can see an underlying consistency in culture throughout - including language. Linguistically, the American Atlantic coast is certainly not speaking the same English it did in 1615, but it is still clearly English. When Barlowe describes the Native Americans living on the Outer Banks in 1588, it's in an English that is plainly readable today. "This island had many goodly woods, full of Deere, Conies, Hares and Fowles, in incredible abundance... Such a flocke of Cranes arose under us, with such a cry redoubled by many Ecchoes, as if an armie of men had showted all together.... {and the locals were] Very handsome, and goodly people, and in their manner as mannerly, and civill, as any of Europe." There is no comprehensibility problem here even after 400 years and through a lot more changes than the Bandkeramik folk could ever have experienced. But of course whatever uniformity there may have been in the speech and culture of those 1615 colonists, regional differences arose that by 1840 were noted by many observers that reflect real material differences - we can read constant references to the "Yankee Nation" of the New Englander. If one can picture a slower rate of change than the 19th and 20th Centuries gave us, it is not hard to see a small number of "peripherally conservative" colonists slowly weening themselves from the traditions they carried from the Danube. And that slowness first of all was a matter of slow initial population expansion which only changes about 4600BC - despite what JoatSimeon at aol.com has been writing, I still only find for example a single Bandkeramik settlement in modern France before 5000BC. Agriculture at first thins population density. It's possible that early Bandkeramik in western Europe represented under a few thousand people before 5000BC, but much more in central Europe. The first real expansion in population and settlements appears to have been more by way of neighboring mesolithic neighbors than by any further colonization from the Danube. Another factor was the strikingly regimented practices of the early Bandkeramik settlers - which allowed them to move as quickly across the geography the way they did - it was like prefab housing construction. There were not a lot of these settlers, but they were almost religious in the way they ritualized their settlements. (Amish settlers in the US come to mind.) These settlements were very uniform until about 4600BC. Then the population starts to soar and it seems something like rock n roll has been introduced and the local "technocomplexes" start to come up all over. There are some new more general practices like megaliths that show up, but most innovation is local. The underlying culture - settlement practices, the long houses, etc. however seems to remain Bandkeramik in central Europe until about 3500BC. Then the local and regional variations completely take over and the influence of kurgan is felt in the east and south of this zone. You'll see it on the maps on the web site I mentioned. <> I can't of course be sure about this, but I think that the simplier explanation is that the uniformity was already disappearing at this point and the basic populations and possibly language were in place and divisions were starting to occur. None of these would have been Celtic or even necessarily pre-Celtic at this point, of course. I can't say you are wrong. But it feels like narrow PIE has already happened and now there are a whole bunch of IE's that have just formed. Perhaps Kurgan a bit later is like Latin or English, a singular IE influence coming in from the east. I think of how Hispanic culture has grown so strongly in the US. The subtle change in the language is obvious. It use to be the hot dog (frankfurter/weiner) that was the number one food of the American summer. Now Nachos, Tacos, Chilli and Burritoes are king. In fact, I look forward to the day 5000 years from now, when is used as evidence for dating the last days of Hispano-American unity. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Feb 11 15:47:56 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 10:47:56 EST Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: In a message dated 2/10/00 1:27:28 AM, you wrote: <<>@4600BC - A north western European version of [narrow PIE] arises >@4000BC - An "early IE language" develops in parts of western Europe and >north of the Alps. >@3500BC - Local differentiation in this 'early IE language' begins This is even worse. You now have local differentiation delaying for over well 1000 years!!!! That is absurd. Given normal rates of language change, this should have happened well before 4000 BC, probably by 4400 or 4500 BC (within your "Narrow PIE"). >> No, you've misread this. The path I ROUGHLY gave above suggests "a northwestern version" (versus e.g. eastern) (600 years) >"an early IE language west and north of the Alps" (500 years) > "local differentiation" (e.g. on the Brittany coast) (@3500) - nothing says that anything identifiably Celtic would have arisen yet. <> Yeah, well as you know, I'm looking forward to exactly how you calculate this differentiation - especially with Hittite and whatever you are differentiating it from. If your formula finds Hittite an awful lot like any language, it sure would have saved Kurylowicz et al a lot of time and trouble. (And I don't know why you think Farsi and Hindi are more differentiated than Hittite and Sanskrit - haven't a clue. Are you talking about a numerical degree of differentiation that can be demostrated? Or is this some kind of ironic reference to the influence of Dravidian?) If this 'degree of differentiation' is based on your personal beliefs, that's fine. I have no argument with that. But if this is supposed to be science, it really needs to be quantifiable and reproducible - so we can feel confident that we are not being influenced by your favorite personal theory. As I said I can't be positive about any of the things I've suggested. But to call them 'absurd' takes a lot of chutzpah, especially when you are doing it on the basis on what seems to be nothing more than an impression. (And references to what may be liturgical languages.) And of course to some mysterious measure of differentiation that can conveniently tell us how much a language can change in 6000 years DESPITE THE FACT we don't even have any direct evidence of languages older than 4000 years. After reading again Arthur Barlowe's Roanoke Island account in 1588 that I mentioned last post, I can mention one language at least that doesn't differentiate much at all in the time it might take narrow PIE to turn into a group of early IE languages. But not yet Celtic. Regards, Steve Long From mclasutt at brigham.net Wed Feb 16 15:06:00 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 08:06:00 -0700 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: <001401bf7853$f96619e0$639f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: A couple of days ago I made the comment that Pat Ryan had been kicked off of two lists. That statement was incorrect and I have apologized to Pat privately for it. I had mixed him up with another member of the Evolution of Language list who was kicked off. I had conflated my memories of a very vehement discussion concerning Pat's views on racist determinism in language, which was quashed by the moderator, with another incident which was not quite as vehement, but became even more obnoxiously insulting to linguists. Pat kindly reminded me of the events I was confusing. Pat has only been kicked off of one list. 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 proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Feb 16 20:12:39 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 20:12:39 -0000 Subject: "is the same as" Message-ID: Dear Rich and IEists: Without reopening the question of possible genetic influences on language structure or phonology, I would only like to note for the record that the definition of 'racism' in my dictionary (American Heritage) is "the nhotion that one's own ethnic stock is superior". I do not subscribe to this view; and hence, to characterize me as a 'racist' is inappropriate and evidence of careless attendance to accuracy. 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 anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Fri Feb 11 10:40:38 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 12:40:38 +0200 Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Tocharian_A_w=E4s=2C_B_yasa?= Message-ID: The Tocharian word for 'gold' (A wäs, B yasa) has traditionally been compared with a Uralic group of words with meanings 'metal', 'iron', 'copper'. It has often been suggested that the U words might be of IE origin, although this assumption is problematic. I am interested in inspecting the possibility that the Tocharian word is a Uralic / Proto-Samoyed loan. First, the data. The Uralic word has two forms, a front and a back vowel variant. The front variant can be reconstructed as *wäs´kä [> Saami veaiki 'copper', Finnish vaski id., Mordvin vis´ke 'metal wire', Proto-Samoyed *wesä (> Nyenets yesye 'iron', Nganasan basa 'metal; iron', Selqup kësï 'iron' etc.)]. The back vowel (-a-) as well as the second syllable vowel (-i-) in Finnish are probably secondary; there are also other examples of sporadic *ä-ä > a-i in Finnish. Mordvin rather suggests 1st syllable *-e- (*wes´kä); there is also an irregular dialectal variant us´ke (with *vi- >> u-). The back vowel variant appears in Hungarian vas 'iron' and Mari vaZ 'ore, metal' (< *was´kV). The loss of *k in Mari is irregular. In addition to this, there are phonologically unclear cognates in Permic and Ob-Ugric. They seem to have undergone reductive phonological developments, since they only appear as the last member of compound words that are names for metals (thus, the meaning seems to have been just 'metal'). The many phonological irregularities suggest that the word is an early "Wanderwort", and this is also compatible with the fact that PU must have been a stone-age language. However, the word must be quite old, since it appears in every branch of Uralic, and at least the consonant correspondences are regular (except for Mari). The direction of loaning can hardly have been IE / Tocharian > Uralic, because: a) Tocharian -s- would not give U *-s´k-. One could of course assume Tocharian > Samoyed (this has been suggested), but this leaves the other U words without explanation. The correspondence Samoyed *wesä ~ U *wäs´kä / *was´kV is hardly a coincidence, since PU *ä > Samoyed *e and PU *s´k > Samoyed *s are regular developments. b) It seems very unlikely that a Tocharian loan word could ever have reached the western periphery of Uralic (Saamic, Finnic). The Tocharian word does not seem to have certain correspondents elsewhere in IE (IEW mentions it under *auso- 'gold': "vielleicht Toch. A wäs"). Now I have two questions: 1) What was the Proto-Tocharian form? (If it was something like *wVsV with front vowels, it fits quite well with Proto-Samoyed *wesä. A loan Samoyed > Tocharian is also geographically the most sensible alternative, if Tocharian was connected with the Afansevo culture.) 2) Is there any other plausible etymology for the Tocharian word? From sarima at friesen.net Sat Feb 12 01:11:52 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 17:11:52 -0800 Subject: language and biology In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:29 PM 2/7/00 +0000, Larry Trask wrote: >Stanley Friesen writes: >> Cognition is a biological process. Ergo, so is language. >Sure. But the biological aspects of language, important though they >may be, are not the subject matter of historical linguistics. >Historical linguistics, by definition, deals with language change. >And language change does not result from biological change: it results >from social factors. The point is that social change is another form of biological process, it is just not *genetic* change. Social change operates under the general constraints and modes of biological processes, even though it does not directly involve genetic factors. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From stevegus at aye.net Thu Feb 10 14:27:30 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 09:27:30 -0500 Subject: Basque * 'round' Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: > Maybe the geographical position of the donor language can be narrowed > down, for a word of the same shape found its way into Northern Europe in > the specialized meaning of 'car' (cf. "wheels"). I'm thinking of course of > Dan.-Norw.-Swed. bil 'car', which must be very old given the assimilation > of the nominative marker in Icelandic bi:ll (from *bi:l-R pointing to > PGmc. *bi:l-az). My understanding has ever been, that -bil- was short for -automobil-, which may be an ancient Germanic root, but it would seem to present certain phonological problems. My guess would be that the Icelandic has been assimilated to fit into a pre-existing declension. -- Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law Fox & Cotner: PHONE (812) 945 9600 FAX (812) 945 9615 http://www.foxcotner.com Post hominem vermis, post vermem foetor et horror. Sic in non hominem vertitur omnis homo. Unde superbit homo, cujus conceptio culpa, Nasci poena, labor vita, necesse mori? --- St. Bernard, Meditationes Piisimae From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Feb 10 14:38:15 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 15:38:15 +0100 Subject: Basque * 'round' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >Any good Celtic etymon for German Auto? Well, it is well known that German au < *u:, and Celtic *p > 0, so that looks very much like a form derived from an unattested Celtic *pu:to- "stinking" (the contraption was apparently named by the La T`ene Celts after its typical exhaust products). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Thu Feb 10 21:24:48 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 15:24:48 -0600 Subject: Basque Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] At 12:30 AM 2/6/00 -0600, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [snip] > you may wish to consider the following notes (keeping in mind that > any errors in copying are my own) > see Basque ekarri "to bring" Basque ekarri; < Pre-Basque *e-kaR-i > [lt/B] > PN263 *kar- "to twist, to turn, to wind" [b/k], see IE *(s)ker- "to jump, > to move in circles"? [p/IE] > maybe "to turn > to return s.t. > to bring s.t." [mcv] > Celtic carru, carricare, see Basque ekarri "bring, carry"; [wje] > carry English and Basque ekarri [rmcc] > Eng. carry is of French-Romance origin: Latin carrus, carruca = cart, > carriage. My Latin dictionary says both are of Gallic origin. see Fr. > charrier. Original meaning: transport by cart. [es] > carpentum "two-wheeled wagon" Gaulish > Spanish carpintero > "carpenter" [abi 4], French charpentier "carpenter" [wde 188-89]; < ? carru > [rmcc] > carru Gaulish "cart" > Spanish carro "cart" [abi 4]; char artisan > term French; from Gaulish [cb62: 13] > carro "car, cart" Spanish/Portuguese; from Celtic [jng]; carrum > Celtic > French char "cart" [mh 241] > carruca Gaulish > French charrue [wje 188-89]; charrue agricultural > word French; from Gaulish [cb62: 13] > carrum Romance < Celtic [wje 183] > carrus "cart" Latin; from Celtic [nv 75-76] > carrus Italian < Celtic [bm66: 25] > carrus "4-wheeled covered wagon" Latin; from Celtic [lrp 53]; carro > Spanish; from Celtic [rks 12-13] Rick, I'm glad to see that you brought up the case of . It's certainly one that has puzzled investigators for some time. In arguing the case for , i.e., how it fits into all of this, one might want to point out what I mentioned earlier. If one looks in Buck (10.75), it turns out that this root is far more wide-spread than any other single root-stem/etynom for 'wheel' -at least that's my impression from reading what others have said on the list. In the case of Buck In the case of the Basque item, using prototype semantics one would say that its prototypic meaning is 'to bring by means of a wheeled vehicle' but rather merely 'to bring', i.e., 'traer' Sp. or 'tirer, apporter' Fr.(cf. Azkue I, 229). Hence, a compound such as (with the common suffixing element <-era> to added to the verbal stem) refers to '(the) bringing, transporting' without explicitly stating the mode of transport. If one were apply the work that has been done in diachronic prototype semantics to this case, one could argue that a meaning such as 'to bring or transport by means of a wheeled vehicle' could be derived from the broader meaning of 'to bring, to transport (by any means)'. Given that the invention of the wheel is a technological innovation (albeit not a terribly recent one) the second definition, i.e., one that restricts the mode of transport to that of wheeled vehicle, could only have come into existence after the wheel itself was invented. Hence in this case a (hypothetical) development from a generalized notion of 'to bring' or 'to transport' to a narrowly defined one would also imply the following: that at some point in that semasiological process the term came to be associated with a particular mode of transport and that subsequently that meaning became the dominant one, the prototypic one. Again I emphasize that there is no evidence that in Euskera the word was ever used to refer specifically to a mode of transport by a wheeled vehicle. This in turn suggests that if one is going to relate the Celtic and Basque items -if one is going to argue that they are cognates and they do give every appearance of being so- there is a caveat. While it seems to me that it would be relatively easy for the meaning to narrow itself and become associated with a common type of transport, it would be more difficult for a word that whose prototypic meaning was originally 'to bring' or 'to transport by a wheeled vehicle' to end up meaning 'to bring' with no connotation whatsoever of any wheeled vehicle which is the case in Basque. But then there is the additional problem that the English word 'to carry' which is traced back to French doesn't mean 'to bring by means of a wheeled vehicle' but merely 'to carry' although I believe that a case could be made that 'to carry' might refer to a particular 'way of bringing', but not necessarily by means of a 'cart'. Someone with a better etymological dictionary of French would have to judge whether originally terms like were restricted in this way semantically. Also, I'm fully aware that the standard interpretation would derive the Romance items from the Latin word for cart , not from a substrate. Now, it's clear that the Latin form was influential, i.e., in introducing a term for a new technological marvel, but there seems to be a case that could be made that we are looking at items that might be better categorized as Basque/Pre-Celtic/Celtic (without trying to figure out exactly who was first in line) data set that was picked up by Romance languages (including Latin where it came to be associated with a particular object). Stated differently, one explanation for its presence in these languages would be that the diffusion of data set in question could be traced back in two stages: 1) the first would situate the lexical feature as part of a preexisting Basque/Pre-Celtic/Celtic substrate and 2) the second would reflect the influence of the prototype meaning of the Latin lexical item and its diffusion throughout the Roman Empire as the name of a particular kind of cart (chariot??). Hence in this simulation of linguistic events, there would be at least two chronological layers, an earlier and later one, that could be uncovered and two relatively different mechanisms for the diffusion of members of the data set in question. I don't know if the time-depth for Celtic/Gaullic would allow for that type of pattern of areal diffusion for this root, but it might. Also, I've noticed on the list several people mentioning that there are substantial substrate lexical (?) items in Germanic languages. Wouldn't it be possible that Celtic and Basque could share elements from a substrate that was found in this zone earlier, a substrate about which we know little and whose of geographical extension is unclear at this point? Also, as I mentioned in an earlier email, since <-bil-> is packaged inside (a Class 1 verb), and the verbal prefix and suffixing elements date back in all likelihood to Pre-Basque (or maybe even before), it is more difficult to argue that Basque just lifted the Celtic word and turned it into . Or if one argues that it happened this way, then we are talking about a significant time depth for the contact period. I've lost track of who said what in the exchange below so please forgive me for not citing who is who: Rick Mc Callister >> What about being 'bil' a loan from Gaulish? >>> PIE *kwel- > Cel *kwi:l- > Gaul *pi:l > ! > bask. bil >>> cf PIE *penque > Cel *kwinkwe > Gaul *pimpetos (ordinal) >>1) Regarding the semantics: >> Remember that the Celts were famous for their cartwright-technique. [snip] >> Of course the i-prefixed verbform is an argument /against/ borrowing from >> Celtic. [rmcc] > Maybe, maybe not. The prefix could have been added after borrowing >--but ask a specialist in Basque, don't take my word on it So in response to your comment about the 'prefix'. This prefix shows no sign of life whatsoever in Basque, whereas there are other elements, i.e., the <-eta> suffix now used to mark the plural of oblique cases (and for other things) that is partly non-productive in one subroutine of the system, but alive and well in other subroutines. This is not the case, to my knowledge, of the verbal prefix . And I think that Larry will agree with me on this one. ...At 04:24 PM 2/2/00 +0000, Larry Trask wrote: >Roz Frank writes: [snip] [RF] >> And as an aside, are there explict criteria set forth that determine >> which items are most representative. I'm speaking of crtieria along the >> lines of those that have been suggested by Larry Trask (and debated by >> many) concerning the selection of items in Pre-Basque. [LT] >But the two cases are very different. We have lots of IE languages, and so >our main tool is the comparative method here. But Basque is isolated, and >so the comparative method is of minimal use, and only internal reconstruction >is available. Hence different criteria are appropriate in the two cases. [RF] >> I would be most >> interested in knowing if such criteria have been debated and/or laid out >> explicitly at some point in the past. For example, how many language groups >> must the item be attested in for it to quality? I assume, for example, that >> identifying cognates/reflexes of the same item in Sanskrit and Celtic would >> be sufficient for the item to qualify? Or is the bar set higher for these >> PIE items, e.g., that the item must be attested in Sanskrit, Germanic and >> Celtic or Hittite, Slavic and Romance, etc. [LT] >There is no unchallengeable answer to this question. By Meillet's Principle, >we require cognates in at least three branches of IE before we can reconstruct >an etymon for PIE. But this is only a rule of thumb, and skilful specialists >need not adhere to it slavishly. [RF] >> For example, just glancing over the entries in Buck, it would seem that >> there isn't as much uniformity for "wheel" across IE languages, as there is >> for, say, "cart" which shows up most IE languages (obviously with the help >> of Latin). [LF] >But loan words don't count for the purpose of reconstruction. If an >identifiable Celtic word is borrowed into Latin, from where it descends into >the Romance languages and is borrowed into Germanic and elsewhere, it is still >only the Celtic word which counts. But if it could be shown that the Celtic word is cognate with a Basque word and that it is unlikely that the Basque word could have been borrowed from Celtic, e.g., if the Basque root-stem were to be encountered only as a verbal root-stem in a Class I non-finite verb (e.g., such as ), wouldn't it follow that the Celtic word itself may represent not a borrowing from Basque but rather from an earlier substrate that also was the source of the Basque and Celtic data sets? And on that note. Earlier we were discussing the semantic structure of the non-finite verb . I said that I believed that because of its structure, it would qualify for admission to candidacy for Pre-Basque. Would you agree that it is extremely difficult to date a word like or given that its structure reveals the presence of morphosyntactic structures that are no longer productive in the language. Let me try to explain what I'm getting at. One of the topics that intrigues me is that of developing techniques for discovering and/or elaborating criteria for judging "morphosyntactic stratification" in the case of the Basque data. And I fully recognize that I'm the neophyte on this list and, therefore, what I'm going to say may be a bit like trying to reinvent the 'wheel' :). However, in the case of Basque it is extremely important for one to be sensitive to the way in which certain morphosyntactic data are situated within the overall system. For instance, we have been speaking of the problem of developing criteria that would allow us to determine the age of verbs such as or . Again keeping in mind that we are speaking of simulations, i.e., of the ways that we can go about modeling the data available, we could ask what aspects of the morphosyntactic structure of Basque can give us clues about the age of the linguistic artifact, the data set under study. The way I see it is a bit like what happens in archaeology where researchers are sensitive to 'context' in which an artifact is discovered, for example, to the 'layer' in which it is encountered. Another way of looking at the problem is to say that when one digs up an artifact and discovers it wrapped in a given type of material, it is assumed that the object inside is at least as old as the wrapping it is found in. In the case of and we are dealing with a particular type of artifact, one that belongs to a class of similar artifacts, i.e., non-finite Class I verbs equipped with a prefixing element in * (which has a phonological variant in ) as well as a final verbal suffix in <-i>. As has been pointed out (Trask 1995) neither of these morphemes is productive today in the language. Therefore, they appear to incorporate morphosyntactic structures that may hearken back to a much earlier stage of the linguistic system. This is because there is no evidence in the language of even the slightest sign of life with respect to the verbal suffix nor that of the verbal prefix in * . This situation might be contrasted with that of the suffxing element <-eta> where one finds it alive and kicking in certain subroutines of the system but relatively moribund in others, as I've mentioned above. Moreover in the case of , and other Class I non-finite verbs, there is another factor that needs to be taken into consideration, although what weight it should be given when modeling the time depth of the artifact is not clear. I refer to the fact that Basque is a suffixing language. There is no trace of prefixing in the language except in the case of Class I verbs (I'm excluding a few lexical calques that have entered the language relatively recently and which are obviously based on Romance formations). Hence, the root-stem <-bil-> in or that of <-karr-> in is encountered wrapped up in material that has every sign of belonging to the most archaic strata that can be detected in the morphosyntactic structure of the linguistic system of Euskera. We are talking about typological issues where the artifact's morphosyntactic packaging provides the researcher with a certain type of information that in turn permits a tentative assignment of the artifact to a given layer, to a given morphosyntactic strata: the artifact ends up being situated at a certain level because of the way that the morphosyntactic data. lends itself to typological stratification. Again I emphasize that all of the above should be considered a highly tentative attempt to develop criteria that could be utilized in examining and dating artifacts such as and . As I mentioned in an earlier email, if an attempt is made to relate the verbal stem of to artifacts found in IE languages, the time-depth that can be assigned to the Basque artifact by means of the above argumentation, should serve as a cautionary sign. This doesn't mean that I would reject such attempts to see in the Basque data reflexes of the IE data. Rather, for such a proposal to flourish, the investigator need to consider whether the purported similarities between the Basque and IE might be best explained by alleging that they result from an even earlier Sprachbund or other type of areal phenomena that allowed reflexes of the same element to show up in two different linguistic systems. Hopefully the above discussion will shed some light on a few of the difficulties involved in constructing an argument in which the verbal stems found in Basque items such as and would be viewed as recent loans from an IE language(s). As so often happens when I start a short response, it gets out of hand. Thanks for your patience, that is, it you've reached this part of my long-winded message :)). Ondo ibili, Roz Frank From edsel at glo.be Thu Feb 10 17:58:29 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 18:58:29 +0100 Subject: Hualde's view Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" Sent: Sunday, February 06, 2000 3:32 PM [snip] > I'm afraid that if Hualde is serious about the "merger", his > explanation is not only not simpler, but leaves more things > unexplained. In the first place, there are a good many > indications that Pre-Pre-Basque initial **p-, **t- and **k- had > simply been dropped (sometimes leaving an aspiration), as in the > well-known cases of *karr- > harri "stone", Aquitanian Talsc- ~ > Halsc-, morpheme variants such as -tegi ~ -egi "house, place" > (maybe connected to Bq. etxe "house" < teg(i) + -xe (dim.)), etc. > But one can dispute or dismiss this evidence. [Ed] A few remarks: -In Iberian toponyms e.g. there is a root kal- that might be related to *karr-, a root that seems to be widespread in the Mediterranean area (cf. e.g. Carrara). -Iberian too, has apparently this opposition t- <> zero-, like in Ibi-Tibi, eban-teban. -Etxe could be derived from **tetxe, itself maybe < **tekte < IE root, like in Lat. tectum (and Du. dak), or else be related to (not necessarily derived, e.g. in N. Catalonia, from) Grk. the:ke:. This is not to say I disagree with what you said. > More seriously, a merger of voiced/unvoiced segments in initial > position, while in itself acceptable for the cases of **k-/**g- > > *g-, **p-/**b- > *b-, and (not sure how Hualde wants to interpret > these) **ts-/*s- > *z-, *ts'-/*s'- > *s-, leads to more problems > than Mitxelena's account already has in the case of supposed > **t-/**d- > *d-. The problem is that there are no Pre-Basque > words beginning with *d-. Hualde's merger doubles the problem of > the missing initial dental, and fails to explain the > superabundance of vowel-initial words. > Another fact which contradicts the merger of voiced ~ voicedless > stops in morpheme initial position is the phonological make-up of > verbal roots, which can start with contrasting b-, d-, t-, g- and > k- (e-man (*e-ban), e-dan, e-torr-i, e-gin, e-karr-i) [only *p- > seems to missing, except as a variant of *b, as in ipini ~ ibeni > "to put"]. [Ed] Taken together with your p-t-k- loss theory (which looks plausible in view of the abnormal number of vowel-initial words) this would mean that verb-initial e- might go back to *ke-. Since the Basque 'infinitives' are actually participles (the reverse of mod. Grk.), we come close to Germanic ge- (and Lat. co-???) again. Maybe Gmc. ge- IS a non-IE substrate vestige. > Miguel Carrasquer Vidal Ed. Selleslagh From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Feb 15 11:22:02 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 11:22:02 +0000 Subject: Basque Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister writes: [on the possibility of a Celtic source for Basque 'be in motion'] [somebody else] >> Of course the i-prefixed verbform is an argument /against/ borrowing from >> Celtic. > Maybe, maybe not. The prefix could have been added after borrowing > --but ask a specialist in Basque, don't take my word on it The big problem here is the seemingly great difficulty of borrowing verbs. Edith Moravcsik, in her universals of borrowing, goes so far as to declare that verbs cannot be borrowed at all. This is probably going too far -- after all, English did borrow verbs from Norman French (didn't it?). But, as a rule, when verbs are borrowed at all, they are borrowed only as non-finite forms -- participles or verbal nouns -- which are then inflected periphrastically in the borrowing language, with finite auxiliaries carrying all tense, agreement, and other verbal categories. This is how Basque borrowed verbs from Latin, and how it borrows verbs from Romance. It is how Turkish borrowed verbs from Arabic and Persian, and how it borrows verbs from French and English today. It is how Old Japanese borrowed verbs from Chinese, and how modern Japanese borrows verbs from English. But Basque is inflected synthetically, not periphrastically. It has a full set of finite and non-finite forms. Consequently, it doesn't look a good bet to be a borrowed verb. The same goes for the other Basque verbs mentioned, like 'bring', also inflected synthetically. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From r.clark at auckland.ac.nz Sun Feb 13 04:37:31 2000 From: r.clark at auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark) Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 17:37:31 +1300 Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: I believe you may be replying to the incomplete version of my post, sent by accident. (This would account for my apparently signing with your Footer.) In the complete version, I mentioned that Dixon makes the very point you are making with respect to Wargamay -- he cannot decide whether its fairly high cognate percentage with Dyirbal is due to a close genetic relationship or to a long period of contact and convergence. It's no longer clear to me what you are claiming about Pama-Nyungan. I thought your point was that their genealogical relationship is very remote, yet they are very similar. My reply was that the former is not certain, and the latter (from the Dyirbal example) clearly untrue. However, since you used the phrase "very closely related", do you mean this in the genealogical sense -- that their proto-language is quite recent? In which case, what is the relevance of the 50,000 year figure? Ross Clark >>> Hans Holm 02/08 3:44 AM >>> RC>very closely related" is extremely misleading. They could be considered RC>closely related only by contrast to the highly diverse (lexically and RC>typologically) other families of the north and west of Australia. RC>Consider just the immediate neighbours of Dyirbal, as described by RC>Dixon: Yidin (27% shared vocabulary), Mbabaram (18%), Warungu (47%), RC>Wargamay (60%) .. misleading are such percentages, if taken as representing proportional genealogical relationship. Direct genealogical relationship means that two daughter-languages directly stem from the same mother language. Replacements, even severe and/or quite different ones, taking place after that split, have no influence on the notice. Thus, two languages with a smaller number of retained common lexemes may be related closer than others with higher percentages. I shall try to make this clearer in the near future. (BTW, you signed with my Footer.) Mit freundlichen Grüßen Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover Tel=FAX x49-511-9585714. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 09:15:10 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 04:15:10 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: In a message dated 2/12/00 8:12:09 PM Mountain Standard Time, mcv at wxs.nl writes: << Wait a minute. PIE-speakers invented the wheel?>> -- possibly; or possibly Mesopotamians did. When something diffuses that fast, it's hard to tell where the original was. Has something definite been found on this? From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 09:16:25 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 04:16:25 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >edsel at glo.be writes: >This is based on the hypothesis that some IE speakers would have preferred >to use a foreign word over a descriptive IE word, if they hadn't invented >the wheel. And that's just a hypothesis, although not an unlikely one. >> -- oh, granted. Not meant as anything more than a hypothesis. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 09:35:51 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 04:35:51 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >This is interesting. 2000yrs from modern Romance language back to Latin? -- I'm being conservative. That's the time from Classical Latin (0 CE, say) to the present. Or one could say that it's from the breakup of Late Latin/Common Romance (400 CE, roughly) to the emergence of more or less the modern standard forms of French, Spanish, and Italian -- around 1500-1600. That would be around 1200 years. 2000 is the upper limit, the maximum possible. >2000 yrs from Myceanaean, Sanskrit and Latin back to what? -- yup, PIE. >Do the similarities between Latin and Hittite 'leap off the page" as you say? -- I was referring to Latin, Sanskrit, and Greek. >And what does Hittite (for starters) add to the total 'differentiation' >between the first attested PIE languages? -- nothing, since Hittite is universally considered to be a special case; and you're changing the subject again. >And of course, the differentiation between the languages above and Tocharian, -- nope. Our corpus of Tocharian dates from the 1st millenium _CE_; 1500 years or more after the first attested Mycenaean and Sanskrit, and well after the breakup of Common Romance. Do try to keep these dates straight. In any case, Tocharian is transparently an IE language, with many archaic features closely similar to those of the earliest attested language. The degree of development vs. a vs. PIE is quite similar to that of other IE languages _of the same period_. (That is to say, the appropriate comparison would be Tocharian and Old English or early French.) >Luwian -- same-same as Hittite; both Anatolian. >the undecipherable Thracian, Albanian and Celtiberian should send >your date of dispersal hurtling back to that magic 7000BC you've mentioned so >frequently. -- another bizzare statement. Would you care to elucidate why the existance of Celtiberian should affect our datings? Particularly as we know virtually nothing about it, or Thracian. And Albanian? How, exactly, do you drag that into the issue in question? We don't have any Albanian prior to the medieval period! >Or do all these languages decline with only a change in the initial vowel -- do try to keep the dates straight. Comparing languages in 1000 BCE and 1000 CE isn't quite the same thing, for the specific purposes of this question. >BTW, would you know if appears in Mycenaean? Or when the >phrase first appears in Greek? -- actually it's, "Diwos", in Mycenaean; later Greek lost the 'w'. In Hittite, 'dsius' (with assibilation of the intial dental); same meaning, "Sky God". It's 'tatis tiwaz' and 'tiyaz papaz' in Anatolian (Luvian and Palaic, specifically); same meaning -- "Sky Father" or "Father Sky". Gemanic has, of course, a reflex of the same term: tiwaz. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 09:36:40 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 04:36:40 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de writes: >Hittite and Tocharian -- very widely separated IE languages>> -- sorry, should have been more clear; geographically separated. From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 15 06:17:39 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 22:17:39 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 02:30 PM 2/8/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >>This is what you'd expect if proto-Indo-European speakers invented the wheel, >>by the way -- otherwise there should be at least one loan-word for "wheel", >>one that isn't resolvable into a PIE root. >Wait a minute. PIE-speakers invented the wheel? Well, it is certainly a serious possibility. The earliest wheels (outside of toys) are found at times and places consistent with this conclusion. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 15 06:34:13 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 22:34:13 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <92.154dc59.25d50825@aol.com> Message-ID: At 01:37 AM 2/11/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 2/8/00 4:20:02 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: ><is to say, with separation somewhere in the 1000 to 2000 years range.>> >This is interesting. 2000yrs from modern Romance language back to Latin? >2000 yrs from Myceanaean, Sanskrit and Latin back to what? >PIE? Not likely. Actually, for those three, almost certainly. Almost all proposed family trees make the most recent common ancestor of those three languages either PIE itself, or something barely differentiated from it (even assuming the Indo-Hittite hypothesis, the language ancestral to all the non-Anatolian members of the family was little different from the older language). Indeed, in some ways PIE could is *defined* as the most recent common ancestor of those three languages (which is why the Indo-Hittite hypothesis often is considered to exclude Anatolian from the IE family proper). After all, it was comparing those three that lead to the *idea* of PIE. >And what does Hittite (for starters) add to the total 'differentiation' >between the first attested PIE languages? If 2000 years separates Latin and >Sanskrit, Hittite should certainly add another 2000 years, wouldn't you say? Nope, not even close! It is about 500 years more differentiated, plus or minus a few years. Phonologically, and (with some exceptions) grammatically, it is quite archaic. The only reason it *seems* so different is the relatively few inherited IE words it retains. >That would put you at (1000BC minus 2000 minus 2000 more) 5000BC. I get 3500 to 4000, 4300 at the outside. >And of course, the differentiation between the languages above and Tocharian, >Luwian, Umm, Luwian is an Anatolian language, for this purpose it is interchangeable with Hittite. And Tocharian is only attested from a *very* late date - an AD date in fact. It adds nothing to the estimated age of unity. > the undecipherable Thracian, Albanian and Celtiberian should send >your date of dispersal hurtling back to that magic 7000BC you've mentioned so >frequently. They are only indecipherable due to extreme rarity of written records. >From what little is know of them, there is no real reason to suppose they are much more differentiated than Latin and Sanskrit. Certainl the very fact they can be *recognized as IE languages at all, given how few words we actually have of them, shows how conservative they really are. If we had as few words of Modern English as we have of Thracian, I doubt we could tell it was an IE language at all! >Or do all these languages decline with only a change in the initial >vowel and do they all have the same name for their principle god - thus >justifying a 2000 year separation between all of them. The phonetic changes we can be sure of in Thracian are at about that level, or maybe even *less* than that. As to gods, in most cases we have no way of telling - but Sky Father is fairly widely attested in place names and such throughout the area, so it is likely he was known to the Thracians. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From alderson at netcom.com Wed Feb 16 23:47:16 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 15:47:16 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <92.154dc59.25d50825@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Fri, 11 Feb 2000, Steve Long wrote in response to S. M. Stirling: > Do the similarities between Latin and Hittite 'leap off the page" as you say? > (Please recall how long it took for relationship to even be detected.) Knudtson published the Tell-el-Amarna letters in 1902, as I remember, and put forth the claim that Hittite was Indo-European at that time. Hrozny' demon- strated the IE-ness of Hittite in his 1917 monograph to the satisfaction of the general IEist populace. How long did you think it took? > And what does Hittite (for starters) add to the total 'differentiation' > between the first attested PIE languages? If 2000 years separates Latin and > Sanskrit, Hittite should certainly add another 2000 years, wouldn't you say? Absolutely not. Hittite looks IE enough that I'd say less than 1000 years, maybe less than 500, separate it from the Neogrammarian core--which was always too close to the classical languages and did not pay enough attention to the outliers. >That would put you at (1000BC minus 2000 minus 2000 more) 5000BC. No, more like 1000 - 2000 - 500 => 3500BCE or so. > Or do all these languages decline with only a change in the initial > vowel and do they all have the same name for their principle god - thus > justifying a 2000 year separation between all of them. > JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > < Nom. sing. agnis ignis > acc. sing. agnim ignem > dative agnibhyas ignibus > Latin and Greek still used nearly the same term for their principle god: > Juppiter/Zeus Pater Not sure what you mean to say by "only a change in the initial vowel": In Indo-Iranian, PIE *e *o *a all > PII *a, while in Latin e > i/_[+nasal stop]. Knowing that, we can take one look at the words for "fire" in these two languages and *immediately*, without further ado, see them for the cognates they are. On the other hand, there were two words for "fire", the active *egni- and the inactive/neuter *pur-, and the different dialects reflect different choices. The cognate phrase _dyauh. pitar_ of course occurs in the Veda, and the Germanic god Tiw/Tyr/Zio is another reflex; in _How to Kill a Dragon_, Watkins mentions, as I recall, a Hittite reflex _s^ius^_ as well. So if that's what you are looking for, it's there. Rich Alderson From colkitto at sprint.ca Sun Feb 13 06:11:58 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 01:11:58 -0500 Subject: Horses Message-ID: For the possible semantc shifts in names of large quadrupeds, the example of elephant > camel (Latin elephantus > Gothic ulbandus > Common Slavc *veliblodu (Polish wielblad) Old English olfend Russian verbljud should not be forgotten Robert Orr From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 09:40:47 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 04:40:47 EST Subject: Horses Message-ID: Armenian also has a word for horse, 'es', that's derived from *ekwos; Luvian, an Anatolian language, uses azuwa; and so forth. In fact, the only groups without a reflex of *ekwos are Slavic and Albanian. From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Feb 13 12:00:50 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 12:00:50 -0000 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: Dear IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Tuesday, February 08, 2000 9:23 PM >> X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >> Not 'the introduction of agriculture as such' > -- yup. Renfrew says PIE spread through Europe with agriculture. This > process begins in 7000 BCE, and reaches as far as the Low Countries well > before 5000 BCE. > Now, are you saying that this process spread Indo-European or not? Yes or > no? How would some of you feel if Renfrew's premise were altered to: Nostratic spread through Europe with agriculture. ? 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 Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Sun Feb 13 08:08:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 08:08:00 GMT Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: SG>I have been "wrong" myself more often .. Who is wrong, who is wright? Linguistics is no mathematics; and out of /this/ reason the expression "wrong" perhaps should be handled with much more caution. Linguists often don't seem to be aware that nearly everything they "state" is to a large degree a question of probability. An easy accessible attempt on this topic is Mark Rosenfelder 'How likely are chance resemblances between languages? in www.zompist.com/chance.html. Though in the binomial formulas one faculty mark '!' is always set wrong*, the results are correct. (*what shows that in one year nobody with minimal mathematical competence really did read this article). HJH From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 09:51:18 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 04:51:18 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >rao.3 at osu.edu writes: >We must be careful to distinguish between entry of a language into a new >area and its spread. -- good point. Eg., the entry of the dialects ancestral to English into the British Isles took place in the 5th and 6th centuries AD, but their spread has been a long-drawn-out process. Even in England proper it took three or four centuries to push Brythonic-Celtic bakc into Wales, and as recently as the early 19th century, Gaelic was still a majority language in Ireland, for instance, whereas now it's virtually extinct. One has a tendency to assume that an area has been "Indo-Europeanized" when the ancestral tongue first enters it, but this may well have been a similarly long-drawn-out process in many areas. Cf. the persistence of Basque/Aquitanian. >Now, there was significant change in social organization in North India >during the ``Second Urbanization'' (urbanization of Ganga valley), from 700 >BCE to 300BCE (I am not sure of technological change). Interestingly, either >Burrow or Kuiper date the majority of the influx of non-IE words in Sanskrit >to about this period. -- true, but there are _some_ Dravidian loans in Sanskrit from the earliest times. >It is not so clear to me that languages change without significant change in >social/economic organization. -- I'd tend to agree with that, but there's a distinction between _social_ change and _technological_ change. The latter is often visible in the archaeological record where the former is not. Subsistence technologies in particular tend to be very tenacious, post-Neolithic. From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Feb 17 03:52:54 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 22:52:54 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: I wrote: <> JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: <<-- languages are not pots. There's usually no way to make a one-to-one correlation between material culture and language.>> Right. Languages are not pots or wheels or primitive horse bits or evidence of milking or evidence of the warp-weighted loom or any other form of "material culture." But some of us seem to have no qualms about using such evidence when it is to our convenience. E.G: < From: JoatSimeon at aol.com Subject: Re: Pre-Greek languages An Elamo-Dravidian speech community through Iran to the Indus and beyond in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age,... DOES FIT THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL DATA RATHER NICELY.>> I wonder what that nicely-fitting archaeological data might have been. Pots or ogham sticks? And of course it is interesting to note that you can find a nice archaeological "fit" for ancient Elamo-Dravidian but you cannot do that for your proto Greek-Phrygian-Armenian-Indo-Iranian language in the Ukraine and the Balkans between 3000 and 2000BC.... Would anyone have any interest in what the archaeological evidence is in the Ukraine between 3000BC and 2000BC? Regards, Steve Long From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Feb 14 00:17:45 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 01:17:45 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000210073704.009c18f0@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: Stanley Friesen wrote: >Skt u:r regularly corresponds to a PIE vocalic resonant followed by a >laryngeal. And preceded by a labial (I forgot to mention that in my reply). Otherwise we mostly have i:r. >Skt mixes PIE 'l' and 'r', so one has to go elsewhere to find >which is original. Baltic also regularly derives from a vocalic >resonant. Between these two we reconstruct PIE *plh- (where the 'l' is >the "vowel"). >The Greek shows o-grade instead of zero-grade, leading to *p(o)lh. Oops, you're right, I didn't check my Greek soundlaws. *plHis would have given +palis, I guess. >Based only on these examples, I see no trace of e-grade, but that may be >due to the incompleteness of the list. Pokorny does not give any more cognates. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Feb 14 00:48:02 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 01:48:02 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- *bergh. *bherg^h >There are derivatives in the Germanic language (eg., OHG burg, >'fort', or Gothic baurgs, 'city, town'. Homeric Greek (I think -- possible >spelling error) burghos That's probably "tower", a Greek substrate word (so-called "Pelasgian", with Germanic-like *r. > ur, and Germanic-like b > p, but only after Greek-like Grassmann's Law *bhrgh > *brgh). Pokorny says that Latin burgus "watchtower" is borrowed from Greek (but what about p-?). >, and definitely Armenian burgn. Wish it were so simple. The root *bherg^h- is regularly reflected in Armenian as barjr "high" etc., so "tower", a centum word if IE, does not appear to be native. Birgit (also from *bherg^h-) Olsen points out that the same irregularity in the exact same environment is also found in "potter's wheel" besides darj- "to turn" (*dhrg^h-). There is also Slavic bre^g- "shore", of course, but there without any satem variants. To add the finishing touch to the confusion, it's necessary to mention Urartian "palace, fort". Urartean (non-IE, related to Hurrian) used to be spoken where Armenian is spoken now. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From alderson at netcom.com Tue Feb 15 01:40:06 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 17:40:06 -0800 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <015a01bf6fd3$ba10a9a0$8c9201d5@xpoxkjlf> (petegray@btinternet.com) Message-ID: On 5 Feb 2000, Peter Gray wrote: >Miguel wrote: >> For instance, I don't think Benveniste's root-theory allows *i and *u in the >> V position (or does it?). It would be nice to have statistics. >Forgive my ignorance - I'm puzzled here. *CiC and *CuC roots are plentiful, >e.g. *digh goat, *bhidh pot, *k'ik strap, *knid louse; *trus reed, *k'up >shoulder, *k'udh dung, *lus louse etc etc. >Could you help me understand what you meant here? Miguel was correct in his recollection of Benveniste's root theory, which was based on the notion of _Wurzeldeterminativen_. All roots are CVC, where V is defined to be the ablauting *e/o; a further _'elargissement_ or determinative can yield two series of stems (*not* roots), CVCC (I) and CCVC (II). All roots are verbal, as are stems with a single determinative; stems with more than one determinative are inherently nominal. Everything you refer to as a root in your list would be called a stem by Benveniste. Rich Alderson From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 15 07:03:48 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 23:03:48 -0800 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 10:11 AM 2/8/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >Compare the number of Ce-/Co-roots (e.g. in Pokorny) with the >number of Ci-/Cu-roots. I guesstimate the difference is a factor >10 or so. Certainly. But in my book, even a handful of such roots is enough to establish i and u as PIE vowel phonemes. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Feb 15 20:18:11 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 20:18:11 -0000 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: > Compare the number of Ce-/Co-roots (e.g. in Pokorny) with the > number of Ci-/Cu-roots. I guesstimate the difference is a factor > 10 or so. (a) Bird offers a summary of Pokorny's roots, identifying the core elements, and ignoring the variety of extensions. He ends up with 2050 such roots. Of these exactly 775 have neither e nor e: anywhere. The number of CeC roots (i.e. with no resonant) is 548. (b) How are you treating roots which show CeRC / CRC ablaut? Peter From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Feb 14 04:51:56 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 23:51:56 EST Subject: *hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-? Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> In a message dated 2/12/00 10:12:09 PM, mcv at wxs.nl replied: <> ("mcv at wxs.nl earlier wrote: <<...the Hittite word for "wheel" is . No relation to the *kwel-words.>>) Let me ask, does evidence of (*hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-?) appear in any other IE languages? I guess it would have to. Otherwise you'd have at best a Tocharian/Hittite connection, but not necessarily PIE. Am I right? After all, you wouldn't want to be finding PIE roots every time just two ancient IE languages showed cognates - that would mean that PIE would need to have a a larger lexicon than any of its daughters, since it would always have an original word for as little as two cognates among the daughters. This seems to be too much to ask of a real or even a hypothetical proto-language. (This idea is interesting though. It makes PIE look like a language of nuggets of abstractions (e.g., to turn, to roll) unrelated to any concrete object, waiting for some practical application. Of course this might be conceived of both very foresightful and very thoughtful of those early PIEists, forseeing the needs of all those future daughter languages.) I wouldn't of course think - if these two languages were the only evidence of root mentioned above - that a PIE root or root-stem would need to be conjectured simply because of some assumption that Hittite and Tocharian had no contact or common ancestor after PIE split. I can't take seriously the idea that it is ENOUGH to say that Hittite and Tocharian are "very widely separated IE languages." For one thing, all IE languages are geographically widely separated from Tocharian, but that couldn't always have been true. And for another thing, some trees at least (e.g., the UPenn tree) have Hittite and Tocharian right next to each other in terms of relatedness. Now it may be that evidence of (*hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-?) might be found dispersed throughout the IE languages in which case all this may be moot. But if it isn't - my question is: Just because (*hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-?) is reconstructable, why reconstruct it and then call it "the preferred word for "to turn, to roll" at quite an early stage?" (Why could it not have been a later innovation, born out of one of Stefan Georg's "expressives" and then formalized as a non-expressive?) I mean, IF the word is only found in Hittite and Tocharian, why not swing the conclusion around to its simpliest form and simply take it as evidence of contact between Tocharian and Hittite? Do you lose valid historical evidence of contact when the presumption is that such words must have had PIE origins? Regards, Steve Long From maxdashu at LanMinds.Com Mon Feb 14 05:16:58 2000 From: maxdashu at LanMinds.Com (Max Dashu) Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 21:16:58 -0800 Subject: brahmin/flamen In-Reply-To: <009c01bf7256$7f3e3380$da04703e@edsel> Message-ID: > (note also Brahman > Flamen). I read recently that this correspondence has been challenged, although it looks reasonable. Anyone know about the current consensus on it? Max Dashu From Georg at home.ivm.de Sun Feb 13 19:10:54 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 20:10:54 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <40.10c4a1d.25d3967b@aol.com> Message-ID: >>mclasutt at brigham.net writes: >>This would be due to avoidance. Reproductive body parts and elimination >>functions are generally subject to very high degrees of euphemism, >> >-- yup. The same with objects which are the subject of fear and avoidance -- >"wolf" and "bear", for instance. ("The Outlaw" and "The Brown One", >respectively). "bear" = "brown one" OK "wolf" = "outlaw", I'd like an explanation St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Feb 14 02:30:26 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 03:30:26 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Ante Aikio wrote: >On Sat, 5 Feb 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> This word is sometimes seen as supportive of a PIE ~ Uralic >> genetic link, but it rather looks like a borrowing from IE into >> Uralic. The IE prototype contains two laryngeals (*h1neh3- or >> *h3neh3-) and the abstract suffix *-men [*], none of which finds >> expression in the Uralic word. >Actually, the lack of reflex of medial *h3 is a bit problematic. One would >expect borrowing from IE *Hneh3men- to give PU *nexmi / *nixmi. But I've >seen such reconstructs as IE *nmen-, based (at least) on Slavic, as far as >I understand. Is this reconstruct valid? It would account nicely for PU >*nimi. *nmen seems right for Slavic ime~ (< jIme~ < Ime~ < nmen). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Mon Feb 14 07:38:03 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 09:38:03 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <33.11e9e27.25d39755@aol.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 9 Feb 2000 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >> Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de writes: >> let me take an Indo-European example, e.g. Italian and French. Superficially >> seen they only have one ancestor: Latin. But this is only the dominant >> ancestor. >> If we look at e.g. French it has a lot of strata which can be called its >> fathers: > -- nope. It has some substrate influence from Celtic, and some loan-words; > ditto from Frankish. But that does not alter its status as a Romance > language one iota. > If you took all the non-Romance elements out of French, it wouldn't make that > much difference. If, on the other hand, you took out all the elements > derived from Latin, it would cease to exist. Indeed. But the crucial point is not whether it makes much difference - a language can borrow so much that taking all the borrowed elements out would certainly make a difference. > Run it backwards, and it > becomes Latin, not a Celtic or Germanic language. Yes, this is the important factor - French is a changed version of Latin and not a changed version of Celtic or something else. And this is of course what genetic relationship by definition is about. Ante Aikio From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 09:58:33 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 04:58:33 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) >So, Parson was certainly, in a way, on the right track (and so was Sassetti >before him, and others have been, too), but neither he nor anyone else >before Bopp was able to put IE complx on the agenda of urgent and solvable >tasks. >> -- it isn't a coincidence that morphological studies were commenced _after_ the lexical comparisons (and simple comparisons like the declension of the noun) became widely known. There had to be a problem, before there could be solutions. "These resemblances are too close for chance" was the fundamental breakthrough; then came detailed examination, and the emergence of comparative linguistics as we know it. Likewise, when doing a "rough cut" on a new language, lexical comparison is still used. Only purists get upset over this. From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Mon Feb 14 20:11:55 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 22:11:55 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <015501bf6fd3$b59cd4c0$8c9201d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Sat, 5 Feb 2000 petegray wrote: RW>No. Relationship is an absolute. .... RW>Genetically related languages were once the same language. >Sorry, Bob, I can't agree, and I suspect you're in a minority >these days (though I may be wrong!). No problem -- differences of opinion are what make for horse races and book reviews. But I'm not entirely sure what you are disagreeing with here: the restriction of related to "genetically related" or the definition of genetic relatedness. I find it difficult to believe (although that doesn't mean that it isn't true) that the definition of genetic relationship that was the cornerstone of historical linguistics for over 200 years -- from Jones' 1786 "sprung from some common source" to Anttila's 1989 "'Related' is a technical term ... meaning that the items were once identical" -- has been dropped in the last 10 years and replaced with something like 'related languages are those that have some features in common or are somehow connected', or 'there is no such thing as genetically related languages'. I note that David Crystal in his _Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language_ (1987) has the following entry in the glossary (p. 429: "related (hist) Said of languages or forms that share a common origin." It will be interesting to check the second edition to see if he has switched over to what you suggest is now the majority position: that related languages do not have to have a common origin. >(a) Unrelated languages do produce offspring - for example, >creoles. It has even been suggested that the entire Germanic >branch of IE is in fact a creole. Yes, I've even heard it suggested that IE was a creole, but I don't think that such theories have many adherents (doesn't mean that they are wrong, just unlikely). But creoles are a different animal and one that is not yet well understood despite intensive study. I think that the mainstream view is something like the following: Creoles develop from pidgins; pidgins are not natural languages (have no native speakers), but auxillary languages used for communication between speakers of different (usually typologically widely divergent) languages, intended for limited purposes such as trade; pidgins have limited lexicons and minimal morphology and syntax (essentially they are mini isolating, bare-bones, no-frills languages); pidgins are often (but not necessarily) based on one language (usually the socially dominant one) but with some elements taken from other language(s); pidgins often die out when the need for communication between the groups ceases or with the development of bilingualism or the assimilation of one of the language groups into the other. Creoles arise when a pidgin becomes the mother tongue of a group of speakers (presumably the children of a group that communicates primarily in pidgin hear only the pidgin and begin expanding it to provide some of the syntactic features that have been stripped from the original language(s) to create the pidgin); this expanded pidgin becomes the native language of the next generation and continues to expand to provide all the syntactic features that are necessary to normal communication; the creole is once again a natural language. Pidgins and creoles are thus two stages of a single process. Many pidgins never become creoles, either dying out when no longer needed or simply continuing in use as pidgins. But I don't know that creoles arise other than out of pidgins (it wouldn't bother me to learn otherwise, however). So the steps involved in the creation of creoles actually form a cycle of contraction and expansion (natural language --> pidgin --> creole [natural language]). The thing is that the creole can arise very quickly from the pidgin (within a generation or two) and the creole is usually not easily intelligble to the native speakers of the language(s) on which the pidgin is based. This is in contrast to the normal development of natural languages where mutual comprehensibility is usually preserved over at least 3 generations (children may think that gramps uses a lot of 'quaint' expression and gramps may think that the youngsters aren't being taught the language properly, but they can still communicate easily). This, I think, is one of the fascinations that creoles hold for current research. The accelerated pace of change in creoles is is distincltly different from non-creolized natural languages and thus forms sort of a laboratory for studying language change. >I think it is unhelpful to restrict our understanding of >relationship to a yes-no either/or. You might have trouble >describing a creole without distorting facts to fit your >definition. I don't think so. I have just described what I think is considered the mainstream view of creoles without having to use the term 'related'. One doesn't have to distort facts to fit a definition. If the definition doesn't apply to the facts, then one just doesn't use it. It is of course, easier to distort the definition to fit the facts. Facts exists in nature; definitions are arbitrary conventions agreeded upon by a speech community. And definitions are subject to change either by the discovery of new facts or by an agreement to amend the convention. But if you change definitions unilaterally, you run the risk of not being able to communicate with your audience. You can redefine "roast beef" to mean "spinach quiche" and "file cabinet" to mean "kitchen sink", if you want to. But if you invite people over for roast beef they may be surprised (and perhaps even dismayed if they are real carnivores) when they are served spinach quiche. And the evening may take a disastrous turn if you tell them to just put the dirty dishes in the file cabinet. But I don't think that the linguistic awareness of creoles alters the facts of genetic relationship. The various parts that form a pidgin are no more related than the bits and pieces of Dr. Frankenstein's monster. The pidgin is not the same as the language on which it is primarily based; it is a severely truncated form -- a mere stump. Since this does not fit the definition of 'related' as used as a technical term in historical linguistics, I see no point in using the term. For example, I would describe Tok Pisin as an English-based pidgin influenced by native Papuan languages that has been creolized in some areas. There is no need to use the term 'related' and I don't think the facts have been distorted. The creole then develops out of the pidgin, but it is not, as a creole, identical to the pidgin nor is it ever identical to the language(s) on which the pidgin is based. So if one continues to use 'related', 'pidgin', and 'creole' as techinical terms, then they each have their specific meanings and it is not necessary to explain the "relationship" between natural languages, pidgins, and creoles. One only needs to start talking about 'related' with references to possible daughters of the creole. There are, of course, some gray and muddled areas (as there always are). For instance, if a pidgin is in use over a wide area, what happens if it is creolized more than once? Are the different creoles genetically related, having once been the same language? Depending on the circumstatnces, it is quite possible that the two (or more) creoles from a given pidgin are not mutually comprehensible. Thus one would have cognate languages that are not mutually intelligible within a generation, not a usual occurrence. >It is ultimately only a matter of which method of description we >prefer, but I do believe it is unhelpful to restrict the term >"related" to mean "genetically related". I can't see why. If you use 'related' in its dictionary sense of "connected, linked, affiliated" rather than its historical linguistics technical sense of "genetically related", then its meaning becomes so diffuse that you always have to explain how you mean 'related' so you might as well cut out the middleman and go straight to a description of the 'relationship' and there is really no point in using the term at all. Then it is quite true as Hans J. Holm says: "'Relationship' is _always and only_ a question of degrees and ways." The term has no specific meaning beyond implying some kind of connection, however vague, so each time you use 'related' or 'relationship' you have to define what you mean. I don't see what makes this so much more helpful. If you allow 'related' to mean "has some connection", then English is 'related' to Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Etruscan, Finnish, Hungarian, Malay, Mayan, Nahuatl, Sumerian, Swahili, Kaffir, Algonkian, Hawaiian, and hundreds if not thousands of other languages from which English with its capacity for swallowing foreign words whole has appropriated words for its own use. Similarly, it could be said that most of the world's 6000 (give or take a few thousand) or so languages are 'related' to English if they have at least one English loanword. 'Related' has become more or less meaningless in any linguistically interesting way. Using 'related' in its non-technical sense would allow you to say that English and Chinese are related (because there are a number of Chinese loanwords in English; ketchup, gung ho, yen ['desire'], and chow come to mind off the top of my head). But almost any historical linguist would take exception to a statement that English is related to Chinese. A historical linguist would say that English and Chinese are not related. And another historical linguist would know, through the technical vocabulary of historical linguistics, that this statement means that English and Chinese were never the same language at any level that has so far been uncovered by the methodology currently available. >Genetically (in your terms), English is equally related to both >French and Italian. They're not my terms; I didn't invent them -- they are standard in historical linguistics textbooks. But I agree with the premise -- except that I wouldn't say "equally related"; I would say "related at the same level." >I find it more helpful to accept a wider use of "related" in such >a way that it allows me to indicate that plural forms and a range >of other stuff in English actually are "related" to French but >not "related" to Italian, and that therefore English has a >different relationship to French and Italian, not an identical >one I can see what you are talking about (although I must confess that I don't know what you mean by "related" plural forms). But it seems to me that this is more a problem of lack of terminology to explain the situation rather than a limitation in the meaning of 'related'. I would simply say that English is related to both French and Italian at the same level but that English and French have (re)converged extensively due to lengthy periods of contact with French as both a superstrate and an adstrate language resulting in more similarites between English and French than between English and Italian. So I don't see the problem as one of limitation imposed by the technical meaning of 'related' in historical linguistics, but rather as a reluctance to use the vocabularly of historical linguistics to describe the situation. English and French have converged as a result of extensive borrowing of Frech lexicon by English due to contact; English and Italian have not. This does not mean that English is more closely "related" to French than to Italian. Languages that are in contact will tend to converge. But convergence does not make the languages related. Languages do not become related (cognate). Languages either start out related (cognate) or they will never be. Languages are either related (cognate) or they are not. The fact that we may not be able to demonstrate relatedness does not change this. Our perceptions of reality do not change reality. If everyone believes that the world is flat that still doesn't make it possible to walk to the edge and jump off. Of course one can say that we should just dump the technical meaning of 'related' and let 'cognate' carry the load. 'Cognate' is perhaps better suited to this because it is etymologically more transparent. But the problem is that this needs to be done across the board. Mixing terminology just cofuses those who are not trained in historical linguistics. When different people use the same word in different ways it leads to confusion if not chaos. Thus we have these interminable discussions about terminology ("ungoing discussion" as posted [unintentionally I presume] by Eduard Selleslagh on Feb 8 gets my vote as typo of the century [so far] :>) that simply lead us around in circles while the non-linguists who monitor the list conclude that historical linguists don't know what they're talking about. >(b) The idea that there must be a single language progenitor of >daughter languages is widely disputed. Some people accept the >idea that a collection of interrelated languages might never have >had a single ancestor, but as far back as you care to go were >simply a collection of inter-related languages. The >language/dialect issue comes up here. We talk of IE "dialects" >within PIE, but this is simply terminology. The point is that >there is no need whatever for there to have been a single unified >PIE language. There is quite a bit of material for thought in this paragraph. Enough for several dissertations at least. But fortunately, most of these dissertations have already been written. Yes, there are many people who dispute the existence of protolanguages. I have seen some of their web sites. The problem is that no one has yet come up with an explanation that fits the data better. Besides, if there are no protolanguages, then the comparative method, the basic tool of historical linguistics, is useless. Since you seem to be trying to tell me that the basic hypothesis underlying historical linguistics (languages that have more similarities than can be accounted for by chance or borrowing were once the same language) is not true, and that the basic tool used in historical linguistics (by comparing similar forms in related languages one can reconstruct the probable form of the common ancestor -- aka the comparative method) does not work because there is no common ancestor, I get the impression that you are trying to tell me that historical linguistics is a hoax perpetrated on the academic community by a bunch of Germans in the early 19th century (just joking, of course, but it does start to sound that way). The idea of infinitely converging languages instead of a proto-langauge sounds like Trubetskoy to me. This simply does not take into account the overwhelming amount of detail with which PIE can be reconstructed. Much too detailed to be accounted for with a loose federation of languages. Now individual IEists may not agree on the details, but that is due to the wealth of data that is available for interpretation, not on its scarcity. The IE hypothesis (an explanation of observed data) is inductive and thus cannot be proved directly. Rather proof of an inductive hypothesis comes from falsifying the alternative hypotheses. The detail with which the nominal, pronominal, and verbal systems, as well of the syntax, of PIE can be reconstructed do not prove that there was a PIE language. Rather, they make it inconceivable that there was not a PIE language. On the other hand, a group of languages with similar features does not have to be a language family. Discussion continues over whether Altaic is actually a family or a group of languages connected by areal features and convergence through longstandin contact. The eventual outcome of this discussion, however, does not affect the case for PIE. Yes we talk of dialects within PIE. But this is not simply a matter of terminology. PIE was a modern language much like any modern language known today. Any language that exists over a sufficient period of time will develop dialects. Since modern languages have dialects we assume that PIE had dialects. All modern languages display variants in some forms. We assume that PIE had variant forms. All languages that exist over a sufficient period of time will change both from internal causes and from contact with other languages. We assume that PIE changed with time. PIE is a reconstruction of the state of this language just before its first split, based the forms found in its daughter languages. The stage of the language before this we call pre-PIE (since we don't know enough to be able to divide pre-PIE into old, middle, and new phases, we call everything back to the point where pre-PIE split off from whatever its ancestor may have been pre-PIE). Pre-PIE forms must be found by internal reconstruction since the comparative method only works back to PIE. Despite the different names, the comparative method and internal reconstruction are essentially the same thing. They have different inputs and give different results, but the underlying principle is the same: similar forms that are in complementary distribution are likely to be different aspects or outcomes of the same thing. Perhaps the most spectacular use of internal reconstruction was de Saussure's reconstruction, in 1879, of what are now called laryngeals for pre-PIE based on the reconstructed forms of PIE. This reconstruction was not widely accepted, among other reasons because it reconstructed a feature of the pre-protolanguage that was not preserved in any of the known daughter languages. With the discovery that Hittite was IE and that at least one of the recontstructed "laryngeals" were actually present in the language in the words and places where predicted, the reconstruction was considered vindicated and with it the methodology that produced it. This then is what any theory that would replace the concept of PIE has to overcome. It not only has to explain away the wealth of detail with which PIE can be reconstructed, but it also has to explain away the fact that it is possible to make accurate reconstructions of pre-PIE on the basis of the reconstructed PIE forms. Oh, and it is very difficult to wish away the concept of protolanguages while there is a clear example of the breakup of a protolanguage into daughters that is entirely recorded in historic times. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From adahyl at cphling.dk Mon Feb 14 23:04:10 2000 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 00:04:10 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 10 Feb 2000, Ante Aikio wrote: > On Sat, 5 Feb 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> This word is sometimes seen as supportive of a PIE ~ Uralic >> genetic link, but it rather looks like a borrowing from IE into >> Uralic. The IE prototype contains two laryngeals (*h1neh3- or >> *h3neh3-) and the abstract suffix *-men [*], none of which finds >> expression in the Uralic word. > Actually, the lack of reflex of medial *h3 is a bit problematic. One would > expect borrowing from IE *Hneh3men- to give PU *nexmi / *nixmi. But I've > seen such reconstructs as IE *nmen-, based (at least) on Slavic, as far as > I understand. Is this reconstruct valid? It would account nicely for PU > *nimi. The reconstruction for (Pre-)Proto-Slavic *inmen is rather zero grade of *H1neH3mn, i.e. *H1nH3men-. Actually, the laryngeals should be no problem for U *nime-/*nima:- as an IE loanword (why I believe it to be an Indo-Uralic cognate anyway, see below): In protetic position before consonant, laryngeals are usually reconstructed as their consonantal variants. But the material from Uralic (and other language families) generally tend to speak against this, no matter whether you believe the look-alikes to be loans or cognates. So we should perhaps rather reconstruct a *@1neH3mn, phonetically realized as *nnoYwmn (read Y as gamma here; the consonantal variant of *H3 was probably phonetically realized as a voiced, labio-velar fricative *Yw). The development *-eH3- > *-oH3- took place already in PIE, and I find it very unlikely that a PIE *-oYw- should show up as *-i- in Uralic. Of course the borrowing could have taken place at the time of Pre-Proto-Indo-European, i.e. before the "colouring" of *eH3 to *oH3. But the word is also found outside Uralic; it appears in Yukaghir as and in Chuvan as . An Indo-Uralo-Yukaghir reconstruction *(n)newme- seems much more probable. Critics would point out that the PIE word is formed by adding a derivational suffix *-men. First of all, I don't see why a stem ending in *-me shouldn't analogically add an *-n, if nouns are productively formed with a suffix *-men. Secondly, the Uralic reconstruction *-a: corresponds perfectly to the IE vocalic *-n (*-e doesn't). So if the IE suffix isn't analogical, the Indo-Uralic form must be reconstructed as *(n)newmn-. Best Regards, Adam Hyllested -------------- Student of Indo-European, Uralic and Balkan Linguistics Institute for General and Applied Linguistics University of Copenhagen adahyl at cphling.dk --------------- Editor of etymologies and language surveys Danish National Encyclopedia dnhy at gyldendal.dk From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Tue Feb 15 15:17:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 15:17:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >It has some substrate influence from Celtic, and some loan-words; ditto >from Frankish. .. the history of French is by far not such simple. Our time and the space in the list would not be sufficient to list all the phonoogical and morphological influences I only could indicate. Or, regarding lexemes, e.g. a Swadesh-list produced by Rea (1973) of 215 lexemes there are 129 non-cognate between Molière-French and Latin (cited from Embleton 1986). There exist several more works on this topic. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Tue Feb 15 15:16:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 15:16:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: RW>And if you want to use Anttila 89 as a source .. 'use' is the correct expression. It is not the Bible. You cite Anttila with RW>"'Related' is a technical term, exactly like the equivalent 'cognate', RW>meaning that the items were once identical." And then go on: RW>This is the criterion of genetic relatedness in historical linguistics. 1) Anttila speaks of lexemes/items. 2) This was not the point I objected. It is no use to state things as true, which nobody can prove or disprove. So, changing your 'related' to 'relatable', in the sense of Anttila, will be okey. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Feb 15 20:08:30 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 20:08:30 -0000 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: On Hittite and other IE langs: > If you look through a basic vocabulary list, say: ... > -- you get, to put it mildly, a very strong indication. Of course, we do now. My point was that the relationship was not recognised for some time, and even resisted for a time, despite exactly what you say. Like it or not, it is a historical fact that such lists failed to convince - even if they should have. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Feb 15 19:57:12 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 19:57:12 -0000 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: Miguel said: >Now define "single" and "unified". If anything, this reinforces my point. The assumption that genetically related languages must by definition go back to a single ancestor over-simplifies the realities of language. Is there ever a "single, unified" language? Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Feb 15 20:13:19 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 20:13:19 -0000 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: > there is a qualitative difference between > borrowing and inheritance. Yes, I accept this - of course. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Feb 15 20:05:55 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 20:05:55 -0000 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >> (a) Unrelated languages do produce offspring - for example, creoles. > But creolization has nothing to do per se with language mixing. >> It has even been suggested that the entire Germanic branch of IE is in fact >> a creole. Please keep the example in the context of the discussion. The suggestion has certainly been made, and I agree with you that it now seems unlikely, but nonetheless the suggestion is out there in the literature! So don't blame me for the fact that the suggestion exists. Blame me for the way I have used it as an example. (And I admit it is a sidetrack, more misleading than helpful!) I mean that creolisation / language mixing or whatever you call it provides us with an example of a language which goes back to two ancestors, not one. Germanic is clearly and certainly related to other IE languages. If the theory about it being a creole were true (note the subjunctive, indicating unreality), then it would be: (a) related to other IE langs, and at the same time, (b) also related to some other original language, which had no genetic relationship to the other IE langs. Does it make sense in a situation like that - whether it is Germanic or any other language which is involved - to insist that "all related languages descend from a single common ancestor"? Peter From alderson at netcom.com Thu Feb 17 00:05:52 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 16:05:52 -0800 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: (JoatSimeon@aol.com) Message-ID: On Tue, 8 Feb 2000, JoatSimeon at aol.com (S. M. Stirling) wrote: >> petegray at btinternet.com writes: >> Interestingly, these _failed_ to prove convincingly that Hittite was IE! >> It was the rather obscure -r/-n heteroclite declension that was the final >> clincher for some people. > -- the first indication that Hittite was IE was a lexical term -- the word > for "water", specifically. ("watar") This, or course, could have been a coincidence. However, it was the form taken by the genitive that was the clencher: _wetnes^_, thus proving that the word was an r/n heteroclit and related to Gk. _hudo:r, hudatos < *hudn.tos_ and the various Germanic forms (Goth. _wato, watins_, Norw. _vatn_, Eng. _water_). The lexicon was suggestive, the grammar was conclusive. Rich Alderson From mclasutt at brigham.net Sun Feb 13 22:20:19 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 15:20:19 -0700 Subject: Numbers as "Core Vocabulary" (was IE "Urheimat" and evidencefrom Uralic ... In-Reply-To: <99.110bec5.25d397ad@aol.com> Message-ID: >> mclasutt at brigham.net writes: >> Numbers are one of the very WORST things to look at in order to make even a >> preliminary decision about relationship. > -- they work fine with the Indo-European languages; in fact, they were > crucial to the discovery of the IE family itself. They work fairly well > with Semitic, too. I guess that my point is that they are NOT "core vocabulary" for the purposes of comparative linguistics. "Core vocabulary" must be relatively universal in scope and numbers are definitely not. They may work for isolated language families (imagine saying that anything Indo-European is atypical of language change! :-)), but overall they are to be avoided. For every Indo-European and Semitic in the world, there are ten Uto-Aztecans and Siouans. 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 adahyl at cphling.dk Mon Feb 14 21:08:40 2000 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 22:08:40 +0100 Subject: basic vocabulary borrowing (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 9 Feb 2000, Ante Aikio wrote: > Well, I actually forgot about 'ten'. The Hungarian word is also an Iranian > loan. Concerning the affix *-teksä(n), this explanation has been > recently revived: it has been argued that it is a loan from Proto-Iranian > *detsa. The phonetics are flawless; there are other examples of U *ks < > Iranian *ts (The cluster *ts was illegal in U, hence the substitution). > This explanation seems more plausible to me at least than the previous > rather fabricated theory that Finnish kahdeksan and yhdeksän developed > from *kakta e-k-sä-n 'two do not exist' (i.e., "two are missing from > ten") and *ükti e-k-sä-n. Well, what speaks in favour of the latter theory is of course the fact that '10' in Finnish is not **teksa:n, but , a word that also exists in Mordvin, Yukaghir, and Omok. Furthermore, it resembles full grade of a root cognate to the IE *kmt- 'hand' (with the derivations *dekmt '10' and *(d)kmtom '100'); the zero grade shows up in U *ka:te 'hand', Finnish . Whether a loanword, a cognate, or a word of totally different origin, kymmenta: '10' must be older than '8' and '9', if these are borrowed from Iranian. By the way, on the basis of what material you are reconstructing a Proto-Iranian *detsa ?. PIE *dekmt became *das'a already in Indo-Iranian; compare Sanskrit '10' and Avestan '10'. Best Regards, Adam Hyllested -------------- Student of Indo-European, Uralic and Balkan linguistics Institute for General and Applied Linguistics University of Copenhagen adahyl at cphling.dk -------------- Editor of etymologies and language surveys Danish National Encyclopedia dnhy at gyldendal.dk From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Feb 14 05:32:12 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 00:32:12 EST Subject: Hittite /wheel Message-ID: mcv at wxs.nl earlier wrote: <<...the Hittite word for "wheel" is . No relation to the *kwel-words.>> This is STRONG STUFF. It certainly seems to NEGATE the idea - often repeated earlier on this list - that all IE languages shared a common word for wheel. You can look back at the archives and see how often "the wheel word" was used as PROOF of the date of PIE dispersal. The often repeated position was that "the wheel word" had to have entered PIE before it split up, because the word was univeral among IE languages. And because the sound changes "the wheel word" underwent in those languages show the word entered before those sound changes occurred. Pointing out that those SPECIFIC sound changes do not date PIE dispersal and that those sound changes could have occurred long after dispersal should not have been a surprise. I'm told that Trubetsky brought it up before and others have made a point of it, including Lehmann have reiterated it. Mallory seems unaware of this objection, but Mallory seems to me to be unaware of more and more things. (When I asked Sean Crist to identify the "telltale signs of borrowing" that he offered that would tell him if "the wheel word" was borrowed in at least some IE languages, he never replied.) So, the two cases for dating final PIE unity with "the wheel word" - universality and the presence of sound changes - seem to have DISAPPEARED completely. As a matter of fact, IT SEEMS THEY WERE NEVER THERE - despite the often repeated claim that the PIE's final unity could be dated by the wheel. Now, this does not deter JoatSimeon at aol.com from NOW offering us FOUR PIE wheel words - some IE languages have one, some have another. It may strike some readers as obvious that FOUR wheel words WILL NOT support "the wheel word" as the way to date PIE. FOUR wheel words scattered among the IE languages DO NOT SUPPORT UNIVERSIALITY. (The fact that some of those words might have reconstructable roots does not matter - especially if those roots could or did have some meaning other than 'wheel.') Actually FOUR wheel words say the exact opposite. Common sense says that there are four wheel words BECAUSE the wheel was introduced AFTER PIE SPLIT UP. Of course, JoatSimeon at aol.com seems not to be bothered by this. And if others can go on seeing "the wheel word" as PROVING that PIE must have still been unified at 3000BC or 3500BC or 4000BC or whenever it was that the wheel would have been introduced in PIEland, then God bless them. They can clearly see things with a certainty that is not revealed to us ordinary mortals. Whether or not the actual facts are true (i.e., wheel introduced before PIE splits), the evidence hardly makes it necessary and may even argue against it, to the non-ideological observer. For us ordinary mortals on this list, there's a different question: how could this assertion that the wheel can postively and absolutely date PIE go unanswered so often? (Check the archive list - I found it asserted at least13 times!!! without contradiction.) With the intellectual firepower that plainly shows up on this list all the time, how could it be repeated so often without someone at least questioning it or noting the difficulties? Kind of in the way that I might be ripped to shreads for proposing an inappropriate sound change in Greek? It does raise the question as to how many of these kinds of absolute assertions about paleolinguistics deserve to be revisited. I certainly don't have the qualifications to do that linguistically, and I could only start seeing the holes in this argument thanks to "the kindness of strangers." But I wonder whether someone more formidably equipped might not find some other pieces of dogma also just as vulnerable. Regards, Steve Long From ECOLING at aol.com Mon Feb 14 08:38:18 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 03:38:18 EST Subject: Tree or wave? Message-ID: In a message dated 1/26/2000 10:55:35 PM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu writes: >...Ringe, Warnow, and >Taylor made use of this algorithm to compute the family tree for >Indo-European. There is certainly some noise in the data, and there are a >few problematic areas (notably, the placement of Germanic and of >Albanian), but on the whole, the same tree structure come up run after >run. >If it were the case that the proper model of the relations between the >IE >languages were really a fully general wave model, then this isn't the >expected result; what you'd get in that case would be wildly different >trees with every run of the algorithm, with very poor scores each time >for >how closely the tree comes to a perfect phylogeny. This is in fact what >happened when the team tried to compute a phylogeny of the West Germanic >languages: the languages developed in close contact and shared innovations >in ways which can't be captured in a tree. But it's not what you get with >the IE family in general, and this is very unlikely to be an accident. Isn't the direction of this difference (IE representable using tree model, \vs. Germanic using wave model) a predictable consequence merely of the difference in time depths, that intermediates tend to have vanished more with greater time depths? If so, does it not have little or no empirical content of interest to linguists? *** >As a matter of scientific economy, we should always choose the most >restrictive theory that the data will allow. Tree representations are >much more restrictive than wave representations; so if the data will allow >us to claim that all language relations are properly represented in this >more restrictive model, that's the claim we should make. The _empirical_ >question is whether the IE languages will allow a tree representation. As a *tentative hypothesis*, yes, because that may yield further progress. But as a result or conclusion to be reported to non-specialists, I believe the policy proposed above is a quite pernicious policy. We should rather be conservative and report what we actually have evidence for, that is the weakest hypothesis that is sufficient to account for the data, not anything unnecessarily stronger than that. Occam's razor cannot decide empirical fact. It can only point to a dangerous hyperelaboration of complex hypotheses to account for some phenomena for which the true explanation may be much simpler and quite different. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From ECOLING at aol.com Mon Feb 14 20:20:15 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 15:20:15 EST Subject: Hindsight vs. First Steps Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: There was no quoted material included in the received posting. --rma ] The message by Stefan George (quoted below) is highly reasonable, and I agree with most of it. The IE family was in an important sense discovered not from vocabulary comparisons but from verbal morphology. However, relationships in many other language families have in fact been discovered (in the sense of proposed, and still considered valid) from comparison of basic vocabulary. Judgements in hindsight are often easy, forgetting in some cases that our current judgements are merely past errors, viewed from some probable future. I do not think I would characterize as a rush to publication the first investigators who thought that Quechua and Aymara were related, biased as we *now* understand by using those Quechua languages which were most strongly influenced by Aymara. The general opinion has since reversed on that claim, once the borrowings and areal influences were factored out. And then it may have opened up yet again, granting that Quechua and Aymara *may* be related at a very deep level, but that the evidence on which the earlier conclusion of their relationship was first based is not of deep genetics but of later influence. All of which shows that "final" conclusions are difficult to draw within the lifetime of individual investigators, and that we must therefore rely on publication of non-final conclusions, and on exchange of views from different perspectives. Of course we would like everything that is published to be careful, to take into account all of the known ways in which conclusions drawn are subject to error, and to use as many techniques as are reasonably available to the investigators. Lloyd Anderson From ECOLING at aol.com Mon Feb 14 22:33:09 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 17:33:09 EST Subject: No single ancestor - breath of fresh air Message-ID: The message today by Peter Gray is really a breath of fresh air. I quote only the final paragraph below. Once we recognize that the facts of reality are more complex than any of our simple models, we can more easily investigate the facts, and spend less time in terminological disputes. That said, it is still the case that various of our techniques, *even* ones whose assumptions require a much simpler world, such as single-rooted family trees instead of dialect networks, can still be useful in challenging us to see just how far they can be pushed, because such results themselves tell us something about the facts we are trying to analyze. The conclusions should whenever possible include a measure of "strain" on the model, so that the position of Germanic within IE clearly indicates that one can impose the simple model of the single-rooted family tree with no converging branches and no overlapping dialect networks only at the cost of considerable strain (strain means mismatch with the facts). Is there a better model, which captures all of the virtues of the family-tree model without limiting us to that model when it is clearly not applicable? Perhaps dialect-network and family-tree superimposed in some way (perhaps what was referred to in another recent communication)? Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson In a message dated 2/8/2000 2:54:37 PM, petegray at btinternet.com writes: >(b) The idea that there must be a single language progenitor of daughter >languages is widely disputed. Some people accept the idea that a >collection of interrelated languages might never have had a single ancestor, >but as far back as you care to go were simply a collection of inter-related >languages. The language/dialect issue comes up here. We talk of IE >"dialects" within PIE, but this is simply terminology. The point is that >there is no need whatever for there to have been a single unified PIE >language. >Peter From ECOLING at aol.com Mon Feb 14 22:33:05 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 17:33:05 EST Subject: k' > ts > c-hachek order of changes? Message-ID: The following mention got my attention: > k' > c > ts > g' > j > dz I have come to suspect / believe / almost to argue evidence that the normal development is rather the reverse, phonetically, that we more commonly have (universally?) k' > ts > c-hachek g' > dz > j-hachek because the /ts,dz/ require more effort, reflect better their origin as a *fronted* tongue-body production, with the flat front of the tongue rather than the back contacting the roof of the mouth, whereas the grooved are more relaxed, with less fronting or raising of the heavy body of the tongue, but still an affricated acoustic effect, so presumably a later substitute for /ts,dz/. The theta is also I believe often a reflex of earlier /ts/ rather than only via /ts/ > /s/ > "th". Does this make sense to anyone? Is there evidence from Slavic, which shows both reflexes for velars? Is there evidence in the Indo-Iranian group for this other order of changes? The only thing I can think to add at the moment is a vague memory that in the NW part of India there are reflexes /ts,dz/ where we otherwise expect (from Sanskrit) the grooved . The basic letters of Tibetan also have these values /ts,dz/, and a diacritic is used to represent the Sanskritic . From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Feb 14 05:20:56 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 00:20:56 EST Subject: SV: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 2/13/00 10:13:18 PM, Lars Martin Fosse wrote: < And, for example, cattle dairying -- well-attested from the PIE vocabulary, > with words for 'to milk' (cows), curds, whey, 'cow rich in milk', butter, > etc., is generally dated to the mid-4th millenium BCE. (eg., McCormick, 1992, > "Early Faunal Evidence for Dairying", Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 11, > 201-209). > Note also that the genes for lactose tolerance (ability to digest cow's-milk > as an adult) show a distinct drop-off in Mediterranean Europe and the Near > East, but are high in northern and eastern Europeans. This seems to me to be an interesting observation. Have you got any bibliographic references on lactose tolerance? Also: are there any data on lactose tolerance in India?>> I hope to get to this later, but just a wee bit of a caution here and some additional questions that may be helpful. Number one, linguistically, do we find the IE languages discriminating cow's milk from mother's milk or goat's milk - both yielding substantially earlier dates? Number one point five, does goat's milk or mare's milk produce curds, whey, butter? Number two, do all the milk of all cattle or even of wild cattle produce the intolerance syndrome? Number three, does lactose intolerance apply to cheeses, butters and other by-products of cattle dairy farming? Number four, without refrigeration, particularly in warm climates, what would be the most common form in which the milk from cows would be consumed? Number five, would one forestall naming cow milk until one is able to drink it? Number six, when did lactose intolerance or tolerance to cow's milk apeans. Number seven, the production of cheese (from curds and whey) is an attribute of Sherratt's Secondary Products Revolution, which premises a long production curve before a sufficient surplus is reached. So that the premise is that the growth in cattle dairy farming is attributed to the ability to store and travel the products that start appearing just about 4000BC. And finally - given all the above - what precisely is "the PIE vocabulary for 'to milk' (cows), curds, whey, 'cow rich in milk', butter" and how in the world can it be "attested" much less "well-attested?" Just off the cuff. More to come. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Feb 14 05:31:39 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 00:31:39 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: <> In a message dated 2/13/00 11:24:00 PM, edsel at glo.be replied: < Flamen). Usually (I don't know in this case) at least parts of sacrificed animals were eaten.>> Going a little bit further, the primary remains of horses at Sredny Stog I believe are those used as food. This is true I'm pretty sure throughout "the Steppes cultures" that originated in the Ukraine about 4000BC and went east. I will try to look this up when I get back to my books. Regards, Steve Long From mclasutt at brigham.net Mon Feb 14 13:59:57 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 06:59:57 -0700 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <000a01bf72d0$1a6a4780$20d31b3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: > The minimal components of Nostratic are PIE and AA. Of course there is the competing claim of Greenberg, Ruhlen, and Bengtsen that AA does not belong in any group with PIE, but combines with Uralic and Altaic with IE in "Eurasiatic". 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 JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 19:04:38 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 14:04:38 EST Subject: SV: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >lmfosse at online.no writes: >This seems to me to be an interesting observation. Have you got any >bibliographic references on lactose tolerance? >> -- Cavalli-Sforza, "The History and Geography of Human Genes". From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 19:05:52 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 14:05:52 EST Subject: SV: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >lmfosse at online.no writes: >"Hence at the present state of the evidence, it seems unlikely that there >were PIE speakers in the Middle Danube towards the end of the Neolithic." >> -- you're quite right; absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, after all. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 19:11:59 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 14:11:59 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >edsel at glo.be writes: >Equus October in Rome, As'vamedha in India. (note also Brahman <> Flamen). >Usually (I don't know in this case) at least parts of sacrificed animals were >eaten. >> -- many other examples of horse sacrifice, too -- Celtic, as in the *ekwo-medu, "horse-mead", derived from the Gallic personal name Epomeduos. And the Sintasha graves show evidence of ritual sacrifice of horses (in a rather Vedic manner... 8-). The "horse-drunk" would appear to be a good candidate for a PIE religious ceremony, involving sacrificing a horse and getting totally blitzed on mead. The pagan Germanics, btw, certainly did both sacrifice horses and eat the flesh of the sacrifice. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 19:29:10 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 14:29:10 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >Important point, I think. Since Germanic and Balto-Slavic (as far as >they're traceable to the "Corded Ware" cultural area) both developed on a >TRB substrate (c.q. out of a TRB substrate) -- in some areas; not so much in the Baltic zone, for instance, or the huge extension into the mixed-forest and forest-steppe areas of Russia. The Corded Ware phenomenon extended well into zones that were preagricultural before the characteristic ceramics and battle-axes showed up. In fact, it stretches from the Rhine Delta into the area east of the Volga, and directly borders the Sredny Stog/Yamna cultures of the Ukraine and points east. The extreme speed of its spread is also an interesting point. >Probably because there'a a historic postcedent (the spread of >Turkic) in the same area (the Central Asian-Ukrainian(-Hungarian) >steppe zone). Nothing of the sort is known to have happened in >the North European temperate forest area. -- but Indo-Iranian spread widely not only in the steppe zone, but into areas that had long been agricultural; Iran, and India, which in area and population are quite comparable to temperate Europe. Note also that Turkic spread into Anatolia and far into Balkan Europe -- as recently as the 1870's, half the population of Bulgaria was Turkish-speaking, for example; and much of what's now Greece had large Turkish-speaking groups. It's only the massacres and explusions attendant on the fall of the Ottoman empire which halted a centuries-old process of language replacement that had gone quite far towards replacing the Greek and Slavic languages of the Balkans with Turkish. >Well, that would make Mallory's "Proto-IE'ans" the descendants of >Renfrew's "Proto-IE'ans". -- no, just the people they picked up agriculture and animal husbandry from. The 'wave of advance' peters out in the western Ukraine. The cultures to the east were Mesolithic and adopted the Neolithic package from their neighbors; at least, that's what it looks like. >No they ain't. -- they are the choices in Renfrew's scenario. >Intuitions about how long the IE languages had been diverging when they are >first attested c. 1500 BC, can't pin anything down to a higher degree of >confidence than "give or take a millennium or two". -- true, but a millenium or two does definitely rule out 7000 BCE. >The study of the proto-lexicon doesn't offer much more certainty either: >absence says nothing (what the hell is a weighted-web loom anyway?) -- one where the warp threads are held steady by weights on the bottom of each thread. It's highly visible in the archaeological record because the weights last well. It's the characteristic form of European loom, although not the only one. One absence says nothing; a number are indicative. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 19:31:06 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 14:31:06 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >frank at uiowa.edu writes: >Isn't there an assumption here that all such lexical items if they once >existed in PIE would have been transmitted integrally into the daughter >languages and down to us...? -- into some of them, at least. >and still mean today something like "loom"? -- or at least in Latin, or Greek. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 19:34:17 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 14:34:17 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >Steve Long >It indicates that the horse would be an rather unlikely candidate for a >dating of PIE unity in the Ukraine later than 4000BC. -- domestic horse =/= wild horse. >And of course the evidence to date is that livestock domestication >accompanied the rest of agriculture into the Ukraine at 4500BC or earlier. -- but not the domestic horse. That was not part of the original Near Eastern 'package' and the domestic horse is intrusive in the original areas of Eurasian agriculture. PS: there is no such thing as "domestication technology". There are only animals which have been domesticated. Do you mean the _idea_ of domestication? From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 19:40:34 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 14:40:34 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de writes: >... would you please give the exact source? I only know sredny rog. -- I had the Dereivka stallion in mind. The evidence of bit-wear on the teeth is unequivocal, but the dating of the skeleton is not. The Dereivka site was occupied c. 4200-3700 BCE (calibrated radiocarbon dates) but the sample from the stallion's skull dates to 2900 BCE. From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 15 07:06:59 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 23:06:59 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <009c01bf7256$7f3e3380$da04703e@edsel> Message-ID: At 05:48 PM 2/8/00 +0100, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: >They were sacrificed though: see e.g. G. Dumézil (La religion romaine >archaïque) : Equus October in Rome, As'vamedha in India. (note also Brahman ><> Flamen). Usually (I don't know in this case) at least parts of sacrificed >animals were eaten. Quite possibly. But animals that are *primarily* food animals are rarely sanctified. A subtle, but important distinction. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 15 07:10:55 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 23:10:55 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <7fg0as4mcdiopgeim5dsfgg5bdc8p979np@4ax.com> Message-ID: At 06:09 PM 2/8/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >Important point, I think. Since Germanic and Balto-Slavic (as >far as they're traceable to the "Corded Ware" cultural area) both >developed on a TRB substrate (c.q. out of a TRB substrate), it is >strange that none of the Germanic substrate words appear in >Balto-Slavic. I am not sure about this - I seem to recall a moderate number of entries in Pokorny that are only attested in Germanic and Balto-Slavic. Those sound like good candidates for substrate words to me. [Though I actually question tracing B-S back to Corded Ware]. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 15 07:12:29 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 23:12:29 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <000a01bf72d0$1a6a4780$20d31b3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: At 07:34 AM 2/9/00 +0000, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >The minimal components of Nostratic are PIE and AA. I have heard, somewhere, that AA is now often considered one of the most peripheral, and most doubtful, components of Nostratic. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 15 01:25:28 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 17:25:28 -0800 Subject: Balkan Kurgans In-Reply-To: <200002080823.p891@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: At 06:23 AM 2/8/00 +0000, Hans Holm wrote: >A question to the professional archeologists reading here: >In JIES 21-3,4/Fall/Winter 1993:207214, I found an article >'Silver in the Yamna (Pit-grave) Culture in the Balkans'. >Though silver cannot speak - is there any evidence pro or contra an >(Pre-)Indo-European community there??? Well, weakly pro. PIE has a reconstructible word that *probably* meant silver, and it is derivable from a root meaning "white", which makes it unlikely to be borrowed. But that is not very constraining. Silver is relatively easy to smelt, and was widespread very early. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Feb 15 01:45:20 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 20:45:20 EST Subject: reality of PIE as dialect network Message-ID: The following comments by Larry Trask on comments by Peter Gray reveal yet again that the use of absolutely discrete categories yes-or-no may be a model not fitting the facts, and attempts to force such a terminological usage on us may be counterproductive, by rendering such a model incapable of application to messy reality. [PG commenting on someone else] >>> No. Relationship is an absolute. .... >>> Genetically related languages were once the same language. >> Sorry, Bob, I can't agree, and I suspect you're in a minority these >> days (though I may be wrong!). [LT, with clarifying inserts [ ] in the first sentence] >You [PG] are [wrong], I'm afraid. The statement above is true not just >because all linguists believe it: it is true by definition. Languages which >do not descend from a common ancestor are not genetically related. Not so, the matter is not so simple. Sufficiently massive borrowing *does* constitute a kind of genetic relation, and the more sophisticated researchers today do recognize that all of these kinds of genetic relation do occur simultaneously, in various different combinations and mixtures. That does not mean we cannot distinguish the kinds. And with careful work and also some luck, we can also use the manifest results of language cross-breedings to conclude something about the circumstances of the language contacts and social contacts which led to them. If two language clusters are in intimate contact (whether ultimately descending from some proto-world or not) long enough that their interaction creates a complex dialect network, then that dialect network *is real* (referring here to Trask's phrase that PIE is real, which Peter Gray did not in any way deny), yet it may be impossible in the time frame of that dialect net or in any time frame somewhat preceding it to say that there is a single point uniform ancestor, from which all descendants evolved. The same may be true of a single language having spread across an area with a number of other languages which become substrates of different parts of the proto-language cluster. It simply may be a more useful model to think in terms of an ancestor with some regional variations which do *not* go back to a common origin, in either of the real sorts of situations just mentioned (and others). This in no way denies that there should *also* be single origins for some common elements in such situations, nor does it deny that much significant IE morphology *does* go back to a common singular origin in PIE. Nor, more importantly than either of the above, which are conclusions, does it deny that it is useful to try to lead various attested forms back to common origins in PIE, to discover more cognate forms and structures than are known at any given time. All of these models and techniques can operate simultaneously, with more benefit that if we limit ourselves to only one, as long as we keep in mind the limited capabilities of each technique we use, that *every* technique is biased towards certain sorts of answers rather than others, biases which may be more harmful or helpful depending on the particular nature of the context being investigated. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics PO Box 15156 Washington, DC 20003 From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Feb 15 01:45:10 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 20:45:10 EST Subject: "pronoun" is semantic or distributional? Message-ID: Another way of seeing why our long discussions have been at cross purposes is the following. Pat Ryan, in attempting to conform to the terminology being used by Larry Trask, wrote the following: >[PR] >Perhaps the discussion could be foreshortened. 'My' could perhaps be termed >a "pronominal determiner". This is a perfectly reasonable position, *GIVEN* that Pat is using the word "pronoun", here in the form "pronominal", as a semantic-functional term (referring to persons etc.). I believe that is an accurate statement, even if Pat's explanations have not said so explicitly. Trask is however using "pronoun" as a distributional class. For Trask, "pronominal" and "determiner" are a contradiction because both refer to distributional classes, distinct classes, one standing for a full noun phrase, the other as a modifying element part of a noun phrase (loosely put). Back to Pat Ryan's terminology: "possessive pronoun" is perfectly reasonable when both terms are taken in their semantic-functional senses. But Trask does not use "pronoun" that way. (Nor do I, when I am dealing with distributional classes.) Pat Ryan seems not to understand that "she" does not substitute for "woman" with "the" mysteriously not manifest. Rather, "she" stands for the entire noun phrase "the woman", normally with all modifying semantics also included, so that "she who came yesterday" is at the margins in modern English, a rather unusual construction, even if perfectly grammatical. As Trask points out, "the she who came yesterday" is not grammatical. On the other hand, Pat Ryan could also point out that in "her book", the "her" stands also (in Trask's analysis I think also) for the entire noun phrase modifying book in (the woman who came yesterday's book), and thus may be regarded as the genitive or possessive form of the pronoun "she", in the contrast "she" vs. "her book", just as "the woman who came yesterday's" is the genitive form of the noun phrase "the woman who came yesterday". That is all consistent in the standard analysis, I believe? My point, as it has been for some time, is that despite whatever Pat Ryan may or may not understand of the type of distributional analysis represented by many of us, his terminology was quite consistent and sensible, and used an older tradition in the meaning of "pronoun", a semantic-functional one. He should not be beaten upon for that. Even Trask's distributional usage might be criticized by a purist, in that for him a "pronoun" does not stand for a "noun" but rather for a noun phrase. So we should all give up the term "pronoun"? I certainly don't advocate that, despite how misleading it may be to some. Larry Trask was kind enough to take the time to distinguish semantic-functional senses from distributional senses, but I think had not acknowledged that much of the discussion was motivated not by a lack of knowledge on Pat Ryan's part, but rather by Pat Ryan using "pronoun" in a semantic-functional sense. With different definitions, the discussion was bound to be unfruitful. So can we please stop trying to prove each other wrong, and get back to discovering interesting things about the real world? Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics *** The following is a refinement, dealing with a more difficult "edge" case. Paul Postal (I think it was) many years ago argued that in expressions like "we linguists" the "we" was the head of the construction and the "linguists" was something like an appositive (I don't remember the details just now). I don't think this kind of construction is usefully laid up against "those linguists", arguing the reverse of Postal's position that "we" can be a determiner, because it is understood as "we, who are linguists" (non-restrictive), more than as a restrictive "those linguists who are we" in the manner of "the house which is here" ~=~ "this house". *** From sarima at friesen.net Wed Feb 16 02:49:30 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 18:49:30 -0800 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: <00c901bf744f$1c992460$6da294d1@roborr.uottawa.ca> Message-ID: At 12:16 AM 2/11/00 -0500, colkitto at sprint.ca wrote: >[ Moderator's note: > The following is quoted from a posting by Stanley Friesen, made on Sat, > 05 Feb 2000 22:05:24 -0800. > --rma ] >>In this context I was really only pointing out that language "suffers" from >>one of the main issues I see in all biological studies: fuzzy, imprecise >>boundaries. There is no precise way to distinguish one language from >>another. >What is the problem with so-called "fuzzy" thinking? Is this a >manifestation of "physics envy"? *I* have no problem with it, that is why I put "suffers" in quotes. Indeed it is my default mode in matter like this (though I do have an almost irrepressible drive to classify everything). But there are many who do have trouble with it, perhaps even some here. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Feb 14 21:07:55 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 21:07:55 -0000 Subject: reality of PIE Message-ID: Continuing the discussion on relationship: (No doubt I will have to admit stupidity soon, but do bear with me as I try to explain what I meant.) As often it may be that terms are being used in different ways - probably my fault! Larry said: > Without a tolerably unified PIE ..... Quite! My point is that we cannot go beyond the "tolerably unified" and speak of a single, undifferentiated language. I thought this was standard stuff. To reconstruct PIE without allowing for some internal variety would seem to me - in my innocence, and in light of the IE evidence - somewhat doubtful. Indeed, this very variety is what some of the glottalicists rely on - for example, in order to link Skt /bh/ with Germanic */b/, both derived from dialectic allophones (or "dialectophones") of b/bh. That's just one example - you know the kind of stuff I mean. A single unified PIE is certainly not what we can reconstruct, except as an artificial abstraction. A more interesting and slightly philosophical question is whether we believe a perfectly unified pre-PIE is a necessity. I am arguing that it is not - that dialect variation within a language is perfectly normal, and the daughter languages may indeed reflect that variation, and even show mixing of the dialects (as modern English does). Of course there are examples of a single dialect spawning variant daughters, but I am challenging the assumption that all daughter languages must - by definition - come from a single undifferentiated original. >>> Genetically related languages were once the same language. On this, Larry said: >The statement above is true ... by definition. This begs the question I asked above, and also relies on questions of definition - are we talking of a single unifed undifferentiated language? That's the concept I am attacking. It is not true *by definition* that genetically related langauges derive from a single undifferentiated ancestor. It may be true by definition that they derive from closely related forms of that language, but where is your evidence that all must come from a single form of that language? I think it is an assumption open to challenge and debate. >Languages which do not > descend from a common ancestor are not genetically related. Even if they descend from sister languages, which are themselves descended from different dialects, which are themselves reflexes - maybe quite complex ones - of an earlier dialect continuum - which is itself the result of earlier close dialects - etc etc .... So that there is no single unified undifferentiated ancestor? Or do you believe that there always must be a single ancestor without variation? Perhaps we are again using different meanings of "common ancestor" - yours more loose, including variation, and mine excluding it in order to make the point that a single dialect-free ancestor may not be necessary. >Proto-Germanic, ..., looks nothing like a creole. It was intended as an example, and I accept that it was a misleading one. Creoles - how can you describe a Creole as descended from a single ancestor? Doesn't his mean prioritising one of its "parents" over the other? >the English plural This was answered in another post - I accept that it is an expansion of an English original. But it was just an example. Your restriction of "related" to mean only "genetically related" means we cannot say, "English shows a closer relationship to French than to Italian." Instead we have to spell out the nature of that relationship, and say, "English is equally related to both French and Italian, but has been more deeply influenced by... and so on." I want to say both sentences have their place, and given the right understanding of "relationship", both are true. You appear to be saying that the first is always wrong. I would say it is only wrong if "relationship" is understood purely in a genetic sense. So I ask, is the only relationship two languages can have, a genetic one? (Indeed you talk of "inventing non-existent "relationships", and confusing these with > genetic links?") What about Sprachbuende, etc? There are other relationships - so why deny them? Why not keep the word "relationship" open, and specify "genetic" when necessary? Peter From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 15 13:39:44 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 08:39:44 EST Subject: reality of PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 2/14/00 4:08:53 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk wrote: <> But notice what you are saying here. By calling this definitional, you are saying really it doesn't matter whether even one linguist BELIEVES it or not - if it is true by definition. Just like assumptions in a geometry proof, you don't need to BELIEVE the side of triangle A = the side of triangle B. All you need to do is PROCEED AS IF.... "Let x = y" is the way we've phrased it since Pythagoras. The Greek geometrists would politely ask the observer to "allow" x = y, for the sake of proceeding with the proof. A wonderfully civil approach perhaps worth emulating. This is all aside from a definition's relevance to the real world. To the extent you never find equal sides in the real world, your definition and also your "proof" may have no real world application. larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk also quoted: > and that therefore English has a > different relationship to French and Italian, not an identical one ...and then larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk replied: <> Well, that's also a matter of definition. What you described - the influence of French on English - was a relationship in a certain, normal sense. Some folks are related by marriage. You are just saying here that 'relatedness' must be 'genetic.' However, the 'relationship' you are describing between French and English is HARDLY 'non-existent.' No reason to usurp every word that derives from 'relate," is there? Even biological geneticists use the word 'relationship' in its normal sense. Why not let 'relatedness' be a restricted technical term. But let 'relationship' retain its good, sensible, normal, understandable and very useful wider meaning. "Allow" that, if you would. But all this also brings up the issue of 'reification.' As we have been reminded on this list in the past, we can get carried away and start believing our working concepts are real flesh and blood things. We already know that a language itself may be a "non-existent" entity. I don't need to cite Gaston Paris on the undefinablity of the real world line between French and Italian. Just do a word search of the IE list archive entering the phrase "reification" and you'll see plenty of evidence from Prof. Trask on just how theoretically intracable the idea of a "language" really is. So, it seems rather odd to be fretting here about inventing 'non-existent relationships.' Especially since the relationships we are talking about are between what appear to be 'non-existent' entities. After reading those old 'reification' posts, you might begin to feel as if we are arguing here about whether Snoopy is or isn't - technically - Charlie Brown's dog. Regards, Steve Long From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Feb 15 16:46:06 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 11:46:06 EST Subject: Assumptions in Computing phylogenies Message-ID: Thanks to Sean Crist for once again clarifying what the UPenn group is doing. I believe some further clarifications are in order about possible questions which may be raised, without claiming to be an expert on this. I may have gotten something quite wrong. I am copying this message to Sean Crist because a later message from him says that he will not be receiving IndoEuropean list messages automatically from now on for a while. I am agreeing with Sean on terminology, on the automaticity of the algorithm and the fact that if it contains a random element, then getting the same unrooted tree result again and again indicates some stability of the tree, etc. Not in discussion here. I am more concerned with problems raised by specialists in biological classification about the technique itself, without implying we need to take everything from biologists. (See other discussions recently.) I am also glad the UPenn team is doing this (computers can help us), at the same time that I am always skeptical about assumptions getting hidden when computers are used. There are simply so many examples of this happening. How to fool oneself unintentionally with statistics, etc. Anyhow, onwards: [SC] >For a given set of coded characteristics for the 10 >taxa ("is a vertebrate", "has a beak"), some of these trees will score >better than others. The problem is to find the one which scores the best, >and the only way to compute the problem deterministically is to compute >the score for _every one_ of these trees. Even computing it deterministically might not give the best answer. An important question is the degree to which using the measure "scores the best" will in fact yield the closest to the TRUE tree of the historical splits which occurred in the history of PIE and its descendants. That is to say, the method and the "scores" used must be *evaluated* against their success judged by other means. They are not themselves the judge of other considerations. They may help us to gain more insight, and a computer can handle much more computation than we can do by hand, so even given that the full computation Sean Crist refers to would take too long to actually carry out, >This would just take too long >over any data sets of larger than trivial size. the technique can still be useful. But the question remains, how closely does the "scoring" system favor a TRUE tree. I am *not here* questioning whether dialect-networks is a better model than a tree, that is a separate question. I am here only concerned with whether the tree produced by *this* technique is the best *tree* possible. The "least strain" on the model may properly correspond to the best score if the scoring system is designed ideally. The result of this technique is by definition not a dialect net. I would be happier if we had a technique that could give results as a combination of dialect net and tree, and assume if we had such a technique, it could handle Germanic better, both as to its place within IE and as to the dialect divisions within it. But such a new technique might, in some versions, make fewer suggestions about tree splits, simply avoiding them in difficult cases. That might be good sometimes (i.e. when the result was true), but bad other times (i.e. when not true). [SC notes the impossibility of doing complete deterministic computations, and that] >In the 1990's, M. Farach, S. Kannan, and T. Warnow worked out >a way of partly getting around the problem. >The mathematics of their algorithm are beyond me, >but as is often the case, you don't have to understand the >internals of an algorithm to be able to understand >what it's computing and to be able to use it. >The practical characteristics of their algorithm are as follows: >1) If the characters allow a perfect phylogeny, the algorithm >will return it. 2) If there is no perfect phylogeny, the algorithm will >return a pretty-good tree, but not one which is guaranteed to be the >best-scoring one out of all the possible trees. However, since the >algorithm involves a random element, >you can repeatedly run the algorithm, and if the same tree >keeps coming up, that's a good indication of the tree's reliability. Then >Don Ringe and Ann Taylor (both Indo-Europeanists) >got together with Tandy Warnow, and applied this method to the family tree of the IE languages. *** Now on to my primary questions: According to one of our correspondents (Stanley Friesen?), the biologists have found that this (?) technique is not highly robust, is subject to artifact effects in several ways, and that the UPenn team have not taken account of these. I have no knowledge to express an opinion on whether they have or have not, but believe these questions should be addressed publicly and clearly. Perhaps they have been, in which case I will appreciate being referred to sources. Perhaps these are among the issues to be more fully explained in a publication in preparation, in which case I will just have to wait, though some sketchy explanations in advance of publication would be helpful. Here are two such claims I think I have seen about artifact effects: (a) results are highly sensitive to the choice of initial characteristics (b) results may be systematically biased by the technique (what someone referred to as the "long branch" attraction effect, if I remember correctly) And here is a third one I raised recently as a question, and do not think the one response I received got me further in my understanding: (c) are results sensitive to whether a dialect in a dialect net is near the center, surrounded by closely related languages, with many nearby characteristics to compare, or near the periphery, surrounded by unrelated languages or isolated, with fewer nearby characteristics to compare? Will these different positions influence results expressed as trees in ways they should not? (That is to say, peripheral dialects may split off or innovate earlier; or they may fail to follow innovations spreading from another part of the dialect network; two quite opposite possibilities. Is the technique biased in these respects?) *** Here is Sean's response to a different question, but relevant to (a): >...the team's work is "mainly based on prior scholarship". >It's quite true that the team >drew on the collective knowledge of the IE scholarly community in >coming up with the character list, much as a biologist might refer to >already-published descriptions of various species in coming up with a >character list for the purpose of computing the evolutionary family tree >of those species. It's obvious that they should do so; they are not >working in a vacuum, and it would be perverse to ignore what we already >know. My own observation (at a lecture by Ringe at the Smithsonian Institution some years ago) was that Ringe expressed "surprise" that the results of using the technique were highly consistent with traditional scholarship. I found that expression of surprise itself surprising, since one would certainly expect that if traditional comparativists had done their job decently and if the UPenn team had done their job decently. But it also made me wonder why Ringe was so strongly emphasizing the superiority of the UPenn technique as compared with previous work. Perhaps simply everyone tends to view their own work as important. I am glad the UPenn team is doing this, and am certain it will at least raise questions which may have been overlooked, and by virtue of using a computer may be able to check some hypotheses which were not previously checked. See the next section below. But results *do* quite properly depend crucially both on the choice of characteristics included in the data and on the interpretation of those characteristics, both in prior scholarship. So there is a sense in which results are partly built in by the selection of characteristics and the interpretation as innovations vs. retentions. This will seem quite proper if one agrees with the conclusions built in, and not if one does not agree with some of them. Presumably traditional scholarship has done its work well, but in that case the results of the UPenn technique really do depend in essential ways on traditional scholarship, the technique cannot question those earlier results which it treats simply as facts, as data. *** Where does the UPenn work fit in a longer view of development of our field? Here is how I see it, as one step in a long chain of steps (as so far presented). Personally, I do think that in order to evaluate whether we think the results of this technique are TRUE (valid, not merely repeatable), we will need a more advanced method which can yield results as a mixture of dialect network and tree structure, at least that, and we will need a much larger amount of data, enough data so that a traditional comparative linguist would be able to identify fairly easily by scanning the data tables of actual forms cases in which there is borrowing or areal influences rather than family-tree phenomena, and the reverse. At that point I would begin to have some confidence that the technique can be applied to more difficult cases with less than optimal quantities of data, and we could begin to measure how reliable are the results of using kinds of subsets of data rather than complete data, then even deriving probability estimates for cases in which we CANNOT have ideal complete data because the time depth is too great. The other area where I think computerization can be most helpful is in developing automatic techniques for detecting assumptions which we need to question, but such usually appear obvious after the fact so we forget them. A good historian of IE studies would know of many trails of analysis which turned out wrong, which could be added here. Consider these two, each embodying the kind of assumption that is often built in unconsciously, perhaps the kind of assumption to which some of our correspondents might be referring. I mention these two simply because they have been of interest to me. If our grouping (say in a dialect net) of gradient centum-satem characteristics relied on an assumption that *k' > c^ > ts > "th", the computer might suggest trying an alternative assumption *k' > ts > {c^ or "th"}. I asked about this in a separate message yesterday, giving phonetic analysis to suggest the second is more realistic, more common, a simpler explanation, whatever. Or, for the Chinese languages, I once read Karlgren's detailed work very carefully, and noticed a great rotation of the vowel space was used as the sound correspondence between two sets of languages in the Chinese family. Karlgren took one form of the vowel space as more original, a second form as derived by rotation of the vowel space. What if we reversed that, took the second form as more original, the first form as derived by a rotation of the vowel space in the opposite direction? How would that affect the family tree or the dialect network for Chinese languages? (There may be good reasons to reject such an alternative assumption, but the question can at least be asked explicitly, and a computer might help to force such assumptions to our conscious level.) *** One of our correspondents has mentioned that the traditional neogrammarians in fact checked their new hypotheses against diagrams in which the sound changes and the vocabulary items affected (?) were displayed on the branches (?) of trees. I would like some detailed references (title, author, *page* in volumes, etc.) to see examples of these. Perhaps, despite our much greater knowledge today, this would still be useful, so that we recognize that our knowledge is always in progress, that we keep its logic always available to us on the surface as much as our display techniques allow us to do so, rather than visually displaying only results without the ability to delve into the reasoning and question them freshly, when either new data *or* new perspectives come along. *** Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics PO Box 15156 Washington, DC 20003 From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Feb 15 16:46:09 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 11:46:09 EST Subject: Celtic closer to Anatolian? Message-ID: For Celtic, is there any argument that on balance the geographic position of Celtic in the earliest stages of PIE dialect network would put it closer to Anatolian, or Tocharian, or Armenian, or etc., because of a few shared isoglosses with those which might be common innovations? Or are any sharings retentions? I am trying to dredge up some old memories. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Feb 15 16:46:10 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 11:46:10 EST Subject: Italic close to Slavic? Message-ID: For Italic, is there any argument that on balance the geographic position of Italic in the earliest stages of PIE dialect network would put it closer to Slavic, or Armenian, or etc., because of a few shared isoglosses with those which might be common innovations? Or are any sharings retentions? In either case, Perhaps shared verbal conjugations? If so, shared with which other IE groupings? I am trying to dredge up some old memories. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Tue Feb 15 12:02:33 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 14:02:33 +0200 Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario In-Reply-To: <73.f3d36e.25cbb926@aol.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 4 Feb 2000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > Perhaps more importantly, inscriptions appearing in Latin, on the US > Dollar, on religious objects and at the end of e-mail messages (but > not on ogham sticks) show NO CHANGE IN THE LANGUAGE at all - 1800 > years later! Yes, and that's how you can tell that it's a dead language. Living languages change; dead ones don't (at least not to the same extext or in the same way). I know that you don't believe that Latin was a dead language in the Middle Ages because so many people spoke it and used it for communication. But it had no native speakers and therefore it was a dead language. Here is a little assignment for you. Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, it to find some text written in English in 1000 AD and then find the same text written in English in 2000 AD. See if you notice any difference. Next find some text written in French in 1000 AD (or any other living language of your choice that was recorded both then and now) and then find the same text written in the same language in 2000 AD. Then find some text written in Latin in 1000 AD and the same text written in Latin in 2000 AD. I suggest the Lord's Prayer for the text sample since it was extensively recorded in various languages over a long period and later examples are not required to be archaizing copies since the text is a translation of a fixed text and the translator is trying to render the original in his own language. I will even give you a leg up and tell you that you can find a ca. 1000 AD English version of the text in H.H. Hock, _Principles of Historical Linguistics_ (1986), p. 3. See if you can see any difference between the treatment of the text in the English and French (or whatever) versions and the Latin version. Then try to generalize your observations and suggest some explanations for the differences. Come back and report when you have finished. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From sarima at friesen.net Wed Feb 16 03:50:53 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 19:50:53 -0800 Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario In-Reply-To: <72.17e0d5a.25d50dfa@aol.com> Message-ID: At 02:02 AM 2/11/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >I disagree. Actually, Renfrew's evidence is still rather compelling. >Although I am willing to reserve judgment until you unveil the amazing "rate >of differentiation" machine - which I understand will place PIE in a small >village in the Ukraine about 3000BC, Look, NOBODY here is making any such claim, or even anything remotely like it. Nobody claims to be able to narrow the homeland down that far, and I can remember nobody here suggesting a divergence as late as 3000 BC. The point is that *overall* levels of differentiation among the earliest dialects are much less than among living dialects. Comparing averages, and calibrating by observed rates of change in the last 3000 years, we can place a fairly secure *upper* *limit* on how old the divergence of PIE is. That upper limit is about 4500 BC. > where four different words for the wheel >would be divied up among the departing IEian children, just before they >marched off to change the language of Europe and half of Asia. Sigh, the upper limit is not based on any *single* vocabulary item. It is based on the fact that studying Greek, plus learning a few rules of thumb, actually makes it possible to understand Sanskrit in a limited way. Much as knowing English and a few phonetic rules often allows one to piece together the general meaning of basic German. (Indeed, perhaps *better* than that). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Wed Feb 16 04:05:43 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 20:05:43 -0800 Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 04:33 AM 2/11/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Linguistically, the American Atlantic coast is certainly not speaking the >same English it did in 1615, but it is still clearly English. Yes. And now add another 500 years of change. I predict that in rather *less* than another 500 years, most people will find the writings from 1615 to be incomprehensible. >When Barlowe describes the Native Americans living on the Outer Banks in >1588, it's in an English that is plainly readable today. Today, yes. 500 years from today, I seriously doubt. And this with modern roads. >If one can picture a slower rate of change than the 19th and 20th Centuries >gave us, it is not hard to see a small number of "peripherally conservative" >colonists slowly weening themselves from the traditions they carried from the >Danube. Unfortunately, nobody has ever observed language change *much* slower than this. (Perhaps Greek, but I am not certain even that was all that much slower). > And that slowness first of all was a matter of slow initial >population expansion which only changes about 4600BC Actually, that would *accelerate* local language change! These widely separated small settlements would have almost no contacts beyond the local area. Each grouping would tend to develop more or less separately in the absence of regular contact. People in a handful of small settlements in the middle of an area otherwise populated by speakers of other languages would tend to pick up many language features from their immediate neighbors. It was really only the increase in English settlement in NA that stabilized the language enough so that it is still recognizable. > - despite what >JoatSimeon at aol.com has been writing, I still only find for example a single >Bandkeramik settlement in modern France before 5000BC. Which, if true, almost *ensures* that the language of its people would diverge rapidly! >and the local "technocomplexes" start to come up all over. There are some >new more general practices like megaliths that show up, but most innovation >is local. The problem with associating the megaliths with IE peoples is that no IE myths or legends show *any* comprehension of the purpose or origin of them! All known IE myths about them are of the "fantastic" nature, none show any trace of any older tradition continuous from their origin. This suggests that even the immediate predecessors of the IE peoples had forgotten what they were for, and who built them. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Wed Feb 16 04:16:19 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 20:16:19 -0800 Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 10:47 AM 2/11/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Yeah, well as you know, I'm looking forward to exactly how you calculate this >differentiation - especially with Hittite and whatever you are >differentiating it from. One measure is basically how hard one must work to explain the differences in cognate words. > If your formula finds Hittite an awful lot like any >language, it sure would have saved Kurylowicz et al a lot of time and >trouble. The problem with Hittite is not the level of differentiation in phonetics, it is the *dearth* of cognates. The ones that *are* there are all very obvious, and easily correlated with their Sanskrit and Greek counterparts. [I still would like to know: do the other early Anatolian languages have so many non-IE words, or is this trait specific to Hittite itself]. >(And I don't know why you think Farsi and Hindi are more differentiated than >Hittite and Sanskrit - haven't a clue. Are you talking about a numerical >degree of differentiation that can be demostrated? ... I know how similar cognate words are in Hittite and Sanskrit. After one abstracts out the differences in writing systems, they are very little different at all. Indeed, if the phonetic differences were all there were, they would be more like dialect variants of one language. Farsi and Hindi, on the other hand, do not have many such transparently similar cognates (and most of those are accidental - much like the fact that in my dialect of English, "worm" is pronounced almost identically to the reconstructed PIE root it derives from [*wrm] - sans endings). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 16 07:11:50 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 02:11:50 EST Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: <In a message dated 2/10/00 12:17:58 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com replied with only >this comment: ><<-- yes, and without any evidence for doing so.>> >I disagree. -- that's obvious, but you still haven't presented any reason for anyone else to agree with _you_, yet. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 16 07:28:22 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 02:28:22 EST Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Yeah, well as you know, I'm looking forward to exactly how you calculate this >differentiation - especially with Hittite and whatever you are >differentiating it from. -- that would require whole textbooks. In fact, it _does_ require whole textbooks. Has it occurred to you that linguists know something about languages? Things whose demonstration can't be summed up in a paragraph? >And I don't know why you think Farsi and Hindi are more differentiated than >Hittite and Sanskrit - haven't a clue. -- Just a little hint: Hittite Sanskrit English genu janu knee kuis ka who kuen ghnanti kill/strike yukan yugam yoke daru taru wood/tree anzas nas us >If this 'degree of differentiation' is based on your personal beliefs, that's >fine. -- well, 200 years of linguistic scholarship, for starters. From alderson at netcom.com Thu Feb 17 01:56:43 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 17:56:43 -0800 Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario In-Reply-To: (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Fri, 11 Feb 2000, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: > When Barlowe describes the Native Americans living on the Outer Banks in > 1588, it's in an English that is plainly readable today. "This island had ^^^^^^^^ > many goodly woods, full of Deere, Conies, Hares and Fowles, in incredible > abundance... Such a flocke of Cranes arose under us, with such a cry > redoubled by many Ecchoes, as if an armie of men had showted all together.... > {and the locals were] Very handsome, and goodly people, and in their manner > as mannerly, and civill, as any of Europe." There is no comprehensibility > problem here even after 400 years and through a lot more changes than the > Bandkeramik folk could ever have experienced. Yes, *readable*. There is no living American, though, who could understand this text spoken at native speed in late 16th Century English on a single hearing. The two forms of the language are simply too different. We are often cozened by writing, and by the habits of the modern stage, to think of Elizabethan English as being similar or identical to our own, and then to extend that thought to the language of non-literate societies over longer periods of time. The content of stories may have stayed the same, as in Homer, but the language did not. (Against Vedic, I call to witness Avestan--whose texts were meaningless to the Parsi priests until western linguists began to decipher them.) Rich Alderson From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Tue Feb 15 17:20:32 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 19:20:32 +0200 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) In-Reply-To: <0uc5askf7l79k2nj7net21la6jh7h53l6i@4ax.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 10 Feb 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > "Vidhyanath Rao" wrote: >> From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" >>> Still, the unmarked form is a simple past, while the marked forms >>> are the imperfective ("durative", "present-future") with >>> geminated C2, and the perfect (CtCC [iptaras], with infix -t-). >>> Such a system is potentially very close to one with unmarked past >>> vs. marked present (all it takes is the loss of the perfect). >> Is it s a simple past or narrative past? [zero forms do survive as >> subsequent forms even when they have been ousted from isolated >> sentences, conversation etc.] > I don't know much about Akkadian syntax, but what I gather is: > The preterite (iprus) is the unmarked narrative past. This is generally true. > The perfect (iptaras) is less frequent. According to Lipin'ski > it denotes "that a state is produced in someone or in something, > whether it be caused by another or by himself/itself". The -t- > infix in other Semitic languages (as well as in Akkadian modal > forms) denotes a reflexive (Ugaritic yr-t-HS "he washed himself", > preterite with t-infix). Avoid Lipin'ski. At least as far as Akkadian is concerned (I don't have the competence to judge his treatment of the other languages). Lipin'ski gives no footnotes so you do not know whose opinion he is basing his description on and in most cases, what the evidence is for the position he takes. But even worse, he glides over controversial points without even indicating that there is a controversy. Only one point of view is ever expressed and there is no way for the uninformed reader to know this or to know what the relative merits of the unmentioned positions are. For Akkadian use the most recent edition of von Soden's grammar. In classical Old Babylonian the perfect expresses an action that is subsequent to some previous action. In narrating the past, an action that took place in the past is normally expressed with the preterite; subsequent actions (usually ones that are dependent on the first action or result from it) are expressed by the perfect (coordinate actions will still be expressed by the preterite). Since the perfect is used to express subsequent action, it can also be used after a present/ future as a future perfect. In later periods (Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian) the distinction disappears. In main clauses only the perfect is used to express the past. The preterite is now restricted to subordinate clauses. The use of iptaras quoted from Lipin'ski is not really the perfect (it doesn't have to do with time), but a t-stem form used as a middle verb. There is both a stem-forming -ta- infix and a tense-forming -ta- infix. The former results in reflexives and reciprocals to the basic stem (G stem) and in passives to the derived stems (D and $ stems). Sometimes it is used to deny the participation of an agent in the action (i.e., it happened all by itself; cf. R. Reagan: "Mistakes were made"). > I don't know to what extent the imperfective (iparras, > "present/future") was used in past tense contexts. Judging by > its traditional name, not often. The present/future is often used to express a durative in the past. > There is also the Akkadian stative (paris), which is is the > normal perfective / past tense in other Semitic languages (having > ousted the preterite), but which in Akkadian is a true stative, > i.e. a verbal adjective (paris "he is separate"(?)). The Akkadian stative is indeed a verbal adjective and in the basic stem is the least marked form (in derived stems the stative/verbal adjective has the same form as the infinitive) in the tense system. But the form is not unmarked as the vocalization (CaCiC) is a marking (the unmarked form of the verb is the basic stem imperative). I always explain the stative as the absolute form of the verbal adjective to which the bound forms of the nominative personal pronouns are added (the bound form of the third person masculine singular being 0). The stative makes no reference to time and is often used as a permansive (particularly in geographical descriptions: $umma a:lu ina me:le $akin 'if a city is situated on a hill'). In stative verbs the stative simply expresses the existence of the state (damiq 'it is good'); coming into the state at some point in time (inchoative/ingressive) is expressed by the present/future or preterite. In intransitive action verbs, the function of the stative gets blurred; it often expresses an action that was going on or a state that existed when some other action took place or an action that took place over a certain period of time (often translated by a past or present progressive tense). In transitive verbs, the stative is often translated as a passive (the verbal adjective functions as a passive participle); thus paris 'it is decided', Sabit 'he is captured'. > Campbell ("Compendium of the World's Languages") says: > "Instead of the typical Semitic division into perfective and > imperfective aspects, Akkadian has an idiosyncratic quadruple > segmentation which corresponds broadly to a present/ > preterite/perfect system, with the fourth memeber acting as a > kind of stative". Formally, the Akkadian stative corresponds to the West Semitic perfective (and the Egyptian so-called "old perfective") and the Akkadian preterite corresponds to the West Semitic imperfective. The Akkadian present/ future is not represented in West Semitic (although Ethiopic has a similar form) and West Semitic has stem-forming -ta- forms but of course no tense- forming ones. > Diakonov (in EB), contrary to Lipin'ski, seems to say that the > preterite was in origin a perfective (opposed to the iparras > imperfective). "Later a new "perfect" with an infixed -ta- in > the stem developed". It is hard to say whether iparras is an innovation of East Semitic or was original and lost in West Semitic (the Ethiopic form makes a decision difficult). A plausible case could be made for iprus and iparras once having been the same form with the outcomes being the result of differences in stress. If so, then the 'old perfective' became the stative and simply dropped out of the tense system (it is not specific with regard to time). But the sequence presented by Diakonov is correct. Old Akkadian has iparras as does Eblaite, but there are no clear examples of tense-forming -ta- (although stem-forming -ta- is present). Unquestionable examples of tense-forming -ta- do not appear until archaic Old Babylonian (around 2000 BC). Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From rao.3 at osu.edu Fri Feb 18 21:03:31 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2000 16:03:31 -0500 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" wrote: > I don't know to what extent the imperfective (iparras, > "present/future") was used in past tense contexts. > Judging by its traditional name, not often. When it comes to aspectual questions, IMHO, depending on names is a poor guide to syntax. >Come to think of it, Hittite (unlike Akkadian) is quite clear. >The forms without -i are past tense, those with -i present. Actually it is not that clear: There have been suggestions (Josephson, ``The role of sentence particles in Old and Middle Hittite'') that sentence particles had an aspectual role as well. More recent work (Boley ``Sentence particles and place words in Old and Middle Hittite'') suggests local meaning overall but `kan' is given a terminative function for the most part. These need not be mutually exclusive (eg Russian). The more important question in our context is if there is any difference between the tenses in sentences/clauses with and without these particles. I don't know this has been studied (I don't know enough about Hittite to do it without large doses of guidance.) BTW, I remember reading that the Hittite `preterit`, in some cases, to have a performative meaning. I can't find the reference now. Is this true? [Some examples of RV injunctive may be classified as performative, eg RV 1.32: indrasya nu vi:rya:n.i pra vocam.] From rao.3 at osu.edu Fri Feb 18 21:13:32 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2000 16:13:32 -0500 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: "petegray" wrote: > I also seem to remember that the Greek pattern of accentuation in > verbs is a development within Greek - RV keeps the accent further > back. I don't unerstand this. Augmented forms are accented on the augment in RV. In case of unaugmented forms, the accent is generally on the root in the s/is aorist, and shifts between the root and ending in the root aorist. > (b) where is the evidence on the correlation mentioned between > asigmatic aorists and absence of augment? Blumenthal, Some Homeric evidence for the history of the augment , IF 79(1974) 67--77: The data given here is from Iliad 11, but only forms which are metrically secure are counted. Imperfect has 28 augmented and 73 unaugmented, strong aorist has 27 and 76 respectively and weak aorist 37 and 50. I calculated chi-square p-value to be 0.027 from this data for lack of difference between the two aorists. Blumenthal also adds that the ratio of augmented to unaugmented forms is 1:2 in speeches and 1:3 in narrative, and also that in dual (all forms), pluperfect and aorist passives, the figures are 1&6, 8&4 and 5&1. His conclusion is that the augment is young is so is more frequent in newer formations than older ones. From rao.3 at osu.edu Fri Feb 18 21:50:28 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2000 16:50:28 -0500 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: "Ross Clark" wrote: > It is also a feature of Bickerton's prototypical Creole verb > system: an unmarked non-stative verb is interpreted as past; > to make a present you add the non-punctual aspect marker. Bybee et al do talk about creoles, with the conclusion that it supports them: Zero forms are perfective limited to the past on dynamic verbs, but present on statives, a feature also found in some non-creole languages. The problem here may be the definitions of the terms `perfective' and `simple past'. Bybee et al follow the definition of Comrie, with a nod to the modifications proposed by Dahl: A form that is limited to past events considered as a whole is classified as a perfective and not a past. It does not matter if such forms have no non-past versions. In English, for example, we use the same form in both She sang the whole song She sang to him every day. We can also say I knew it even before you told me. without any implication that my knowing whatever it is is over. In Tamil, to say ``I gave it to him'', one says avanukk- atai koDutten. where `koDutten' stands for `gave'. But avanukk- atai koDutten, a:na:l avan atai vangikk- koLLavillai means ``I offered it to him, but he did not accept it.'' The form used for neutral statements and narration can still have habitual, past state or connative meanings. If a form is used for past and narration is excluded from these three, it should be classified as a perfective, not as a simple past. From a.rosta at uclan.ac.uk Tue Feb 15 18:34:00 2000 From: a.rosta at uclan.ac.uk (A Rosta) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 18:34:00 -0000 Subject: Celtic's rate of differentiation Message-ID: Steve Long to "JoatSimeon": > You have no problem with proto-Latin arising among the other Italic > languages before 500BC, wiping out those other languages and giving rise > to modern Romance languages 2500 years later. > But you do have a problem with proto-Celtic arising among related languages > before 800BC, wiping out those related languages and giving rise to the > Celtic languages 1000 years later. By what process would proto-Celtic have wiped out those related languages? By late migrations triggered by something other than the spread of agriculture? If Celtic could spread without agriculture as its vehicle, would that make Renfrew's model less compelling (--because it might imply that PIE too could spread without agriculture as its vehicle)? [Excuse my butting in, but you two seem to be exasperatedly talking across each other.] --And Rosta. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 16 07:10:20 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 02:10:20 EST Subject: Celtic's rate of differentiation Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >You have no problem with proto-Latin arising among the other Italic languages >before 500BC, wiping out those other languages and giving rise to modern >Romance languages 2500 years later. -- obviously not, since it's historically observable that this is what happened. Although Late Latin starts to give rise to the modern Romance languages about 1000 years later, not 2500 -- roughly around the time of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the centuries after 400 CE. Nor does the structure of early Latin contradict a reasonable divergence date for the IE languages. On the contrary, early Latin shows very strong similiarties to all the other early IE languages; which is, of course, just what you'd expect if they hadn't been separated all that long. >But you do have a problem with proto-Celtic arising among related languages >before 800BC -- on the contrary. We were discussing _Renfrew's_ hypothesis, which is that the Celtic languages developed _in situ_ among established IE-speakers all across their historic range from the British Isles to the Danube. That is, that there were no migrations of Celtic speakers in the recent past to account for the uniformity of the Celtic languages as observed by Classical authors and surviving textual evidence. You now disagree with this? >wiping out those related languages and giving rise to the >Celtic languages 1000 years later. -- now you're postulating a Celtic Empire analagous to the Roman Empire? Interesting... To recapitulate: when first observed, the Celtic languages show very close similarities, and a rather conservative overall structure -- particularly when compared with the extensive restructuring they undergo in the early medieval period. In other words, early Celtic is much more similar to, say, Latin, than Gaelic is a few centuries later. This indicates that the Celtic languages had spread from a fairly small core sometime not long before they were first observed; something like a millenia, or less, before the 200's BCE. (Early Urnfield at the earliest, if you want an archaeological reference.) (Incidentally, the linguistic comparisons also indicate that Italic and Celtic had diverged sometime quite recently -- second millenium BCE, I'd say.) >Obviously, a lot could have gone on between Renfrew's 'an early indo-european >language' and the rise of an identifiable Celtic. -- whatever it was, it couldn't have involved much linguistic change, since the early Celtic languages lack most of the distinguishing features which they later developed. Eg., Hispano-Celtic retains the PIE labio-velars; and one could go on. >There could have been plenty of languages and dialects that developed in >between. -- not an leave the early Celtic languages so similar, and with so little change between them and PIE. >THERE IS NOTHING THAT SAYS THAT A STRING OF ANCESTRAL >LANGUAGES CAN'T SEPARATE NON-ANATOLIAN PIE FROM CELTIC. -- well, yes, there is. The similarity of early Celtic to PIE. There is, so to speak, not enough linguistic "room" between proto-Celtic and PIE. No 'space' for many intermediary languages. >Nobody said anything about the languages staying uniform over any great >period of time. -- Renfrew did. >You are simply not comprehending that there is no requirement that Celtic >come directly out of PIE - any more than that modern Greek came directly out >of PIE. -- compare modern and Mycenaean Greek, and then the latter with PIE, and you may begin to grasp this point. Modern Greek is much more different from PIE than Mycenaean Greek is. Eg., in Mycenaean Greek, the word for "cow" is still 'gous', which is very similar to the PIE *gwous. Early Celtic (still less proto-Celtic) is just _not different enough_ from PIE to be the result of a long process of intermediary change. There aren't enough changes. >NOT DIFFERENTIATED ENOUGH? HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT? -- by use of the comparative method; which is how we know that there's such a thing as "PIE" in the first place. From alderson at netcom.com Thu Feb 17 01:40:07 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 17:40:07 -0800 Subject: Celtic's rate of differentiation In-Reply-To: <33.12aa02a.25d50764@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Fri, 11 Feb 2000, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote, in response to S. M. Stirling: > In a message dated 2/2/00 12:43:52 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > < have been separated by that depth of time!>> > NOT DIFFERENTIATED ENOUGH? HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT? Because we have the texts: Vedic Sanskrit, Avestan and Old Persian, Homeric (and the later-discovered Mycenaean) Greek, early Latin, Hittite and the other Anatolian languages, ad nauseam. The languages we see are not much further apart, to casual inspection, than the Romance or Germanic families. You would have done better, rather than resorting to sarcasm, to point out Lithuanian verb and noun morphology in your argument, since they have retained to this day a number of similarities to Vedic Sanskrit, across a gulf of 3500 years--though several have been lost in the last 500. Rich Alderson From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 16 06:42:07 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 01:42:07 EST Subject: The degree of differentiation Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >I'm still waiting for you to tell us how you measure this critical and all >important "degree of differentiation," that "we" are using with such thorough >confidence. -- that would require that you study the languages and linguistics. I can't do that for you; but if you begin now, you should be able to address the question in no more than four or five years. >BUT you have insisted to a fare-thee-well that you somehow >magically know how much time it takes for languages to differentiate in >prehistoric times. -- merely that we must proceed on the assumption that languages in prehistoric times changed and differentiated, other things being equal, about as they do in historic times. From sarima at friesen.net Wed Feb 16 02:45:15 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 18:45:15 -0800 Subject: Numbers as "Core Vocabulary" (was IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000210083449.0094d2e0@staff.uiuc.edu> Message-ID: At 08:43 AM 2/10/00 -0600, Peter A. Michalove wrote: >replacement (by borrowing) of numerals. One of the activities that leads >to language contact and bilingualism is trade. Of course, trade is an >activity in which the numerals are essential, and one must know the >numerals of one's trading partners. >Therefore numerals are often subject to borrowing (others have cited >several examples on this list), and the case of Indo-European, where the >numeral system is well preserved throughout almost all of the family, has >probably acted as a misleading example Hmm, I wonder. Could the stability of numerals in early PIE be due to it being a language of trade? If so, this tends to support my current model of how it spread originally (at least in Europe). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 16 06:38:23 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 01:38:23 EST Subject: Bandkeramik and non-Anatolian PIE Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >So I'm connecting Bandkeramik with post-Anatolian PIE -'narrow PIE'. I'm >sure as an expert linguist you are familiar with the concept. -- Quite. Although you're now left with the little matter of explaining how the entire area from Hungary to Greece ended up speaking languages which evolved from PIE well after the branchoff of Anatolian. Of course, that's a bagatelle. >If you do not understand the connection I'm making between Bandkeramik and >non-Anatolian PIE, please address that fact. -- and here I thought you were agreeing with Renfrew... >I won't address here your apparent claim that Myceanaean and Latin are almost >identical languages (2 on a scale of 1-10 - a 1 score being I presume >identical). -- "quite similar" rather than "identical". >I was being consistent with the subject - which was POST-ANATOLIAN PIE. -- actually, we were discussing Renfrew's views on the spread of the IE languages _as a whole_. From alderson at netcom.com Wed Feb 16 21:28:08 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 13:28:08 -0800 Subject: Lusitanian/Celtic/Italic [was Basque ] In-Reply-To: (message from Rick Mc Callister on Sun, 6 Feb 2000 00:17:56 -0600) Message-ID: I notice that no one else has responded. I have a couple of comments: On Sun, 6 Feb 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Yes, the /p/ problem does distinguish it from Celtic > I've also seen the theory that it was cognate with Celtic and Italic as a > member of a W IE branch > Ed Selleslagh has floated the idea that it might be Q-Italic Q-Celtic, I think you mean. > For me, this rasises the question of the validity of Italic as a group. If > Lusitanian were Q-Celtic, that would imply either > 1: the split between P- & Q-Italic occured before Italic entered Europe > 2: P- & Q-Italic are actually different branches of Western IE and that the > resemblances in phonology and lexicon are actually due to adstrate and common > substrate > Q-Celtic does seem to be in a peculiar little spot on the lower Tiber that > would seem to be prime real estate for interlopers Here, I think you mean Q-Italic. If Lusitanian were Q-Celtic, that would not save the

objection, since *all* Celtic languages lose PIE *p-. Cf. OIr. _athair_ "father" as an example. It has been argued before that P- and Q-Italic do not form a single branch, on morphological as well as lexical and phonological grounds, but there are also arguments on the basis of shared innovations in the morphology that they *do* form a single branch. I have always considered the Italo-Celtic hypothesis weak at best, with any other evidence being adduced to shore up the connection best characterized as "Well, they both have P- and Q- branches, don't they, so they must be closely related, mustn't they?" But I think Italic and Celtic, with similar parallel changes, are safely established. Rich Alderson From alderson at netcom.com Thu Feb 17 01:25:16 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 17:25:16 -0800 Subject: Bandkeramik and non-Anatolian PIE In-Reply-To: (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Thu, 10 Feb 2000, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: > I've often used the term non-Anatolian and 'narrow' PIE to describe PIE after > its separation from Hittite and the other Anatolian languages. This is > rather orthodox linguistics. Only of one school. There are many Indo-Europeanists who do *not* accept that Anatolian is to be viewed as a sister of the entire rest of the IE family. In fact, I would say that the "Indo-Hittite" hypothesis is accepted by very few, almost all students of one person (and certainly of one department) in the US. Rich Alderson From stevegus at aye.net Fri Feb 18 00:00:37 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2000 19:00:37 -0500 Subject: Old Irish Message-ID: As to the possible artificiality and semi-cryptographic quality of at least some Old Irish texts; and the more certain hermeticism of some Hiberno-Latin texts, I did find online a copy of "Adelphus adelpha mater," author unknown, which can be read (or at least looked at) at the following URL: http://www.ucc.ie/celt/online/L400003/ Much of the jargon in the poem is recognisably Greek. But there are enough obscurities in it to keep several Champollions awake for several nights. -- Sella fictili sedeo Versiculos dum facio. From jrader at m-w.com Fri Feb 18 14:45:35 2000 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2000 14:45:35 +0000 Subject: Old Irish Message-ID: [Steve Gustafson]: > I know that literary Irish (and continental missionary Irish) monks > delighted in a strange Latin jargon they called 'Hisperica famina," which > actually meant 'Irish speech.' (Famina for 'speech' is an interesting bit > of etymologising in itself.) They mixed up archaic or newly coined Latin > words with bits of Greek and Hebrew. This flourished in around the sixth > century --- about the time of the earliest OIr. glosses, if I remember > rightly. St. Columba's -Altus prosator- is one of the best known, if > relatively less extreme, examples of the style. According to Michael Herren in the notes to his edition of the _Hisperica famina_, is a variant of post-classical Latin , "western," "Italian" (because Italy was west of Troy), and hence "elegant" in Late Latin terms, referring to Roman as opposed to provincial Latinity. is used in the same sense in the _Hisperica_. is not to be confused with , "Hisperica famina" does not mean "Irish speech," and any resemblance between the Latin of the _Hisperica_ and Old Irish grammar is fortuitous. Jim Rader From fabcav at adr.dk Sat Feb 19 07:40:16 2000 From: fabcav at adr.dk (Fabrice Cavoto) Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2000 08:40:16 +0100 Subject: Indic rag(h)- Message-ID: Dear IEnists, Does anybody have some information about the Indic verbal root ragh-/rag-/rak-, which has a variety of meanings incl. 'to obtain, to get'. According to Monier-Williams, this root is only found in the root list appended to Panini's grammar of Sanskrit. I was wondering if anybody knows of this root in any other context, especially in in later Indic (Indo-Aryan) or even in the rest of Indo-Iranian? Also, if anybody knows the current state of the debate concerning the reality of Sanskrit roots that are only attested in the native grammatical or lexical works. Best regards Fabrice Cavoto. Fabrice Cavoto Badstuestrede 4, 2. sal DK-1209 Kobenhavn K. Danmark Tel.: (45) 33 14 17 54 E-mail: fabcav at adr.dk From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 22 06:29:33 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 01:29:33 EST Subject: language and biology Message-ID: At 12:29 PM 2/7/00 +0000, Larry Trask wrote: >Historical linguistics, by definition, deals with language change. >And language change does not result from biological change: it results >from social factors. In a message dated 2/21/00 9:12:55 PM, Stanley Friesen replied: <> But is this question relevant to the issue of whether recent biological models may help in linguistic analysis? Does really doesn't matter if you classify languages as biological phenomena or not? It would seem that if you are after 'genetic' relatedness, biology provides pretty good models for such concepts associated with the transfer of attributes by 'descent' as wll as by other mechanisms. The analogy may not be perfect, but the prototypical idea of attributes passing from parental to filial generations must come from biology. In fact, I suspect the whole idea of relatedness among languages is by analogy from the biological notion of inheritance. (Although I'm conscious that Grimm predates Mendel.) And clearly the notion of strata in languages must have been a concept borrowed from geology. Systems may have similar organizations not because their constituents are relateable. The similarity in organization may come from the fact that the tasks are similar though the pieces are different. The history of human technology is often, e.g., analogized with natural selection, and the two processes often parallel one another. It should not be that hard to see how biology and linguistics might follow the same paths and processes in terms of 'genetics', though their subject matters are materially different. Regards, Steve Long From mclasutt at brigham.net Tue Feb 22 15:35:55 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 08:35:55 -0700 Subject: language and biology In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000211171019.00996820@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: > [Stanley Friesen wrote:] The point is that social change is another form > of biological process, it > is just not *genetic* change. Social change operates under the general > constraints and modes of biological processes, even though it does not > directly involve genetic factors. No it doesn't. One society can change it's entire structure virtually overnight to match another society. An organism may borrow (if your data are correct) a few genetic features from another organism in rare circumstances, but a blue-green algae cannot change to a bacteria overnight. Society can, however. The Pueblo culture of New Mexico is virtually identical from Pueblo to Pueblo, yet this culture is practiced by representatives of four totally unrelated language families. On the social level, there are radically different social and political systems between the Hopi and the Shoshoni even though they are related. Social change and biological change are NOT similar. Once again, social change, like linguistic change, can borrow from another society wholesale and biological change cannot. IF biologists are discovering a few instances where genes can be "borrowed", they are the exception rather than the rule. IF biologists discover that borrowing of genes is more common than presently accepted, then the correct statement is that biological change is similar to social or linguistic change, NOT the other way around. We staked out the scientific ground first. Biology, IF you are correct (which I don't accept yet), is only catching up. 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 JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 22 07:41:23 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 02:41:23 EST Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Re:=20Tocharian=20A=20w=E4s,=20B=20yasa?= Message-ID: >anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi writes: >1) What was the Proto-Tocharian form? (If it was something like *wVsV with >front vowels, it fits quite well with Proto-Samoyed *wesä. A loan Samoyed > >Tocharian is also geographically the most sensible alternative, if Tocharian >was connected with the Afansevo culture.) -- Tocharian A/B 'was' and 'yasa' from proto-Tocharian *wesa. >2) Is there any other plausible etymology for the Tocharian word? -- Proto-Tocharian *wesa from *haues (with metathesis) from PIE *haeus PIE *haeusom, 'gold' also producing Old Latin 'auron', Old Prussian 'ausis', Lithuanian 'auksas'. There's a possible Mycenaean Greek cognate, 'awos'. (The Classical Greek word for 'gold' is a loan from Akkadian, 'hurasu', 'gold', also found in Hittite. Attested in Mycenaean times as well -- 'kurusos') From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 22 07:50:09 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 02:50:09 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 2/22/00 1:30:33 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: <<-- yup, PIE.>> I wrote: <> JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: <> Well, I wasn't. I intentionally asked you that question and for a very good reason. Here's the part I wrote that you left out - <<2000 yrs from Myceanaean, Sanskrit and Latin back to what? PIE? Not likely. Because even if Mycenean, Sanskrit and Latin were as 'undifferentiated' as is claimed above, this group HARDLY REPRESENTS THE FULL RANGE OF DIFFERENCES that emerge out of the darkness of 4000 years, do they?>> (Caps mine.) This part you left out is crucial. Because it means that your 'leap off the page' test does not work on Hittite (@1500BC) or Thracian (@500BC). And although it may be convenient to brush them off, they will not go away. (We have full texts by the way in Thracian, but nothing "leaps off the page" to say the least.) The fact is all you accounted for with the "leaps off the page" criterion is some kind of proto-Mycenaean-Sanskrit-Latin. But you CAN'T logically use those three ONLY to get back to PIE. Otherwise your PIE is only the ancestor of some IE languages - which would be truly, as you say <> Here's the other section that was partly edited out: <> JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: <> No, you are changing the subject. The subject is PIE. And if Hittite is IE and happens to be attested before Sanskrit or Latin, then THAT IS THE SUBJECT. (And let's not make everything a special case that contradicts your claim that the first IE languages were undifferentiated.) Remember what YOU wrote when you started this? In a message dated 2/2/00 12:43:52 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> Well, the first encountered IE languages include Hittite, Luwian, Thracian - all before Latin. Here's your chance to account for why Mycenaean, Latin and Sanskrit can give you a date for PIE, but why somehow it is necessary to exclude the other first encountered IE languages - in fact the first two encountered IE languages. I mean you wouldn't be excluding them because they are DIFFERENTIATED ENOUGH to move your date way back - by whatever measure you are using - would you? JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> I replied: <<...do all these languages decline with only a change in the initial vowel... thus justifying a 2000 year separation between all of them.>> Let's get back to this proof you offered. Does Mycenaean decline 'fire' the same similar way as Latin and Sanskrit? Does Hittite? And how many extra years do you put on the fact that they don't? Or do you only count evidence of little differences and disregard evidence of big differences? JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> Well, it seems that Anatolian is in the picture when the evidence helps, but not when it doesn't. JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> Of course. And where exactly does it have it, by the way? Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 22 08:50:38 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 03:50:38 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: I wrote: <<2000yrs from modern Romance language back to Latin? Then 2000 yrs from Myceanaean, Sanskrit and Latin back to what? PIE? Not likely.>> In a message dated 2/22/00 2:44:46 AM, sarima at friesen.net wrote: <> I'd still like to see your catalogue of the specific differences between Mycenaean, Sanskrit and Latin. Then I'd like to see how you assign a date to those differences. Until then using "almost certainly" for 2000 years seems to be uncalled for. Quite uncalled for. No rational basis has been presented for any such claims of certainty about that date. sarima at friesen.net wrote: <> I think that is the other way around. The I-H hypothesis I believe has Hittite < PIE. In fact I believe there's still an open question whether Anatolian was the innovator or 'narrow PIE' was. Which means yes you would still have to account for the Anatolian differences in dating PIE, accepting the I-H hypothesis. I wrote: <<...Hittite should certainly add another 2000 years, wouldn't you say?>> sarima at friesen.net replied: <> Really, 500 years. Kind of Italian (1500AD) to Italian (2000AD) - except of course for the lack of gender in Hittite - and some other small matters like that. Nothing important. And I see that the rate of loss of "inherited IE words" also does not enter into the time equation. I've looked for objective measures of linguistic change in the books and I do believe that there have been serious efforts in this direction that may yield results in the future. And I do respect the considered judgment of historical linguists in these matters. I just don't believe we've had the benefit of such knowledge in this thread - not from the start of it. This "2000 years" separating Sanskrit, Latin and Mycenaean that's been repeated in these posts looks more and more like it has very little to do with linguistics and a lot to do with unsupported assertions about rate of differentiation. That time period may be true, but I've seen here nothing to support it. sarima at friesen.net wrote: <From what little is know of them, there is no real reason to suppose they are much more differentiated than Latin and Sanskrit.... If we had as few words of Modern English as we have of Thracian, I doubt we could tell it was an IE language at all!>> This is simply incorrect. We have texts in Thracian and the reason we cannot read them is because they are VERY highly differentiated from Latin and Sanskrit and every other known IE language. And it should also be pointed out that the notion that it took many years and much work to establish Hittite's relation to IE, despite the fact that many, many texts were found. There is no necessary correlation here. On the other hand, if early IE were as undifferented as being claimed here, many of these problems in discipherment logically should not have occurred. Regards, Steve Long From sonno3 at hotmail.com Tue Feb 22 17:28:56 2000 From: sonno3 at hotmail.com (Christopher Gwinn) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 12:28:56 -0500 Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >> the undecipherable Thracian, Albanian and Celtiberian should send >> your date of dispersal hurtling back to that magic 7000BC you've >> mentioned so frequently. > -- another bizzare statement. Would you care to elucidate why the existance > of Celtiberian should affect our datings? Particularly as we know virtually > nothing about it, or Thracian. I think you are overstating a bit on Celtiberian - we may not know as much about it as Gaulish, but we are far from knowing "virtually nothing about it" (and it is certainly not undecipherable!) In any case, we know Celtiberian was already being spoken in Spain in the 6th century BC, and that it shares many similarities with the Goidelic branch (PIE -Kw-=Qu/Ku/Cu, for example). Its vocabulary preserves some archaisms not found in Goidelic or Brythonic (Silbur "silver" next to regular Common Celtic word Arganto-) and its sentance structure was SOV From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Tue Feb 22 10:08:39 2000 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 11:08:39 +0100 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) In-Reply-To: <011b01bf761a$89716300$27d31b3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: >How would some of you feel if Renfrew's premise were altered to: >Nostratic spread through Europe with agriculture. >? Renfrew seems to be about to alter this premise himself, maybe (judging from his active role in organizing Nostratic conferences and the like), but it of course begs the question of the existence of Nostratic. It doesn't exist, so it didn't spread anywhere, less so through Europe, and least so with agriculture. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg home: Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-691332+ Georg at home.ivm.de work: http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/vtw/Georg/Georg.html From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Tue Feb 22 11:09:51 2000 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 12:09:51 +0100 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) In-Reply-To: <200002131008.p1267@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: > An easy accessible attempt on this topic is Mark Rosenfelder 'How likely > are chance resemblances between languages? in www.zompist.com/chance.html. > Though in the binomial formulas one faculty mark '!' is always set wrong*, > the results are correct. (*what shows that in one year nobody with minimal > mathematical competence really did read this article). > HJH There is a sizable body of literature on this topic, some with foul, some with fair mathematics, no doubt about this. What most of the books and article I've seen *don't* address, however, is the question how "resemblances" are to be defined in the first place. Your resemblance may not at all be mine, and the literature on macro-comparative efforts illustrates this amply. It is, however, the crucial question. What is more, mathematical approaches like these tend to treat language (always and only lexicon, to be sure, as if lexicon had *anything* to do with lg. classification, which it of course hasn't) as a static entity, ignoring what may be known about the history of individual items. They also ignore the range of psychological factors which increase iconicity in language, something which will always contribute to more "resemblances" being found than the calculation of probabilities seemed to allow, invariably followed by a loud "he:ureka" and startled incomprehension on discovering the linguistic community yawning. This is not against Rosenfelder, whose attempt I've not found easily accessible, mainly because the link above is dead. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg home: Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-691332+ Georg at home.ivm.de work: http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/vtw/Georg/Georg.html From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Feb 22 11:08:17 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 11:08:17 +0000 Subject: Rosenfelder Message-ID: Hans Holm writes: > An easy accessible attempt on this topic is Mark Rosenfelder 'How likely > are chance resemblances between languages? in www.zompist.com/chance.html. A small correction: the final element here should be ".htm", and not ".html". Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 22 20:20:20 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 15:20:20 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >proto-language at email.msn.com writes: >How would some of you feel if Renfrew's premise were altered to: Nostratic >spread through Europe with agriculture. >> -- I'd wonder about lexical influences from Sindarin Elvish. From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Tue Feb 22 11:37:49 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 11:37:49 GMT Subject: The law Message-ID: Did the speakers of common IE have any notion of "the law" as an institution? What was the IE word for "law", either as "the rules to be obeyed" (Latin {lex}), or as "the process of justice" (Latin {jus})? Each IE language that I know of seems to have a different word. My knowledge here is limited and I accept any correction. Doubled vowel = long. Greek w = digamma. - Anglo-Saxon {ae(w)}, compare Greek {ewaoo} = "I allow". - Old Norse {log} < {lagu}, c.f. {l-g-} = "lay, lie": < "that which is laid down"? - Latin {leg-}; the root also occurs as "choose" and "read". - Latin {jus} < *{jous-} : what cognates are there for that word? - Greek {dikee}: same root in Greek {deiknuumi} = "I indicate", Latin {dico} = "I say". - Greek {nomos}: same root in Greek = "I apportion". - Russian {zakon}. From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Feb 22 07:32:31 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 07:32:31 -0000 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: Dear Miguel and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" Sent: Monday, February 14, 2000 12:48 AM > JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >> -- *bergh. > *bherg^h >> There are derivatives in the Germanic language (eg., OHG burg, >> 'fort', or Gothic baurgs, 'city, town'. Homeric Greek (I think -- >> possible spelling error) burghos > That's probably "tower", a Greek substrate word > (so-called "Pelasgian", with Germanic-like *r. > ur, and > Germanic-like b > p, but only after Greek-like Grassmann's Law > *bhrgh > *brgh). Pokorny says that Latin burgus "watchtower" is > borrowed from Greek (but what about p-?). >> , and definitely Armenian burgn. > Wish it were so simple. The root *bherg^h- is regularly > reflected in Armenian as barjr "high" etc., so "tower", a > centum word if IE, does not appear to be native. Birgit (also > from *bherg^h-) Olsen points out that the same irregularity in > the exact same environment is also found in "potter's > wheel" besides darj- "to turn" (*dhrg^h-). There is also Slavic > bre^g- "shore", of course, but there without any satem variants. > To add the finishing touch to the confusion, it's necessary to > mention Urartian "palace, fort". Urartean (non-IE, > related to Hurrian) used to be spoken where Armenian is spoken > now. Into this mix, we might also consider Pokorny's 2. *bhreg^-, 'stand up stiffly', which I believe can be related to Egyptian b3H, 'phallus'. In the correspondences which I believe I have identified, Egyptian H (dotted h) corresponds to IE final -g(h) or g^h. 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 proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Feb 22 07:55:56 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 07:55:56 -0000 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: Dear Stanley and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stanley Friesen" Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2000 7:03 AM > At 10:11 AM 2/8/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> Compare the number of Ce-/Co-roots (e.g. in Pokorny) with the >> number of Ci-/Cu-roots. I guesstimate the difference is a factor >> 10 or so. > Certainly. But in my book, even a handful of such roots is enough to > establish i and u as PIE vowel phonemes. What I believe I have found is that IE /i/ and /u/ correspond to Semitic /y/ and /w/ whenever a cognate can be established (seems likely). >From this, I provisionally conclude that IE went through a stage in which it had one vowel (= Lehmann's SYLLABICITY), which we designate now as /e/, which later developed a conditioned variant /o/. Of course, this means that /a(:)/ was also not an independent part of the vowel system but only could occur in conjunction with a 'laryngeal'; e.g. IE *(H[2])abh-ro-, 'strong, powerful', should, I believe, be compared to Arabic Habba, 'love'. I believe the process through which this happened is roughly that Nostratic, which had phonemic /e,a,o/ came into areal contact which Caucasian languages that favored extreme vowel reduction, and transference of vocalic differences to glides: CE -> Cya; CO -> Cwa, which were subsequently lost when IE began utilizing root extensions for semantic differentiation. 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 rao.3 at osu.edu Tue Feb 22 15:06:32 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 10:06:32 -0500 Subject: *hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-? Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > Let me ask, does evidence of (*hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-?) > appear in any other IE languages? Yes. Lexicon der Indogermanischen Verbum lists h_2werg, `sich umdrehen, sich wenden' (quoting Latin uergere as the evidence for intransitive meaning, and Hittite for h_2 so that Greek e as due to assimilation), with finite verb forms in Sans (though the meaning changes to `turn away from' => avoid for the most part in Classical Sans), Greek and Latin, and a participle in Toch A. From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Feb 22 17:01:36 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 12:01:36 EST Subject: Buck on the WWWeb? Message-ID: As I read messages on the IE list, and piecemeal discussion of particular word families, it seems to me that one of the most useful things we could possibly have is a fully-updated version of something like Buck, but organized by etymon not by semantic meaning. This could be something like a dissertation project and more, not simply a scanning of already existent data. Pokorny is not easily usable in the fashion I have in mind, though I know its computerization has been mentioned. It uses a visual format in which one must read through a paragraph to find info, not as visually accessible as it could be, perhaps, it does not even make use of the vertical vs. horizontal dimensions of the page. That to me is now too old-fashioned, a waste through non-use of potential information-carrying display devices. Buck is much more accessible. Can the two be merged in some way? A recent dictionary of verb stems (citation not handy) is another source, and its publication is recent enough that a CD could perhaps be made available? Just consider the amount of evidence available to correspondents on this list. What if we had a simple listing of cognate roots in each of the languages, with some cross-reference notes such as that both /durgn/ and /borgn/ in Armenian share the non-satemization of the final /g/? (pardon if my memory for the spellings is not right; I'm referring to a message received today). Or what the meaning contrast might be in particular languages where two roots apear with related meanings, such as between reflexes of the /hurkis/ Hittite for 'wheel' and the *kwel- root? When such info is available (more of that kind is in Buck, sometimes). Attestations in the left column, for fast searching, comments to the right. It takes more paper, in printing, but is infinitely more usable, and does not take more storage on CD or on the web. Etc. We need some new tools, and creating them requires work. ***It also requires a very balanced individual to supervise, one who will neither try to prove how rigorous they are by excluding almost everything interesting or on the edges of knowledge, nor one who will include every possibility without distinguishing the kinds of support available, or not, for particular analyses.*** If there are two word-families which within themselves cohere quite clearly, but which pose some problems for linking the two together, then that should be overt and public, not hidden by either lumping them or splitting them. There *are* ways of noting possible links without having to take a final position on their validity or not, while still giving reasoning both for and against hypotheses. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Feb 22 18:20:36 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 13:20:36 EST Subject: "Related" debate unproductive? Message-ID: I want to be perfectly clear at the outset that "the point" of a discussion may be different for different participants, what I am trying to focus on here is what points have in fact been brought up, as distinct from the straw-man element of many messages, and which points, if we discuss them, are likely or not likely to be productive. The debate, now ongoing for months, about the term "related", seems to me to have been singularly unproductive. I agree with most of the posting by Bob Whiting today, but feel that it is not to the point, at least not to the important points where we might make progress (and I am not particularly singling out this posting). To too great an extent, it is a battle about words, not about content at all. And it is getting *v e r y* boring. There are probably a number of quite sane people among us who believe that the traditional meaning of (genetically) related is useful, (so all discussion of abolishing the use of the term "related" in that sense is not to *our* point at least, it seems only a red herring), and who are *not* discussing creoles or any other special cases of similar kinds (so discussion of creoles is not to *our* point at least, and contributes nothing new to the discussion we thought was ongoing), and who do not need a long textbook stating the obvious. Many of us I think are concerned with much more subtle and sophisticated problems. By considering primarily extreme cases where we probably all agree, we make no progress towards handing the difficult ones. ** I would note first that it is probably impossible in practice to avoid a mixture of ordinary language with technical usage. When Whiting says today in response to someone's >>Genetically (in your terms), English is equally related to both >>French and Italian. as follows: >They're not my terms; I didn't invent them -- they are standard >in historical linguistics textbooks. But I agree with the >premise -- except that I wouldn't say "equally related"; I would >say "related at the same level." I of course agree. Perhaps our common reluctance to use the phrase "equally related" here is that it has a portion of its ordinary-language meaning, and we know clearly English *is* especially closely related to French, as *all* linguists recognize. (English loans from Hindi or Chinese or Afrikaans or whatever, are also not really to the point, I think, because such extreme cases were not mentioned by those wishing to question an overly narrow sense of "relationship". So bringing *them* up is at least not to the point of what I believe many of us are concerned with, such would also be red herrings.) ** It is perhaps my personal interest and bias, but the problem that remains as a subtle and sophisticated one, and which has clearly *not* been resolved by previous scholarship, is the handling of trees vs. dialect areas, and the implications of the following paragraph, which I did not write, and which was referred to by Whiting today: >(b) The idea that there must be a single language progenitor of >daughter languages is widely disputed. Some people accept the >idea that a collection of interrelated languages might never have >had a single ancestor, but as far back as you care to go were >simply a collection of inter-related languages. The >language/dialect issue comes up here. We talk of IE "dialects" >within PIE, but this is simply terminology. The point is that >there is no need whatever for there to have been a single unified >PIE language. The example Whiting mentions of the Altaic "family" (or perhaps not a family, if long contact and mutual influences and massive borrowings were involved) is closer to a propos to the view expressed by the author of the above paragraph, it seems to me. The possibility that PIE was some close complex of languages which exchanged even morphology, but which retained traces of various distinct substrates or whatever one wishes to discuss, is a real possibility. Not necessarily to a great degree, not necessarily as much as Altaic, but to some degree, it is quite possible and an entirely reasonable hypothesis consistent with *traditional* views of historical linguistics. Merely one that is mostly not discussed, rightly or wrongly. This possibility, which may exist for many proto-languages, *does* have practical, as opposed to purely terminological, implications. To recognize that this is a possible situation for a proto-language, we must handle vocabulary and morphological distributions across *portions* of the dialect network of any proto-language in *at least* the frameworks of the following 1) simple family tree, innovations on one branch, replacement on one branch, etc. branch then dividing. 2) wave spread of items across a part of a dialect network, which may have no relation to the family-tree structure 3) persistence as areal dialect-net isoglosses of what were substrate inheritances in only part of the territory of an eventual proto-language, the substrate inheritances in another part of that territory being from a different language or languages. When substrates are strong, and morphology can spread, the difference between the various kinds of "inheritance" can become quite blurred. 4) proto-languages need not (not even by the narrow definition of "genetically related") be completely uniform, they need not be indivisible points with no internal dimensions Living languages do not fit such a simple model, so what business do we have insisting that dead languages did? That would make them theoretical constructs, useful primarily for making it easier for us to think about them, so artificially simplified. In limiting special cases, sure, when a single family or village migrated, and became the nucleus of a new language family. But those are limiting special cases, they do not define a narrow total range of possibilities which historical and comparative linguistics should restrict itself intellectually to being able to deal with. 5) Any proto-language need not be pure, it may share substrate inheritances from quite a number of substrates, substrates which either are known as separate language families, or which have become extinct as independent languages, or in an intermediate situation, which may appear as substrates also for some other language or language family. It may be possible to reconstruct part of the vocabulary even of a language or family which survives *only* as substrates to two or more other languages or language families, if we can determine that the substrates within each of those latter are indeed substrates, rather than being later innovations in some area which crosses language boundaries, or later loans from part of the area of one language or family to part of the area of another language or family. So let us sharpen our existing tools, develop new tools, avoid oversimplifications, *and* recognize the inherited wisdom of comparative and historical-reconstructive linguistics. There is absolutely no reason we should need to choose between these as if they were mutually exclusive alternatives. And let us treat the contributions of others by always trying to find the *most* reasonable view of them, or the part of them which we believe we can make the most productive contributions to, rather than spending most of our words trying to defeat them. There is absolutely no reason to throw out *any* of the tools of comparative-historical linguistics. There *is* reason to sharpen those tools and to add more tools and to add less simplistic formats for recording results of using those tools. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Feb 15 19:35:07 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 14:35:07 EST Subject: Long monomorphemic Basque words Message-ID: Trask writes: > I am only interested in monomorphemic words, and >monomorphemic words tend to be short, while long words tend to be >polymorphemic, in Basque as in all the languages I know anything about. >Consequently, Lloyd's objection could only constitute a problem for me >in the following scenario: > Pre-Basque had lots of long monomorphemic words as well as short > ones, but, for some reason, the long monomorphemic words have been > generally lost from the language, while the short ones have > preferentially survived. >And I don't see this as a plausible scenario. When reworded slightly, I find it highly plausible indeed. It is not that the long monomorphemic words have been generally lost, it is that Trask's criteria exclude them from his considering them as early Basque (this has been discussed in many other messages, one a cumulation of 9 ways in which his criteria might usefully be modified). It is one respect in which the totality of Trask's criteria embody a bias against certain vocabulary not justified by careful linguistic methodology. Under Larry Trask's criteria for inclusion in his data set, some polysyllabic monomorphemic words, a set which would generally include all but the most common expressives, are disproportionately disfavored for written records because of their meanings. Although "txitxi" 'chick' is perhaps recorded early (Trask did not say otherwise in his message dealing with it), Trask says it sticks out a mile. I assume he means the two voiceless stops, and the voiceless stop initial. Words for 'butterfly' probably were also not recorded early, among many others. Some of those for 'butterfly' are monomorphemic, at least under the sensible understanding that the so-called reduplication is not a separate morpheme unless some word exists with it removed, rather the reduplication is a part of the shape of the root of a number of expressive words. Half of a reduplicated form is not a functioning morpheme in such cases. Trask has argued that the endings of some of these words, such as /-leta/ etc. are not suffixes, not analyzable as productive Basque morphemes. If so, the forms are monomorphemic. I do not in this message deal with the question whether the forms in question are reconstructible back to early Basque, that is a different question from whether they are monomorphemic. Lloyd From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Tue Feb 22 07:06:16 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 09:06:16 +0200 Subject: Basque In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Larry Trask wrote: > The big problem here is the seemingly great difficulty of borrowing verbs. > Edith Moravcsik, in her universals of borrowing, goes so far as to declare > that verbs cannot be borrowed at all. This is probably going too far -- > after all, English did borrow verbs from Norman French (didn't it?). > But, as a rule, when verbs are borrowed at all, they are borrowed only as > non-finite forms -- participles or verbal nouns -- which are then inflected > periphrastically in the borrowing language, with finite auxiliaries carrying > all tense, agreement, and other verbal categories. > This is how Basque borrowed verbs from Latin, and how it borrows verbs from > Romance. It is how Turkish borrowed verbs from Arabic and Persian, and how > it borrows verbs from French and English today. It is how Old Japanese > borrowed verbs from Chinese, and how modern Japanese borrows verbs from > English. This may be true in the cases you mention above, but the generalization is incorrect. To name just one counterexample: Saami has a huge amount of verbs borrowed from both Finnish and Scandinavian, and most of these are quite recent borrowings. They are without exception inflected according to the normal Saami inflectional paradigm. This even holds for new borrowings: a borrowed verb root that has not even been phonologically nativized gets Saami mood, tense, number and person suffixes attached to it quite regularly. Ante Aikio From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Feb 22 10:12:32 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 10:12:32 +0000 Subject: Basque Message-ID: Roz Frank writes: > Moreover in the case of , and other Class I non-finite > verbs, there is another factor that needs to be taken into consideration, > although what weight it should be given when modeling the time depth of the > artifact is not clear. I refer to the fact that Basque is a suffixing > language. There is no trace of prefixing in the language except in the case > of Class I verbs (I'm excluding a few lexical calques that have entered the > language relatively recently and which are obviously based on Romance > formations). OK. The Basque of the historical period does indeed exhibit a few word- forming prefixes which are borrowed from, or calqued on, Romance. To these no antiquity can be imputed. Otherwise, the language has the following prefixes. Personal-agreement prefixes in finite verb-forms. These are all related in form to the corresponding free pronouns, and they must surely result from the incorporation of pronouns into the verb at some ancient date. Such prefixes exist only for the first two persons, since Basque has no third-person pronouns. Tense-mood prefixes in finite verb-forms. Though the original functions of these things are still moderately clear, their origin is completely unknown. Curiously, they are overtly present only when no personal- agreement prefix is present. The prefix * in all non-finite forms of ancient verbs based on verbal roots (but not in ancient verbs derived from nominal roots). The original function of this is unknown, though in my 1990 TPhS paper I presented a case that it was a nominalizing prefix. I think my evidence is moderately persuasive, but probably not strong enough to be unanswerable. The ancient causative prefix <-ra->, which precedes the verbal root it is added to but follows * in non-finite forms and all other prefixes in finite forms. Example: 'do'; 'make (somebody) do'. The prefix *, which derives negative-polarity indefinites from interrogatives. Example: 'what?'; 'anything'. A curious apparent prefix <-i->, which sometimes surfaces to the left of the verbal root in finite verb-forms marked for indirect-object agreement. Example: for usual 'I bring it to him'. Several other prefixes attached to finite verb-forms: 'if', affirmative (whose prefixal status is debatable), (hard to translate), optative (archaic). And that, I think, is it. The personal prefixes are easy to explain, and one or two of the others are perhaps not really prefixes at all. But the rest are rather mysterious. It is far from clear what these prefixes are doing at all in a language which is otherwise strictly (and luxuriantly) suffixing. It may be that we are looking at here at the fossilized relics of a very ancient period when Basque was typologically different. But who knows? > Hence, the root-stem <-bil-> in or that of <-karr-> in > is encountered wrapped up in material that has every sign of > belonging to the most archaic strata that can be detected in the > morphosyntactic structure of the linguistic system of Euskera. We are > talking about typological issues where the artifact's morphosyntactic > packaging provides the researcher with a certain type of information that > in turn permits a tentative assignment of the artifact to a given layer, to > a given morphosyntactic strata: the artifact ends up being situated at a > certain level because of the way that the morphosyntactic data. lends > itself to typological stratification. Indeed. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From Helmut.Birkhan at mailbox.univie.ac.at Tue Feb 22 08:09:32 2000 From: Helmut.Birkhan at mailbox.univie.ac.at (o. Prof. Dr. Helmut Birkhan) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 09:09:32 +0100 Subject: Basque * 'round' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] > From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal > Date sent: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 15:38:15 +0100 > Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >> Any good Celtic etymon for German Auto? > Well, it is well known that German au < *u:, and Celtic *p > 0, > so that looks very much like a form derived from an unattested > Celtic *pu:to- "stinking" (the contraption was apparently named > by the La T`ene Celts after its typical exhaust products). Lieber Richy, diese Etymologie ist durch die seit unserer Kindheit/Jugend üblichen FUT/AUTO-Inschriften eigentlich schon vorweggenommen worden. Helmy _______________________________ Prof. Helmut Birkhan Institut für Germanistik der Universität Wien Dr. Karl Lueger Ring 1 A-1010 Wien ÖSTERREICH iemehl: Helmut.Birkhan at univie.ac.at Tel.: + 43 - 1 - 4277 / 421 41 From jer at cphling.dk Wed Feb 23 16:33:50 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 17:33:50 +0100 Subject: "Upper limit" of PIE In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000215194427.009d2550@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Stanley Friesen wrote: > [...] [W]e can > place a fairly secure *upper* *limit* on how old the divergence of PIE is. > That upper limit is about 4500 BC. > [...] Help me, I'm dumb and ignorant, what is up and down in archaeological dating? Does the quoted statement mean that PIE split up "no later than" 4500 BC, or does it mean "no earlier than" 4500 BC? Is the present moment the low or the high end of the scale? This is quite honestly meant as no criticism, but perhaps there are other language-oriented IE-ists who have difficulties following an argument that points up and down when it means before and after (in this order or the reverse). Will anyone stoop to informing me (us) on this important point? Jens From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 22 20:28:55 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 21:28:55 +0100 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000214221552.009dce60@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: Stanley Friesen wrote: >At 02:30 PM 2/8/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >>>This is what you'd expect if proto-Indo-European speakers invented the >>>wheel, by the way -- otherwise there should be at least one loan-word for >>>"wheel", one that isn't resolvable into a PIE root. >>Wait a minute. PIE-speakers invented the wheel? >Well, it is certainly a serious possibility. The earliest wheels (outside >of toys) are found at times and places consistent with this conclusion. Still, the origin of the wheel is usually thought to be in Mesopotamia (e.g. Sharrett). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 22 20:56:33 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 15:56:33 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: I wrote: >> Do the similarities between Latin and Hittite 'leap off the page" as you >> say? (Please recall how long it took for relationship to even be detected.) In a message dated 2/22/00 3:08:16 AM, Rich Alderson replied: >Knudtson published the Tell-el-Amarna letters in 1902, as I remember, and put >forth the claim that Hittite was Indo-European at that time. Hrozny' demon- >strated the IE-ness of Hittite in his 1917 monograph to the satisfaction of >the general IEist populace. How long did you think it took? Did it take 15 years for the similarities to "leap off the page?" That is still rather slow leaping. (And it appears that laryngeals are still more hesitant about any such acrobatics.) But more importantly I must point out that mere identification of IE-ness is NOT what S. M. Stirling was talking about or what I was responding to. The "leap off the page" quote was made to tell us just how "undifferentiated" Sanskrit, Latin and Mycenaean are supposed to be. 98 years after Knudtson I do not believe that the similarities between Latin and Hittite do much leaping at all, even to expert Hittite scholars. I'm on the road now, but I hope to grab a random Hittite text and post it and ask specifically how often these striking similarities with Latin show up. I wrote: >> And what does Hittite (for starters) add to the total 'differentiation' >> between the first attested PIE languages? If 2000 years separates Latin >> and Sanskrit, Hittite should certainly add another 2000 years, wouldn't you >> say? Rich Alderson replied: >Absolutely not. Hittite looks IE enough that I'd say less than 1000 years, >maybe less than 500, separate it from the Neogrammarian core--which was >always too close to the classical languages and did not pay enough attention >to the outliers. I respect your judgment on this. But the issue here is really the certainty that can be attached to any such dating. What are the chances that the gap between Hittite and Classic IE languages is actually much older? There is the tail-end of a thread called "How weird is Hittite? Not weird enough :)" on this list's archive and I believe I have some of the pre-archive posts stashed somewhere back on my system. One can read those messages and easily conclude that, while Hittite is not weird enough to be excluded from IE, it certainly is 'weird' enough to at least reasonably support much more than 500 years of separation time. The morphological and syntactical differences mentioned alone seem to suggest not certainty, but problems that still need to be worked out before any hard conclusions about dating can be drawn. As far as the lexical?/phonological? differentiation between Hittite and the "Neogrammarian core" (pre-laryngeal?), this turns into an honest question about how one measures such things. Perhaps a way of making this understandable is to ask the following: If Hittite were separated from Sanskrit-Latin-Mycenaean by an additional 2000 years, how would the comparison be different than it is now? What would one expect in the comparison to change if in fact Hittite separated 1500 or 1000 years earlier? If you wanted to see what Hittite would have been like if its ancestor were a distinct language in 6000-5500BC, how would it reconstruct differently? Does the degree of variance in the reconstructed forms become greater in some way? Do the numbers of retentions or innovations increase? What changes would one expect to reflect the greater effects of a longer time period? If I have been successful in posing this question understandably, then one should see the value in considering what the reconstructed proto-Hittite of 6000-5500BC would look like. What would it be missing? What would it have lost? What additional signs of age should we expect? This would give us a way of saying 'Hittite texts would need to look like this if proto-Hittite indeed separated from PIE about 7500 years ago.' And that would seem to me to be of great value. >> JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >> <> Nom. sing. agnis ignis >> acc. sing. agnim ignem >> dative agnibhyas ignibus I wrote: >> Or do all these languages decline with only a change in the initial >> vowel and do they all have the same name for their principle god - thus >> justifying a 2000 year separation between all of them. Rich Alderson replied: >Not sure what you mean to say by "only a change in the initial vowel": In >Indo-Iranian, PIE *e *o *a all > PII *a, while in Latin e > i/_[+nasal stop]. >Knowing that, we can take one look at the words for "fire" in these two >languages and *immediately*, without further ado, see them for the cognates >they are. >On the other hand, there were two words for "fire", the active *egni- and the >inactive/neuter *pur-, and the different dialects reflect different choices. Precisely. Go back to the original post and you'll see that agnis/ignis was being used to selectively support the 2000 year separation between those early IE languages. My point that this was very convenient for Latin and Sanskrit to be compared this way. And equally inconvenient not to find anything like the same similarity in either Greek or Hittite. If agnis/ignis prove something about the degree of differentiation over time, then what does the absence of agnis/ignis in other early IE languages prove about time and differentiation? "Different dialects reflecting different choices" would suggest that some time was involved in those processes too. I did not use this singular example. I simply point out that it does not support the premise it was meant to support - which was the closeness of not just two languages - but of all early IE languages. (As a matter of fact, I'm surprised that the closeness between agnis/ignis in Sanskrit and Latin does not suggest a much more recent date of commonality for those words by themselves, without regard to the rest of those two languages. If all the words in Latin and Sanskrit matched like this, you could argue 50 years separated the two languages. Lehmann tells me that Sjoberg and Sjoberg showed why words in south Asia like 'sun' should be eliminated from the "glottochronological core" precisely because they reflected very early and widely borrowed religious vocabulary. Forgive me for asking whether agnis/ignis might not fall into the same category.) Regards, Steve Long From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 22 20:27:19 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 21:27:19 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <004101bf78b2$818126e0$a2a701d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: "petegray" wrote: >> Compare the number of Ce-/Co-roots (e.g. in Pokorny) with the >> number of Ci-/Cu-roots. I guesstimate the difference is a factor >> 10 or so. >(a) Bird offers a summary of Pokorny's roots, identifying the core elements, >and ignoring the variety of extensions. He ends up with 2050 such roots. >Of these exactly 775 have neither e nor e: anywhere. 38%. Is that including a(:) and o(:)? >The number of CeC >roots (i.e. with no resonant) is 548. >(b) How are you treating roots which show CeRC / CRC ablaut? Benveniste treats them as CeRC roots. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From alderson at netcom.com Tue Feb 22 23:35:54 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 15:35:54 -0800 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000214230249.009d1ca0@mf.mailbank.com> (message from Stanley Friesen on Mon, 14 Feb 2000 23:03:48 -0800) Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Feb 2000, Stanley Friesen (sarima at friesen.net) wrote: > At 10:11 AM 2/8/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> Compare the number of Ce-/Co-roots (e.g. in Pokorny) with the number of >> Ci-/Cu-roots. I guesstimate the difference is a factor 10 or so. > Certainly. But in my book, even a handful of such roots is enough to > establish i and u as PIE vowel phonemes. Of course, there is no question of the phonemicity of *i and *u, which has nothing to do with their occurrence in roots. Benveniste's root theory is very specific: *All* roots are of the form C1VC2, where the V is the apophonic *e/o vowel, and C1 and C2 have some co-occurrence restrictions: 1. C1 may not be identical to C2. 2. C1 and C2 may not both be "voiced plain" (*b *d *g *g{^w}). 3. If either C1 or C2 is "voiceless" (*p *t *k *k{^w}), the other may not be "voiced aspirated" (*bh *dh *gh *g{^w}h). Benveniste's theory treats *i and *u as conditioned variants of *y and *w, only occurring on the surface when *e/o is not present for accentual reasons. The real problem is that there are occurrences of *i and *u which do not ever vary with *y and *w, so they must be phonemic, and the interchange is no longer phonetically or phonemically automatic. Rich Alderson From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 22 20:31:59 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 15:31:59 EST Subject: Horses Message-ID: In a message dated 2/22/2000 4:00:34 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Armenian also has a word for horse, 'es' Did something change while I wasn't looking? I thought > was ass. S. Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Feb 23 08:22:04 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 03:22:04 EST Subject: Domesticating the Horse Message-ID: I wrote: >>It indicates that the horse would be an rather unlikely candidate for a >>dating of PIE unity in the Ukraine later than 4000BC. In a message dated 2/22/2000 10:20:29 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- domestic horse =/= wild horse. The linguistics seems quite against you here, I think. No word for 'the wild horse' in early IE or *PIE as far as I can tell. To PIEians wild and tame seemed to be one and the same. Colin P. Groves suggests that there's very good evidence that the possibly ancestral wild 'tarpan' of eastern Europe and possibly even an ancestral wild Equus ferus were still frequently encountered in Roman times, but those wild horses apparently were given no distinctive name - except to be called 'wild' horses. (OED says 'tarpan' is a Khirgiz Tartar name.) And of course at the time of first domestication there would hardly be a reason to distinguish between the two, especially since they were both used for food. And if as has been suggested *ekwos is from *ok os, speedy, no distinction there. Wild horses are speedy too. (Cf. early L. , tamed) I wrote: >>And of course the evidence to date is that livestock domestication >>accompanied the rest of agriculture into the Ukraine at 4500BC or earlier. JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: >-- but not the domestic horse. That was not part of the original Near >Eastern 'package' and the domestic horse is intrusive in the original areas >of Eurasian agriculture. But dirt farming and animal domestication enter the Ukraine, care of the Tripolye (read Renfrew's narrow PIEians), just around 4750BC calibrated (Dolukanov 1996). Dereivka, the best-known Sredni Stog settlement (first dating at 4570BC calibrated) will have evidence of domesticated animals possibly predating evidence of early true horses fairly early on (by 4400BC?) This is no surprise since the most western Sredni Stog settlements are about a hundred miles from the most eastern remains of Tripolye. It is not hard to see how Sredni Stog culture might have learned domestication and livestock breeding from Tripolye and applied it to the animal it had a wealth of - the horse. Needless to say, we have evidence of people eating horses in the middle Ukraine for 7000 years BEFORE Tripolye enters the scene, but we only have evidence of horse domestication AFTER - rather soon after - Tripolye enters the scene, clearly carrying the domestication process and breeding know-how with it. JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: >there is no such thing as "domestication technology". There are only >animals which have been domesticated. Ooh, don't tell the biotechnologists that. As a matter of fact, I believe Karl Ereky when he coined the word back in 1919 cites animal domestication as one of the original biotechnologies. Gordon Childe would also disagree with you (Man Makes Himself 1936) where he specifically uses 'technology' to apply to domestication. Not to quibble about the word 'technology'. But the statement 'there are only animals that have been domesticated' couldn't be farther off the mark. F ew if any species of thoroughly domesticated animal we know (not even the cat) have not undergone extensive changes through breeding and in morphology. And that is precisely how we can identify domesticated animals in ancient remains. If there were domesticated aurochs or domesticated equus ferus, we have no way of telling them from wild ones in the bone middens. And our very best guess is that neither aurochs or tarpans were domesticatible in a single generation. Or maybe at all. So if you object to the term 'technology', that's fine. But 'domestication' as a term of art involves more than taming a squirrel or a circus bear. It involves well-managed techniques in handling, breeding and husbandry that had to be developed and learned and transfered across generations. JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Do you mean the _idea_ of domestication? No, that is apparent in the dog. But cattle and horse breeding are a different matter. Nowadays, biotechnologists are talking about expanding the "biodiversity" of our livestock by gene manipulation, specifically because ordinary attempts at 'domesticating' certain kinds of wild fowl, e.g., have been totally unsuccessful. Domestication is not just an idea, or taming a single individual animal. Domestication is a managed change in genotype that must have taken a lot of work and a lot of nerve (aurochs were much bigger and meaner than cows). IN CONCLUSION: No distinction I know of between wild and domesticated horses in early IE. (Ready to be corrected.) Domestication of the horse was quite possibly the result of domestication and breeding know-how coming from the Danube area about 4500BC. I stand by my statement: >>It indicates that the horse would be an rather unlikely candidate for a >>dating of PIE unity in the Ukraine later than 4000BC. I may be wrong of course, but that's how the evidence just seems to lean. Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 22 20:32:12 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 15:32:12 EST Subject: brahmin/flamen Message-ID: >maxdashu at LanMinds.Com writes: >I read recently that this correspondence has been challenged, although it >looks reasonable. Anyone know about the current consensus on it? -- as far as I know it's regarded as doubtful. brahmin/flamen (and Old Persian 'brazman' etc.) would require a PIE form something like *bhlaghmen, and there's no evident reflex of PIE *gh in the Latin form From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 22 20:37:06 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 15:37:06 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >"wolf" = "outlaw", I'd like an explanation>> -- well, PIE for 'wolf' is *wlkwos. It's been suggested that this is a normalization of an adjective, *ulkwos 'dangerous'; ie., Hittite walkuwa 'dangerous', and Sanskrit 'avrka', 'not wild'. In Anatolian, *wlkwos gives 'lion', which also suggests that the meaning of 'wolf' is a semantic narrowing of an original 'the dangerous one'. I should have been more precise; perils of working from memory. From inakistand at yucom.be Wed Feb 23 17:08:59 2000 From: inakistand at yucom.be (jose.perez3) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 18:08:59 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >>>This would be due to avoidance. Reproductive body parts and elimination >>>functions are generally subject to very high degrees of euphemism, >> >>-- yup. The same with objects which are the subject of fear and avoidance -- >>"wolf" and "bear", for instance. ("The Outlaw" and "The Brown One", >>respectively). >"wolf" = "outlaw", I'd like an explanation I reckon he wasn't thinking of E. "wolf" or Sw. "ulv" but of its synonym "varg" (the same in Norw) < ON "vargr" which is related to OHG "warg" (villain, criminal). From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 22 20:36:16 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 21:36:16 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Adam Hyllested wrote: >The development *-eH3- > *-oH3- took place already in PIE, and I find it >very unlikely that a PIE *-oYw- should show up as *-i- in Uralic. Of >course the borrowing could have taken place at the time of >Pre-Proto-Indo-European, i.e. before the "colouring" of *eH3 to *oH3. But >the word is also found outside Uralic; it appears in Yukaghir as neve, nim> and in Chuvan as . An Indo-Uralo-Yukaghir >reconstruction *(n)newme- seems much more probable. >Critics would point out that the PIE word is formed by adding a >derivational suffix *-men. First of all, I don't see why a stem ending in >*-me shouldn't analogically add an *-n, if nouns are productively formed >with a suffix *-men. Secondly, the Uralic reconstruction *-a: corresponds >perfectly to the IE vocalic *-n (*-e doesn't). So if the IE suffix isn't >analogical, the Indo-Uralic form must be reconstructed as *(n)newmn-. But what about the laryngeals? They can't have sprung out of thin air in the Indo-European part of Indo-Uralic. If this word is a cognate, we should at least reconstruct something like *(H)neGumn-, for some value of H and G. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From alderson at netcom.com Wed Feb 23 00:27:27 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 16:27:27 -0800 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: (message from Adam Hyllested on Tue, 15 Feb 2000 00:04:10 +0100 (MET)) Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Adam Hyllested (adahyl at cphling.dk) wrote: > The reconstruction for (Pre-)Proto-Slavic *inmen is rather zero grade of > *H1neH3mn, i.e. *H1nH3men-. The initial laryngeal *must* be *H3, given the evidence of the Greek prothetic vowel in _onoma_. There is no way for *H1 (the "e-colouring laryngeal") to yield an initial /o/ in Greek. Rich Alderson From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Wed Feb 23 11:59:42 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 13:59:42 +0200 Subject: PU *nimi / PIE *HneH3men- (was: Re: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Adam Hyllested wrote: [I wrote:] >> Actually, the lack of reflex of medial *h3 [in Proto-Uralic *nimi 'name'] is >> a bit problematic. One would expect borrowing from IE *Hneh3men- to give PU >> *nexmi / *nixmi. (snip) [Adam Hyllested relpied:] > Actually, the laryngeals should be no problem for U *nime-/*nima:- as an > IE loanword. (snip) > In protetic position before consonant, laryngeals are usually > reconstructed as their consonantal variants. But the material from Uralic > (and other language families) generally tend to speak against > this, no matter whether you believe the look-alikes to be loans or > cognates. So we should perhaps rather reconstruct a *@1neH3mn, > phonetically realized as *nnoYwmn (read Y as gamma here; the consonantal > variant of *H3 was probably phonetically realized as a voiced, labio-velar > fricative *Yw). But if you reconstruct *H3 phonetically as *[Yw], this should give PU *x (which was phonetically most probably *[Y]). One can speculate that PU *xm was perhaps phonotactically excluded, since there is no evidence of clusters consisting of *x and a nasal. But still, one would expect that *H3 was substituted with something (e.g. *w?) > The development *-eH3- > *-oH3- took place already in PIE, and I find it > very unlikely that a PIE *-oYw- should show up as *-i- in Uralic. Of > course the borrowing could have taken place at the time of > Pre-Proto-Indo-European, i.e. before the "colouring" of *eH3 to *oH3. IE *o > PU *i would indeed be impossible. If PU *nimi is a loan, it is either Pre-IE, or else it must derive from the zero grade - *(H)n(H3)men- > PU *nimi- is phonetically sensible, given Uralic phonotaxis, which requires roots to be of shape *(C)V(C)CV-. > But > the word is also found outside Uralic; it appears in Yukaghir as neve, nim> and in Chuvan as . An Indo-Uralo-Yukaghir > reconstruction *(n)newme- seems much more probable. It seems ad hoc to me, since no conclusive evidence of a genetic relationship between these language families has been presented. But it seems likely that at least the Yukaghir item is not a chance correspondence. (Perhaps a loan U > Yukaghir? Other such borrowings have been pointed out.) > Critics would point out that the PIE word is formed by adding a > derivational suffix *-men. First of all, I don't see why a stem ending in > *-me shouldn't analogically add an *-n, if nouns are productively formed > with a suffix *-men. Secondly, the Uralic reconstruction *-a: corresponds > perfectly to the IE vocalic *-n (*-e doesn't). But you can't reconstruct PU *-ä for this item: the reconstruction must be *nimi (= traditional *nime). Second syllable *i gives regularly Finnish -i : -e-, Saami -a and Mordvin and Proto-Samoyed zero. Thus, PU *nimi > Finnish nimi : (oblique stem) nime-, Saami namma, Mordvin (dissim.) l´em, Proto-Samoyed *nim. There is no evidence for 2nd syllable *ä here: it would have been retained in Finnish and Samoyed, and changed to -i in Saami and -e in (Erzya) Mordvin. Regards, Ante Aikio From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 22 20:40:42 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 15:40:42 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: In a message dated 2/22/00 12:21:34 PM Mountain Standard Time, petegray at btinternet.com writes: << Is there ever a "single, unified" language? >> -- for all practical purposes, yes. Eg., English. Certainly there are dialects within English, but so what? As long as intercommunication remains intense, the dialect divergences don't become separate languages. From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 22 20:41:05 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 21:41:05 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <003d01bf78b2$7def2680$a2a701d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: "petegray" wrote: >Miguel said: >>Now define "single" and "unified". >If anything, this reinforces my point. The assumption that genetically >related languages must by definition go back to a single ancestor >over-simplifies the realities of language. Is there ever a "single, >unified" language? No. The "genetic" model is a simplification, of course. Thankfully, it works well enough in most cases (just like the (over)simplification "species" [only real twins/x-plets have exactly the same DNA] works well enough in biology, in most cases). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Wed Feb 23 07:53:39 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 09:53:39 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <003e01bf78b2$7eda22c0$a2a701d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, petegray wrote: (snip) > I mean that creolisation / language mixing or whatever you call it provides > us with an example of a language which goes back to two ancestors, not one. A creole does not "go back" to any ancestor at all in the same sense that a non-creole does, because there is no structural continuity between a creole and its lexical source languages (= "ancestors"). The relationship between a creole and its "ancestors" is different from the realtionship between a non-creole and its single genetic ancestor ("relationship" being used here in its normal sense and not as a technical term of historical linguistics; in linguistic terms, a creole has no relationships). - Ante Aikio From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Wed Feb 23 08:23:54 2000 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 09:23:54 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >-- it isn't a coincidence that morphological studies were commenced _after_ >the lexical comparisons (and simple comparisons like the declension of the >noun) became widely known. >There had to be a problem, before there could be solutions. "These >resemblances are too close for chance" was the fundamental breakthrough; then >came detailed examination, and the emergence of comparative linguistics as we >know it. >Likewise, when doing a "rough cut" on a new language, lexical comparison is >still used. Only purists get upset over this. Though I don't think it to be really objectionable to be a purist of sorts, I wouldn't really describe myself as one. I don't get upset when a "rough cut" on unknown languages is started by looking at the lexicon. I've done this myself. But what does get me down a bit, however, when this "rough cut" is presented as the whole story, for which I have a bulky (and pricey) collection of witnesses on my bookshelf. "These resemblances are too close for chance" is never a breakthrough to the establishment of relatedness. It may be the breakthrough to knowing that something happened here, and this something may also be areal convergence. The failure to see this is haunting, e.g., comparative Altaic studies ever since the days of Schott (who pinned down "resemblances to close for chance", for that matter). If such an observation, which may well serve as a first indicator that a problem is there, which awaits some kind of solution, I'm with you here, is taken for a "breakthrough", then we all should re-read Ritter v. Xylander's 1837 "Sprachgeschlecht der Titanen", which argues for Manchu being Greek on the basis of hundreds of vocabulary resemblances. Yes, of course they lack systematicity of any kind, and semantics is getting wild at the knight's hands, but such things do get published even today, which is the result of allowing lexical "resemblances" as "fundamental breakthroughs". So, as we shouldn't take first suspicions with fundamental breakthroughs when we try our luck on language classification ourselves, we shouldn't do it when writing it's history. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg home: Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-691332+ Georg at home.ivm.de work: http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/vtw/Georg/Georg.html From edsel at glo.be Wed Feb 23 12:07:53 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 13:07:53 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Whiting" Sent: Monday, February 14, 2000 9:11 PM [snip] > Yes, I've even heard it suggested that IE was a creole, but I > don't think that such theories have many adherents (doesn't mean > that they are wrong, just unlikely). But creoles are a different > animal and one that is not yet well understood despite intensive > study. I think that the mainstream view is something like the > following: > Creoles develop from pidgins; pidgins are not natural > languages (have no native speakers), but auxillary languages > used for communication between speakers of different > (usually typologically widely divergent) languages, intended > for limited purposes such as trade; pidgins have limited > lexicons and minimal morphology and syntax (essentially they > are mini isolating, bare-bones, no-frills languages); > pidgins are often (but not necessarily) based on one > language (usually the socially dominant one) but with some > elements taken from other language(s); pidgins often die out > when the need for communication between the groups ceases or > with the development of bilingualism or the assimilation of > one of the language groups into the other. > Creoles arise when a pidgin becomes the mother tongue of a > group of speakers (presumably the children of a group that > communicates primarily in pidgin hear only the pidgin and > begin expanding it to provide some of the syntactic features > that have been stripped from the original language(s) to > create the pidgin); this expanded pidgin becomes the native > language of the next generation and continues to expand to > provide all the syntactic features that are necessary to > normal communication; the creole is once again a natural > language. > Pidgins and creoles are thus two stages of a single process. > Many pidgins never become creoles, either dying out when no > longer needed or simply continuing in use as pidgins. But I > don't know that creoles arise other than out of pidgins (it > wouldn't bother me to learn otherwise, however). [Ed Selleslagh] I think your idea about 'contraction and expansion' (of syntactic and other features) is indeed the core of what pidgins and creoles are all about. But in contrast to what you seem to suggest (correct me if I am wrong), this can happen without the intermediate stage of a pidgin: Afrikaans is a typical example of that. The original 17th century Dutch suffered a very major reduction of syntactic (and other) features under the influence of indigenous (and to a much lesser degree: other European) peoples who had to collaborate with the Dutch colonizers (in earlier times mostly as farm hands etc.). Even today, there is a major group of indigenous, Asian and mixed-race people among the Afrikaans speaking population. But it seems unlikely that there ever was a pidgin; if it existed among the non-Europeans, it must have died out without leaving much of a trace. Anyway, the Boers never spoke a pidgin. Nonetheless, modern Afrikaans has many of the characteristics of a creole, like a seriously altered syntax and (much less altered) lexicon. Maybe Papiamento (Curaçao etc.) could be a similar case, based upon Spanish and some Portuguese. And Haïtian French Creole, maybe (i.e. if there was uninterrupted presence of a French speaking fraction of the population, which I don't know). English can be considered a mild case of creolization without an intermediate pidgin (even though the former existence of a pidgin cannot be ruled out entirely, but it would not have been the origin of modern English): not only the vocabulary was altered very seriously (which doesn't mean it's a creole), but syntax was moderately altered as well, e.g. lack word order inversion after an adverbial phrase (a typical error of French speakers who learn Dutch or German) and in some other cases, and the simplifications of the verbal system, including the disappearance of the participial prefix ge- that existed in Old English. All this is of course a very personal view of mine. Ed. Selleslagh From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Wed Feb 23 16:07:58 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 18:07:58 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <200002151716.p1428@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Hans Holm wrote: > You cite Anttila with > RW>"'Related' is a technical term, exactly like the equivalent 'cognate', > RW>meaning that the items were once identical." > And then go on: > RW>This is the criterion of genetic relatedness in historical linguistics. > 1) Anttila speaks of lexemes/items. No, Anttila is speaking of "Language Families and Family Trees." Read the heading of the section. "Lexemes" are nowhere mentioned in the section. The "items" Anttila is talking about are languages and dialects. Read the paragraph in which the statement occurs. > 2) This was not the point I objected. Good. Then I presume that you agree that related languages are descended from some common source and that therefore languages either start out related or they will never be. > It is no use to state things as true, which nobody can prove or disprove. > So, changing your 'related' to 'relatable', in the sense of Anttila, will > be okey. It is equally useless to state that because there is no way to demonstrate that any two languages are not related there is no such thing as unrelated languages. Since the non-relatedness of languages cannot be established empirically, unrelated languages are simply those that cannot be shown to be related. And it not "my" 'related'; it is historical linguistics' 'related.' If you don't want to take Anttila 89 as the Bible (and there is no reason why you should) then check out some other introductory textbooks on historical linguistics (e.g., Hock 86, 8: "... these languages are descended from a common source. In such cases we speak of Related Languages."). But historical linguists know that when one says that two languages are not related it means "not demonstrably related." Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Feb 23 17:24:01 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 17:24:01 +0000 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: Pete Gray writes: > I mean that creolisation / language mixing or whatever you call it provides > us with an example of a language which goes back to two ancestors, not one. Creolization is not at all the same thing as language mixing. > Germanic is clearly and certainly related to other IE languages. If the > theory about it being a creole were true (note the subjunctive, indicating > unreality), then it would be: > (a) related to other IE langs, and at the same time, > (b) also related to some other original language, which had no genetic > relationship to the other IE langs. > Does it make sense in a situation like that - whether it is Germanic or any > other language which is involved - to insist that "all related languages > descend from a single common ancestor"? OK; folks. My two cents. First, as others have pointed out, there are big problems with asserting that a creole derives from two (or more) ancestors. This is far from being obviously true, and many of us would prefer to say that a creole has *no* ancestors at all. That is, a creole is *not* genetically related to any of the languages which may have provided input to it. It is connected to them in some way, but it is not genetically related to them. Second, Germanic is a simply terrible example. Germanic looks not at all like a creole, but it looks very much like a daughter of PIE. If the Germanic languages descend from a creole constructed in part from PIE, then why the hell do they preserve PIE ablaut, PIE inflectional endings, PIE word-forming morphemes, and other PIE complexities that should have vanished in any creole? And why does Germanic phonology correspond so systematically to PIE phonology? The idea of Germanic as a creole is a non-starter, so let's forget about it. Now let's turn to a real and much better example: the North American language Michif. Michif is probably the finest example of a mixed language on the planet. To oversimplify a bit, Michif consists of a French nominal system (with French lexicon and phonology) bolted onto a Cree (Algonquian) verbal system (with Cree lexicon and phonology). OK. What should we say about Michif? Is it well described as a language descended from two ancestors? Or is it better described as a language descended from no ancestor at all? The floor is open. I know what I think, but I'll leave that for later. ;-) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 22 23:03:27 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 18:03:27 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: In a message dated 2/22/00 2:05:10 PM Mountain Standard Time, alderson at netcom.com writes: >The lexicon was suggestive, the grammar was conclusive.>> -- well, that's what I said; you use the lexical items for the rough cut, to indicate a probability, and then investigate in more detail. Mind you, if there are _enough_ lexical items... 8-). From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 22 21:00:30 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 22:00:30 +0100 Subject: Tocharian A wds, B yasa In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Ante Aikio wrote: >Now I have two questions: >1) What was the Proto-Tocharian form? I suppose *wya"sV < *wesV- (or *wisV-). >(If it was something like *wVsV with >front vowels, it fits quite well with Proto-Samoyed *wesd. A loan Samoyed > >Tocharian is also geographically the most sensible alternative, if Tocharian >was connected with the Afansevo culture.) >2) Is there any other plausible etymology for the Tocharian word? The most likely etymology still seems to be *h2wes- (*h2aus-). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 22 23:13:31 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 18:13:31 EST Subject: Hittite /wheel Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >This is STRONG STUFF. It certainly seems to NEGATE the idea - often repeated >earlier on this list - that all IE languages shared a common word for wheel. -- well, no, it doesn't. As mentioned, Hittite 'hukri' derives from PIE *hwergh, as does Tocharian A/B 'warkant' and 'yerkwanto'. Tocharian A/B also have a reflex of PIE *kwekwlom, 'kukal' and 'kokale', and possibly of *rotho, 'ratak'/'retke'. What this suggests is that PIE had several words for wheel; as does English. Some dropped out of one language or another, or were subject to semantic shift. (Eg., in Sanskrit the reflex of *rotho becomes "chariot", rather than "wheel".) >The often repeated position was that "the wheel word" had to have entered PIE >before it split up, because the word was univeral among IE languages. -- "widespread", actually. >And because the sound changes "the wheel word" underwent in those languages >show the word entered before those sound changes occurred. -- yup. >seem to have DISAPPEARED completely. -- nope. >It may strike some readers as obvious that FOUR wheel words WILL NOT support -- better than one, actually. Also words for "wheeled vehicle" and "to travel by vehicle". >They can clearly see things with a certainty that is not revealed to us >ordinary mortals. -- only to linguists, apparently. From alderson at netcom.com Wed Feb 23 00:56:36 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 16:56:36 -0800 Subject: Hittite /wheel In-Reply-To: <8e.13e55bb.25d8ed5c@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Feb 2000, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: > The often repeated position was that "the wheel word" had to have entered PIE > before it split up, because the word was univeral among IE languages. There is a misunderstanding here. It was never claimed that the "wheel word" was the one and only word for "wheel" in the protolanguage; rather, the claim is that the word that comes down to us in English as _wheel_ was present in the protolanguage, because where it *does* occur in various daughter languages, the form in which it occurs is always developmentally regular. The same thing is true for all four words so far adduced with respect to the concept "wheel". > Pointing out that those SPECIFIC sound changes do not date PIE dispersal and > that those sound changes could have occurred long after dispersal should not > have been a surprise. I'm afraid you have it backwards: Those specific sound changes *do* date PIE dispersal, and could not have occurred late, so the wheel must have been known prior to dispersal. Period. > It may strike some readers as obvious that FOUR wheel words WILL NOT support > "the wheel word" as the way to date PIE. Not the way you have mistakenly understood the phrase "the wheel word", no, but as I noted above, no one meant what you thought they meant with that phrase. [ moderator snip ] > how could this assertion that the wheel can postively and absolutely date PIE > go unanswered so often? (Check the archive list - I found it asserted at > least13 times!!! without contradiction.) With the intellectual firepower > that plainly shows up on this list all the time, how could it be repeated so > often without someone at least questioning it or noting the difficulties? There is only a contradiction when one misunderstands the phrase "the wheel word" as meaning "the one and only word for _wheel_ in PIE", rather than as "the word for _wheel_ that comes down to us, _mutatis mutandis_, in English with that meaning". I hope I have cleared this up enough that we can move on. Rich Alderson From jer at cphling.dk Wed Feb 23 17:08:08 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 18:08:08 +0100 Subject: Hittite /wheel In-Reply-To: <8e.13e55bb.25d8ed5c@aol.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Feb 2000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > mcv at wxs.nl earlier wrote: > <<...the Hittite word for "wheel" is . No relation to the > *kwel-words.>> > This is STRONG STUFF. It certainly seems to NEGATE the idea - often repeated > earlier on this list - that all IE languages shared a common word for wheel. > You can look back at the archives and see how often "the wheel word" was used > as PROOF of the date of PIE dispersal. > [...] Hey, hey, hey - a word can be replaced, or synonyms can coexist. The word _wheel_ most certainly is of PIE date by virtue of its forms and distribution. It got replaced in Anatolian by the hurki- stem (Tocharian has wa"rka"nt/yerkwant- from the same root) and in Latin and Celtic by rota etc. That says nothing more about the knowledge of the wheel in PIE times than the rich diversity in names for the horse does about the existence of PIE *ek'wos which can hardly be doubted. Jens From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 22 20:29:03 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 15:29:03 EST Subject: *hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-? Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >I mean, IF the word is only found in Hittite and Tocharian, why not swing the >conclusion around to its simpliest form and simply take it as evidence of >contact between Tocharian and Hittite? -- because at their earliest historic attestation, Tocharian and Hittite are 4000 miles apart; because there's no evidence of close contact between the two (as opposed to common survivals from PIE). Because the words mentioned are common derivatives from an ancestral _root_, and hence it's a cognate, not a loanword. And so on and so forth. From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Feb 22 17:35:51 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 17:35:51 -0000 Subject: *hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-? Message-ID: Dear Steve and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Monday, February 14, 2000 4:51 AM [ moderator snip ] > Let me ask, does evidence of (*hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-?) appear in any > other IE languages? [ moderator snip ] Surely you are familiar with IE *wer-g-, 'turn', a stem based on Pokorny's 3. *wer-, 'turn, bend'. It is surely highly unlikely that *hwerg- is not related to it in some way. I would segment it *H-wer-g-. What might the source of this prefix be? I have made an attempt to address that question in http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/ProtoLanguage-IE-PrefixPlurals.htm I would be glad for any critique of the ideas expressed in 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/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 mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 22 21:06:52 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 22:06:52 +0100 Subject: *hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-? In-Reply-To: <31.13b8430.25d8e3ec@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 2/12/00 10:12:09 PM, mcv at wxs.nl replied: ><differently (Hitt. *HwrK-is, Toch *HwerK-ontos). It does seem to >indicate that this (*hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-?) was the >preferred word for "to turn, to roll" at quite an early stage.>> >("mcv at wxs.nl earlier wrote: <<...the Hittite word for "wheel" is . >No relation to the *kwel-words.>>) >Let me ask, does evidence of (*hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-?) appear in any >other IE languages? I'm not sure. There's a whole family of roots with the general meaning "to turn, to twist" strating with *wer- (*wert-, *werg-, etc.). As far as I can see in Pokorny, this family consistently fails to show prosthetic a- in Greek (PIE *h2wer- > Grk aer-), which makes me doubt the Hittite word is related. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 23 03:37:09 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 22:37:09 EST Subject: SV: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >This seems to me to be an interesting observation. Have you got any >bibliographic references on lactose tolerance? -- Cavalli-Sforza, "The History and Geography of Human Genes" and "The Great Human Diasporas". >Number one, linguistically, do we find the IE languages discriminating cow's >milk from mother's milk -- unlikely to be the latter, since the terms actually usually derive from a verbal form, "to milk"; eg., *melk Also *dhedhnos, 'sour milk, cheese'; *pipiusi, giving Lithuanian papijusi, 'cow rich in milk'; *tenki, 'buttermilk'; *nguen, 'butter'; *turo, 'curds, curdled milk', etc. >Number two, do all the milk of all cattle or even of wild cattle produce the >intolerance syndrome? -- if drunk unprocessed. >what precisely is "the PIE vocabulary for 'to milk' (cows), curds, whey, >'cow rich in milk', butter" and how in the world can it be "attested" much >less "well-attested?" -- see above. By the usual methods. From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Feb 22 22:54:14 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 22:54:14 -0000 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: Dear Stanley and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stanley Friesen" Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2000 7:06 AM > At 05:48 PM 2/8/00 +0100, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: >> They were sacrificed though: see e.g. G. Dumizil (La religion romaine >> archaoque) : Equus October in Rome, As'vamedha in India. (note also Brahman >> <> Flamen). Usually (I don't know in this case) at least parts of sacrificed >> animals were eaten. > Quite possibly. But animals that are *primarily* food animals are rarely > sanctified. > A subtle, but important distinction. Just where did you get this, out of curiosity? 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 mcv at wxs.nl Wed Feb 23 06:55:24 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 07:55:24 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000214230742.009d0360@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: Stanley Friesen wrote: >At 06:09 PM 2/8/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >>Important point, I think. Since Germanic and Balto-Slavic (as >>far as they're traceable to the "Corded Ware" cultural area) both >>developed on a TRB substrate (c.q. out of a TRB substrate), it is >>strange that none of the Germanic substrate words appear in >>Balto-Slavic. >I am not sure about this - I seem to recall a moderate number of entries in >Pokorny that are only attested in Germanic and Balto-Slavic. Those sound >like good candidates for substrate words to me. >[Though I actually question tracing B-S back to Corded Ware]. G-B-S. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Feb 23 14:10:06 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 15:10:06 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- but Indo-Iranian spread widely not only in the steppe zone, but into areas >that had long been agricultural; Iran, and India, which in area and >population are quite comparable to temperate Europe. But not linguistically. There are 250 million people speaking Dravidian languages in the Indian subcontinent. Basque is spoken by some 660,000 people. "Steppe invasions" have affected Northern India, Iran, Anatolia, the Balkans, the Hungarian plains. Never Southern India, Northern or Western Europe. >>Well, that would make Mallory's "Proto-IE'ans" the descendants of >>Renfrew's "Proto-IE'ans". >-- no, just the people they picked up agriculture and animal husbandry from. >The 'wave of advance' peters out in the western Ukraine. The cultures to the >east were Mesolithic and adopted the Neolithic package from their neighbors; >at least, that's what it looks like. Not really. The Bug-Dniestr culture is Balkanic, Mallory quotes Telegin on the North-Western origin of the Dniepr-Donets culture, and even the Sredny Stog culture can be considered a cultural satellite of the Western/Balkanic Tripolye culture. After all, the steppe cultures have been mainly dated on the basis of imported Tripolye pottery. Between 6500 and 4000 BC, the handful of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in the Western steppe area could have been easily Indo-Europeanized linguistically from the west at any time, several times over. It would have been a minor event. Only after 4000 (after the domestication of the horse in the steppe) do we see a partial reversal in the direction of technological and cultural flow, and we find steppe influences going westwards into the Hungarian steppe and the Balkans, although not into Northern/Central Europe (roughly Netherlands to Poland). Mallory's scenario requires "steppe pastoralists" to have become linguistically dominant after 3500 over an area that was densely populated by contemporary standards, but highly decentralized. In the Balkans (even more densely populated, but more centralized), seizing the "tells" and taking over the native political structures may have worked. In Northern Europe, there were no cities and no sizeable political structures to take over. Only massive infiltration might conceivably have done the trick, and we know there was none of that (the population still has largely "Anatolian" genes). The most parsimonious solution is therefore to assume that Northern/Central Europe was Indoeuropeanized rapidly from 5500 with the advance of the Linear Pottery culture, followed in the ensuing millennia by acculturation of the peripheral sub-Neolithic areas (N.Germany-Denmark-S.Sweden; Baltic-Bielorussia; Pontic-Caspian). After 4000, the Pontic area became a secondary center of (re-)Indo-Europeanization, affecting mainly the Balkans and Central Asia (-> Iran, India), while local developments in the Western/Central European area ca. 3500 (Corded Ware-Bell Beaker) carried Indo-European languages further into Eastern Europe (Russia) and Atlantic/West-Mediterranean Europe (France, Italy, Spain, British Isles). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Feb 22 19:33:38 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 19:33:38 -0000 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: Dear John and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dr. John E. McLaughlin" Sent: Monday, February 14, 2000 1:59 PM >> The minimal components of Nostratic are PIE and AA. > Of course there is the competing claim of Greenberg, Ruhlen, and Bengtsen > that AA does not belong in any group with PIE, but combines with Uralic and > Altaic with IE in "Eurasiatic". It is certainly good practice to be aware of this modification of the original theory. My major reason for proposing and maintaining the earliest version of the theory is the remarkable coincidences of phonological developments between Semitic and Germanic, which I attempt to illustrate at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/comparison.AFRASIAN.3_germanic.htm 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 JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 23 05:48:20 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 00:48:20 EST Subject: reality of PIE as dialect network Message-ID: That all languages are dialect clusters is true, but not particularly meaningful or important for our purposes. >ECOLING at aol.com writes: >Sufficiently massive borrowing *does* constitute a kind of genetic relation -- only if we redefine "genetic relation", which would serve only to make our vocabulary less succinct and less useful; and which we should therefore refuse to do. What we're discussing here is the relations of languages _over time_, from their _origins_. Borrowing is definitely a type of relation between languages -- there is more Romance vocabulary than Germanic in this sentence -- but that doesn't show a _genetic_ relationship between English and, say, French (or Romance). It shows a relationship of large-scale borrowing, which is a different type of relationship from that for which the term "genetic" was coined in this field. Likewise, substrate or superstrate influence on a language is also a relationship between the languages in question... but not a _genetic_ relationship. We have perfectly good terms for describing these relationships; "borrowing" and "super/substrate". Blurring these with "genetic" decreases the precision of the vocabulary available to discuss historical linguistic development. Where once we had three terms, each referring to something specific, now we would have only one -- which would therefore require elaborate amplification to make clear what we were talking about. If we "run the film backwards", the Romance accretions drop out of English, and we eventually arrive at a Northwest-Germanic language with very little Romance influence, and then at Proto-Germanic. And "running the film backwards" is _in essentio_ what comparative linguistics is about, after all. That's why this is the "Indo-European" list. Does anyone suggest that Persian should now be reclassified as a "IE/Semitc language" because half its vocabulary is Arabic? What earthly purpose would be served by such a redefinition? From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 23 07:33:23 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 02:33:23 EST Subject: reality of PIE Message-ID: >petegray at btinternet.com writes: >Quite! My point is that we cannot go beyond the "tolerably unified" and >speak of a single, undifferentiated language. I thought this was standard >stuff. To reconstruct PIE without allowing for some internal variety would >seem to me - in my innocence, and in light of the IE evidence - somewhat >doubtful. >> -- I don't think anyone has ever argued that PIE was completely internally undifferentiated. Particularly not in the "late PIE" period, when the spread/dissolution was under way. There are plenty of late isoglosses which are shared by several of the IE daughter languages/language families but not by others -- satemization, for instance. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 23 07:35:50 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 02:35:50 EST Subject: reality of PIE Message-ID: >petegray at btinternet.com writes: >but I am challenging the assumption that all daughter languages must - by >definition - come from a single undifferentiated original. >> -- that's only if you insist there's a meaningful difference between "tolerably undifferentiated" and "absolutely undifferentiated". There isn't really. What we can say with some confidence is that, at the time our reconstructions cease, PIE exists as a set of highly mutually intelligible dialects -- no more distinct than the contemporary dialects of English or German, say. That's close enough to a single, undifferentiated language for government work. This isn't organic chemistry, after all. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 23 07:38:10 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 02:38:10 EST Subject: reality of PIE Message-ID: >petegray at btinternet.com writes: >Creoles - how can you describe a Creole as descended from a single ancestor? >Doesn't his mean prioritising one of its "parents" over the other? -- in point of fact, the Creoles I'm familiar with all do owe more to one. Krio, for example, or Gullah, or Haitian creole. Creoles also tend to have highly distinctive grammatical features which are common to all creoles as such. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 23 07:39:30 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 02:39:30 EST Subject: reality of PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 2/22/00 11:27:53 PM Mountain Standard Time, petegray at btinternet.com writes: << "English shows a closer relationship to French than to Italian." >> -- that would be misleading. It's more concise to say something along the lines of: "Middle and Modern English show strong Romance influence, most particularly from French." From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Wed Feb 23 15:00:07 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 17:00:07 +0200 Subject: reality of PIE In-Reply-To: <000c01bf7798$894380a0$3b8901d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Feb 2000, petegray wrote: [someone wrote:] >>>> Genetically related languages were once the same language. > On this, Larry said: >>The statement above is true ... by definition. > This begs the question I asked above, and also relies on questions of > definition - are we talking of a single unifed undifferentiated language? > That's the concept I am attacking. The application of the comparative method always gives a single, homogenous parent language for a group of genetically related languages. This results from the nature of the method, since it always derives present heterogenity from earlier homogenity. But the result of the method must never be accepted as such - it must be interpreted. The reconstructed proto-language is an idealization, and idealizations should not be mistaken as reality. I believe no serious linguist would maintain that the proto-language was in reality completely homogenous (= without dialect variation). > It is not true *by definition* that > genetically related langauges derive from a single undifferentiated > ancestor. Not "undifferentiated", since no natural language is completely homogenous. Rather, the currently heterogenous state derives from an earlier, less heterogenous state. And when we go backwards in time, there will be a point which is homogenous enough to justify the concept of a single parent language. - Ante Aikio From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 23 07:47:48 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 02:47:48 EST Subject: Celtic closer to Anatolian? Message-ID: >ECOLING at aol.com writes: >For Celtic, is there any argument that on balance the geographic position of >Celtic in the earliest stages of PIE dialect network would put it closer to >Anatolian, or Tocharian, or Armenian, or etc., >> -- whether or not one goes so far as to posit a post-PIE "Italo-Celtic" unity (along the lines of Balto-Slavic) there are undoubtedly some shared features. Eg., both Celtic and Italic assimilate *p...kw to kw...kw -- PIE *penkwe, 'five' > Latin 'quinque', Old Irish 'coic'. Then there's the optative in -a-, and some uniquely shared vocabulary (Old Irish 'tir', 'land', and Latin 'terra'), and so forth and so on. On the whole, Celtic seems to have separated from the main bulk of PIE rather early, but later than Anatolian, and to have been "near" proto-Italic in the dialect continuum. That would mean, geographically, it was 'always' the southwesternmost fringe of PIE. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Feb 23 15:44:22 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 15:44:22 +0000 Subject: No single ancestor - breath of fresh air Message-ID: Lloyd Anderson writes: [on the family-tree model] > Is there a better model, which captures all of the virtues of the family-tree > model without limiting us to that model when it is clearly not applicable? > Perhaps dialect-network and family-tree superimposed in some way > (perhaps what was referred to in another recent communication)? There are many models on offer. In my forthcoming dictionary of historical and comparative linguistics (out in March over here and in March or April in the US), I group the various proposals under seven headings: 1. family-tree 2. wave 3. rake 4. rhizotic 5. crystallization 6. social-network 7. punctuated-equilibrium The first three emphasize divergence, while the last four focus more on convergence, or at least regard convergence and divergence as equally important. Only the last four have anything to say about non-genetic languages, such as creoles and mixed languages. I don't think any of these can be regarded as the ultimate model. Each is good at handling some things, bad at handling others. They are, I think, best regarded as complementary, rather than as competing. As always, linguistic reality is too complex to be captured adequately within a single model. However, I want to stress that the family-tree model remains our standard model. This is just too successful in too many cases to be brushed aside. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From jer at cphling.dk Wed Feb 23 18:03:02 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 19:03:02 +0100 Subject: Basque * 'round' In-Reply-To: <38A2CAD2.10A03647@aye.net> Message-ID: On Thu, 10 Feb 2000, Steven A. Gustafson wrote: [On my connection of the Basque/Celtic word with >> Dan.-Norw.-Swed. bil 'car', which must be very old given the assimilation >> of the nominative marker in Icelandic bi:ll (from *bi:l-R pointing to >> PGmc. *bi:l-az). > My understanding has ever been, that -bil- was short for -automobil-, > which may be an ancient Germanic root, but it would seem to present > certain phonological problems. My guess would be that the Icelandic has > been assimilated to fit into a pre-existing declension. Spoilsport, phonological problems are there to be overcome. And just because a Copenhagen newspaper gave first prize to the suggestion _bil_ in 1902 doesn't mean that the word is necessarily artificial; the prizewinner may well have been the last surviving speaker of the kind of Celtic that influenced Basque (which is apparently the most interesting IE language of them all, and one that has been sadly lacking in the training I have received). And on Thu, 10 Feb 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: [in reply to my plea:] >> Any good Celtic etymon for German Auto? > Well, it is well known that German au < *u:, and Celtic *p > 0, > so that looks very much like a form derived from an unattested > Celtic *pu:to- "stinking" (the contraption was apparently named > by the La T`ene Celts after its typical exhaust products). Now, that's more like it! And it makes excellent semantic sense. Perhaps someone knows how it ties in with current knowledge on the state of environment pollution in La Tene times? In that case perhaps he'd better keep it to himself, so that we do not strain the moderator's patience any further. Sorry, Rich, I couldn't help myself. Jens From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Feb 23 00:16:02 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 01:16:02 +0100 Subject: k' > ts > c-hachek order of changes? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ECOLING at aol.com wrote: >I have come to suspect / believe / almost to argue evidence >that the normal development is rather the reverse, phonetically, >that we more commonly have (universally?) >k' > ts > c-hachek >g' > dz > j-hachek >because the /ts,dz/ require more effort, >reflect better their origin as a *fronted* tongue-body production, >with the flat front of the tongue rather than the back contacting >the roof of the mouth, >whereas the grooved are more relaxed, >with less fronting or raising of the heavy body of the tongue, >but still an affricated acoustic effect, >so presumably a later substitute for /ts,dz/. >The theta is also I believe often a reflex of earlier /ts/ >rather than only via /ts/ > /s/ > "th". >Does this make sense to anyone? I can't think of any examples of c > c^ [using Slavic notation]. The most common paths seem to be: k to k^ t to t^ k^ to t^ or c^ t^ to c c^ to s^ c to T or s s^ to s T to s or t ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Wed Feb 23 08:33:51 2000 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 09:33:51 +0100 Subject: k' > ts > c-hachek order of changes? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Is there evidence in the Indo-Iranian group for >this other order of changes? >The only thing I can think to add at the moment is a vague memory >that in the NW part of India there are reflexes /ts,dz/ >where we otherwise expect (from Sanskrit) the >grooved . You are doubtlessly having the Nuristani languages of SE Afghanistan in mind, which are sometimes viewed as the third Aryan group besides Indic and Iranian. >The basic letters of Tibetan also have these values /ts,dz/, >and a diacritic is used to represent the Sanskritic . No, it's the other way round in Tibetan. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg home: Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-691332+ Georg at home.ivm.de work: http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/vtw/Georg/Georg.html From strand at sedona.net Fri Feb 25 03:12:21 2000 From: strand at sedona.net (Richard F.Strand) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 22:12:21 -0500 Subject: k' > ts > c-hachek order of changes? Message-ID: As the author of the "mention" in ECOLING's query, >The following mention got my attention: >> k' > c > ts >> g' > j > dz >I have come to suspect / believe / almost to argue evidence >that the normal development is rather the reverse, phonetically, >that we more commonly have (universally?) >k' > ts > c-hachek >g' > dz > j-hachek I can only refer him to the reference (http://users.sedona.net/~strand/Nuristani/nuristanis.html) on my original posting on this list on 2/3/2000. The "mentioned" sequence is found in the Iranian and Nuristani languages, as well as in several Indo-Aryan languages. The processual sequence is Fronting (k > k' > c [c = lamino-alveolar affricate]) followed by "Prognathizing" (jutting out the jaw while keeping the tongue's apex pressed behind the lower teeth, which moves the tongue's blade against the upper teeth). This sequence is inferred in proto-Iranian and is clearly attested in the Nuristani languages (e.g., Kamviri *dekm > *daca > *datsa > *dats > *dots > duts 'ten') and twice in Pashto (e.g., *deKm > *daca > *datsa > *dasa > las, 'ten', and *kwetu(e)r- > *catuar > tsalor > [Northeastern dialects] salor 'four'). The sequence may proceed to Obstruent Laxing (ts > s, dz > z), as in Eastern Iranian, contemporary Pashto dialects, and the Nuristani language ASkuNu, or to Strengthened Prognathizing (ts > th, dz > d), as in Old Persian. To my knowledge nowhere in the region is the reverse sequence "k' > ts > c-hachek" attested. As for the assertion >because the /ts,dz/ require more effort, >reflect better their origin as a *fronted* tongue-body production, >with the flat front of the tongue rather than the back contacting >the roof of the mouth, >whereas the grooved are more relaxed, >with less fronting or raising of the heavy body of the tongue, >but still an affricated acoustic effect, >so presumably a later substitute for /ts,dz/ there is no a priori reason why this should be so, and in fact in the Indo-Iranian frontier region it is just the opposite. Once you are speaking with a prognathized jaw, who is to say that /ts, dz/ require "more effort" than /c, j/? And there is nothing about this process that implies that the latter sounds must be a "later substitute" for the former. Any "effort" that occurs goes into the prognathizing that produces /ts, dz/; it has its origins in the belligerent facial posture as seen today in the generally hostile tribal environment of the Afghan-Nuristani ethnic divide. Regarding >The theta is also I believe often a reflex of earlier /ts/ >rather than only via /ts/ > /s/ > "th". this is exactly what my original post said in reference to the /th/ (read "theta") of Old Persian. Richard Strand Richard Strand's Nuristan Site http://users.sedona.net/~strand From edsel at glo.be Wed Feb 23 12:59:17 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 13:59:17 +0100 Subject: k' > ts > c-hachek order of changes? Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Monday, February 14, 2000 11:33 PM [snip] > The theta is also I believe often a reflex of earlier /ts/ > rather than only via /ts/ > /s/ > "th". [Ed Selleslagh] In European Spanish c (before i, e) (=theta) < /ts/ < Latin c (before i,e) or -t(i)-. Ed. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Feb 23 14:59:35 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 14:59:35 +0000 Subject: "pronoun" is semantic or distributional? Message-ID: Lloyd Anderson writes: > Another way of seeing why our long discussions > have been at cross purposes is the following. > Pat Ryan, in attempting to conform to the terminology > being used by Larry Trask, wrote the following: >> [PR] >> Perhaps the discussion could be foreshortened. 'My' could perhaps be termed >> a "pronominal determiner". > This is a perfectly reasonable position, *GIVEN* that Pat is using > the word "pronoun", here in the form "pronominal", > as a semantic-functional term (referring to persons etc.). > I believe that is an accurate statement, even if Pat's explanations > have not said so explicitly. > Trask is however using "pronoun" as a distributional class. > For Trask, "pronominal" and "determiner" are a contradiction > because both refer to distributional classes, distinct classes, > one standing for a full noun phrase, the other as a modifying > element part of a noun phrase (loosely put). Yes, except that I prefer 'specifying' to 'modifying'. But I don't agree that 'pronoun' can or should be used as a label for a semantico-functional class, since the term is already in use for a syntactic class. To apply the same label to two entirely different things is merely to invite unnecessary confusion. > Back to Pat Ryan's terminology: > "possessive pronoun" is perfectly reasonable when both terms > are taken in their semantic-functional senses. > But Trask does not use "pronoun" that way. > (Nor do I, when I am dealing with distributional classes.) [snip] > On the other hand, Pat Ryan could also point out that in > "her book", the "her" stands also (in Trask's analysis I think also) > for the entire noun phrase modifying book in > (the woman who came yesterday's book), > and thus may be regarded as the genitive or possessive form > of the pronoun "she", in the contrast "she" vs. "her book", > just as "the woman who came yesterday's" is the genitive > form of the noun phrase "the woman who came yesterday". > That is all consistent in the standard analysis, I believe? Not necessarily. Syntactic analysis does not, in general, work in terms of which things can "stand for" other things, whatever that might mean. Anyway, the determiner 'her' does not intrinsically mean 'the woman who came yesterday'. It might be so interpreted in a given case, but so what? This is still no argument that possessive 'her' is a pronoun -- now is it? Consider a parallel case: John: "I'm looking for a book with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley." Mary: "I have such a book." Now, in this context, 'such' is clearly to be interpreted as meaning 'with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley'. But does this observation make 'such' a prepositional phrase? No? Then how can possessive 'her' be regarded as a pronoun, on the basis of a parallel argument? > My point, as it has been for some time, is that > despite whatever Pat Ryan may or may not understand > of the type of distributional analysis represented by many of us, > his terminology was quite consistent and sensible, > and used an older tradition in the meaning of "pronoun", > a semantic-functional one. > He should not be beaten upon for that. Well, this is debatable -- the "consistent and sensible", I mean, not the beating-up part. > Even Trask's distributional usage might be criticized by a purist, > in that for him a "pronoun" does not stand for a "noun" > but rather for a noun phrase. So we should all give up the term > "pronoun"? I certainly don't advocate that, despite how > misleading it may be to some. We all realize that the label 'pronoun' is a little unfortunate, and that 'pro-NP' would be preferable in principle. But the term is traditional and established, and all linguists know what it means, so there is no good reason to change it. We are not so foolish as to commit the etymological fallacy. Mathematicians apply the label 'imaginary numbers' to a certain class of numbers. This name too is a little unfortunate, since it misleads outsiders into believing that the "imaginary" numbers are somehow less real than the "real" numbers -- which they are not. But again the term is traditional and established, and all mathematicians know what it means, and so they have seen no reason to change it. If outsiders misunderstand it, that's just their tough luck -- and it's the same with us. > Larry Trask was kind enough to take the time to distinguish > semantic-functional senses from distributional senses, > but I think had not acknowledged that much of the discussion > was motivated not by a lack of knowledge on Pat Ryan's part, > but rather by Pat Ryan using "pronoun" in a semantic-functional > sense. With different definitions, the discussion was bound > to be unfruitful. No doubt. But I notice that no semantico-functional definition of 'pronoun' has been advanced, either by Pat Ryan or by anyone else. Anybody like to try? > So can we please stop trying to prove each other wrong, > and get back to discovering interesting things about the real world? I'd love to. But I honestly do not believe that 'pronoun' should, or even can, be usefully applied to a semantico-functional category -- especially to a hypothetical such category which nobody has tried to characterize. > The following is a refinement, dealing with a more difficult > "edge" case. > Paul Postal (I think it was) many years ago argued that in > expressions like "we linguists" the "we" was the head of > the construction and the "linguists" was something like > an appositive (I don't remember the details just now). This analysis makes some sense, though it's not so easy to defend in English, with its lack of agreement. In languages with more agreement, the comparable construction usually shows first-person agreement, not third-person, confirming that the pronoun is best taken as the head. > I don't think this kind of construction is usefully laid > up against "those linguists", arguing the reverse of Postal's > position that "we" can be a determiner, because it is > understood as "we, who are linguists" (non-restrictive), > more than as a restrictive "those linguists who are we" > in the manner of "the house which is here" ~=~ "this house". I query this analysis. When I say 'we linguists', I normally mean '*all* linguists (including me)', and *not* 'a few people (including me) who happen to be linguists'. In context, I might mean something different. For example, within my university, I might conceivably say 'we linguists' to mean 'all the members of the Linguistics Department', but then I still couldn't use it to mean only 'some of the people in the LD, including me'. Anyway, note that, in English, this odd construction is confined to 'we' and to plural 'you': nobody permits *'I linguist' or *'she linguist' or *'they linguists'. The construction is therefore somewhat marginal, and it should not be invoked too freely in drawing conclusions about English syntax. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Feb 23 18:01:04 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 18:01:04 -0000 Subject: "pronoun" is semantic or distributional? Message-ID: Dear Lloyd and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2000 1:45 AM As usual, you have very concisely and accurately summed up the situation --- with an eye to creating the conditions for fruitful discussion. >> [PRp] >> Perhaps the discussion could be foreshortened. 'My' could perhaps be termed >> a "pronominal determiner". > This is a perfectly reasonable position, *GIVEN* that Pat is using > the word "pronoun", here in the form "pronominal", > as a semantic-functional term (referring to persons etc.). > I believe that is an accurate statement, even if Pat's explanations > have not said so explicitly. You have made explicit what the underlying assumptions were. But, I would ask Larry if, given the analysis above, 'pronominal' is inappropriate to distinguish 'my' from 'this' etal., what would be the appropriate term? Certainly, I do not believe anyone will easily agree that there is no discernible difference between 'my' and 'this' etal. Certainly, 'possessive', the term Larry employs in his published definition is unproblematical so far as I can see but is it entirely without merit to identify the substitutional difference between words like 'my' and 'this'? A more troublesome omission(?) in Larry's definifitions concerns words like 'mine', which he has assured us in a recent posting are 'pronouns'. But under his published definition of 'pronoun', we find only personal, reflexive, demonstrative, indefinite, interrogative, and relative --- listed as categories. Larry, under which of these categories does 'mine' belong? > Pat Ryan seems not to understand that > "she" does not substitute for "woman" with "the" mysteriously > not manifest. > Rather, "she" stands for the entire noun phrase > "the woman", normally with all modifying semantics also > included, so that "she who came yesterday" is at the margins > in modern English, a rather unusual construction, > even if perfectly grammatical. As Trask points out, > "the she who came yesterday" is not grammatical. I am not sure why you have interpreted what I have written to mean this --- perhaps I expressed myself awkwardly. I am aware that 'she' stands not just for the head noun but for the entire NP. 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 X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Feb 23 16:11:58 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 11:11:58 EST Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: In a message dated 2/23/2000 5:03:03 AM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote: >I suggest the Lord's Prayer for the text sample >since it was extensively recorded in various languages over a long period >and later examples are not required to be archaizing copies since the text >is a translation of a fixed text and the translator is trying to render >the original in his own language. Actually, I did sort of go through a similar exercise - perhaps before the archive - on this very list. If it's in the archive, you'll see I even compared the Lord's Prayer in Italian and OFr to 'Silver Age' Latin (Saxo Grammaticus 1200AD) and OCSl to Pol and Polabian. I was trying to make a point about the degree of divergence in Slavic and was beat up quite nicely by Miguel Carrasquer Vidal. The fact that you are sending me back to that lesson may just indicate that I am one of those slow learners. :) Let me make the point I was making in my original post more explicit: I wrote: > Perhaps more importantly, inscriptions appearing in Latin, on the US > Dollar, on religious objects and at the end of e-mail messages (but > not on ogham sticks) show NO CHANGE IN THE LANGUAGE at all - 1800 > years later! whiting at cc.helsinki.fi replied: >Yes, and that's how you can tell that it's a dead language. Living >languages change; dead ones don't (at least not to the same extext or in >the same way). Well, my point - perhaps too subtle - was that the Celtic inscriptions on ogham sticks might be like the Latin inscriptions on coins and such. If you recall, a number of folks on this list asserted that the Celtic on ogham sticks had a great deal of similarity to the Celtic found (also mainly in inscriptions I believe) on the continent maMy point was that the inscriptions on ogham sticks may have had an artificial uniformity as one finds in inscriptional Latin. To the extent that these ogham sticks had some religious or ritual significance and were not meant to be 'littera' - communications for more everyday purposes, that seems possible. Tacitus describes Germanic priests carving sacred words on wood sticks and sacred words might tend to preserve anachronisms. Hope this clarifies things. Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 23 19:35:59 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 14:35:59 EST Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: >sarima at friesen.net writes: >Much as knowing English and a few phonetic rules often allows one to piece >together the general meaning of basic German. (Indeed, perhaps *better* >than that). -- good point. There's actually less structural difference between Greek (particularly Mycenaean) and Sanskrit than there is between modern English and standard German. Eg., the verbal morphology of Mycenaean and Sanskrit are much closer than English and German. In fact, you could make a good case that _Latin_ and Sanskrit are more similar than contemporary English and German. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 23 19:41:45 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 14:41:45 EST Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: >alderson at netcom.com writes: >We are often cozened by writing, and by the habits of the modern stage, to >think of Elizabethan English as being similar or identical to our own, and >then to extend that thought to the language of non-literate societies over >longer periods of time. -- good point. The pronunciation has changed a lot more than the orthography. When English spelling was regularized, it was fairly phonetic. From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Feb 23 19:17:12 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 19:17:12 -0000 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: Dear Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stefan Georg" Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2000 10:08 AM >> How would some of you feel if Renfrew's premise were altered to: >> Nostratic spread through Europe with agriculture. >> ? > Renfrew seems to be about to alter this premise himself, maybe (judging > from his active role in organizing Nostratic conferences and the like), but > it of course begs the question of the existence of Nostratic. > It doesn't exist, so it didn't spread anywhere, less so through Europe, and > least so with agriculture. Stefan is undoubtedly right in his major premise. But (is there no always a 'but') I sincerely believe that, however the details may eventually sort themselves out, the correspondences between Semitic and IE are so demonstrable that no objective observer can doubt them --- even if we consider oursleves still in the MLC of inspection. The question of AA and IE is obviously much more complicated. The non-Semitic languages of AA are not easy to get at because of neglected study and relative dearth of references. Those efforts that have been made (e.g. Ehret) have not satisfied AAists let alone Nostraticists (presuming they exist). I sympathize with those who have looked at Nostratic and found it wanting. Only for linguists who cut their teeth on Hegel is Mo/ller stimulating reading; and others like Linus Brunner seem to have missed the Brunne altogether. However, Bomhard has assembled a lot of data which, I believe, has substantial merit and exploratory power. Although I differ with him principally phonologically, I certainly do believe that many of his comparisons have ultimate validity. Bomhard had to, I believe, rely on data that was faulty because, in some cases, better data was not available. Critics have seized on these discrepancies, and viciously attacked Bomhard's work. This, in my opinion, is equivalent to refusing a date with a beautiful woman because she has a mole, which can always be surgically removed. Almost no one has looked at his work with an eye to refining it --- only rejecting it. And I believe this is a serious and intellectually unforgivable mistake. 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 JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 03:26:27 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 22:26:27 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl writes: >Renfrew seems to be about to alter this premise himself, maybe (judging >from his active role in organizing Nostratic conferences and the like) >> -- I'm not surprised. He probably would have retracted long ago, if he hadn't invested so much personal prestige in the hypothesis. Nostratic is safely in the realm of the unfalsifiable hypothesis and provides a graceful avenue of retreat... 8-). From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Thu Feb 24 13:21:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 13:21:00 GMT Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: SG>not against Rosenfelder, whose attempt I've not found easily SG>accessible, mainly because the link above is dead. .. < The link via the homepage seems to be disconnected, indeed; but, the URLdoes work now leaving out the 'l': "www.zompist.com/chance.htm";-)) SG>What most of the books and article I've seen *don't* address, however, is SG>the question how "resemblances" are to be defined in the first place .. < Rosenfelder tries to define them, I think. Another source is e.g. Ringe in Diachronica 1992, passim, in his nearly famous Greenberg-controversy; in abridged form to be found in Larry's textbook. ---------- SG>Your resemblance may not at all be mine, .. < I never maintained any resemblance (as common heritage, you mean). ---------- SG>as if lexicon had *anything* to do with lg. classification, .. < correct, regarding the percentage calculations à la Dyen. Only by understanding and applying the properties of the 'hypergeometric' and, using a complete etymological dictionary, it is possible to compute split-off bases between any two languages. Not more, and nothing less. And the brain of homo sapiens has not been constructed to grasp the hypergeometric ad hoc. --------- SG>the calculation of probabilities .. I wrote: >>Yes. SORRY. But yes. Not 'the introduction of agriculture as such' - The >>term 'middle neolithic' as applied to Europe as a whole (not locally) >>encompasses my 4500-4000BC date. For some reason you are calling the whole >>process 'early neolithic'. Neolithic is basically a distinction from >>mesolithic. Early neolithic in Europe as a whole generally denotes the >>period before 5000BC. Locally the term is sometimes used when different >>sub-periods can be identified. But in terms of Europe, farming 'as such' is >>also being introduced in the late neolithic and in some areas even in the >>'European iron age.' In a message dated 2/13/2000 5:02:19 AM, sarima at friesen.net wrote: >This is a different use of the terms than I am familiar with. I guess I >have not often come across their use for "Europe as a whole". I did not get a chance to respond to this post earlier. A good sense of how period classifications are applied can be gotten from John Collis' The European Iron Age (1984), a still impressive overview of the archaeology of the late bronze, iron and early Roman periods. Although it does not deal with the neolithic, it does make clear how the categorization of "Europe as a whole" during a period correlates with local classifications. sarima at friesen.net also wrote: >But this still doesn't change the basic facts: the agricultural revolution >is too old, and took too long to spread over Europe, for it to be >associated with PIE. Whether one uses local terminology or pan-European >terminology does not change this fact. Knowing the terminology helps to avoid misstatements about the facts. And I'm becoming more convinced that in fact a certain neolithic culture spread farming too fast, populated Europe too thoroughly and was too technologically advanced not to be associated with PIE. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Feb 24 02:08:18 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 21:08:18 EST Subject: Bandkeramik and non-Anatolian PIE Message-ID: I wrote: >> I've often used the term non-Anatolian and 'narrow' PIE to describe PIE >> after its separation from Hittite and the other Anatolian languages. This >> is rather orthodox linguistics. In a message dated 2/23/2000 2:15:46 PM, Rich Alderson wrote: >Only of one school. There are many Indo-Europeanists who do *not* accept that >Anatolian is to be viewed as a sister of the entire rest of the IE family. In >fact, I would say that the "Indo-Hittite" hypothesis is accepted by very few, >almost all students of one person (and certainly of one department) in the US. After reading that the UPenn tree had confirmed "the Indo-Hittite hypothesis," I seem to have confused myself and everyone else here. This Danubian scenario for "narrow PIE" does not require 'the Indo-Hittite hypothesis' in any way. All that is required is that one accept the rather "orthodox linguistic" notion that "the archaic features of Hittite can be explained by assuming that Hittite speakers made up the first group to leave the Indo-European community. Assumption of a considerable period of separation would account for the innovations in Hittite." (W. Lehmann, Historical Linguistics 1992, p.82) The one glitch is that it is not the proto-Hittites/Anatolians who left, but the 'Indo-European' community - the first splitting or branching occuring in either case. The 'Indo-Hittite hypothesis' is a more elaborate idea and is taxonomic: "Some Indo-Europeanists, notably E. H. Sturtevant, proposed reclassification of the [IE] family because of the h: sounds, others archaisms and the early time of the records. They suggested that Hittite was a sister language, rather than a daughter language, of Proto-Indo-European, and proposed a new label Indo-Hittite for the family." (Lehmann, ibid) I'm using "narrow PIE" as a shorthand (I learned from Prof Trask's posts on this subject) for the proto-language that is left AFTER the split-off of Anatolian. (This has nothing necessarily to do with the true "Indo-Hittite hypothesis.") "Narrow PIE" is shorthand for "PIE minus Anatolian/Hittite" or "proto-Celtic-Italic-Germanic-Slavic-IIr-etc." This appears to be quite orthodox, unless one concludes that the IE families split-off all at once. My read on this is that "PIE minus Anatolian" forms on the Danube and becomes Bandkeramik. The predecessor "Anatolian-Balkan painted pottery" culture found in the Balkans and Anatolia represents the residue of 'wide PIE' AFTER the split and would include proto-Hittite-Luwian (and possibly proto-Phrygian-Thracian, though don't hold me to that.) Renfrew does not concern himself much with intra-IE movements and anyone who actually reads A&L will see why. (Mallory is not the best place to get an accurate capsulization of Renfrew.) Renfrew is mainly dealing with the spread of IE (not PIE) in non-IE areas. He does however seem to see no need for pre-Greek to move into Greece, except as part of the first migration out of Anatolia. This may be at odds with the scenario I described above, though Renfrew hardly seems adament about it. Miguel Carrasquer Vidal has mentioned the view that in effect the Danuabian PIEians or post-PIEians moved south (the A>B>A migration.) At the time Renfrew wrote A&L, 1987, there was little evidence of Bandkeramik's progeny moving into the Balkans. There is some now. I don't know if this has affected his evaluation, which as I said was not strongly stated at all. (see A&L, 176-7, where he quotes John Chadwick - of Linear B fame - saying that the question "Where did the Greeks come from? is meaningless" based on the idea that Greek was not yet Greek when it entered Greece.) What does strike me again going through all this is the powerful evidence of a migration and a deep cultural change that comes from Anatolia into Greece about 2200BC. This is the time when we see the introduction of the domesticated horse into Greece, along with the fast wheel, new burial and building practices that merge with the existing culture to create what would become Mycenaean culture. This evidence was just beginning to be gathered when Renfrew wrote A&L and I wonder if it has affected his evaluation. In any case, if Renfrew ("not the Bible") is even 75% correct, his explanation seems to me to have the advantage of plausibility - for what that is worth in this crazy world. It is somewhat easier to believe that IE languages developed out of settlers/speakers populating the land, then to believe a rather small horde of Ukrainian horsemen/sheepherders entirely coverted the language of the first large, widespread technically advanced population in Europe - adept at trade, agriculture, building and metallurgy - whom must have by the way had an extremely adequate language of their own, but who nevertheless left no substrate. But stranger things have happened in history, I guess. Regards, Steve Long From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Thu Feb 24 08:46:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 08:46:00 GMT Subject: Bandkeramik and non-Anatolian PIE Message-ID: RMA>the "Indo-Hittite" hypothesis is accepted by very few, almost all RMA>students of one person (and certainly of one department) in the US. .. correct. I hope that is now clear to everyone in this list at least. Unfortunately, Ringe did feed this opinion /into/ the UPenn tree. (It was /not an outcome/ of the Warnow tree, because the algorithm produces so-called 'unrooted' trees). Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 02:27:15 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 21:27:15 EST Subject: The law Message-ID: >mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk writes: >Did the speakers of common IE have any notion of "the law" as an institution? >What was the IE word for "law", either as "the rules to be obeyed" (Latin >{lex}), or as "the process of justice" (Latin {jus})? >> -- two words; *dhe-ti, 'that which is established, law'; reflexes in Latin, Germanic, Greek, Sanskrit; derivation from *dheh, 'set, place'. And *ieuos, 'law, ritual', reflexes in Celtic, Latin ('ius'), Slavic and Indo-Iranian. From edsel at glo.be Thu Feb 24 12:05:48 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 13:05:48 +0100 Subject: The law Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Anthony Appleyard" Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2000 12:37 PM > Did the speakers of common IE have any notion of "the law" as an institution? > What was the IE word for "law", either as "the rules to be obeyed" (Latin > {lex}), or as "the process of justice" (Latin {jus})? Each IE language that I > know of seems to have a different word. [ moderator snip ] [Ed] You could add: Dutch {wet} : could that be related to 'veda'? (The Dutch verb 'weten' means 'to know') German {Gesetz} : 'what has been set' Ed. Selleslagh From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 03:02:42 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 22:02:42 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: <> -- sure. Hittite shows greater differentiation than other IE languages of the same date, but not _that_ much more. Eg, some vocabulary: PIE Latin Hittite English iugom iugum yukan yoke neuos novus newas new kwis quis kuis who kuuon canis kuwan dog es es es 'be' (as in 'to be') nsos nos anzas us And so forth and so on. >Because it means that your 'leap off the page' test does not work on Hittite >(@1500BC) -- I'm afraid it does. See above. >or Thracian (@500BC). -- What on earth do you mean? We don't _have_ enough Thracian to say more than it's transparently Indo-European; eg., Thracian 'Dia' from PIE *diuo -- and derivatives from the PIE words for 'horse', 'white', etc., mostly from place-names and personal names. Another perfectly standard IE language of the period. >The fact is all you accounted for with the "leaps off the page" criterion is >some kind of proto-Mycenaean-Sanskrit-Latin. -- plus Balto-slavic, Celtic, Germanic and Tocharian, to name a few. You should note that Latin and Sanskrit aren't considered particularly closely related. >But you CAN'T logically use those three ONLY to get back to PIE. -- see above. between the first attested PIE languages? If 2000 years separates Latin and >Sanskrit, Hittite should certainly add another 2000 years, wouldn't you say?>> -- more like 500 to 1000, actually. Anatolian is first attested in written sources around 2000 BCE or a little later -- personal names in documents from the Assyrian merchant colonies in what's now eastern Turkey. >Well, the first encountered IE languages include Hittite, Luwian, Thracian - >all before Latin. -- I've dealt with the Anatolian languages above. The -- very fragmentary -- sources for Thracian are contemporary with out first Old Latin texts and show about the same degree of development from PIE, as far as they go, which isn't very far. >I mean you wouldn't be excluding them because they are DIFFERENTIATED >ENOUGH to move your date way back - by whatever measure you >are using - would you? -- no. As I've shown above, and as any textbook would tell you, they're not differentiated enough either. Do you insist that every example come from every IE language? That's going to make things very tedious. >Let's get back to this proof you offered. Does Mycenaean decline 'fire' the >same similar way as Latin and Sanskrit? -- quite similar inflectional forms in the noun. The similarities of Greek and Sanskrit grammar were, you will remember, among the first clues to the existance of an Indo-European family of languages. Mycenaean and Sanskrit are so similar that knowing one, and a few rules for sound-changes, will enable you to read the other and get the general gist of the meaning. <> >Of course. And where exactly does it have it, by the way?>> -- it's the proto-Germanic word for "god/Sky God", of course, with the usual Germanic sound-change of PIE initial *d to 't'. As in 'diwaz' ==> Germanic 'tiwaz'. This is one of the best-established words in the lexicon, with derivatives in Germanic, Hittite/Anatolian, Italic, Greek, Celtic, Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic. You didn't know? From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 03:04:34 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 22:04:34 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >I'd still like to see your catalogue of the specific differences between >Mycenaean, Sanskrit and Latin. Then I'd like to see how you assign a date to >those differences. >> -- might I suggest you get a couple of textbooks and _read_ them? Then we wouldn't have to keep repeating commonplaces for you. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 03:23:48 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 22:23:48 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Really, 500 years. Kind of Italian (1500AD) to Italian (2000AD) - except of >course for the lack of gender in Hittite - and some other small matters like >that. -- Kind of like Anglo-Saxon (1000 AD) and Early Modern English (1500 AD), actually. Massive freight of Romance loan-words, drastic grammatical simplification, and -- right around 1500 -- an equally drastic set of sound-shifts. >And I see that the rate of loss of "inherited IE words" -- mmmm, in case you hadn't noticed, Hittite (as is well-known) has a massive freight of borrowed vocabulary from the non-Indo-European language Hattic, particularly in terms having to do with religious ritual, government and urban life. This is, of course, exactly what happens when one language moves into the territory of another whose speakers are at a higher level of technology and social organization. (The Greek word for "bath" is a non-IE loan, as is the Greek terminology for specifically Mediterranean plants -- hyacinth, for instance.) The Hittites (just to add some confusion, they actually called their language "Neshite") preserved the older Hattic language as a liturgical tongue and borrowed very extensively from it. >And I do respect the considered judgment of historical linguists in these >matters. I just don't believe we've had the benefit of such knowledge in >this thread - not from the start of it. -- that's odd, since the actual historical linguists in this thread have simply been repeating the consensus of the field. >We have texts in Thracian and the reason we cannot read them is because they >are VERY highly differentiated from Latin and Sanskrit and every other known >IE language. -- no, I'm afraid you're simply incorrect. The sum total of extant Thracian consists of a small series of short inscriptions in Greek script, which are difficult to translate because of problems in word division. (This is characteristic of _short_ inscriptions.) There are some glosses found in Hesychius and Photius which give us about 30 certain Thracian terms. The rest of our information comes from personal and place-names. In sum, we have less than a hundred Thracian words -- most of them names. Those we do have, are transparently IE, and present no particular difficulty: -para, 'settlement', -bria, 'town', for instance. >On the other hand, if early IE were as undifferented as being claimed here, >many of these problems in discipherment [of Hittite] logically should not >have occurred. -- no, you're simply wrong, again. The difficulties with Hittite were due to the form of _writing_, not to the language. Once the writing forms were thoroughly understood, the language presented no particular difficulties and indeed bore out some predictions -- the famous laryngeals, for instance. The writing system was a nightmare, though. Eg., the extensive use of Sumerograms in the Hittite version of cuneiform makes a large number of Hittite vocabulary items unrecoverable; and cuneiform is badly suited to writing Indo-European languages in the first place. Not to mention the extensive use of learned terms borrowed from Akkadian for the written form of Hittite. It's rather as if our only source for Latin were 7th-century Irish monastic graffitti. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 03:24:50 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 22:24:50 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: In a message dated 2/23/00 4:51:30 PM Mountain Standard Time, sonno3 at hotmail.com writes: >I think you are overstating a bit on Celtiberian >> -- sorry; sloppy writing. My mind was on "Thracian" while my fingers were still on Celtiberian... 8-). From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Wed Feb 23 07:38:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 07:38:00 GMT Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: SF>>Sanskrit, Hittite should certainly add another 2000 years, wouldn't SF>>you say? SF>Nope, not even close! It is about 500 years more differentiated, plus SF>or minus a few years. .. how will you know? I sometimes feel to be at an auction here.. SF>Phonologically, and (with some exceptions) grammatically, it is quite SF>archaic. .. again: how will you know? In the contrary, (not only to me) it seems rather contaminated. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Wed Feb 23 07:25:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 07:25:00 GMT Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: We should no longer discuss the aboriginal langs on this IE list. I only mentioned Pama-Nyungan as an example that languages under small outside pressure remain relatively conservative over long times. Don't mix that up with the percentages of co-occurrences, please. "Closely related" in a genealogical sense means only that they stem from the same ancestor language. That must not necessarily have been "recently". (I am not going into any glottochronology discussion). And the 50,000-year figure is the one presented by archeologists, as far as I know, these people were HSS and not Neanderthal. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 07:04:02 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 02:04:02 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >Still, the origin of the wheel is usually thought to be in Mesopotamia (e.g. >Sharrett). -- this is, I think, an unresolvable question. The use of the wheel appears at such very "compressed" dates over so much of Eurasia that it's hard to say whether it spread from Point A to Point X or vice-versa. The most one can say is that it's unlikely to have been invented independently at so many contiguous points so close in time. On a related subject, it _is_ fairly safe to say that the chariot (limiting the word to light vehicles with two spoked wheels) didn't appear first in Mesopotamia -- or in the near east. At present, the evidence would seem to indicate a northern Indo-Iranian origin for it, although a rather early one -- late third millenium, which would be prior to the I-I entry into the Middle East, Iran, or India. A pity the Sinashta charioteers didn't write their word for "one hundred" on the bronzework of the horse-harness, so we could date satemization... 8-). And even if it wasn't a PIE-period development, it certainly spread very far, very fast. Eg., the Tocharian word for "army" seems to derive from a term for "wheels", and there were chariots in Scandinavia, of all places, by the 14th century BCE -- no more than 8 centuries after the burials east of the Urals. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 08:02:18 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 03:02:18 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Did it take 15 years for the similarities to "leap off the page?" That is >still rather slow leaping. (And it appears that laryngeals are still more >hesitant about any such acrobatics.) -- it took a fair proportion of those 15 years (including the opening years of WWI, which sort of disrupted scholarly work) to reliably decypher the highly idiosyncratic Hittite writing system, which is an eccentric form of a script originally designed for another language; in fact, it's a local variant of Akkadian cuneiform adapted to write "Hittite", and that had in turn been designed for Sumerian and adapted to write Akkadian. Eg., the apparent distinction between b/p, d/t, and g/k in written Hittite is not real because it represents a phonological difference between Akkadian and Sumerian -- it has no relevance to spoken Hittite. Things like this had to be worked out before we could get at the actual shape of the language. Add to this the fact that the overwhelming bulk of the Hittite documents were religous and/or governmental, and it's precisely in those semantic fields that the non-IE element in the Hittite lexicon is greatest -- from Hattic, Akkadian, and Sumerian. To use an analogy, studying Hittite from the texts we have is rather as if we had to study English exclusively through works dealing with Greek architecture and Christian theology, written by a set of medieval copyists given to dropping into Latin every now and then and sprinkling the page with Greek words meant to be pronounced as their English equivalents. The _core_ vocabulary of Hittite is unambiguously Indo-European, and of a rather archaic form, at that, indicating a short separation. We were lucky that cuneiform was already known; it took 40 years before someone could show that Linear B was archaic Greek, a feat requiring skull-cracking ingenuity. >The "leap off the page" quote was made to tell us just how "undifferentiated" >Sanskrit, Latin and Mycenaean are supposed to be. -- that's "are". Has anyone here disputed their close similarity? Eg., Homeric Greek "Hieron menos" and Sanskrit "ishiram manas" (both meaning "mighty and powerful"). NB: no, the relationship does not depend on that one pairing. That's just a typical example. >What are the chances that the gap between Hittite and Classic IE languages >is actually much older? -- very little, in the judgement of most in the field. It's comparable to the difference between Old English and Early Modern English; a brusque restructuring of the morphology, and a massive freight of loan-words in certain semantic fields. >If I have been successful in posing this question understandably, then one >should see the value in considering what the reconstructed proto-Hittite of >6000-5500BC would look like. -- it shouldn't look so close to the PIE you get by comparing the other IE languages, for starters. Given a gap of 4000 years, one would expect an extreme degree of differentiation, similar to that between, say, English and Proto-Germanic. >My point that this was very convenient for Latin and Sanskrit to be compared >this way. And equally inconvenient not to find anything like the same >similarity in either Greek or Hittite. -- oh, there are plenty of similarities. The word for fire was just one. eg., that for "field" is, in four fairly early IE languages: Sanskrit: ajras Greek: agros Latin: ager Gothic: akrs Or to use the famous phrase: Sanskrit: Devas adadat datas Latin Deus dedit dentes Greek*: Theos doken ondontas (*my feeble stab at a Homeric version; Hellenists feel free to correct. Anyone care to venture a Mycenaean rendering?). >then what does the absence of agnis/ignis in other early IE languages prove >about time and differentiation? -- very little. You have to consider the whole language, of which that noun was simply one example. See above. You also have to consider the broad series of examples of the speed of linguistic change which we have records of. >"Different dialects reflecting different choices" would suggest that some >time was involved in those processes too. -- it's concurrent, not sequential. When one language was "deciding" to use *egnis or *pur-' as its word for "fire", it did not have to wait until another had gone the other way. All the languages in question were changing _simultaneously_, tho' of course not at exactly the same speed. >I simply point out that it does not support the premise it was >meant to support - which was the closeness of not just two languages - but of >all early IE languages. -- nobody in the field disputes the closeness of the early IE languages, that I'm aware of. There's disagreement about the _relative_ closeness, but not that the languages at first observation are still quite close. >As a matter of fact, I'm surprised that the closeness between agnis/ignis in >Sanskrit and Latin does not suggest a much more recent date of commonality >for those words by themselves, without regard to the rest of those two >languages. -- that's because they're cognates. They both undergo -- here's that phrase again -- the characteristic Indo-Iranian and Latin sound-shifts from a PIE form. Latin ignis Lithuanian ugnis OC Slavonic ognis Sanskrit agnis from PIE *egnis. The _alternative_ term, also of PIE date, is of course PIE *pur; which gives Germanic furr (standard *p ==> f) Umbrian pir Czech pyr (ashes, a semantic shift) Hittite pahur Tocharian puwar, etc., etc. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 03:29:46 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 22:29:46 EST Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: >proto-language at email.msn.com writes: >I believe the process through which this happened is roughly that Nostratic, >which had phonemic /e,a,o/ came into areal contact which Caucasian languages >that favored extreme vowel reduction, and transference of vocalic >differences to glides: CE -> Cya; CO -> Cwa, >> -- I thought this was the _Indo-European_ list? Since most people here probably classify "Nostratic" with the tooth fairy, must we waste our time? [ Moderator's comment: Would your reaction be as strong if Mr. Ryan had said "pre-IE" instead of "Nostratic"? --rma ] From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Feb 24 11:22:56 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 11:22:56 -0000 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: >> Bird's summary of Pokorny's roots, ....2050 core roots. >> Of these exactly 775 have neither e nor e: anywhere. > 38%. Is that including a(:) and o(:)? I simply got the computer to check - so it includes absolutely everything listed in Bird without e or e:. > Benveniste treats roots with CeRC / CRC ablaut as CeRC roots. Then it is no wonder that so few (comparatively) roots appear with CRC - whether the R is /i/ or /u/ or anything else. Is it possible that the apparent imbalance in numbers of CeC roots and CiC/CuC is a chimaeara - merely the result of the way we record the root in question? And further, since CeC includes CeR, a comparison would not be about -e- and -i-/-u- at all, but about the number of roots without a third consonant compared with the number of roots with third consonant, with medial R, but without full grade. Is anything meaningful being compared there? It does not seem to be a comparison of like with like. Peter From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Wed Feb 23 08:52:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 08:52:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: AH>The reconstruction for (Pre-)Proto-Slavic *inmen is rather zero grade AH>of *H1neH3mn, i.e. *H1nH3men-. Some more "loans" (???) to the north: - yukagir nim/niu - tshuk ninn - jap namu - ainu namup to the south (with s-mobile) - bask izen - semitc *s-m-n - nub esmi/esum far east: - indones. namma I do not know or claim these to be cognates. But it might be. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Wed Feb 23 08:30:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 08:30:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: RW>has been dropped in the last 10 years and replaced with something RW>like 'related languages are those that have some features in common or RW>are somehow connected', or 'there is no such thing as genetically RW>related languages'. French and Rumanian have Latin as one common ancestor language. Only in this sense they are said to be genealogically related and named Romance languages. Anttila shows that not in all cases it is clear which language should be called the "mother language" insofar as we prefer lexical versus grammatical & morphological features as criterion. Take Albanian with a rest of 10% (!) of original lexemes (cf. Anttila 89:172), but nobody hesitates to name it an /IE language/. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Feb 24 07:54:29 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 07:54:29 -0000 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: Dear Joat and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2000 8:37 PM >> Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >> "wolf" = "outlaw", I'd like an explanation>> > -- well, PIE for 'wolf' is *wlkwos. It's been suggested that this is a > normalization of an adjective, *ulkwos 'dangerous'; ie., Hittite walkuwa > 'dangerous', and Sanskrit 'avrka', 'not wild'. > In Anatolian, *wlkwos gives 'lion', which also suggests that the meaning of > 'wolf' is a semantic narrowing of an original 'the dangerous one'. > I should have been more precise; perils of working from memory. The Egyptian has wnS, 'jackal', which, I believe, is likely to be a cognate. Rather than 'dangerous', I have speculated that the the term can be analyzed as a combination of 4. *wel-, 'wool' ('sheep'), and 1. *kwei-, 'watch'. 'Dangerous', an adjective, is more likely to be derived from 'wolf' ('wolflike') than deriving a noun ('dangerous one') from an early adjective. 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 JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 21:03:31 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 16:03:31 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >edsel at glo.be writes: >this can happen without the intermediate stage of a pidgin: Afrikaans is a >typical example of that. -- Afrikaans is not a creole; it's transparently a Germanic language and transparently descended from 17th-century Netherlandish. Certainly there's been a morphological simplification, but only slightly more so than in English. In fact, Afrikaans is to Dutch very much as English is to Old English -- many of the same developments. >including the disappearance of the participial prefix ge- that existed in Old >English. -- however, Frisian shares many features with English, and never had the sort of Romance superstrate experience that English did. From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Wed Feb 23 08:04:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 08:04:00 GMT Subject: Horses Message-ID: >Armenian also has a word for horse, 'es', that's derived from *ekwos; .. that is not generally accepted. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 08:11:13 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 03:11:13 EST Subject: Horses Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Did something change while I wasn't looking? I thought > was ass. -- my reference lists it as "Arm: es, 'horse'. I don't have an Armenian dictionary on hand -- does anyone? From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 20:53:13 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 15:53:13 EST Subject: Domesticating the Horse Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >To PIEians wild and tame seemed to be one and the same. -- PIE has another word for horse -- *markos -- which has a derived feminine in Germanic, *markiha. In animal names a derived feminine in *-eha seems to denote a domestic animal (eg., PIE *h(1)ekueha, 'mare') and in *-iha denotes a wild animal. (eg., *ulkwiha, 'she-wolf). Therefore the original meaning of *markhos was probably specifically a wild horse. There's also an eastern-IE word, *gheios (from "impells, drives") which gives reflexes in Armenian -- 'ji', 'horse' -- and Sanskrit 'haya', 'horse'. Although in point of fact, English has no separate word for "wild horse", and we distinguish the wild from the domestic variety without any particular problem. >It is not hard to see how Sredni Stog culture might have learned >domestication and livestock breeding from Tripolye and applied it to the >animal it had a wealth of - the horse. -- no objection there; that's probably exactly what happened. PIE-speaking Sredni Stog picked up Neolithic traits from the non-PIE-speaking Tripolye culture and then did them the dirty. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 06:08:26 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 01:08:26 EST Subject: "Upper limit" of PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 2/23/00 10:47:45 PM Mountain Standard Time, jer at cphling.dk writes: >Does the quoted statement mean that PIE split up "no later than" 4500 BC, or >does it mean "no earlier than" 4500 BC? >> -- "no earlier than" 4500 BCE is what was meant, I think. Probably rather later. My own take would be "sometime after 4000 BCE" for the split with Anatolian; "Sometime after 3500" for the beginning of the breakup of the rest of PIE. I'd say around 3500 BCE or a little earlier for the split with Anatolian and around 3000 BCE for the rest, myself. Of course, there are no absolute dates here. In 3000 BCE, PIE was undoubtedly already a collection of dialects. Some of them went on sharing innovations much longer than others -- the percusors of Balto-Slavic-Greek-Phyrgian-Armenian-Indo-Iranian (and probably the lost IE languages of the Balkans) for example. Germanic seems to have made many of its most characteristic changes very late -- in the Iron Age. It's like very slowly pulling a mass of warm taffy in various directions, rather than chopping it up with a cleaver. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Feb 24 10:00:50 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 10:00:50 +0000 Subject: "Upper limit" of PIE Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard writes: > On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Stanley Friesen wrote: >> [...] [W]e can >> place a fairly secure *upper* *limit* on how old the divergence of PIE is. >> That upper limit is about 4500 BC. >> [...] > Help me, I'm dumb and ignorant, what is up and down in archaeological > dating? Does the quoted statement mean that PIE split up "no later than" > 4500 BC, or does it mean "no earlier than" 4500 BC? Is the present moment > the low or the high end of the scale? This is quite honestly meant as no > criticism, but perhaps there are other language-oriented IE-ists who have > difficulties following an argument that points up and down when it means > before and after (in this order or the reverse). Will anyone stoop to > informing me (us) on this important point? It means 'no earlier than'. When we say that 4500 BC is an upper limit for an event, we mean that the event cannot have happened any *earlier* than 4500 BC, though it may have occurred later. The archaeologists' calendar runs backward in time from the bottom of the page to the top. So, a "high" date is earlier than a "low" date, and an "upper" limit is a *terminus non ante quem*, while a "lower" limit is a *terminus non post quem". Don't blame us linguists for this. ;-) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Feb 24 08:10:11 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 08:10:11 -0000 Subject: Celtic closer to Anatolian? Message-ID: This all depends on the isoglosses you choose - obviously. I would be interested to see the ones that link Tocharian with Celtic. There are some isoglosses which are claimed to separate the two. I'm rather cautious about putting too much weight on "isoglosses" that I cannot always justify from my own knowledge, but for what it's worth: Germanic, Celtic and Italic are one side of collection of isoglosses which has Tocharian, Hittite etc on the other, and includes: (a) nouns in -tu:t formed from adjectives (b) -ss- consistently rather than -st- or -tt. (c) I also have a note about "-a- derivative nouns" which I no longer understand. Maybe it will remind you of something. Celtic Italic & Greek are one side of another collection which has Tocharian and Hittite on the other, and includes: (a) feminine form comparatives (b) Interconsonantal H falls (c) absence of -i on secondary endings Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Feb 24 08:29:02 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 08:29:02 -0000 Subject: Tocharian and Macedonian Message-ID: Inspired by Lloyd to ask odd questions, I dare to wonder if there is any connection between Tocharian and Macedonian -or is our evidence for Macedonian too weak? Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Feb 24 08:27:19 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 08:27:19 -0000 Subject: Italic close to Slavic? Message-ID: LLoyd seesm intersted in the place of Hittite, Tocharian & Albanian. For what it's worth, which is very little, I have spent some time working out a "pseudo-map" of the dialects based on as many usable isoglosses as I could find. The well-known 8 dialects have to go in their usual positions in a kind of circle. That's uninteresting. The interesting bit is fitting in Tocharian, Hittite, Albanian and Armenian. To get the simplest map, these all ended up in the middle of the circle, in a kind of square - in clockwise order, Hittite, Albanian, Armenian, Tocharian, Hittite. Armenian has to lie close to I-I and Greek. It shares one isogloss with Greek against I-I, and one with I-I against Greek, and three with Slavic or Baltic & Slavic against both Greek and I-I. There are five that separate Armenian, Greek and I-I from everything else, and another 6 that separate it off from most others. Albanian on the other hand appears closer to Baltic and Slavic (at least on the isoglosses I used, and on my interpretation of them). I find 7 isoglosses between Albanian and Hittite, 8 between Alb and Toch. Hittite and Tocharian seem much closer to each other - the only major PIE isogloss I have found to separate them is the distinction of short o and a (merged in Hittite, Germanic, I-I etc). And both, of course, are centum, appear to have a new tense system derived from the perfect, and so on. Hittite appears on my pseudo-map closer to Germanic than anything else. I found this a helpful exercise to do, and perhaps in gross terms there is some value in it as a kind of broad overview. Peter From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Feb 24 09:28:45 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 09:28:45 +0000 Subject: reality of PIE Message-ID: Pete Gray writes: > Larry said: >> Without a tolerably unified PIE ..... > Quite! My point is that we cannot go beyond the "tolerably unified" and > speak of a single, undifferentiated language. I thought this was standard > stuff. To reconstruct PIE without allowing for some internal variety would > seem to me - in my innocence, and in light of the IE evidence - somewhat > doubtful. But nobody is proposing that PIE was a language devoid of variation. Every living language exhibits variation: regional, social, contextual, individual. And PIE cannot have been different. It is merely that variation is generally very hard to reconstruct. Only occasionally do we find evidence pointing to the existence of variation in our reconstructed language, and even then such evidence is often hard to interpret unambiguously. I can give you a nice example from Basque. We can reconstruct for Pre-Basque a certain noun meaning 'interval', but the modern reflexes are inconsistent: some point clearly to earlier *, others equally clearly to earlier *. There is no way of resolving this with the data available, and it may be simply that the form of the word was variable in Pre-Basque. Or there may be some other explanation which we can't detect for lack of evidence. > Indeed, this very variety is what some of the glottalicists rely on - for > example, in order to link Skt /bh/ with Germanic */b/, both derived from > dialectic allophones (or "dialectophones") of b/bh. Sorry; I don't follow. As far as I know, *everybody* links Sanskrit /bh/ to Proto-Germanic */b/, both being derived from PIE */bh/. > That's just one > example - you know the kind of stuff I mean. A single unified PIE is > certainly not what we can reconstruct, except as an artificial abstraction. But nobody is claiming that our reconstruction contains every detail of the speech of the PIE-speakers. That's out of the question. What we *do* claim is that we can reconstruct a great deal of PIE. > A more interesting and slightly philosophical question is whether we > believe a perfectly unified pre-PIE is a necessity. I am arguing that it > is not - that dialect variation within a language is perfectly normal, and > the daughter languages may indeed reflect that variation, and even show > mixing of the dialects (as modern English does). Of course there are > examples of a single dialect spawning variant daughters, but I am > challenging the assumption that all daughter languages must - by > definition - come from a single undifferentiated original. Then you are arguing with no one, because no one either denies the reality of variation or insists that PIE was a language without variation. >>>> Genetically related languages were once the same language. > On this, Larry said: >> The statement above is true ... by definition. > This begs the question I asked above, and also relies on questions of > definition - are we talking of a single unifed undifferentiated language? > That's the concept I am attacking. It is not true *by definition* that > genetically related langauges derive from a single undifferentiated > ancestor. Assuming that 'undifferentiated' means only 'exhibiting sufficiently little variation that we may regard the whole as a single language', then I'm afraid that this *is* true by definition. That's what we *mean* by 'genetically related languages'. > It may be true by definition that they derive from closely > related forms of that language, but where is your evidence that all must > come from a single form of that language? I think it is an assumption open > to challenge and debate. Put it this way: the Romance languages derive from a single ancestor, spoken Latin, in the same way that the IE languages descend from a single ancestor, PIE. Nobody claims that spoken Latin was devoid of variation, but only that spoken Latin was, by any reasonable standard, a single language. >> Languages which do not >> descend from a common ancestor are not genetically related. > Even if they descend from sister languages, which are themselves descended > from different dialects, which are themselves reflexes - maybe quite complex > ones - of an earlier dialect continuum - which is itself the result of > earlier close dialects - etc etc .... So that there is no single unified > undifferentiated ancestor? Or do you believe that there always must be a > single ancestor without variation? Again, *nobody* is claiming an absence of variation for any language. But are you suggesing that a dialect continuum can derive only from an earlier dialect continuum, and so on, back in time without limit? I remain to be persuaded that such a thing is possible. Anyway, 'dialect' is a two-place predicate: a dialect must be a dialect *of* something: it can't just be a dialect, *tout court*. > Perhaps we are again using different meanings of "common ancestor" - yours > more loose, including variation, and mine excluding it in order to make the > point that a single dialect-free ancestor may not be necessary. Actually, I am very close to taking the presence of variation as part of the definition of 'natural language'. Not quite sure if I want to do that, but we never find natural languages without variation. I also suspect you may be taking regional variation as the only significant kind of variation. If you're not, I apologize, but in fact regional variation is just one of several kinds of variation that languages exhibit. It is also the one that is generally easiest to trace back to an earlier absence of variation. > Creoles - how can you describe a Creole as descended from a single ancestor? I haven't done so. > Doesn't his mean prioritising one of its "parents" over the other? There is nothing wrong with this conclusion in principle. We routinely describe an individual creole as 'English-based' or 'Portuguese-based', or whatever -- and with good reason. > Your restriction of > "related" to mean only "genetically related" means we cannot say, "English > shows a closer relationship to French than to Italian." Correct. We can't, because it's not true. > Instead we have to > spell out the nature of that relationship, and say, "English is equally > related to both French and Italian, but has been more deeply influenced > by... and so on." Are you seriously objecting to stating the facts accurately? Do you really think it would be a step forward to abandon all distinctions and shove every kind of connection between languages into a black bag marked 'related'? Count me out. > I want to say both sentences have their place, and given the right > understanding of "relationship", both are true. You appear to be saying > that the first is always wrong. I would say it is only wrong if > "relationship" is understood purely in a genetic sense. But that is how we *do* understand the term in historical linguistics. Basque has borrowed thousands of words from Latin and Romance. But this does not make Basque any more closely related to Romance than it ever was. 2000 years ago, Basque was a genetically isolated language (as far as we know). Today, Basque is a genetically isolated language whose lexicon has been heavily influenced by Latin and Romance. That's all. > So I ask, is the only relationship two languages can have, a genetic one? > (Indeed you talk of "inventing non-existent "relationships", and confusing > these with > > genetic links?") > What about Sprachbuende, etc? There are other relationships - so why deny > them? Why not keep the word "relationship" open, and specify "genetic" > when necessary? First, because our terminology is established, and changing established terminology without a profound reason is a bad idea. Second, because we already have terminology for labeling these other states of affairs -- 'Sprachbund' being a good example. I've written several dictionaries of linguistics, and nobody knows better than I do just what a mess much of our linguistic terminology is in. It's a relief to find an area of linguistics in which our terminology is in good order and generally accepted. And messing about with this established terminology is absolutely the last thing I want to contemplate. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Feb 24 11:38:30 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 11:38:30 -0000 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: I (Peter) said: >> the Greek pattern of accentuation in >> verbs is a development within Greek - RV keeps the accent further >> back. Vidyanath said: > I don't unerstand this. Augmented forms are accented on the augment in > RV. In case of unaugmented forms, the accent is generally on the root in > the s/is aorist, and shifts between the root and ending in the root > aorist. A new pattern developed in Greek which limits how far back the accent can fall. The accent must fall in one of the last three syllables, and may have to be on the second to last, (or even the last after contraction), depending on word shape. The means the augment cannot always be accented. eg 'ephe:na (1 sg aor act = I appeared) but ef'e:namen (1 pl = we appeared), 'elusa, but el'usamen etc. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Feb 24 11:57:52 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 11:57:52 -0000 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: >> where is the evidence on the correlation mentioned between >> asigmatic aorists and absence of augment? > Blumenthal, [comparing] strong aorist ..and weak aorist Thanks! But can I check two things: (a) Has he used "strong" to mean "asigmatic" rather than "second"? (There are number of asigmatic first aorists, e.g. e:ggeila, hgeira, e:ra e:muna apekriname:n ege:ma edw:ka etc) (b) What about verbs that appear to be asigmatic/"strong" merely because they lost their -s- in the development of the language? Would these affect the results? Peter From rao.3 at osu.edu Thu Feb 24 16:05:52 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 11:05:52 -0500 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: "Robert Whiting" wrote: I am confused by some of these. I will appreciate some expansion. > Formally, the Akkadian stative corresponds to the West Semitic > perfective (and the Egyptian so-called "old perfective") and the > Akkadian preterite corresponds to the West Semitic imperfective. > ... A plausible case could be made for iprus and iparras once > having been the same form with the outcomes being the result of > differences in stress. If so, then the 'old perfective' became the > stative and simply dropped out of the tense system If I understand this correctly, the evolution seems decidely odd: Perfective becomes a stative (existence of a state of indeterminate duration would seem to be in the domain of imperfective) while the imperfective became the narrative past but some other form was often used for `durative' past. [OTOH, stative -> perfect -> perfective is a more familiar chain.]. What are the reasons for this reversal of functions? BTW, isn't the `imperfective' used with wa- in Biblical Hebrew for narration? I know that people have been arguing for over 100 years about the explanation, but I thought that nowadays this was taken to be a survival of an old preterite and comparable to the Akkadian use. What is the preferred explanation these days? From rao.3 at osu.edu Thu Feb 24 15:23:25 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 10:23:25 -0500 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: wrote: > Number one point five, does goat's milk or mare's milk > produce curds, whey, butter? They make cheese from goat's milk, so there must something like curds or whey. > Number three, does lactose intolerance apply to cheeses, > butters and other by-products of cattle dairy farming? It is said to apply to cheese. It does not apply to yoghurt. I doubt it applies to butter, as butter is mostly fat. Anyway, people don't enough butter in one sitting to make much difference. BTW, ``butter'' and ghee used in (South) India is generally made from >fermented< milk (ie, it is fat separated from yoghurt, not fresh milk). This may make a difference. Also, there was some research I read about several years ago about practical implications of lactose intolerance. Apparently, people who consume milk from infancy on without break can tolerate milk even if they are, strictly speaking, lactose intolerant (defined as capable of consuming x gm of lactose on an empty stomach in one go. This amount, as I remember, comes to one pint of milk on an empty stomach which I don't think I can stand, but I drink two cups of milk a day (with oatmeal, cold cereal or in South Indian style coffee) plus yoghurt). Even if there is a break, if one persists for several months, one can get used to it. Secondly, lactose intolerance need not stop anyone from consuming 1-2 cups of milk a day, especially if accompanied by solid food. [In Tamil Nadu (South India), milk is generally consumed either as yoghurt/buttermile or in coffee (60-75% milk)or ``khiir/paayasam'' and often with some other food.] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 21:33:14 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 16:33:14 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >But not linguistically. There are 250 million people speaking >Dravidian languages in the Indian subcontinent. -- and currently around 800 million speaking Indo-European languages there, which if you add in Iran, eastern Anatolia and central Asia, comes to over 1 billion. >"Steppe invasions" have affected Northern India, Iran, Anatolia, >the Balkans, the Hungarian plains. -- the Huns got as far as France, the Avars raided all over western and southern Europe, and the Mongols devastated Poland. They weren't stopped by the Europeans, either; Ogedai Khan died and they all went back to Mongolia. In any case, with the IE expansion in the Neolithic, we're talking about a social-political-ecological setting which has no historic parallel. Eg., the sparsity of population in Europe, the small size of the political units, the focus of settlement on what are now heath and upland areas, and the existance of broad and largely uninhabited areas of scrub and second growth. >Mallory's scenario requires "steppe pastoralists" -- well, no. Mobile mixed agriculturalists with a pastoral emphasis. It's clear from the archaeological record that true steppe nomadism was a _much_ later development. Even the Andronovo culture east of the Volga isn't pastoralist in the way that, say, the Kirgihz or Mongols were. >to have become linguistically dominant after 3500 over an area that was >densely populated by contemporary standards -- no problem. Roman Britain was densely populated too, and also politically decentralized. In fact, there were more people in Britain c. 400 CE than in 1400 CE. And it was Anglo-Saxonized to a startling degree; just from the linguistic evidence, you wouldn't know that the Romano-British had ever existed at all. The Germanic incomers were highly decentralized too. What seems to have happened there is small war-bands accompanied by their families bullying or bashing their way in among a less militant native population, making deals with the small local polities (often to help them against their domestic British rivals) and then turning on them later as they expanded by assimilating individual locals and/or bringing in more people from their homeland. Eventually the British settlements get overrun, or encapsulated and assimilated. And then the Germanicized areas of initial settlement in turn served as bases for the same process further west. Sort of like a series of ink-blots slowly growing and merging on a map, for a visual metaphor. >In Northern Europe, there were no cities and no sizeable political >structures to take over. -- well, that makes things easier for incomers, not harder; see the example of England, above. All that's required is one-way assimilation, which could be accounted for by the intruders having a hierarchical social structure suited to assimilating individual outsiders, and the natives not having such a mechanism. When the paradigm is: "What's mine is mine, what's yours is negotiable", the process has only one end -- regardless of the relative numbers. >Only massive infiltration might conceivably have done the trick, and we know >there was none of that (the population still has largely "Anatolian" genes). -- not according to Cavalli-Sforza, who shows a wave of migration starting north of the sea of Azov and spreading throughout Europe. >The most parsimonious solution is therefore to assume that Northern/Central >Europe was Indoeuropeanized rapidly from 5500 with the advance of the Linear >Pottery culture, followed in the ensuing millennia by acculturation of the >peripheral sub-Neolithic areas (N.Germany-Denmark-S.Sweden; >Baltic-Bielorussia; Pontic-Caspian). -- that's ruled out by the linguistic evidence. Archaeological stuff can only be a supplement, useful to confirm linguistic information, but unable to disprove it. >After 4000, the Pontic area became a secondary center of >(re-)Indo-Europeanization, affecting mainly the Balkans and Central Asia (-> >Iran, India) -- that presupposes a complex set of overlapping re-migrations which (very conveniently!) wipe out the supposed "IE" languages of the original European agricultural hearth. >ca. 3500 (Corded Ware-Bell Beaker) carried Indo-European languages further >into Eastern Europe (Russia) and Atlantic/West-Mediterranean Europe (France, >Italy, Spain, British Isles). -- it's more parsimonious to assume that the Corded Ware culture and its Bell-Beaker offshoot were in fact the agents of Indo-Europeanization of northern and western Europe; and even more important, there's a much better temporal fit with the linguistics. From rao.3 at osu.edu Thu Feb 24 15:32:39 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 10:32:39 -0500 Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: "Stanley Friesen" > I know how similar cognate words are in Hittite and Sanskrit. > After one abstracts out the differences in writing systems, they > are very little different at all. Indeed, if the phonetic differences > were all there were, they would be more like dialect variants of > one language. Farsi and Hindi, on the other hand, do not have > many such transparently similar cognates (and most of those are > accidental - much like the fact that in my dialect of English, "worm" > is pronounced almost identically to the reconstructed > PIE root it derives from [*wrm] - sans endings). I am curious about this. Has anybody actually sat down with dictionaries and tried it out? One problem is that, depending on the speaker, Hindi can contain varying amounts of loans from Iranian languages [For example, the Hindi word for 1000, `hazaar' is transperantly Persian, and transparently cognate to the Sanskrit sahasra.]. On the other hand, ``Shudh Hindi'' deliberately replaces these with Sanskrit words whose selection criteria may introduce its own bias into the comparison. I would like to know how these were handled? From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Thu Feb 24 13:09:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 13:09:00 GMT Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: SF>Comparing averages, and calibrating by observed rates of change in the SF>last 3000 years, we can place a fairly secure *upper* *limit* on how SF>old the divergence of PIE is. That upper limit is about 4500 BC. .. < you aren't really a linguist, are you? Who told you this outdated glottochronological fuss? just see my parallel mails for counter examples. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Thu Feb 24 10:01:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 10:01:00 GMT Subject: Rosenfelder Message-ID: LT>A small correction: the final element here should be ".htm", and LT>not ".html". .. correct, thank you (on my Atari I only have 3 gaps for the file ending, anyway); at least now that is the correct URL. Just in the moment I got it this way; What seems broken, is indeed the link via the homepage, as SGeorg stated in a parallel mail. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Thu Feb 24 13:04:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 13:04:00 GMT Subject: Balkan Kurgans Message-ID: Dear Stanley, SF>PIE has a reconstructible word that *probably* meant silver, and it is SF>derivable from a root meaning "white", which makes it unlikely to be SF>borrowed. .. That is well-known. The question aimed at *professional archaeologists* for archaeological evidence whether that silver showed any traits that could be termed or compared with clearly IE art. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Thu Feb 24 13:23:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 13:23:00 GMT Subject: Buck on the WWWeb? Message-ID: >it seems to me that one of the most useful things we could possibly have >is a fully-updated version of something like Buck, but organized by >etymon not by semantic meaning. .. The VTW at Leiden University, NL, is working on a new Indo-European etymological dictionary 'IED'. But it will still take some more years as I was informed some days ago by personal e-mail. Meanwhile we urgently are looking for an digitized version of the Pokorny!! Who knows one ???? Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Thu Feb 24 13:08:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 13:08:00 GMT Subject: Assumptions in Computing phylogenies Message-ID: "UPenn tree" LA>I am always skeptical about assumptions getting hidden when computers LA>are used. .. < they must not nessessarily get hidden: in a standard scholarly work you do have to make things clear. The UPenn tree is not clear. - the one side is the so called "perfect phylogeny" of prof. Warnow. The truth is that biological taxonomists come out with new, increasing complicated "perfect phylogenies" every 14 days. A professional overview is "Swafford/Olsen/Waddell/Hillis: 'Phylogenetic inference'. Molecular Systematics, 2nd ed. 1996." - have fun;-)) - the other side is Prof. Ringe's list; but: first, this is not published, and - still worse - the decisions fed into the tree are not published either. Or did I miss one of the many articles ? So - /what/ can we really argue about? Every question LLoyd stated furtheron shows that the UPenn tree is not fully documented. ---------- LA>I would be happier if we had a technique that could give results as a LA>combination of dialect net and tree, ... .. < There is. See e.g. Forster/Toth/Bandelt 'Evolutionary network analysis of word lists: Visualising the relationships between Alpine Romance languages. in: Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, Vol 5-3/1998:174- 187. And this one in fact /is fully documented/, including the word list. --------- LA>a third one I raised recently as a question, and do not think the one LA>response I received got me further in my understanding: LA>(c) are results sensitive to whether a dialect in a dialect net is near LA>the center, surrounded by closely related languages, with many nearby LA>characteristics to compare, ..< attention! We /must/ not mix up dialect geography with genealogy! These are quite different issues. Two languages may be direct offsprings of a mother language, in spite that one of them has lost e.g. ~90% of the original features (e.g. Albanian, mainly due to Latin influence) and the other, e.g. Greek, lost only ~ 40%. -------------- LA>that Ringe expressed "surprise" that the results of using the technique LA>were highly consistent with traditional scholarship. I found that LA>expression of surprise itself surprising, .. > indeed. It's commonplace in informatics: "garbage in = garbage out". And, vice versa, of course. --------------- Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From ie at AA5779.spb.edu Thu Feb 24 21:19:25 2000 From: ie at AA5779.spb.edu (Artem V. Andreev) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 00:19:25 +0300 Subject: R and r Message-ID: Dear sirs! I have a question that at a glance might seem not to have any relation to the domain of the present list; but I humbly ask u to believe that it has a direct connection with my studies in IE and that I am very hard to solve it myself. The question is: is there any language in the world which has a *phonemic* opposition between dental vibrant /r/ and uvular *vibrant* /R/? Thank u very much in advance, Sincerely yours etc Artem Andreev From edsel at glo.be Thu Feb 24 11:46:31 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 12:46:31 +0100 Subject: Lusitanian/Celtic/Italic [was Basque ] Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard M. Alderson III" Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2000 10:28 PM > I notice that no one else has responded. I have a couple of comments: > On Sun, 6 Feb 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> Yes, the /p/ problem does distinguish it from Celtic >> I've also seen the theory that it was cognate with Celtic and Italic as a >> member of a W IE branch >> Ed Selleslagh has floated the idea that it might be Q-Italic > Q-Celtic, I think you mean. [snip] [Ed Selleslagh] No, I really said Q-Italic. The reason is that most of the Cabeço das Fraguas text can be interpreted as some not too deviant form of Latin. Actually it can almost entirely be transposed in more normal Latin without the help of far-fetched analogies. The only real problem is the manifest incompleteness of the sentence. But this still is a personal idea of mine, of course. Ed. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Feb 24 09:46:09 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 09:46:09 +0000 Subject: Basque Message-ID: Ante Aikio writes: [on borrowing verbs] > This may be true in the cases you mention above, but the generalization is > incorrect. To name just one counterexample: Saami has a huge amount of > verbs borrowed from both Finnish and Scandinavian, and most of these are > quite recent borrowings. They are without exception inflected according to > the normal Saami inflectional paradigm. This even holds for new > borrowings: a borrowed verb root that has not even been phonologically > nativized gets Saami mood, tense, number and person suffixes attached to > it quite regularly. Very interesting, and I thank you for the information. I presume, though, that the inflectional pattern of Saami is such that a foreign verb-stem can be readily absorbed and inflected. In many other cases, the two languages involved have such different verbal morphologies that there is no way the borrowing language can inflect the borrowed verb-stem. Arabic loans into Turkish are a good case in point: there is no earthly way that an internally inflected Arabic verbal root can be handled within the purely suffixing Turkish verbal morphology, which requires verb-stems to contain vowels. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From colkitto at sprint.ca Fri Feb 25 03:45:07 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 22:45:07 -0500 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: For "warg" the meaning "wolf" in Germanic is, however, secondary, see, Weitenberg 1988: 194 (The Meaning of the expression "To Become a Wolf" in Hittite", Perspectives on IE Language, Culture, and Religion, Journal of Indo-European Studies: Monograph No. 7,) and the literature cited therein. Robert Orr From sarima at friesen.net Fri Feb 25 05:44:42 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 21:44:42 -0800 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 08:10 PM 2/13/00 +0100, Stefan Georg wrote: >"bear" = "brown one" OK >"wolf" = "outlaw", I'd like an explanation The word is used in that meaning in many old texts, especially old laws, such as the Hittite legal code. It is also one of the words applied to Germanic berserkers in Roman times. However, it is not clear to me in which direction the shift of meaning occurred. I can just as easily see the original word for wolf being used as a slang term for an outlaw, or for a "wild man" in general. [Certainly the article I read on its use in the Hittite legal code seemed to assume the shift was from wolf to outlaw]. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Fri Feb 25 05:52:58 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 21:52:58 -0800 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <003e01bf78b2$7eda22c0$a2a701d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: At 08:05 PM 2/15/00 +0000, petegray wrote: > I mean that creolisation / language mixing or whatever you call it provides >us with an example of a language which goes back to two ancestors, not one. I am not sure that it actually does, though. I remember reading (second-hand) about a study done of the English-based creoles of the various islands in the Pacific. The result, as it was presented to me, was that applying standard reconstruction techniques recovered something close to the dialect of English prevalent among English sailors in the 18th century - not a hybrid of English and Polynesian. Does anybody here remember the study? Is my understanding of it correct? -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Feb 24 17:51:50 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 17:51:50 -0000 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: > The initial laryngeal *must* be *H3, given the evidence of the Greek > prothetic vowel in _onoma_. There is no way for *H1 (the "e-colouring > laryngeal") to yield an initial /o/ in Greek. I believe the argument is that analogy has so profoundly affected reflexes of laryngeals in Greek, including prothetic vowels, that the single evidence of Greek alone is insufficient to establish the nature of the laryngeal. I have read somewhere (sloppy idiot that I am, I forget where) the argument that the nature of the initial vowel in onoma is determined by the medial -o-. This only means that Rich's *must* might perhaps be softened to *can be counted as, given the lack of any evidence to the contrary*. Peter From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Fri Feb 25 16:02:51 2000 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 17:02:51 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: You should bear in mind that labels such as IE etc. used for individual languages do never (or should never) reflect the ontological status or some generic qualities of the language in question, but rather serve to identify a network of structural aspects.... It's up to linguists to weigh this network (mainly on grammatical grounds) and to decide whether it represents sufficient reflexes of a former network called e.g. PIE ... Hans Holm wrote: > Take Albanian with a rest of 10% (!) of original lexemes (cf. Anttila > 89:172), but nobody hesitates to name it an /IE language/. ***************************** Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet München Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 D-80539 München Tel.: +89-21805343 / Fax: +89-21805345 Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ ***************************** From Georg at home.ivm.de Fri Feb 25 16:48:09 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 17:48:09 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <200002231052.p2060@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: >AH>The reconstruction for (Pre-)Proto-Slavic *inmen is rather zero grade >AH>of *H1neH3mn, i.e. *H1nH3men-. >Some more "loans" (???) >to the north: >- yukagir nim/niu /niu/; /nime/ is "house" >- tshuk ninn I know /Tshuk/ only as one of the subdialects of Thakali/Nepal; since this language is to be sought "in the north", you probably mean /Chukchi/, where "name" is indeed /nynny/ >- jap namu ?? This means "amen" in Japanese >- ainu namup There is no such word in any lexical source of Ainu accessible to me (and I have more than three). Source ? >to the south (with s-mobile) >- bask izen So Basque is Indoeuropean, I see (try to inflect it, maybe it shows -r/-n heteroclisis as well). >far east: >- indones. namma /nama/, an obvious Sanskrit loan; formal Indonesian swarms with them and this is one of them. >I do not know or claim these to be cognates. But it might be. I claim these not to be cognates. No, it might not be. On the other hand, if containing - somewhere in the word - an /n/ (oops, obviously a nasal will do) is sufficient enough to suspect cognacy, well, then we could add quite an array of languages, as e.g. Tibetan /ming/, Swahili /jina/ (looks like Basque, so perhaps with j-mobile), Mongolian /ner-e/ (hey, here's the heteroclitic; I knew it had to be somewhere !), Khmer /chmua/ (remember the semitic forms !), aso. Voilà, l'unità d'origine dell'linguaggio, how could I ever be so skeptical, silly me. St.G. PS: welcome to the beautiful land of Ruhlenistan Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From edsel at glo.be Fri Feb 25 19:16:09 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 20:16:09 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2000 10:03 PM >> edsel at glo.be writes: >> this can happen without the intermediate stage of a pidgin: Afrikaans is a >> typical example of that. > -- Afrikaans is not a creole; it's transparently a Germanic language and > transparently descended from 17th-century Netherlandish. Certainly there's > been a morphological simplification, but only slightly more so than in > English. [Ed] And Haïtian Creole is transparently (heavily 'mutilated') French - which does not mean it's easy to understand (when spoken) for a French speaker, quite the contrary. But in written form, let's say it's not hopeless once you learn some tricks, I was told by a French speaking friend who has been there. On the other hand, Surinam Srinatong is another piece of cake: it's very, very mixed and transformed. > In fact, Afrikaans is to Dutch very much as English is to Old English -- many > of the same developments. >> including the disappearance of the participial prefix ge- that existed in >> Old English. > -- however, Frisian shares many features with English, and never had the sort > of Romance superstrate experience that English did. [Ed] This is strictly a matter of definition - or rather of how strict/fuzzy your definitions are. Actually I was referring in my mail to what Robert Whiting was saying about 'contraction and expansion' of (mainly) syntactic features, and that's what happened in Afrikaans, but it is not entirely the same as what happened to English. I clearly said that "modern Afrikaans has many of the characteristics of a creole" which is not the same as saying it IS a creole. Just one random example: there was a very major simplification of the verbal system, virtually down to the level of child talk (no offense intended) - to the ears of Dutch speakers, but also some new features were created like the ever present double negation, and modern Afrikaans is a full-flung language comparable to any European language. BTW, don't get confused by the many puristic neologisms (built upon Dutch words, retained or re-introduced) that make it look more (pseudo) Dutch than it actually is. Today you wrote: ">petegray at btinternet.com writes: >Creoles - how can you describe a Creole as descended from a single ancestor? >Doesn't his mean prioritising one of its "parents" over the other? -- in point of fact, the Creoles I'm familiar with all do owe more to one. Krio, for example, or Gullah, or Haitian creole." [Ed] This is clearly the case of Afrikaans (and Haïtian Creole, Papiamento etc.). "Creoles also tend to have highly distinctive grammatical features which are common to all creoles as such". [Ed] Could you elaborate on that? What do you consider to be grammatical features which are common to all creoles (Apart from the process of destruction and later reconstruction of a number of basic features)? I believe most of this apparent disagreement is about how much residue of the major component's features (of Dutch in Afrikaans, of French in Haïtian Creole, of Spanish/Portuguese in Papiamento...) you accept in order to still call it a creole - or not. To me it's a matter of degree. About Frisian : I haven't seen any of the changed syntactic features of English in Frisian; the parallelism is rather with Old English. It certainly didn't change its syntax as English did (e.g. word order inversion). I wonder (but don't know) if some Western Germanic (e.g. Dutch Saxon) dialects ever had a ge- prefix. English lost it in historical times. (As a non-specialist of OE, I am not so sure about its participial use, but it certainly existed in its other uses, e.g. "ge-thenc"). I am a native speaker of Dutch, with French as my second language and an inhabitant of a country where French speakers often make the same mistakes when speaking Dutch, and I can easily see that English word order has been seriously affected by French (partially copied on it). In fact, if you used English word order in Dutch (or any continental West-Germanic for that matter), or vice-versa, it would sound very weird and foreign indeed, except in very simple sentences like 'I have a car' (SVO). E.g. What would you think of a sentence like *"I said clearly that "modern Afrikaans many of the characteristics has of a creole"* (cf. above)? Of course all these are considerations of a non-specialist. Ed. Selleslagh From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Feb 26 00:21:56 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 01:21:56 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>edsel at glo.be writes: >>this can happen without the intermediate stage of a pidgin: Afrikaans is a >>typical example of that. >-- Afrikaans is not a creole; Afrikaans has been described as a "creoloid". There was a "bottleneck", though not as narrow as with a real creole. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Fri Feb 25 07:15:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 07:15:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: RW>The "items" Anttila is talking about are languages and dialects. .. that would be unusual. But if you decide it, this ends the discussion here. RW>It is equally useless to state .. > see above. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From adahyl at cphling.dk Sat Feb 26 15:25:26 2000 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 16:25:26 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > Adam Hyllested wrote: >> So if the IE suffix isn't >> analogical, the Indo-Uralic form must be reconstructed as *(n)newmn-. > But what about the laryngeals? They can't have sprung out of > thin air in the Indo-European part of Indo-Uralic. That was my point (see below). > is a cognate, we should at least reconstruct something like > *(H)neGumn-, for some value of H and G. Not necessarily. What if the phonetic realization of the phoneme cluster /H1n/ or /@1n/ was *nn-, i.e. syllabic n + consonantal n ? In my own language (Danish), /@n/ is often pronounced in that way. Adam Hyllested From adahyl at cphling.dk Sat Feb 26 16:15:24 2000 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 17:15:24 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <200002230027.QAA10916@netcom.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Richard M. Alderson III wrote: > On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Adam Hyllested (adahyl at cphling.dk) wrote: >> The reconstruction for (Pre-)Proto-Slavic *inmen is rather zero grade of >> *H1neH3mn, i.e. *H1nH3men-. > The initial laryngeal *must* be *H3, given the evidence of the Greek > prothetic vowel in _onoma_. There is no way for *H1 (the "e-colouring > laryngeal") to yield an initial /o/ in Greek. Except the umlauting of prothetic *H1 before a syllable containing *o. This would explain why we also have Greek _enuma-(kratidon)_, and make us able to reconstruct the IE word for 'tooth' (Greek _odont-_) as *H1dont-, originally present participle of the root *H1ed- 'eat'. Adam Hyllested From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Feb 27 01:42:17 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 20:42:17 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >proto-language at email.msn.com writes: >Dangerous', an adjective, is more likely to be derived from 'wolf' ('wolflike') than >deriving a noun ('dangerous one') from an early adjective. -- since the Germanic word for "bear" is precisely a derivative from an adjective -- "the brown one", this argument is a little odd. Especially since the original PIE word itself -- *h(2)rtkos -- is itself probably a nominalized adjective (via a stress shift), from *h(2)rektes; see Sanskrit raksas, "destruction". From adahyl at cphling.dk Sat Feb 26 15:50:51 2000 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 16:50:51 +0100 Subject: Michif (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 23 Feb 2000, Larry Trask wrote: > Now let's turn to a real and much better example: the North American language > Michif. Michif is probably the finest example of a mixed language on the > planet. > To oversimplify a bit, Michif consists of a French nominal system (with > French > lexicon and phonology) bolted onto a Cree (Algonquian) verbal system > (with Cree > lexicon and phonology) > OK. What should we say about Michif? Is it well described as a language > descended from two ancestors? Or is it better described as a language > descended from no ancestor at all? I suppose Michif wasn't created overnight, which means that it is best described as a language descended from EITHER French OR Cree - depending on its prehistory. What do we know about earlier stages of Michif? Adam Hyllested From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Feb 25 03:43:23 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 22:43:23 EST Subject: Celtiberian Message-ID: I wrote: >>>That would put you at (1000BC minus 2000 minus 2000 more) 5000BC. >>>And of course, the differentiation between [Mycenaean, Latin, Hittite] and >>>Tocharian, Luwian, the undecipherable Thracian, Albanian and Celtiberian >>>should send your date of dispersal hurtling back to that magic 7000BC >>>you've mentioned so frequently. Mr. Stirling replied with the usual pertinent pointedness: >> -- another bizzare statement. Would you care to elucidate why the >>existance of Celtiberian should affect our datings? Particularly as we >>know virtually nothing about it, or Thracian. On 2/23/2000 6:51:30 PM, sonno3 at hotmail.com further replied: >I think you are overstating a bit on Celtiberian - we may not know as much >about it as Gaulish, but we are far from knowing "virtually nothing about it" >(and it is certainly not undecipherable!) In any case, we know Celtiberian was >already being spoken in Spain in the 6th century BC, and that it shares many >similarities with the Goidelic branch (PIE -Kw->=Qu/Ku/Cu, for example). Its >vocabulary preserves some archaisms not found in Goidelic or Brythonic (Silbur >"silver" next to regular Common Celtic word Arganto-) and its sentance >structure was SOV. Just want to point out that I never called Celtiberian 'undecipherable' as I did not call Albanian indecipherable. As the author above points out, we actually know a bit about Celtiberian. The problem is that the language is not the 'remarkably uniform' Celtic that has been represented on this list. Since evidence of Celtiberian dates back as far as early Latin, contrary to what was said above, it certainly is a candidate as one of the earliest IE languages on record and needs to be accounted for on an equal basis, I think. I received some additional information on Celtiberian: "The 'first full manual' on the language appeared in 1998. Jordán Cólera, Carlos. Introducción al Celtibérico. Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza. Wolfgang Meid's commentaries on Celtiberian Inscriptions Archaeologica (Budapest 1994) have been considered authoritative. Francois Villar's A new interpretation of Celtiberian grammar (Innsbruck 1995) approaches the issues of both the non-Indoeuropean and what may be singular indoeuropean aspects of the language. Some general observations: The Iberian "syllabic" script that was used to write Celtiberian has often been described as unable to represent the opposition of voiced and voiceless consonants, as well as being limited to representing a limited range of final consonants (s, m, r, n, l). These conclusions have been questioned recently... On the basis of Latin scripts used in the last phase of Celtiberian, it was concluded that the language fell into the Q-Celtic category. However, it now appears that this may also have been the result of the Latinization of the language in the late period, since some early texts now seem to show signs of being P-Celtic... The lexical data shows that Celtiberian innovated or borrowed a good many words and roughly half the vocabulary is not known with real certainty... It has been said that Celtiberian also contains some Indoeuropean archaisms, but far outnumbering these are elements that remain to be explained - including the frequent use of the genitive singular ending -o. And while the predicted Indoeuropean passive -r ending does not now seem to be present, some researchers feel they have detected evidence of mutation (lenition) in the Celtiberian script... There is also the difficult problem, mentioned above, as to whether Latinization in the mid 2d century BC altered the language so that it was at least dialectically different from the one used in the Iberian script. Familiar structure that appears in Latin alphabet texts are not often confirmed in the earlier texts. And this difficulty is amplified by the fact that the accepted phonetic interpretation of early Celtiberian texts have not proved especially useful in elucidating the original Iberian script...>> Regards, Steve Long From sarima at friesen.net Fri Feb 25 05:28:56 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 21:28:56 -0800 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) In-Reply-To: <011b01bf761a$89716300$27d31b3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: At 12:00 PM 2/13/00 +0000, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >How would some of you feel if Renfrew's premise were altered to: >Nostratic spread through Europe with agriculture. >? Well, if one or more of Etruscan, Basque or one of the other non-IE languages of Europe could be reasonably be placed within the Nostratic group, that would be plausible. But as long as IE appears to be the only likely Nostratic language in Europe - It seems unlikely. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From alderson at netcom.com Fri Feb 25 23:57:39 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 15:57:39 -0800 Subject: Hypergeometric? [was Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?)] In-Reply-To: <200002241521.p2121@h2.maus.de> (Hans_Holm@h2.maus.de) Message-ID: On Thu, 24 Feb 2000, Hans Holm (Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de) wrote in reply to Stefan Georg: SG> as if lexicon had *anything* to do with lg. classification, HH> correct, regarding the percentage calculations \340 la Dyen. Only by HH> understanding and applying the properties of the 'hypergeometric' and, HH> using a complete etymological dictionary, it is possible to compute HH> split-off bases between any two languages. Not more, and nothing less. HH> And the brain of homo sapiens has not been constructed to grasp the HH> hypergeometric ad hoc. All right, I'll ask: What is meant here by "the hypergeometric"? Rich Alderson From sarima at friesen.net Fri Feb 25 05:40:40 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 21:40:40 -0800 Subject: *hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-? In-Reply-To: <31.13b8430.25d8e3ec@aol.com> Message-ID: At 11:51 PM 2/13/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Let me ask, does evidence of (*hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-?) appear in any >other IE languages? >I guess it would have to. Otherwise you'd have at best a Tocharian/Hittite >connection, but not necessarily PIE. Am I right? Not necessarily. In fact in the *particular* case of a cognate in Tocharian and Hittite, reconstructing a PIE word is at least reasonable. >After all, you wouldn't want to be finding PIE roots every time just two >ancient IE languages showed cognates Naturally. One does not reconstruct a PIE root for just *any* cognates found in a pair of IE languages. But when the languages are as geographically separated, and when at least one of them is likely to have split off very early, then there are few other good alternatives. Thus cognates in Latin and Celtic just suggest an old northern European word. But a word in Sanskrit and Celtc is hard to explain by means of later shared vocabulary (whether borrowed or jointly innovated). Tocharian and Hittite are about as deeply split as any two IE languages can be, and there is no real possibility of late contact. >I wouldn't of course think - if these two languages were the only evidence of >root mentioned above - that a PIE root or root-stem would need to be >conjectured simply because of some assumption that Hittite and Tocharian had >no contact or common ancestor after PIE split. I can't take seriously the >idea that it is ENOUGH to say that Hittite and Tocharian are "very widely >separated IE languages." For one thing, all IE languages are geographically >widely separated from Tocharian, but that couldn't always have been true. >And for another thing, some trees at least (e.g., the UPenn tree) have >Hittite and Tocharian right next to each other in terms of relatedness. But with no shared ancestral nodes that are not also shared with all other IE languages. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From inakistand at yucom.be Sat Feb 26 01:42:20 2000 From: inakistand at yucom.be (jose.perez3) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 02:42:20 +0100 Subject: *hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-? Message-ID: > Yes. Lexicon der Indogermanischen Verbum lists h_2werg, `sich umdrehen, > sich wenden' (quoting Latin uergere as the evidence for intransitive > meaning, and Hittite for h_2 so that Greek e as due to assimilation), > with finite verb forms in Sans (though the meaning changes to `turn away > from' => avoid for the most part in Classical Sans), Greek and Latin, > and a participle in Toch A. Hello IEists, I've just started reading the list and was wondering wether any of you might help me with the following: Could you, please, give me the complete reference of the Lexicon der Indogermanischen Verbum? Does anybody know whether it could be purchased via internet? I'm also after other "classics" such as Rick's Laut und Formenlehre des Griechisches and Meiser's Laut und Formenlehre des Lateins... can they be bought in the net? Can somebody give me the reference of the Pokorny's CD version of his roots dictionary? Is there any more up-dated IE roots dictionary (I remember Beeke's mentioning that the Dutch were working on a "new Pokorny". Has it come out yet?) Could anybody recommed a German dictionary organized by IE roots? (something on the lines of Clairborne's The Roots of English or, still better, of Robert's and Pastor's Diccionario etimológico indoeuropeo de la lengua española). I'm sure that the Germans must have brought out some good stuff. And since I've mentioned German... Is there such a dictionary for French? Duch? Greek? (I'm afraid I'm still using Andrioti's etymological dictionary for Modern Greek, which unfortunately doesn't usually take you far if you don't use an Old Greek etymological dictionary to go with it. Would Chantraine's Dictionnaire étymologique still be your best recommendation?) Russian? Final request: Ernout and Meillet's Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine has been out of print for ages and my photocopies (yups!) were never much good to start with. What shall I replace them with? Thanks a lot for your assistance and keep the good work, Joe From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Feb 25 05:16:04 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 00:16:04 EST Subject: ? Both ts > c^ and c^ > ts ? Message-ID: I gather from responses that both of these occur, and that folks do not believe there is a preference for one vs. the other? Or if a preference, it is the opposite of what I had suggested? (In any case, I think I cannot make more sense out of the "satem" area as a dialect net, whichever one were to choose.) *** On the following (please reply privately if you wish; I do not think the following topic is appropriate for the general list). >the prognathizing that produces /ts, dz/; it has its >origins in the belligerent facial posture as seen today in the generally >hostile tribal environment of the Afghan-Nuristani ethnic divide. I do not remember often hearing suggestions that sound changes were driven by social interaction norms (except some matters of men's vs. women's speech). One other case I do remember concerned the fact that Japanese /u/ is normally not strongly rounded -- I have heard or read the suggestion that this is because facial expressions are minimized by social convention in Japan. Do other correspondents have cases they believe strongly in? (Again, please reply privately to me only; anyone wanting a summary of responses I may receive to this last question, I'll be happy to send a compilation of them if you ask me privately.) Lloyd From strand at sedona.net Mon Feb 28 09:16:34 2000 From: strand at sedona.net (Richard F.Strand) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 04:16:34 -0500 Subject: Nuristani (was k' > ts > c-hachek order of changes?) Message-ID: Stefan George wrote: >You are doubtlessly having the Nuristani languages of SE Afghanistan in >mind, which are sometimes viewed as the third Aryan group besides Indic and >Iranian. Not to be too picky, but Nuristan is in *north*-eastern Afghanistan, on the southern slopes of the Hindu Kush range. I would add that only non-specialists in the region would deny the linguistic and ethnic validity of the Nuristanis' place as a third group within Indo-Iranian. However, while both Iranians and Indo-Aryans claim to be "Aryan" (AryA'i in Afghan FArsi), I have found no linguistic or cultural evidence for an "Aryan" consciousness among any Nuristanis (aside from a few intellectuals who have taken this notion from Western researchers). From the cumulative evidence it would appear that the Proto-Nuristanis were ethnically non-Aryas who were swept up in the earliest expansion of those Aryas who later became Iranians, only to be displaced later into the Indo-Aryan milieu of northeastern Afghanistan. Details of the Nuristanis' migration to their present homeland appear on my website. Richard Strand Richard Strand's Nuristan Site http://users.sedona.net/~strand From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Feb 26 09:37:01 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 10:37:01 +0100 Subject: Correction Message-ID: I stated earlier: >- jap namu ?? This means "amen" in Japanese This of course reveals that I don't exactly *know* Japanese. The rendering "amen" is of course highly, so to speak, acculturated (though Japanese Christians use it in this sense, so I'm told). A better translation could be "reverence, bowing", and it is, surprise, a Sanskrit loan, from the well-known Buddhist formula "namo Buddha:ya, namo dharma:ya, namo saMgha:ya" (reverence to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Congregation". The word HH probably had in mind is /namae/; but here /na/ means "name", and the rest of the compound - for a compound it is - is /mae/ "front". Though it doesn't mean exactly "first name" or sthlth. according to my sources and the informants I was able to interview yesterday, it seems likely that its semantic history involves something along these lines. Anyway, the resemblance to IE words is entirely fortuitous. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From sarima at friesen.net Fri Feb 25 06:21:40 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 22:21:40 -0800 Subject: Assumptions in Computing phylogenies In-Reply-To: <6e.c8dd3a.25dadcce@aol.com> Message-ID: At 11:46 AM 2/15/00 -0500, ECOLING at aol.com wrote: >According to one of our correspondents (Stanley Friesen?), >the biologists have found that this (?) technique is not highly >robust, is subject to artifact effects in several ways, >and that the UPenn team have not taken account of these. >... >Here are two such claims I think I have seen about artifact effects: >(a) results are highly sensitive to the choice of initial characteristics This is true, and some doubt about their selection of characters has been expressed. However, I am not sure how important that is in this case. >(b) results may be systematically biased by the technique > (what someone referred to as the "long branch" attraction effect, > if I remember correctly) Actually, these are two different things. Long branch attraction is a general problem with deeply branched sparse trees, across virtually all known techniques. Biologists are still struggling with this one, with no final answers yet. Basically, it is hard to recover the *true* branching order for deep branches in the absence of very early sub-branches. (This is probably one of the reasons why the relationships of the animal phyla are so hard to determine). But technique can also be biasing. (And I have some issues even with the more common techniques used in biology). >(c) are results sensitive to whether a dialect in a dialect net >is near the center, surrounded by closely related languages, >with many nearby characteristics to compare, >or near the periphery, surrounded by unrelated languages or isolated, >with fewer nearby characteristics to compare? >Will these different positions influence results expressed as trees >in ways they should not? (That is to say, peripheral dialects >may split off or innovate earlier; or they may fail to follow innovations >spreading from another part of the dialect network; two quite opposite >possibilities. Is the technique biased in these respects?) This could actually be considered a special case of the same basic problem as long branch attraction. >But results *do* quite properly depend crucially both on the choice of >characteristics included in the data and on the interpretation of >those characteristics, both in prior scholarship. >So there is a sense in which results are partly built in by the selection >of characteristics and the interpretation as innovations vs. retentions. Actually, properly done, cladistic analysis *determines* which characters are innovations and which are retentions. That is one of its real powers. The distribution of the characters determines the tree topology, with the character transitions placed on the branches between nodes. Then one uses some method to determine the root of the tree. Now, each transition is an innovation as one moves away from the root. Any character lacking a transition rootwards is retained. Actually, this reminds me of another problem with the UPEnn tree! They effectively *assume* the placement of the root. They do not use any of the various established means for locating the root. Unfortunately the most powerful method, outgroup comparison is not available in linguistics at this time depth (unless one accepts a relationship of PIE with the Uralic languages or some such thing). [The rooting problem is why many biological trees based on gene analysis or protein comparison are presented in "rootless" form, as seen in the recent article in Scientific American on the relationships of the various eukaryotic and prokaryotic groups]. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Fri Feb 25 06:46:31 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 22:46:31 -0800 Subject: language and biology In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 01:29 AM 2/22/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >But is this question relevant to the issue of whether recent biological >models may help in linguistic analysis? I was talking *methods*, not models. (OR at least I was talking about the mathematical features of models of change in general). >Does really doesn't matter if you classify languages as biological phenomena >or not? It gives insight into what *sorts* of processes are likely to occur. It suggests that sharp, well-defined boundaries are unlikely, indeed virtually impossible, which was my original point. It suggests that using analogies based on discrete physical systems are likely to be unproductive. All electrons are *identical* - absolutely interchangeable in all respects: this is fundamentally different than biological systems, where no two of *anything* are ever more than similar. Thus one must give up treating languages as simple discrete entities, and deal with them a "fuzzy" biological entities, for which "same" means "not enough different to matter for the present purpose (whatever that happens to be)". >It would seem that if you are after 'genetic' relatedness, biology provides >pretty good models for such concepts associated with the transfer of >attributes by 'descent' as wll as by other mechanisms. The analogy may not >be perfect, No analogy ever is - but this is *especially* true when biology is involved. > but the prototypical idea of attributes passing from parental to >filial generations must come from biology. In fact, I suspect the whole idea >of relatedness among languages is by analogy from the biological notion of >inheritance. (Although I'm conscious that Grimm predates Mendel.) Ideas of inheritance long predate Mendel - they just used a different model. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From alderson at netcom.com Fri Feb 25 18:46:32 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 10:46:32 -0800 Subject: Philologists' metaphors [was Re: language and biology] In-Reply-To: (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: > In fact, I suspect the whole idea of relatedness among languages is by > analogy from the biological notion of inheritance. (Although I'm conscious > that Grimm predates Mendel.) And clearly the notion of strata in languages > must have been a concept borrowed from geology. It is, _ab origine_, a biological metaphor, but one much older than Mendel: I'll remind everyone that (Indo-European) historical linguistics was once known as comparative philology, and that the comparative method as applied to a set of languages descends from that of the manuscript studies of the philologists, who used the metaphor of a family tree to describe the descent of manuscript recensions. It wasn't so much *biological* inheritance as inheritance _per se_ that was the model. As for the notion of strata, that is an explicit borrowing from geology, one made in the 20th Century. Prior to that time, there was a vague notion of "influence", but no explicit metaphor. Rich Alderson From sarima at friesen.net Fri Feb 25 07:01:30 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 23:01:30 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 03:50 AM 2/22/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >sarima at friesen.net wrote: ><ancestor of those three languages (which is why the Indo-Hittite hypothesis >often is considered to exclude Anatolian from the IE family proper).>> >I think that is the other way around. The I-H hypothesis I believe has >Hittite < PIE. Not at all. In fact the very *form* of the word implies exclusion of Anatolian from IE proper (unless you want to suggest it means that Hittite is more closely related to Indic than to other branches of IE :-) The way the names of proto-languages are formed pretty much requires PIE to be derived from PIH. > In fact I believe there's still an open question whether >Anatolian was the innovator or 'narrow PIE' was. Actually, it is clear that *both* must have innovated in some respects (assuming such a branch sequence). >Which means yes you would still have to account for the Anatolian differences >in dating PIE, accepting the I-H hypothesis. Well, actually I do anyhow, since I reject the Indo-Hittite hypothesis! But the differences in form of the actual cognates are very minor. In fact the retention of some laryngeals is very telling. It significantly limits the date of divergence. >sarima at friesen.net replied: ><minus a few years. Phonologically, and (with some exceptions) >grammatically, it is quite archaic. The only reason it *seems* so >different is the relatively few inherited IE words it retains.>> >Really, 500 years. Kind of Italian (1500AD) to Italian (2000AD) - except of >course for the lack of gender in Hittite - and some other small matters like >that. Nothing important. It is rather interesting: gender has virtually disappeared in some IE languages in rather less time than that. English lost grammatical gender between 900 AD and 1200 AD, if I remember correctly. It actually *is* a minor matter. [Though I have some doubts about reconstructing a full fledged grammatical gender system for PIE]. >And I see that the rate of loss of "inherited IE words" also does not enter >into the time equation. It has some bearing, but rates of borrowing vary greatly, and so this is not very illuminating (glottochronology notwithstanding). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From alderson at netcom.com Fri Feb 25 19:23:30 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 11:23:30 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: > sarima at friesen.net wrote: >> Indeed, in some ways PIE could be *defined* as the most recent common >> ancestor of those three languages (which is why the Indo-Hittite hypothesis >> often is considered to exclude Anatolian from the IE family proper). > I think that is the other way around. The I-H hypothesis I believe has > Hittite < PIE. In fact I believe there's still an open question whether > Anatolian was the innovator or 'narrow PIE' was. The "Indo-Hittite" hypothesis was put forth most strongly by Edgar Sturtevant in the 1930s and 1940s. His view was that since Hittite (and the Anatolian languages generally) retained in consonantal form reflexes of the "laryngeals" which had disappeared leaving only vocalic effects (timbre and length) in the other Indo-European languages, perhaps the entire Anatolian branch should be seen as a sister to Neogrammarian PIE. Sixty years later, we know that the laryngeals persisted into several, if not all, of the daughter languages past the time IE unity, and thus the Anatolian languages are not especially marked out by this feature. More important are morphological innovations and retentions in the Anatolian group, but nothing in all this calls for a 2000 year gap between them and PIE proper (your "narrow PIE"). More like about 500 years. In anticipation, > Really, 500 years. Kind of Italian (1500AD) to Italian (2000AD) - except of > course for the lack of gender in Hittite - and some other small matters like > that. Nothing important. How about English (1000CE), which had grammatical gender in nouns, and English (1500CE), which did not? French (1200CE), which had a case system in nouns, and French (1700CE), which did not? As noted in another thread (or perhaps this one, but very long ago), Comanche and Shoshone are no longer mutually intelligible, in less than 300 years. So why do you have so much difficulty with Hittite (Anatolian) developing away from the mainstream in that amount of time? On linguistic grounds, mind you, not archaeological ones. > On the other hand, if early IE were as undifferented as being claimed here, > many of these problems in discipherment logically should not have occurred. One would think so, but then, one would have only to look at things like early Latin inscriptions, some of which have not been satisfactorily deciphered to this day, to know that logic has nought to do with the question. After all, we are supposed to *know* Latin... Rich Alderson From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Fri Feb 25 17:43:59 2000 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath K. Rao) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 12:43:59 -0500 Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > A pity the Sinashta charioteers didn't write their word for "one > hundred" on the bronzework of the horse-harness, I will appreciate a reference where I can examine photographs of the said bronzework of these harnesses. [The only thing from harness/bridling I have seen photos of are the cheekpieces. I don't remember of the top of my head if these were bronze or bone.] From alderson at netcom.com Fri Feb 25 19:48:36 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 11:48:36 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <65.1d863d4.25e399b1@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: > (We have full texts by the way in Thracian, but nothing "leaps off the page" > to say the least.) Full bibliographical citation, s'il vous plai^t. Only Thracian data I know of is some small inscriptions (personal names and the like) and glosses in Greek texts. Full texts in Thracian would excite entire generations of Indo-Europeanists. So please, where are these to be found? > JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>> the word for "fire" in Sanskrit and Latin: >>> Nom. sing. agnis ignis >>> acc. sing. agnim ignem >>> dative agnibhyas ignibus > I replied: >> ...do all these languages decline with only a change in the initial >> vowel... thus justifying a 2000 year separation between all of them. > Let's get back to this proof you offered. Does Mycenaean decline 'fire' the > same similar way as Latin and Sanskrit? Does Hittite? I just had a tacky thought: The answer to the question *as posed* is "Within the bounds of phonological change in the individual languages, yes, Mycenaean and Hittite decline their words for 'fire' similarly to Latin and Sanskrit. That is one of the defining characteristics of the IE family, after all." But that's not what you meant to ask, is it? >JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >> It's 'tatis tiwaz' and 'tiyaz papaz' in Anatolian (Luvian and Palaic, >> specifically); same meaning -- "Sky Father" or "Father Sky". > Well, it seems that Anatolian is in the picture when the evidence helps, but > not when it doesn't. But that's the way of *all* evidence in *every* discipline: If there's nothing to be said by a particular witness, you don't bother to call her to the stand. Rich Alderson From sarima at friesen.net Sat Feb 26 02:28:23 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 18:28:23 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 03:56 PM 2/22/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >I wrote: >>> Do the similarities between Latin and Hittite 'leap off the page" as you >>> say? (Please recall how long it took for relationship to even be >>> detected.) >In a message dated 2/22/00 3:08:16 AM, Rich Alderson replied: >>Knudtson published the Tell-el-Amarna letters in 1902, as I remember, and put >>forth the claim that Hittite was Indo-European at that time. Hrozny' demon- >>strated the IE-ness of Hittite in his 1917 monograph to the satisfaction of >>the general IEist populace. How long did you think it took? >Did it take 15 years for the similarities to "leap off the page?" No - notice the statement: "in 1902, as I remember, and put forth the claim that Hittite was Indo-European at that time". It was *immediate*. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From alderson at netcom.com Fri Feb 25 22:37:17 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 14:37:17 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: >>> Do the similarities between Latin and Hittite 'leap off the page" as you >>> say? (Please recall how long it took for relationship to even be >>> detected.) In a message dated 2/22/00 3:08:16 AM, Rich Alderson replied: >> Knudtson published the Tell-el-Amarna letters in 1902, as I remember, and >> put forth the claim that Hittite was Indo-European at that time. Hrozny' ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >> demonstrated the IE-ness of Hittite in his 1917 monograph to the satisfac- >> tion of the general IEist populace. How long did you think it took? > Did it take 15 years for the similarities to "leap off the page?" That is > still rather slow leaping. No, it apparently took Knudtson looking at it for him to state that this was an Indo-European language. I'd call that "leaping off the page". Hrozny''s book was simply a setting forth of large bodies of evidence for the claim. If we date the founding of IE studies to Sir Wm. Jones' little dictum, but the *scientific* study of the question to Rask, Hrozny' beats Rask by about 15 years. > (And it appears that laryngeals are still more hesitant about any such > acrobatics.) No linguist who ever examined with an open mind the evidence set forth by Saussure in 1868, and that of Hittite, ever doubted that Saussure was correct. I can't speak for what *close-minded* folks might have done. > What are the chances that the gap between Hittite and Classic IE languages is > actually much older? [ than 500 years or so, as stated by several posters, myself included ] What are the chances? Not good. Not zero, but not good. Yes, we have the example of the extreme conservatism of Old Lithuanian, but that is so unusual that we *do* make note of it. Historical linguistics is, after all, a *historical* science, and so must make assumptions about such things as rates of change based on *historical* obversation of similar occur- rences--the development of the Romance languages from Latin, the development of modern English from Anglo-Saxon, and so on. In order for Hittite (and the other Anatolian languages) to have diverged from the rest of the Indo-European languages very much more than 1000 years earlier (my own outside estimate), we would have to reject the evidence for rates of change provided by all the historical obversations we can make and instead say that Old Lithuanian is the expected result, and *every* *single* *other* *IE* *language* underwent accelerated development. An archaelogist may be willing to do that; I, and I think most if not all of my colleagues as well, will not. > If Hittite were separated from Sanskrit-Latin-Mycenaean by an additional 2000 > years, how would the comparison be different than it is now? What would one > expect in the comparison to change if in fact Hittite separated 1500 or 1000 > years earlier? If you wanted to see what Hittite would have been like if its > ancestor were a distinct language in 6000-5500BC, how would it reconstruct > differently? I'm sorry, but the question is meaningless. Linguistic change is not determin- istic; we *cannot* say "these changes must, or should, or will, take place if languages are separated by X centuries/millennia". In a historical discipline, we can only say "similar changes, or similar *kinds of change*, took place over a period of X in these families or languages under our control, so we expect that it will have taken a similar amount of time for a group of languages *not* under our control to have undergone similar changes". > Does the degree of variance in the reconstructed forms become greater in some > way? Do the numbers of retentions or innovations increase? What changes > would one expect to reflect the greater effects of a longer time period? Lexical retention as a measure is of course the usual stalking horse, although this means not only "words on a list" but occurrence both of free and of bound morphemes when being done by a non-glottochronologist. Innovation is of course simply 1 - (measure of retention), so one only gets the one when one gets the other. I've already address the last question above, which answer also covers the next query: > If I have been successful in posing this question understandably, then one > should see the value in considering what the reconstructed proto-Hittite of > 6000-5500BC would look like. What would it be missing? What would it have > lost? What additional signs of age should we expect? This would give us a > way of saying 'Hittite texts would need to look like this if proto-Hittite > indeed separated from PIE about 7500 years ago.' And that would seem to me > to be of great value. > Go back to the original post and you'll see that agnis/ignis was being used > to selectively support the 2000 year separation between those early IE > languages. No, it wasn't. It was being used as an easily accessible example of the large number of similarities which "leap off the page" to anyone familiar with both languages. Nothing selective about it, not in the secret-cabal sense I read into what you've written. > My point that this was very convenient for Latin and Sanskrit to be compared > this way. And equally inconvenient not to find anything like the same > similarity in either Greek or Hittite. If agnis/ignis prove something about > the degree of differentiation over time, then what does the absence of > agnis/ignis in other early IE languages prove about time and differentiation? Absolutely nothing. Similar sets from each pair of IE languages can be set up, as well as sets from larger groups; several have been posted in the last couple of days. > (As a matter of fact, I'm surprised that the closeness between agnis/ignis in > Sanskrit and Latin does not suggest a much more recent date of commonality > for those words by themselves, without regard to the rest of those two > languages. But as linguists, we *don't* disregard the rest of the languages--we leave that to the people who claim kinship between Basque and Xalxa Mongolian or the like. If the form of the word in either Latin or Sanskrit were somehow anomalous, we might suspect contact later than (near) the time of PIE unity, but since both show all the expected developments for all sounds within the word, there is no reason to look for zebras in the stable. > If all the words in Latin and Sanskrit matched like this, you could argue 50 > years separated the two languages. And if the differences between these two words were the only differences between them, you might even be correct. That's why we don't focus on any word pair in particular to the exclusion of all other data, to see whether such a claim *would* be justified. > Lehmann tells me that Sjoberg and Sjoberg showed why words in south Asia like > 'sun' should be eliminated from the "glottochronological core" precisely > because they reflected very early and widely borrowed religious vocabulary. > Forgive me for asking whether agnis/ignis might not fall into the same > category.) You're forgiven. They don't, even if there were such thing as a "glottochrono- logical core" for them to fall into. (I agree with the sentiment that we have to be wary of such possibilities, just deny that anyone can come up with an _a priori_ list of things we *must* leave out, or in, or whatever.) Rich Alderson From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Feb 26 21:59:33 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 21:59:33 -0000 Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: > >Sanskrit, Latin and Mycenaean .... > ...Has anyone here disputed their close similarity? I'm happy to, if required. The "similarity" depends where you look. There are some major restructurings in Latin verb morphology that seem to be being ignored by the claim of "close similarity". And since no finite verb forms other than third persons occur in Mycenaean, the claim might also seem to be based more on classical Greek, where we can identify traces and relics of an original situation, but which is certainly not "closely similar" to Sanskrit in the form in which we actually have it. I freely grant that Greek and Sanskrit present closely similar pictures of what their common ancestor probably was, but let's remember that the claim was made to support an argument about the time it takes for languages to change. In that context, the claim can only be valid if based on the languages as they actually are, not on our reconstructed proto-forms. Greek as it is has thematicised the vast majority of verbs. The "closely similar" claim ignores that. Greek as it is has collapsed nominal morphology (or Sanskrit has expanded it) so that one language has five cases, the other 8. The "closely similar" claim ignores that. Sanskrit does not show the aspectual system which is so vital to the non-finite verb forms of Greek. I could go on. I had not disputed the claim to "close similarity" because I recognised it as an unimportant over-statement, and in effect an unprovable generalisation - since it depends so much on what you look at, how you count, and so on. But when you suggest that I actually approve of your claim, you go too far! Peter From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Feb 25 15:18:15 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 10:18:15 EST Subject: Indo-Hittite Hypothesis Message-ID: In a message dated 2/25/2000 3:30:24 AM, Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de wrote: >>the "Indo-Hittite" hypothesis is accepted by very few, almost all >>students of one person (and certainly of one department) in the US. >.. correct. I hope that is now clear to everyone in this list at least. >Unfortunately, Ringe did feed this opinion /into/ the UPenn tree. (It was >/not an outcome/ of the Warnow tree, because the algorithm produces >so-called 'unrooted' trees). Actually, I've tried to figure out how the UPenn tree could possibly 'confirm' the Indo-Hittite hypothesis and I think that the term may have been misapplied in the papers that are available on this subject. You may recall that the top of the UPenn tree was diagrammed on this list as: > PIE > / \ > / Anatolian This is not the I-H hypothesis, which would yield something like this: > PIH > / \ > PIE P-Anatolian The premise being that PIE and proto-Hittite/Anatolian are sister languages with a common parent. My understanding is now that the difference between these approaches is not trivial. The reconstruction of the hypothesized PIH gives substantially more weight to the Anatolian languages than does a reconstruction of PIE that makes Hittite et al a mere branch of Indo-European. And although the I-H hypothesis has been associated with, e.g., the new version of the IE obstruent system offered by Hopper, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, I'm told that the actual scope of its possible ramifications for PIE reconstruction has not yet been explored. As far as I-H support goes in the US, I suspect that the biggest problem it faces is the understanding of its implications. And possibly - as evidenced by the usage in connection with the UPenn tree - even its proper definition. Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de also wrote: >Unfortunately, Ringe did feed this opinion /into/ the UPenn tree. (It was >/not an outcome/ of the Warnow tree, because the algorithm produces >so-called 'unrooted' trees). I do not believe - again, from the papers we have - that the algorithm used on IE at UPenn ever produced an 'unrooted tree'. Contrary to what has been said on this list in the past, the external adjustments appeared to have been made directly to the algorithm from the outset. What we see in the papers is a model of a 'unrooted tree', but I could not find one that represents the IE languages. Regards, Steve Long From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Fri Feb 25 09:04:38 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 11:04:38 +0200 Subject: basic vocabulary borrowing (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [I wrote:] Concerning the affix *-teksä(n) [in e.g. Finnish kahdeksan 'eight', yhdeksän 'nine'], this explanation has been >> recently revived: it has been argued that it is a loan from Proto-Iranian >> *detsa. The phonetics are flawless; there are other examples of U *ks < >> Iranian *ts (The cluster *ts was illegal in U, hence the substitution). >> This explanation seems more plausible to me at least than the previous >> rather fabricated theory that Finnish kahdeksan and yhdeksän developed >> from *kakta e-k-sä-n 'two do not exist' (i.e., "two are missing from >> ten") and *ükti e-k-sä-n. [Adam Hyllested replied:] > Well, what speaks in favour of the latter theory is of course the fact > that '10' in Finnish is not **teksa:n, but , a word > that also exists in Mordvin, Yukaghir, and Omok. Furthermore, it > resembles full grade of a root cognate to the IE *kmt- 'hand' (with the > derivations *dekmt '10' and *(d)kmtom '100'); the zero grade shows up in U > *ka:te 'hand', Finnish . Whether a loanword, a cognate, or a word > of totally different origin, kymmenta: '10' must be older than '8' and > '9', if these are borrowed from Iranian. I don't think that Finnic-Mordvin *küm(m)ini '10', PU *käti 'hand and arm' and PIE *kmt- have anything to do with each other. Loaning is out of question, because PIE *mt would not give U *m(m) (in *küm(m)ini) or *t (in *käti), since PU *-mt- was fully possible. Also, the words for '10' and '100' have PIE palatal *k´, which regularly gives PU palatalized *s´ in loan words. Thus, in case of loaning one would rather expect U *s´VmtV or something like that. Cognateship of course remains a possibility, but this is pure speculation. There is internal evidence suggesting suggesting that Fi.-Mordv. *kümmini is secondary, whatever its origin might be. There is an apparently native U word for '10' with a wider distribution: PU *luka '10', found in Saamic, Mari and Manysi. This is obviously connected with PU *luki- 'count, say', even though the morphology is unclear. The origin of *kümmini- is obscure, but it resembles curiously Finnish kämmen 'palm of the hand'. However, the sound correspondence (*-ü- ~ *-ä-) has no internal explanation. And what are the Yukaghir and Omok cognates of *kümmini? This sounds susceptible to me. > By the way, on the basis of what material you are reconstructing a > Proto-Iranian *detsa ?. PIE *dekmt became *das'a already in > Indo-Iranian; compare Sanskrit '10' and Avestan '10'. It's not my reconstruction really, but one of Asko Parpola and Jorma Koivulehto. They maintain that PIE *e was retained in early Proto-Iranian, which has something to with palatalization of velars in Iranian, if I recall correctly - I can dig up the references for you, if you are interested. Regards, Ante Aikio From edsel at glo.be Fri Feb 25 10:18:31 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 11:18:31 +0100 Subject: SV: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2000 4:37 AM >> X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >> This seems to me to be an interesting observation. Have you got any >> bibliographic references on lactose tolerance? > -- Cavalli-Sforza, "The History and Geography of Human Genes" and "The Great > Human Diasporas". >> Number one, linguistically, do we find the IE languages discriminating cow's >> milk from mother's milk > -- unlikely to be the latter, since the terms actually usually derive from a > verbal form, "to milk"; eg., *melk > Also *dhedhnos, 'sour milk, cheese'; *pipiusi, giving Lithuanian papijusi, > 'cow rich in milk'; *tenki, 'buttermilk'; *nguen, 'butter'; *turo, 'curds, > curdled milk', etc. >> Number two, do all the milk of all cattle or even of wild cattle produce the >> intolerance syndrome? > -- if drunk unprocessed. [Ed Selleslagh] That's only true if 'processing' involves 'fermentation', because otherwise lactose is still present. Fermentation transforms lactose (sugar) into lactic acid, which causes no intolerance. That's the basic reason why Eurasian steppe peoples invented yoghurt and similar products, apart from the fact that milk, even boiled, spoils easily, while the products obtained through a fermentation process (yoghurt, cheese, etc.) do not (except butter, but that's a different story: formation of butyric acid). Ed. Selleslagh From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Feb 26 01:51:47 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 02:51:47 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>But not linguistically. There are 250 million people speaking >>Dravidian languages in the Indian subcontinent. >-- and currently around 800 million speaking Indo-European languages there, >which if you add in Iran, eastern Anatolia and central Asia, comes to over 1 >billion. That wasn't my point. >>"Steppe invasions" have affected Northern India, Iran, Anatolia, >>the Balkans, the Hungarian plains. >-- the Huns got as far as France, the Avars raided all over western and >southern Europe, and the Mongols devastated Poland. They weren't stopped by >the Europeans, either; Ogedai Khan died and they all went back to Mongolia. None of which had any linguistic effects. >In any case, with the IE expansion in the Neolithic, we're talking about a >social-political-ecological setting which has no historic parallel. Eg., the >sparsity of population in Europe, the small size of the political units, the >focus of settlement on what are now heath and upland areas, and the existance >of broad and largely uninhabited areas of scrub and second growth. >>Mallory's scenario requires "steppe pastoralists" >-- well, no. Mobile mixed agriculturalists with a pastoral emphasis. It's >clear from the archaeological record that true steppe nomadism was a _much_ >later development. >Even the Andronovo culture east of the Volga isn't pastoralist in the way >that, say, the Kirgihz or Mongols were. >>to have become linguistically dominant after 3500 over an area that was >>densely populated by contemporary standards >-- no problem. Roman Britain was densely populated too, and also politically >decentralized. In fact, there were more people in Britain c. 400 CE than in >1400 CE. And it was Anglo-Saxonized to a startling degree; just from the >linguistic evidence, you wouldn't know that the Romano-British had ever >existed at all. I consider Welsh (including its Latin component) to be pretty solid linguistical evidence. >The Germanic incomers were highly decentralized too. What seems to have >happened there is small war-bands accompanied by their families bullying or >bashing their way in among a less militant native population, making deals >with the small local polities (often to help them against their domestic >British rivals) and then turning on them later as they expanded by >assimilating individual locals and/or bringing in more people from their >homeland. Eventually the British settlements get overrun, or encapsulated >and assimilated. >And then the Germanicized areas of initial settlement in turn served as bases >for the same process further west. >Sort of like a series of ink-blots slowly growing and merging on a map, for a >visual metaphor. >>In Northern Europe, there were no cities and no sizeable political >>structures to take over. >-- well, that makes things easier for incomers, not harder; In general it doesn't. >see the example >of England, above. All that's required is one-way assimilation, which could >be accounted for by the intruders having a hierarchical social structure >suited to assimilating individual outsiders, and the natives not having such >a mechanism. >When the paradigm is: "What's mine is mine, what's yours is negotiable", the >process has only one end -- regardless of the relative numbers. >>Only massive infiltration might conceivably have done the trick, and we know >>there was none of that (the population still has largely "Anatolian" genes). >-- not according to Cavalli-Sforza, who shows a wave of migration starting >north of the sea of Azov and spreading throughout Europe. Yes, *precisely* according to Cavalli-Sforza. >>The most parsimonious solution is therefore to assume that Northern/Central >>Europe was Indoeuropeanized rapidly from 5500 with the advance of the Linear >>Pottery culture, followed in the ensuing millennia by acculturation of the >>peripheral sub-Neolithic areas (N.Germany-Denmark-S.Sweden; >>Baltic-Bielorussia; Pontic-Caspian). >-- that's ruled out by the linguistic evidence. How so? The linguistic evidence confirms that there is a sizeable Pre-Germanic substrate element, which fits exactly with the genesis of the TRB culture in the area around Denmark. Early infiltration in the Baltic area fits with the PIE borrowings into Uralic, and possibly the early differentiation of both Tocharian and, in the Pontic area, Indo-Iranian. >Archaeological stuff can >only be a supplement, useful to confirm linguistic information, but unable to >disprove it. But linguistic information gives no absolute dates. There's nothing about the "linguistic information" that "rules out" a date of 5500 BC. >>After 4000, the Pontic area became a secondary center of >>(re-)Indo-Europeanization, affecting mainly the Balkans and Central Asia (-> >>Iran, India) >-- that presupposes a complex set of overlapping re-migrations which (very >conveniently!) wipe out the supposed "IE" languages of the original European >agricultural hearth. Not necessarily Indo-European, but related to Pre-IE, as expected for the Neolithic timeline (Anatolia->Balkans, 7000 BC). Not wiped out entirely by historical times was Etruscan-Lemnian in the Aegean area. >>ca. 3500 (Corded Ware-Bell Beaker) carried Indo-European languages further >>into Eastern Europe (Russia) and Atlantic/West-Mediterranean Europe (France, >>Italy, Spain, British Isles). >-- it's more parsimonious to assume that the Corded Ware culture and its >Bell-Beaker offshoot were in fact the agents of Indo-Europeanization of >northern and western Europe; But that glosses over the origin of the Corded Ware horizon. There is no evidence for invasions and no evidence for a link with the Pontic area. On the other hand, Corded Ware is initially found in exactly the area occupied by the earlier TRB culture. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From sarima at friesen.net Sat Feb 26 03:01:40 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 19:01:40 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 07:55 AM 2/23/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >Stanley Friesen wrote: >>[Though I actually question tracing B-S back to Corded Ware]. >G-B-S. I am coming from the position of being unconvinced of the reality of Germano-Balto-Slavic. In fact I cannot consistently place Balto-Slavic in the IE tree. Depending on how I analyze it, it either comes out linked to Germanic (as you suggest), or linked to the Greek and Indo-Iranian groups. [Actually, I tentatively associate Corded Ware with German-Italo-Celtic, with *possible* inclusion of Balto-Slavic: I call this loose grouping "North European"]. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Sun Feb 27 06:02:31 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 00:02:31 -0600 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: At 11:06 PM 2/14/00 -0800, Stanley Friesen wrote: >At 05:48 PM 2/8/00 +0100, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: >>They were sacrificed though: see e.g. G. Dumézil (La religion romaine >>archaïque) : Equus October in Rome, As'vamedha in India. (note also Brahman >><> Flamen). Usually (I don't know in this case) at least parts of sacrificed >>animals were eaten. >Quite possibly. But animals that are *primarily* food animals are rarely >sanctified. >A subtle, but important distinction. I believe that there may be a slight problem with the notion of "sacrificed" and/or "sanctified" when read through the framework of modern thought. In traditional cultures even a 'tree' can be understood to be giving up its life when cut down; or an herb when plucked from the soil. I would argue that we need to be careful about rendering judgements on past ritual practices based on the secular view that dominates western thought vis-a-vis the natural world and the way that its 'resources' are regularly utilized. Ritualization of the death of an animal, asking its forgiveness when the hunter is about to take its life, it not unusual in traditional cultures, whether that animal be a bear or a rabbit. Therefore, I would be interested in knowing what the source is, i.e., the ethnographic data base, for the statement "... animals that are *primarily* food animals are rarely sanctified." In the case of the traditional cultures with which I'm familiar, it is precisely those animals and plants that are used by humans for food that receive the most elaborate and special ritual treatment, not others that are left alone and not harvested. In such traditional cultures, there tends to be a sanctification, if you wish, of life and the natural world as well as humans' relationship to it. On egin, Roz From brent at bermls.oau.org Fri Feb 25 11:28:17 2000 From: brent at bermls.oau.org (Brent J. Ermlick) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 06:28:17 -0500 Subject: English as a creole In-Reply-To: <000201bf7e02$4cd19060$1306703e@edsel> Message-ID: On Wed, Feb 23, 2000 at 01:07:53PM +0100, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: . . . > English can be considered a mild case of creolization without an intermediate > pidgin (even though the former existence of a pidgin cannot be ruled out > entirely, but it would not have been the origin of modern English): not only > the vocabulary was altered very seriously (which doesn't mean it's a creole), > but syntax was moderately altered as well, e.g. lack word order inversion > after an adverbial phrase (a typical error of French speakers who learn Dutch > or German) and in some other cases, and the simplifications of the verbal > system, including the disappearance of the participial prefix ge- that > existed in Old English. But the "ge-" shows up until the end of the Middle English period, and even appears in Spenser as "yclept". The inversion after an initial adverb or phrase still appears in Elizabethan English and the King James Bible. One old piece of advice for Americans used to be to imitate the syntax of the Pilgrim Fathers when trying to speak Dutch. Native Norman French speakers in England appear to have died out by the early 14th century. It is unlikely that their influence would have lain dormant for the next 3 or 4 hundred years. -- Brent J. Ermlick Veritas liberabit uos brent at bermls.oau.org From sonno3 at hotmail.com Fri Feb 25 16:05:24 2000 From: sonno3 at hotmail.com (Christopher Gwinn) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 11:05:24 -0500 Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: > Well, my point - perhaps too subtle - was that the Celtic inscriptions on > ogham sticks might be like the Latin inscriptions on coins and such. If you > recall, a number of folks on this list asserted that the Celtic on ogham > sticks had a great deal of similarity to the Celtic found (also mainly in > inscriptions I believe) on the continent maMy point was that the inscriptions > on ogham sticks may have had an artificial uniformity as one finds in > inscriptional Latin. To the extent that these ogham sticks had some > religious or ritual significance and were not meant to be 'littera' - > communications for more everyday purposes, that seems possible. Tacitus > describes Germanic priests carving sacred words on wood sticks and sacred > words might tend to preserve anachronisms. You are correct, Ogam inscriptions portray an "official" language learned by the scribes which does not necessarily reflect the spoken language at the time (specifically the later Ogmas) - though I would imagine that it DID reflect "proper" or "learned" Goidelic of the 2nd/3rd centuries (probably the time that the Irish were recieving enough Latin influence from Britain - if only through trading/raiding - to base a new alphabet on the Latin one). -Chris Gwinn From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Feb 26 10:01:03 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 10:01:03 -0000 Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: > the verbal morphology of Mycenaean and Sanskrit are much closer than > English and German. I think you are underestimating the similarity of German and English. (a) the overall pattern of the verb is remarkably similar: present, simple past (with strong & weak forms); past participle (strong and weak forms); future formed by modal verb + infinitive etc. (b) largely, strong verbs in English are also strong verbs in German, with similar patterns. come, came, come kommen, kam, gekommen etc etc (c) Even where the patterns for particular verbs are different, they are mostly recognisably present in English: eg the -en ending on strong participles: begotten etc. (d) subjunctive formed similarly, even if much more restricted in English: If I were ... (ich waere) (d) English of a slightly earlier time (still intelligible today) shows good similarities in person endings, eg: Thou hast, thou makest; she hath, she maketh du hast, du machst, sie hat, sie macht Peter From sarima at friesen.net Sat Feb 26 03:12:43 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 19:12:43 -0800 Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario In-Reply-To: <90.10d86e9.25e591f9@aol.com> Message-ID: At 02:41 PM 2/23/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- good point. The pronunciation has changed a lot more than the orthography. > When English spelling was regularized, it was fairly phonetic. Far more than most people realize. I recently discovered that the vowels in 'bead' and 'deed' were different in Elizabethan English (and the 'head' probably had the same vowel as 'bead'). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From alderson at netcom.com Fri Feb 25 22:41:10 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 14:41:10 -0800 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: (message from Miguel Carrasquer Vidal on Tue, 22 Feb 2000 21:27:19 +0100) Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal (mcv at wxs.nl) wrote: > "petegray" wrote: >> (b) How are you treating roots which show CeRC / CRC ablaut? > Benveniste treats them as CeRC roots. Technically, he treats them as CeR roots, with a -C enlargement. Rich Alderson From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Feb 25 15:49:37 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 10:49:37 EST Subject: Please accurate message titles Message-ID: Subject lines of messages on our list, as on many other lists, often bear no resemblance to the contents of the messages. This makes it very difficult to find a message we want at a later time, and difficult to retrieve messages from Archive, etc. It also makes it difficult to sort incoming messages. I beg our list members to title their messages by deliberate choice, not by simply pressing the "reply" button. Just as three examples: *** Messages with this title: Re: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] have been appearing for some time which are about NEITHER of those topics, but which are about the PIE vowel system, whether it had only /e/ or also others, specifically /i,u/ independent of ablauting /ei, eu/, and etc. I would love to have been able to find and group the messages which really were about the centum/satem topic. quite enlightening and full of details. I cannot do so. Or can do so only with much greater difficulty. *** Messages with the title: "Urheimat..." appeared for a long time which had nothing to do whose subject had moved, first to Uralic and IE locations, and then moved further to very specific topics in Uralic-IE loanwords. Since Uralic-IE relations are an important topic, and since only *some* of the messages under the subject line "Urheimat..." were about Uralic, I would LOVE to be able to retrieve all of these messages, or to sort them in displaying the contents of my storage disk, which would mention Uralic. Or even more specifically which would mention Uralic-IE loanwords. Or even more specifically, given the number of messages on the subject, Uralic-IE loanword 'name'. I cannot do so. Or can do so only with much greater difficulty. *** Messages with the title: Re: "is the same as" appeared for a long time which had nothing to do with that original discussion. Whatever they were about, they are now essentially lost to retrieval. *** Can we do a better job of choosing subject lines in messages? Do we all want to give our list moderator permission to retitle messages whose content is clearly and blatantly not any longer about what the subject line refers to? (Would our moderator even like to have that freedom? It would be a small amount of work, occasionally, though after each retitling presumably the "Reply..." button would then work properly for quite a while, and the list would be much better organized.) *** Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson [ Moderator's comments: I have, from time to time, taken it upon myself to change the Subject: line when messages have drifted far from their original topic, but I do not have the time to do this consistently. The search facility at the archives maintained on our behalf by the fine folks at linguistlist.org can, and does, work on message content as well as on subject lines. But I agree that topic changes should be reflected in the message headers. There is even a standard for such: Include the old text in square brackets with the word "was:" prepended, as in the first example above. --rma ] From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Feb 25 17:44:57 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 17:44:57 -0000 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: Dear Joat and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2000 3:29 AM >> I believe the process through which this happened is roughly that Nostratic, >> which had phonemic /e,a,o/ came into areal contact which Caucasian languages >> that favored extreme vowel reduction, and transference of vocalic >> differences to glides: CE -> Cya; CO -> Cwa, >> > -- I thought this was the _Indo-European_ list? Since most people here > probably classify "Nostratic" with the tooth fairy, must we waste our time? > [ Moderator's comment: > Would your reaction be as strong if Mr. Ryan had said "pre-IE" instead of > "Nostratic"? > --rma ] As I have explained, I do really understand the sensitivity of some list-members to this topic of Nostratic. But, let us approach this from another avenue. 1) What I believe we find in the earliest IE is one vowel, /*e/, which has a conditioned variant , /*o/. 2) I believe with Benveniste that /*u/ and /*i/ are to be accounted as avocalic instances of /*w/ and /*y/. 3) I also believe that all /*a/ and any long vowels are due to the presence of "laryngeals", and that /*a(:)/ cannot exist in a syllable that did not contain a "laryngeal" at some earlier stage. I presume you disagree with one or more of these premises. Let us discuss it and see if we can elucidate matters in any meaningful way. I would be grateful to any list-member for suggestions of a methdology that would allow us to convince each other of a pro or con position on any of these premises --- if one can be devised. 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 proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Feb 25 18:16:36 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 18:16:36 -0000 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2000 11:22 AM >>> Bird's summary of Pokorny's roots, ....2050 core roots. >>> Of these exactly 775 have neither e nor e: anywhere. >> 38%. Is that including a(:) and o(:)? > I simply got the computer to check - so it includes absolutely everything > listed in Bird without e or e:. >> Benveniste treats roots with CeRC / CRC ablaut as CeRC roots. > Then it is no wonder that so few (comparatively) roots appear with CRC - > whether the R is /i/ or /u/ or anything else. > Is it possible that the apparent imbalance in numbers of CeC roots and > CiC/CuC is a chimaeara - merely the result of the way we record the root > in question? This is, of course, the crux of the matter. Though there are some nominals with no full-grade roots in evidence, I do not believe there are any verbal roots of the form CRC. This suggests to me, at least, that, unless we want to posit two different root-forms: one for nominals and another for verbals (which, I consider rather unlikely), that the aberrant nominals are zero-grade forms of verbal roots which have been lost, or possibly expressive formations, or even borrowings. > And further, since CeC includes CeR, a comparison would not be about -e- > and -i-/-u- at all, but about the number of roots without a third consonant > compared with the number of roots with third consonant, with medial R, but > without full grade. Is anything meaningful being compared there? It > does not seem to be a comparison of like with like. Not sure I understand all the implications of this paragraph but I think I agree. 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 friesen.net Sat Feb 26 02:37:20 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 18:37:20 -0800 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <200002222335.PAA05381@netcom.com> Message-ID: At 03:35 PM 2/22/00 -0800, Richard M. Alderson III wrote: >Benveniste's root theory is very specific: *All* roots are of the form C1VC2, >where the V is the apophonic *e/o vowel, and C1 and C2 have some co- >occurrence restrictions: Yes, and I believe he gets there by over generalization. There are a fair number of roots for which e/o cannot be reconstructed, and even more for which it is doubtful (finding an e- or o-grade in just one branch of IE is not, IMHO, sufficient to securely reconstruct a PIE e/o, given the power of analogical change). Now, I suspect the 38% listed in the other post does include forms for which an e/o plus laryngeal is the best reconstruction. On the other hand, adding in some of the forms with doubtful e/o somewhat compensates for this. I would not be surprised to find as many as 20% of roots as having no reconstructible vowel except i or u. >Benveniste's theory treats *i and *u as conditioned variants of *y and *w, >only occurring on the surface when *e/o is not present for accentual reasons. >The real problem is that there are occurrences of *i and *u which do not ever >vary with *y and *w, so they must be phonemic, and the interchange is no >longer phonetically or phonemically automatic. Quite so. Nor am I convinced all of these *ever* had an e/o. [I also question Benveniste's root+enlargement concept]. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Feb 26 00:26:04 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 01:26:04 +0100 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: <20.277b1b9.25e641a1@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >>Did something change while I wasn't looking? I thought > was ass. >-- my reference lists it as "Arm: es, 'horse'. There's (in transcription) a macron over the e, a hac^ek over the s, and the word means "donkey". The details were discussed here not long ago. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From varny at cvtci.com.ar Fri Feb 25 23:57:55 2000 From: varny at cvtci.com.ar (Vartan Matiossian) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 20:57:55 -0300 Subject: Horses Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2000 5:11 AM >> X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >> Did something change while I wasn't looking? I thought > was ass. > -- my reference lists it as "Arm: es, 'horse'. I don't have an Armenian > dictionary on hand -- does anyone? I'm a native speaker of Armenian, and I know Modern Arm. e:s with the meaning of "ass". For a more accurate view, I went to check Ajarian's Etymological Dictionary (the standard work for Armenian), and I found no single mention of "e:s" as "horse" in ancient Armenian. So, it's "ass" and not horse. Regards, Vartan Matiossian From varny at cvtci.com.ar Sat Feb 26 00:04:08 2000 From: varny at cvtci.com.ar (Vartan Matiossian) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 21:04:08 -0300 Subject: Horses Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Hans Holm Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2000 5:04 AM >> Armenian also has a word for horse, 'es', that's derived from *ekwos; > .. that is not generally accepted. As I explained in a previous posting, 'es' doesn't mean 'horse', but "ass". On the other hand, what's the meaning of "not generally accepted"? Ajarian gave the etymology of "es" < I.E. ek'wos (see "Etymological Dictionary of the Armenian Language", in Armenian, vol. II, Yerevan, 1973, reprint from the 1926-1935 edition), which has been commonly recognized as the standard etymology and it hasn't been challenged since then. In his "Le vocabulaire indoeuropeen" (Paris, 1984, just to mention a recent work in an European language), X. Delamarre gives that same etymology. I'm curious to hear about alternative etymologies, of course. Regards, Vartan Matiossian From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Sun Feb 27 06:29:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 06:29:00 GMT Subject: Horses Message-ID: >I don't have an Armenian dictionary on hand -- does anyone? .. < what do you understand by 'Armenian' ? Eastern? Or Western? or hopefully, Graban? Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover, (no mails >16kB please). From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Feb 25 18:40:29 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 18:40:29 -0000 Subject: Domesticating the Horse Message-ID: Dear Joat and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2000 8:53 PM >> X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >> To PIEians wild and tame seemed to be one and the same. > -- PIE has another word for horse -- *markos -- which has a derived feminine > in Germanic, *markiha. > In animal names a derived feminine in *-eha seems to denote a domestic animal > (eg., PIE *h(1)ekueha, 'mare') and in *-iha denotes a wild animal. (eg., > *ulkwiha, 'she-wolf). Therefore the original meaning of *markhos was > probably specifically a wild horse. Another point of view. It seems to me that IE *-y and *-H(2)e are both established as feminine formants; and I would need several more examples to be convinced that females are differentiated by wildness through these suffixes. By the way, Pokorny lists *u.lkwi: for 'female wolf'. Where do you get *ulkwiha? > Although in point of fact, English has no separate word for "wild horse", and > we distinguish the wild from the domestic variety without any particular > problem. Well, perhaps. But 'mustang' comes very close, does it not, to being a 'wild horse'? 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 Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Fri Feb 25 06:44:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 06:44:00 GMT Subject: Domesticating the Horse Message-ID: SL='I wrote'>>the horse would be an rather unlikely candidate for a dating SL>>of PIE unity .. Please remember, how fast the American Plains Indians adopted horse riding! So - how can we be shure ascribing horse riding to any language community, logically? Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Feb 26 17:52:28 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 12:52:28 EST Subject: Domesticating the Horse Message-ID: I wrote: The linguistics seems quite against you here, I think. No word for 'the wild horse' in early IE or *PIE as far as I can tell. To PIEians wild and tame seemed to be one and the same. Colin P. Groves suggests that there's very good evidence that the possibly ancestral wild 'tarpan' of eastern Europe and possibly even an ancestral wild Equus ferus were still frequently encountered in Roman times, but those wild horses apparently were given no distinctive name - except to be called 'wild' horses. (OED says 'tarpan' is a Khirgiz Tartar name.) In a message dated 2/25/2000 1:25:12 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- PIE has another word for horse -- *markos -- which has a derived feminine >in Germanic, *markiha. In animal names a derived feminine in *-eha seems to >denote a domestic animal (eg., PIE *h(1)ekueha, 'mare') and in *-iha denotes >a wild animal. (eg., *ulkwiha, 'she-wolf). Therefore the original meaning >of *markhos was probably specifically a wild horse. Your saying *-iha denoted a wild animal, but it only shows up in the female ending. (eg., *ulkwiha, 'she-wolf). And that the -(i)ha ending for in Germanic meant the same thing. In Germanic, could have ended in -eha? And are there any other examples of this? This should apply to other domestics and wild species, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't. (Cf., *k^(h)e:i-eha (stative, intrans, "be fast") <*k^(h)e:- (deer, run fast), Porkorny I 538 (1954)) An OHG word for a domesticated horse is , female domesticated horse, . Only Germanic uses the word for the female horse and that use is obviously derivative. The word appears throughout Germanic for all horses and for female horses, but in Celtic it is ONLY used for the horse in general. A number of Greek historians tell us the Celtic word for horse was , never mentioning or or any other name. Early 6th Century BC uses of have been found on inscriptions to the Thracian and Illyrian "horseman" god. (Cf.Marcomanni.) Colin P. Groves mentions a whole series of references to WILD HORSES going back to Roman times and NOT ONE appears to use the word. JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Although in point of fact, English has no separate word for "wild horse", and >we distinguish the wild from the domestic variety without any particular >problem. No. I've seen not one shred of serious evidence of ANY IE language EVER actually using a separate native word for "wild horses." JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >There's also an eastern-IE word, *gheios (from "impells, drives") which gives >reflexes in Armenian -- 'ji', 'horse' -- and Sanskrit 'haya', 'horse'. This was discussed extensively on this list this month and a good account of the word's separate usage was given by rao.3 at osu.edu and of its relative dating by mcv. JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Therefore the original meaning of *markhos was probably specifically a wild >horse. This is the usual careless, bilbous overstatement that we've come to expect. There appears to be no serious linguistic evidence that PIEians distinguished between wild and domesticated horses, so that using the horse word to date PIE dispersal with any kind of overblown, absolute statements would appear to be a serious misrepresentation of the truth - intended or not. Horses were there before there was a PIE. Nothing identifies the *ekwos word with either originating with a rider or domestication. The only root it has been connected with so far is (*ok^us "fast"). I wrote: >>It is not hard to see how Sredni Stog culture might have learned >>domestication and livestock breeding from Tripolye and applied it to the >>animal it had a wealth of - the horse. JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- no objection there; that's probably exactly what happened. PIE-speaking >Sredni Stog picked up Neolithic traits from the non-PIE-speaking Tripolye >culture and then did them the dirty. Please recall that then you have just dated PIE at about 4500BC. If the Uralic borrowings of PIE words are indeed from before 5000BC, then you have good evidence that IE-speaking Tripolye gave IE-speaking Sredni Stog a language, domestication and maybe even a population. You see there is no discernible evidence of Sredni Stog before 5000BC. But there may now be evidence of PIE in the same area - before 5000BC. Regards, Steve Long From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Sun Feb 27 06:31:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 06:31:00 GMT Subject: Domesticating the Horse Message-ID: >PIE has another word for horse -- *markos -- which has a derived >feminine in Germanic, *markiha. .. Only Cel & Grmc. Not necessarily PIE. Cf the Sino-Tibetan langs & Korean! Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover, (no mails >16kB please). From sarima at friesen.net Sat Feb 26 02:25:33 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 18:25:33 -0800 Subject: "Upper limit" of PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 05:33 PM 2/23/00 +0100, Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Stanley Friesen wrote: >> [...] [W]e can >> place a fairly secure *upper* *limit* on how old the divergence of PIE is. >> That upper limit is about 4500 BC. >> [...] >Help me, I'm dumb and ignorant, what is up and down in archaeological >dating? Does the quoted statement mean that PIE split up "no later than" >4500 BC, or does it mean "no earlier than" 4500 BC? No earlier than. It is the upper limit on the size of the number used to specify the date. > Is the present moment the low or the high end of the scale? It is high AD. That was high BC. The two have opposite polarities. [Or at least that is how I was using the numbers: I make no claim to this being in any way a formal usage]. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Sun Feb 27 06:33:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 06:33:00 GMT Subject: "Upper limit" of PIE Message-ID: LT>The archaeologists' calendar runs backward in time from the bottom of LT>the page to the top. So, a "high" date is earlier than a "low" date, LT>and an "upper" limit is a *terminus non ante quem*, while a "lower" LT>limit is a *terminus non post quem". .. 16kB please). From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Feb 26 06:48:33 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 01:48:33 EST Subject: reality of PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 2/25/2000 4:33:08 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk wrote: >But nobody is claiming that our reconstruction contains every detail of the >speech of the PIE-speakers. That's out of the question. What we *do* claim >is that we can reconstruct a great deal of PIE. I cannot think of stronger, more compelling evidence in favor of the actual existence of PIE than what Ante Aikio presented in his list of PIE borrowings in Uralic. The claim that PIE can be reconstructed accurately is always going to be confirmed by internal evidence, after all that is what the reconstruction is made of. There's really no way to disprove it internally, because by definition it was created to be consistent with the evidence. But to see it confirmed in Uralic is very, very impressive. That's predictability. It is very hard to be cynical about the actual existence of *PIE when you have that kind of external evidence. I wonder if the full impact of that work has been appreciated. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Feb 26 08:24:19 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 03:24:19 EST Subject: reality of PIE Message-ID: Someone wrote: >Genetically related languages were once the same language. Just want to point out that there is one very big difference betwen languages and other things that are genetically related. An animal species is basically made up of a bunch of animals all of the same basic genotype. Each individual chicken is supposed to be more or less genetically like all the other chickens in terms of genetic relatedness. But languages are made up of a bunch of different parts. Individual words in the vocabulary of a language can carry different 'genes'. Sprachbund affects grammar. Morphological features may be traceable to different sources. And of course innovations should bring brand new 'genes' into the picture. (Words and specific morphologies are different. They DO act like other things we call genetically related. But languages don't.) I'm not saying that some fundamental aspects of a language doesn't come from a single parent. Rather that - unlike a biological species - one part of a language does not carry the whole defining genetic profile. Languages aren't made up of individual parts that all have the same genes. Unlike biological relatedness, the individual parts do not carry the genes that would faithfully reproduce (clone) the language somewhere else. The nouns won't tell you what the verbs are like. The pure cognate vocabulary won't give you proper syntax. In fact, the pure cognate vocabulary may not even give you a very good vocabulary to work with - if you were hoping for a working language. And if you put all those pure genetic parts together, you may not have much of a language left. Poul Anderson I think gave us that example of a science essay in English without using Greek or Latin loans and of course it doesn't look like English at all. Or not as we know it. And maybe that is the problem some of us feel with "genetic relatedness" in language. It does not necessarily describe the essence of the language. Someone wrote earlier of certain Germanic dialects being so "contaminated" that you couldn't make out their immediate genetics. And there are those of us who think, as a practical matter, the more contaminated the better. Ghurkas, moccasins, brewskis and living la vita. It all comes in handy. Larry Trask writes in another post of "variation" as maybe being part of his definition of a language. And maybe there's also a characterization that can capture a language's ability to assimilate or borrow what it needs. Something like platform free compatibility in computing. The degree of "openess" or something like that. Something that goes beyond mere variation in describing the range of diversity of genetics within a language or that a language is capable of. Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 27 17:35:30 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 17:35:30 +0000 Subject: reality of PIE as dialect network Message-ID: Lloyd Anderson writes: > The following comments by Larry Trask on comments by Peter Gray > reveal yet again that the use of absolutely discrete categories > yes-or-no may be a model not fitting the facts, and attempts to force > such a terminological usage on us may be counterproductive, > by rendering such a model incapable of application to messy reality. > [PG commenting on someone else] >>>> No. Relationship is an absolute. .... >>>> Genetically related languages were once the same language. >>> Sorry, Bob, I can't agree, and I suspect you're in a minority these >>> days (though I may be wrong!). > [LT, with clarifying inserts [ ] in the first sentence] >> You [PG] are [wrong], I'm afraid. The statement above is true not just >> because all linguists believe it: it is true by definition. Languages which >> do not descend from a common ancestor are not genetically related. > Not so, the matter is not so simple. Yes, it is. (This is beginning to sound like a British Christmas pantomime. ;-) ) > Sufficiently massive borrowing *does* constitute a kind of > genetic relation, No, it doesn't. This is rather like arguing that I can become more closely related to you by copying your behavior and your clothes. English has borrowed no words that I know of from Pitjantjatjara, and the two are not related. English has borrowed one word ('sauna') from Finnish. This doesn't make them genetically related. English has borrowed a handful of words from Chinese. This doesn't make them related. English has borrowed quite a number of words from Algonquian. This doesn't make them related. English has borrowed a couple of hundred words from Italian. This doesn't make them related -- or, at least, it doesn't make them more closely related than they were before. English has borrowed several thousand words from Old French and modern French. This doesn't make them related. Lloyd, are you trying to tell us that there exists some number N, such that, as soon as a language borrows N words from another language, the two suddenly become related? If not, then what *are* you trying to say? > and the more sophisticated researchers today > do recognize that all of these kinds of genetic relation do occur > simultaneously, in various different combinations and mixtures. OK. Which "more sophisticated researchers" have you got in mind here? Can we have some names and publications, please? *Who* exactly has argued that borrowing on any scale constitutes a genetic relationship? Answers, please. > That does not mean we cannot distinguish the kinds. > And with careful work and also some luck, we can also use the manifest > results of language cross-breedings Now we have cross-breeds? Lloyd, just which languages would you regard as cross-breeds? Cross-breeds of what? > to conclude something about > the circumstances of the language contacts and social contacts > which led to them. We would all like to do this, but that doesn't mean we have to ruin our established terminology in favor of a pink haze of undifferentiation. > If two language clusters are in intimate contact > (whether ultimately descending from some proto-world or not) > long enough that their interaction creates a complex dialect > network, then that dialect network *is real* > (referring here to Trask's phrase that PIE is real, > which Peter Gray did not in any way deny), But this state of affairs is *not* what we call a 'dialect continuum'. It's more like an extreme -- and so far hypothetical -- variety of Sprachbund. > yet it may be impossible in the time frame of that dialect net > or in any time frame somewhat preceding it > to say that there is a single point uniform ancestor, > from which all descendants evolved. No common ancestor, no dialects. The Balkan languages do not constitute a dialect continuum merely because they are in a Sprachbund. > The same may be true of a single language having spread > across an area with a number of other languages which > become substrates of different parts of the proto-language cluster. I'm getting a bit edgy about this repeated incantation of 'substrates', and I may shortly fire off a comment or two. > It simply may be a more useful model to think in terms of > an ancestor with some regional variations which do *not* > go back to a common origin, in either of the real sorts of situations > just mentioned (and others). > This in no way denies that there should *also* be single origins > for some common elements in such situations, nor does it deny > that much significant IE morphology *does* go back to a common > singular origin in PIE. This sounds to me like a version of Dixon's punctuated-equilibrium scenario. Well, we've discussed that before, and we'll doubtless do so again. But note: Dixon explicitly *denies* that his scenario is relevant to IE, and he accepts the reality of PIE. > Nor, more importantly than either of the above, which are conclusions, > does it deny that it is useful to try to lead various attested forms back > to common origins in PIE, to discover more cognate forms and > structures than are known at any given time. > All of these models and techniques can operate simultaneously, > with more benefit that if we limit ourselves to only one, > as long as we keep in mind the limited capabilities of each > technique we use, that *every* technique is biased towards > certain sorts of answers rather than others, biases which may > be more harmful or helpful depending on the particular nature > of the context being investigated. I don't object to anything in this last paragraph. But I do object to the repeated assertions that there is something fundamentally wrong with our current understanding of IE and of PIE. If you want to seek evidence that proto-languages and family trees are less than universally applicable, IE is one of the very worst places to look. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 27 16:17:31 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 16:17:31 +0000 Subject: Tree or wave? Message-ID: Lloyd Anderson writes: [on the policy of using a tree-model presentation of the IE family] > But as a result or conclusion to be reported to non-specialists, > I believe the policy proposed above is a quite pernicious policy. > We should rather be conservative and report what we actually have evidence > for, that is the weakest hypothesis that is sufficient to account for the > data, > not anything unnecessarily stronger than that. Er -- "pernicious"? Well, the *weakest* hypothesis consistent with the data here is the one we adopt: the IE languages are descended from a single common ancestor, PIE. No weaker hypothesis can account for the data. The links among the languages are due to chance? Falsified. The links are due to borrowing? Falsified. The links are due to extensive language mixing? Falsified. The only hypothesis that accounts for the data is descent from a single common ancestor. End of story. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From edsel at glo.be Sat Feb 26 19:46:22 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 20:46:22 +0100 Subject: R and r Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Artem V. Andreev" Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2000 10:19 PM > Dear sirs! > I have a question that at a glance might seem not to have any relation > to the domain of the present list; but I humbly ask u to believe that it > has a direct connection with my studies in IE and that I am very hard to > solve it myself. > The question is: is there any language in the world which has a *phonemic* > opposition between dental vibrant /r/ and uvular *vibrant* /R/? > Thank u very much > in advance, > Sincerely yours etc > Artem Andreev [Ed Selleslagh] (Brazilian) Portuguese? What do the native speakers say? Maybe also Classical Greek (rho / rho with spiritus asper or daseíon)? Ed. From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Feb 26 11:17:56 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 12:17:56 +0100 Subject: R and r In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > The question is: is there any language in the world which has a *phonemic* >opposition between dental vibrant /r/ and uvular *vibrant* /R/? Such languages seem to be extremely rare and it has been questioned that they exist at all. The only example I can give is that of now elderly speakers of some Eastern dialects of Occitan, which, according to some sources, have such a contrast, continuing the Latin contrast of single vs. geminate /r/, e.g.: /gari/ "cured" vs. /gaRi/ "oak tree". Refs: Coustenoble, Helene N.: La phonetique du Provencal Moderne en Terre d'Arles, Hertford: Austin 1945 Bouvier, Jean-Claude: Les parlers Provencaux de la Drome: Etude de Geographie Phonetique, Paris: Klincksieck 1976 St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From adahyl at cphling.dk Sat Feb 26 15:05:46 2000 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 16:05:46 +0100 Subject: R and r In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 25 Feb 2000, Artem V. Andreev wrote: > The question is: is there any language in the world which has a *phonemic* > opposition between dental vibrant /r/ and uvular *vibrant* /R/? European Portuguese has a phonemic opposition between a dental *flap* /r/ and a uvular *vibrant* /R/. Compare /karo/ 'dear, expensive' to /kaRo/ 'car'. But I suppose that is not quite what you are looking for. Adam Hyllested From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 27 13:44:55 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 13:44:55 +0000 Subject: R and r Message-ID: Artem Andreev writes: > The question is: is there any language in the world which has a *phonemic* > opposition between dental vibrant /r/ and uvular *vibrant* /R/? Ladefoged and Maddieson, in The Sounds of the World's Languages (Blackwell, 1996) report as follows (p. 227): ...it would be necessary to examine a language which uses both apical and uvular trills, although we are not sure that any such language now exists. Older speakers of Eastern dialects of Occitan...may still maintain a contrast between lingual and uvular trills, deriving from the Latin contrast of single vs geminate 's, in words such as 'cured' vs 'oak tree'. We do not know of any articulatory or acoustic measurements on such speakers' trills. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Feb 28 11:47:21 2000 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max Wheeler) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 11:47:21 +0000 Subject: R and r Message-ID: -- Begin original message -- > From: "Artem V. Andreev" > Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 00:19:25 +0300 (MSK) > The question is: is there any language in the world which has a *phonemic* > opposition between dental vibrant /r/ and uvular *vibrant* /R/? -- End original message -- That may depend a bit on what you mean by 'vibrant' (and whether you insist on 'dental'). Many varieties of Occitan, and of Portuguese, contrast an alveolar tap with a uvular trill. Max Wheeler ____________________________________________________________ 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 rao.3 at osu.edu Sat Feb 26 10:49:15 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 05:49:15 -0500 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: >> Blumenthal, [comparing] strong aorist ..and weak aorist > Thanks! But can I check two things: > (a) Has he used "strong" to mean "asigmatic" rather than "second"? >[...] > (b) What about verbs that appear to be asigmatic/"strong" merely because > they lost their -s- in the development of the language? I don't remember any details being given about the classification. As the couts were used to support an historical distinction, I assumed that history of the verb forms was taken into account. In hindsight, this is unwarranted. The only way to find out seems to be to do a recount. From adahyl at cphling.dk Sat Feb 26 16:48:47 2000 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 17:48:47 +0100 Subject: PU *nimi / PIE *HneH3men- (was: Re: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 23 Feb 2000, Ante Aikio wrote: > But if you reconstruct *H3 phonetically as *[Yw], this should give PU *x > (which was phonetically most probably *[Y]). The reconstruction of *H3 as Yw is Indo-European, not Indo-Uralic. I suggest: PIU *(n)newme- or *(n)neYme- Pre-PIE (with analogical -men) *H1neH3men > PIE *H1noH3mn PU-Yuk *niwme > PU *nime > Finnish nimi > But you can't reconstruct PU *-ä for this item: the reconstruction must be > *nimi (= traditional *nime). Why are you reconstructing an *-i for traditional *-e ? From what I know, *-e > Finnish -i, whereas Finnish -e < *-eC. Adam Hyllested From inakistand at yucom.be Sat Feb 26 19:07:32 2000 From: inakistand at yucom.be (jose.perez3) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 20:07:32 +0100 Subject: Linking some words in Germanic languages... Message-ID: Hello I-Es: I was trying to relate some cognate words in Germanic words that seem to come from IE *(s)ter "stiff". It seems that the ones which kept the initial s will give us "st" in English (stiff, starch) and German (stiff, starren). While those which had lost it will yield "d" in German (Dorn, derb) and the expected "th" in English (thorn). Can somebody remind me why?. I reckon that it was a change that applied to other "s" clusters: like *sk in *skel "to cut" -though not in all the Germanic dialects (E. shirt vs. skirt)- and *sp. I also reckon that some roots starting with an aspirated plosive could be linked to s+unaspirated plosive... which would render I-E. initial /s/ a prefix. What would it indicate? If somebody has this information on the tips of her/his fingers a brief explanation and a list of examples it would be very welcome. I'm also having trouble explaning one of the semantic changes that several etymological dictionaries. Namely arriving to the idea behind"start, startle, strike" and G. "stürzen, Umsturz, streiten". Did this happen through an old word for tail (G. Sterz) that would be first understood as "the stiff one" and then as "the quick moving one". Somehow that doesn't seem enough. Does anybody have a clearer idea of that change of meaning?. What about the several birds that are related to this root? E. "stork, redstart"; G "Strauss, Drossel". Would you agree with the etymologies that explain their names because of their being "stiff" or "clumsy"?. Has anybody linked this root to the one that meant simply "to stand"? IE *steH2? From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Feb 27 01:27:18 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 20:27:18 EST Subject: Bandkeramik and non-Anatolian PIE Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >The one glitch is that it is not the proto-Hittites/Anatolians who left, but >the 'Indo-European' community - the first splitting or branching occuring in >either case. -- that simply does not work and makes no sense. Eg., Hittite is intrusive in Anatolia, the internal relationships of the other IE languages show none of the links one would expect (eg., Greek is not particularly closely related to Anatolian), etc. >My read on this is that "PIE minus Anatolian" forms on the Danube and becomes >Bandkeramik. -- leaving what, exactly, in the Balkans and the Mediterranean areas which were neolithicized via an east-to-west movement? >(and possibly proto-Phrygian-Thracian, though don't hold me to that.) -- good thing you added the qualifier, since Phrygian shows close links to Greek and none in particular to Anatolian. >the advantage of plausibility - for what that is worth in this crazy world. -- if one disregards all linguistic considerations, which is odd, when one is trying to solve a _linguistic_ problem. >whom must have by the way had an extremely adequate language of their own, >but who nevertheless left no substrate. -- you have evidence for there being no LBK substrate in, eg., proto-Germanic? From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Feb 27 07:44:34 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 02:44:34 EST Subject: Balkan Kurgans Message-ID: In a message dated 2/25/2000 7:59:52 PM, Hans J. Holm wrote: <PIE has a reconstructible word that *probably* meant silver, and it is SF>derivable from a root meaning "white", which makes it unlikely to be SF>borrowed. .. That is well-known. The question aimed at *professional archaeologists* for archaeological evidence whether that silver showed any traits that could be termed or compared with clearly IE art.>> I don't have the original post but perhaps this may help. The appearance of silver ornaments in Balkan 'shaft graves' is not altogether surprising, unless they were found in some large quantity. We've discovered that metallurgy is very early in the Balkans - copper appearing before 5000BC. (Metallurgy here means evidence of extraction and processing by use of extreme heat.) There is thinking furthermore that silver was actually smelted before the advent of copper as part of earlier lead extraction. Lead appears in fact to have been processed well before copper in Anatolia, lead ornaments being common already by 6500BC. And silver is a by-product of lead smelting. At about 1000 degrees centigrade lead become solid while silver not oxidizing becomes liquid. Most processed silver before the bronze age in Europe contains fair quantities of lead. 'Working silver' however was not particularly sophisticated in Europe at the time and there has not been found an identifiable style associated with these objects - unlike pottery and tools. And so, for example, silver objects have been found in so-called "shaft-graves" that are clearly Minoan as early as 2300BC, but even their character is often such that they could have been found anywhere. Once again, I don't know the site. But 'Shaft-Graves' (and by that I mean the culture associated with axe burials and red ochre, though not necessarily mounds or 'kurgans' which are rare in Europe) have not generally yielded a wealth of identifiably unique metalworks. This all leads up to the fact that nowadays I don't think you'll find a lot of professional archaeologists - at least on this side of the tracks - who would be very willing to identify anything called "IE art." The eminent Prof Casskey did venture a guess at what cultural materials at Lerna might be related to Indo-European speakers and a summary of those findings from a few decades ago can be found on the web at http://users.erols.com/gayle/lerna.htm. Reading through the summary of the excavation (pre-Renfrew's A&L) - particularly dealing with 'Shaft Grave' period I think you may get a sense of the ambiguoties involved in the idea of IE art. A very recent and thorough report on a dig in Moravia where Shaft-Grave and 'group grave' cultures interwove - with I seem to remember descriptions and maybe pictures of metal ornaments - is on the web at the Comparative Archaeology site and perhaps also at the upenn museum site. Sorry I don't have the urls but a search should turn the home pages up. Hope this helps. Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 27 13:27:52 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 13:27:52 +0000 Subject: Tocharian and Macedonian Message-ID: Pete Gray writes: > Inspired by Lloyd to ask odd questions, I dare to wonder if there is any > connection between Tocharian and Macedonian -or is our evidence for > Macedonian too weak? Too weak. Peter Schrijver summarizes the position as follows in Glanville Price's Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe: Our knowledge of Macedonian is extremely fragmentary: place-names, personal names, and a few nouns surviving as glosses in Greek sources. These have given rise to hot and often politically inspired debates concerning its linguistic affiliation, which are far from settled. The sources can be divided into three categories: (1) Greek words and names; some of these are Attic and were undoubtedly borrowed (Attic Greek was the official language of the court of the Macedonian kings); others are not Attic but show possible resemblances to northern Greek dialects; (2) words which have Greek (and sometimes wider Indo-European) cognates but whose sound structure differs markedly from any known Greek dialect (e.g., 'death', Greek ); (3) words which have no known Greek cognates and usually no convincing Indo-European etymology (e.g., 'air'). Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 27 14:33:22 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 14:33:22 +0000 Subject: Long monomorphemic Basque words Message-ID: Lloyd Anderson writes: > Trask writes: >> I am only interested in monomorphemic words, and >> monomorphemic words tend to be short, while long words tend to be >> polymorphemic, in Basque as in all the languages I know anything about. >> Consequently, Lloyd's objection could only constitute a problem for me >> in the following scenario: >> Pre-Basque had lots of long monomorphemic words as well as short >> ones, but, for some reason, the long monomorphemic words have been >> generally lost from the language, while the short ones have >> preferentially survived. >> And I don't see this as a plausible scenario. > When reworded slightly, I find it highly plausible indeed. How? Why? > It is not that the long monomorphemic words have been generally lost, > it is that Trask's criteria exclude them from his considering them as > early Basque (this has been discussed in many other messages, one a > cumulation of 9 ways in which his criteria might usefully be modified). Oh, no -- not this again! ;-) Lloyd, this is not true. My criteria are independent of phonological form, and therefore they cannot possibly systematically exclude words of any particular phonological form. > It is one respect in which the totality of Trask's criteria embody a bias > against certain vocabulary > not justified by careful linguistic methodology. And just what "careful linguistic methodology" would you put in place of my explicit criteria? Lloyd, I have asked you this question countless times now, and you have still refused to answer it. You just keep muttering darkly that there must be something wrong with my criteria, but you have *never* advanced any other explicit criteria. Now have you? If you want to pursue this matter, will you *please* finally now spell out the criteria you think we should be using? Mine are on the table: where are yours? Should any given Basque word, such as 'butterfly' or 'crest', be included in my list or excluded from it? And on the basis of what criteria? Answer, please -- and now. As far as I can see, I'm already being maximally careful, while you're urging me to throw caution to the winds and to toss all sorts of implausible things into the Pre-Basque basket just because it pleases you to see them there. > Under Larry Trask's criteria for inclusion in his data set, > some polysyllabic monomorphemic words, a set which would > generally include all but the most common expressives, > are disproportionately disfavored for written records > because of their meanings. Really? And what leads you to believe this? What evidence do you have to support such a conclusion? > Although "txitxi" 'chick' is perhaps recorded early > (Trask did not say otherwise in his message dealing with it), > Trask says it sticks out a mile. > I assume he means the two voiceless stops, > and the voiceless stop initial. Some confusion here. First, has two affricates, and it is pronounced rather like English 'chee-chee'. Second, does not mean 'chick': it is a nursery word meaning 'meat'. The word for 'chick' is usually or , with variants and . This word is recorded from 1571 -- very early, by Basque standards. It will probably satisfy my criteria and go into my list. But it will indeed stand out a mile, with its peculiar phonological form. And the origin of that peculiar form is obvious: this is a word of imitative origin. It has the same motivation as the English word 'cheep'. And, by the way, there is a British word 'cheeper', meaning 'chick (of a game bird)', recorded from 1611. And, of course, there is the American word 'peeper' for a certain kind of cheeping frog. > Words for 'butterfly' probably were also not recorded early, > among many others. Well, *one* word for 'butterfly' is recorded in 1562 -- very early by Basque standards. That word has disappeared completely from the language. The most widespread word today is only recorded from 1912, and apparently did not even exist in 1905. Lloyd, what conclusions do you draw from observations such as these? My conclusions are clear: words for 'butterfly' in Basque are overwhelmingly of expressive origin, and they are unstable and subject to frequent alteration and replacement. Accordingly, they are useless as evidence for Pre-Basque. > Some of those for 'butterfly' are monomorphemic, > at least under the sensible understanding that the > so-called reduplication is not a separate morpheme > unless some word exists with it removed, rather > the reduplication is a part of the shape of the root of > a number of expressive words. Half of a reduplicated > form is not a functioning morpheme in such cases. > Trask has argued that the endings of some of these words, > such as /-leta/ etc. are not suffixes, not analyzable > as productive Basque morphemes. If so, the forms are > monomorphemic. Arguably, yes, but there is a problem in that the first elements often recur. Recall the cases like , , and , all 'butterfly'. The first element recurs, but the second elements are unique to these individual words. Anyway, consider an English parallel: say, 'ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay'. How many morphemes would you say were present in this word, and what are they? > I do not in this message deal with the question whether > the forms in question are reconstructible back to early Basque, > that is a different question from whether they are > monomorphemic. Indeed, but I can answer the question anyway. There is *no* evidence that any of the numerous words for 'butterfly' can be reconstructed back to Pre-Basque, and there is a great deal of evidence against any such view. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From colkitto at sprint.ca Sun Feb 27 15:59:49 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 10:59:49 -0500 Subject: Turkic Message-ID: There is an Indo-European parallel to the items below (alleged homogeneity of Turkic) I will take the liberty of quoting myself (adapted) [ Moderator's note: The following two paragraphs are quoted from a posting by Stefan Georg, dated 10 Feb 2000, quoting in turn one from Larry Trask, dated 6 Feb 2000. Just to keep everything clear. --rma ] >> Indeed. Uyghur is one of the most divergent Turkic languages, and a >> glance through a comparative vocabulary of the Turkic languages reveals >> a very modest proportion of shared vocabulary between Turkish and Uyghur. > Well, this isn't "Altainet", but, while Larry is right that the degree of > "mutual intelligibility" of the Turkic languages is often overemphasized, > the scene depicted is not as inconceivable as it may seem. >From the point of view of internal heterogeneity Slavic is surprisingly uniform. Reading texts in an unknown Slavic language based on one's knowledge of another using a good dictionary is far less daunting (and entails much less of a sense of futility!) than in many other language groups. In this context one might take issue with statements that hint that it is erroneous to say that learning to read a new Slavic language based on knowledge of another is "not a very daunting task", or that confronted with a passage in, e.g., Czech, Polish, or Serbo-Croatian, based on a knowledge of, e.g., Russian alone, "you will probably have great difficulty doing more than figuring out what the passage is about, if that." However, for a hypothetical unknown language, "figuring out what [a] passage is about" with no prior knowledge is already a tremendous step forward. As an illustration of this point one only has to contrast the degree of internal uniformity within Slavic with that in, e.g., Germanic. This point will be grasped simply by attempting to read a page of Faroese with only a knowledge of English or German as a guide, and then juxtaposing the result with a comparison of any two Slavic languages. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 27 16:35:26 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 16:35:26 +0000 Subject: Hittite /wheel Message-ID: Steve Long writes: > (When I asked Sean Crist to identify the "telltale signs of borrowing" that > he offered that would tell him if "the wheel word" was borrowed in at least > some IE languages, he never replied.) OK. I'm no IEist, and I can't evaluate the IE evidence here. But I can illustrate the general point Sean was making with a Basque example. All but the westernmost dialects of Basque have a word <(h)anka> 'haunch', and also 'buttocks', 'leg', 'paw', 'foot' in places. This word is regarded by all Vasconists as a loan from Romance. A certain long-ranger has recently been interested in finding evidence of a genetic link between Basque and the two North Caucasian families. He has noted that Basque <(h)anka> looks quite a bit like something in Caucasian, and he therefore denies the loan status of <(h)anka>, insisting that the word must be native and ancient in Basque, and therefore cognate with the Caucasian item. How can we reply to him? Well, the problem is that cluster /nk/. This was indeed perfectly normal in Pre-Basque. But, in the early medieval period, Basque underwent a categorical phonological change, in all but the easternmost dialects, by which plosives were uniformly voiced after /n/. For example, the Latin word 'anvil', which was borrowed early into Basque, appears today as in all but the easternmost dialects. Likewise, the native adverb-forming suffix <-ki> appears today as <-gi> after /n/. For example, 'beautiful' forms 'beautifully', but 'good' forms 'well' in all but the easternmost dialects, which alone preserve . Now, the word in question is *everywhere* <(h)anka> in Basque, and no such form as *<(h)anga> is recorded anywhere. Therefore, the very form of the word is enough to *prove* that it was not in the language at the time of the change, and must have entered the language later -- from whatever source. As it happens, we know the source: it is the very widespread Romance 'haunch', with regular regional developments like French , all ultimately from a Frankish *. But, even if we didn't know the source, the form of the word would tell us at once that this is a late entry into the Basque lexicon, and therefore probably a borrowing. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 27 17:47:00 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 17:47:00 +0000 Subject: "pronoun" is semantic or distributional? Message-ID: Pat Ryan writes: > But, I would ask Larry if, given the analysis above, 'pronominal' is > inappropriate to distinguish 'my' from 'this' etal., what would be the > appropriate term? Certainly, I do not believe anyone will easily agree that > there is no discernible difference between 'my' and 'this' etal. There is no difference in the syntax, which is all that matters for part-of-speech assignments. There are semantic differences, of course, but these are of no relevance for assignment to syntactic classes. There are enormous semantic differences among 'dog', 'arrival' and 'colorlessness', but all are nouns, regardless, because they all behave like nouns. > Certainly, > 'possessive', the term Larry employs in his published definition is > unproblematical so far as I can see but is it entirely without merit to > identify the substitutional difference between words like 'my' and 'this'? And what 'substitutional difference' would that be? The problem with 'pronominal determiner' is not so much that it's intrinsically inappropriate -- though it is -- but that it is not in use. Pretty much everybody calls 'my' a possessive determiner, so why not just accept this standard piece of terminology? > A more troublesome omission(?) in Larry's definifitions concerns words like > 'mine', which he has assured us in a recent posting are 'pronouns'. But > under his published definition of 'pronoun', we find only personal, > reflexive, demonstrative, indefinite, interrogative, and relative --- listed > as categories. > Larry, under which of these categories does 'mine' belong? None, probably. I probably would have been wise to make it clear that my list was not meant to be exhaustive, but I see now that my wording is unfortunate. Thanks for pointing that out. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Feb 28 04:47:55 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 23:47:55 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: In a message dated 2/27/2000 11:16:35 PM, edsel at glo.be wrote (re English syntax): >E.g. What would you >think of a sentence like *"I said clearly that "modern Afrikaans many of the >characteristics has of a creole"*...? Pennsylvania Dutch. Regards, Steve Long From mclasutt at brigham.net Mon Feb 28 08:07:42 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 01:07:42 -0700 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >> [AH] I do not know or claim these to be cognates. But it might be. > [Stefan George] I claim these not to be cognates. No, it might not be. > On the other hand, if containing - somewhere in the word - an /n/ (oops, > obviously a nasal will do) is sufficient enough to suspect cognacy, well, > then we could add quite an array of languages, as e.g. > Tibetan /ming/, Swahili /jina/ (looks like Basque, so perhaps with > j-mobile), Mongolian /ner-e/ (hey, here's the heteroclitic; I knew it had > to be somewhere !), Khmer /chmua/ (remember the semitic forms !), aso. > Voilà, l'unità d'origine dell'linguaggio, how could I ever be so > skeptical, > silly me. > St.G. > PS: welcome to the beautiful land of Ruhlenistan ...and Shoshoni, Panamint, and Comanche /nahnia/; Lushootseed /da?/ (Proto-Salish *n > d)... Let's make it even more explicit. /n/ occurs in about 90% of the world's languages. About 99% of the world's languages have any kind of nasal (I'll assume this is 100% in the calculations below). Within these languages, /n/ accounts for, on a rough average, for 5-10% of the consonants occurring in the words of any lexicon. Nasals account for 10 to 20% of the consonants. Let's assume that there are 500 unrelated language families and isolates in the world. That means that in 23 to 45 of these unrelated language families the word for 'name' will have an /n/ (500 x (.05 or .1) x .9) and that in 50 to 100 of them it will have any nasal (500 x (.1 or .2)). That's based on pure chance. It doesn't take much rocket science (or linguistic skill) to find "compelling" evidence from around the world linking very disparate language families based on chance correspondences. That's especially true if one finds W in the word for X in language families A, B, G, and R, then finds Y in the word for Z in language families B, H, N, M, and R. We now have a "language family" consisting of A, B, G, H, N, M, and R! The mass comparativists would be most pleased. 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 whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Mon Feb 28 09:45:12 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 11:45:12 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <200002231030.p2059@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: On Wed, 23 Feb, Hans Holm wrote: >RW>has been dropped in the last 10 years and replaced with >RW>something like 'related languages are those that have some >RW>features in common or are somehow connected', or 'there is no >RW>such thing as genetically related languages'. >French and Rumanian have Latin as one common ancestor language. >Only in this sense they are said to be genealogically related >and named Romance languages. And in historical linguistics this is the only sense that 'related' has. >Anttila shows that not in all cases it is clear which language >should be called the "mother language" insofar as we prefer >lexical versus grammatical & morphological features as criterion. >Take Albanian with a rest of 10% (!) of original lexemes (cf. >Anttila 89:172), but nobody hesitates to name it an /IE >language/. All of which is quite true, and all of which is quite beside the point (irrelevant). The degree of difficulty of establishing relatedness is not part of the definition of 'related'. If 'related' is defined (as it is in historical linguistics) as "sprung from some common source", then 'non-related' languages are not "not sprung from some common source" and that is the end of the matter. The ease or difficulty of demonstrating relatedness, or even the impossibility of demonstrating unrelatedness, simply does not affect the definition. In human beings it is sometimes difficult to determine if an individual is male or female by normal criteria. But this does not affect the general division of human beings into male and female. Relatedness is an absolute (by definition). Languages are either related or they are not (by definition). The difficulty of establishing relatedness does not change this. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Mon Feb 28 09:59:42 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 11:59:42 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <200002250915.p2222@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: On Fri, 25 Feb, Hans Holm wrote: >this ends the discussion here. >RW>It is equally useless to state >.. > see above. Well, I'm glad you agree. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Feb 28 15:50:45 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 16:50:45 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Stefan Georg wrote: >>to the south (with s-mobile) >>- bask izen >So Basque is Indoeuropean, I see (try to inflect it, maybe it shows -r/-n >heteroclisis as well). Careful now, Basque *does* have -n/-r- "heteroclisis" of sorts (e.g. "day", "weather"[*]) and even one case of true -r/-n- heteroclisis (erg. oblique "this"). [*] Despite PII *ag^her, ag^hnas "day", I do *not* think that the Basque phenomenon can be equated with the PIE one. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 29 03:11:05 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 19:11:05 -0800 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 08:42 PM 2/26/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Especially since the original PIE word itself -- *h(2)rtkos -- is itself >probably a nominalized adjective (via a stress shift), from *h(2)rektes; see >Sanskrit raksas, "destruction". This brings up a little hypothesis of mine: the principle origin of the thematic inflection of nouns (the o-stems) was via nominalization of adjectives. How reasonable is this? -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 29 04:24:07 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 23:24:07 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: In a message dated 2/27/00 8:26:05 PM Mountain Standard Time, W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de writes: >and to decide whether it represents sufficient reflexes of a former network >called e.g. PIE ... >> -- or, in plain English, a former language called PIE. From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Tue Feb 29 11:55:58 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 13:55:58 +0200 Subject: PU *nimi / PIE *HneH3men- (was: Re: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [I wrote:] >> But if you reconstruct *H3 phonetically as *[Yw], this should give PU *x >> (which was phonetically most probably *[Y]). [Adam Hyllested replied:] > The reconstruction of *H3 as Yw is Indo-European, not Indo-Uralic. Yes - what I meant was that if PU *nimi is an IE loan word, one would expect that IE *H3 (= [Yw]) was substituted with *x (= [Y]) in PU. > I suggest: > PIU *(n)newme- or *(n)neYme- > Pre-PIE (with analogical -men) *H1neH3men > PIE *H1noH3mn > PU-Yuk *niwme > PU *nime > Finnish nimi This sounds completely ad hoc. But I'm ready to inspect the validity of your Indo-Uralic reconstruction with an unbiassed attitude. So, could you give exact parallels for the sound correspondences between the items? >> But you can't reconstruct PU *-ä for this item: the reconstruction must >> be *nimi (= traditional *nime). > Why are you reconstructing an *-i for traditional *-e ? From what I know, > *-e > Finnish -i, whereas Finnish -e < *-eC. PU high *i is reconstructed in non-intial syllables in place of traditional mid *e by Juha Janhunen and Pekka Sammallahti. There are at least two good reasons for this (although these were not the reasons stated by P.S. and J.J.; they based their reconstruction on the assumption of maximal distinctions): - Saami and Ugric show metaphony *(C)e(C)Ci > *(C)i(C)Ci. (*e-e > *i-e hardly makes sense). - Finnish shows sporadic labial assimilation *-i > y/u in some stems with y/u in the first syllable (e.g. PU *kuli- 'wear out' > Finnish kulu-, PU *süks´i 'autumn' > Finnish syksy). Again, *u-e > u-u and *ü-e > y-y would not make sense; one would rather expect *o-e > o-o, but there is no evidence of such a development. According to this assumption, Finnish -i (alternating with -e- and zero when non-final) comes regularly from PU *-i and Finnish -e (phonologically /-e?/, alternating with -ee-) comes from PU *-ik and *-iS. Regards, Ante Aikio From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Feb 28 09:01:45 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 09:01:45 +0000 Subject: Michif Message-ID: Adam Hyllested writes: > I suppose Michif wasn't created overnight, which means that it is best > described as a language descended from EITHER French OR Cree - depending > on its prehistory. What do we know about earlier stages of Michif? Not much: nobody was taking notes at the time. But it's clear the language was created by a generation of people who were fluently bilingual in Cree and in French (its modern speakers can speak neither language, though they are now bilingual in English). And we may reasonably surmise that Michif was created as an act of identity. That is, for some reason its creators decided that they did not want to be regarded either as Cree-speakers or as French-speakers, but as a quite different group. So they must have deliberately set about the job of constructing a distinctive language for themselves. Such acts of identity are far from rare, and a number of cases have been reported in the literature. But few such cases are as remarkable as Michif. More usually, speakers content themselves with altering the form of a single language, so as to make it different from the speech of another group originally speaking the same language. This is the process that has been dubbed 'exoterogeny'. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From Georg at home.ivm.de Mon Feb 28 10:00:38 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 11:00:38 +0100 Subject: Jose Perez' questions In-Reply-To: <000201bf7ffa$d305fdc0$68a608d4@joseperez3> Message-ID: > Could you, please, give me the complete reference of the Lexicon der >Indogermanischen Verbum? LIV - Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben. Die Wurzeln und ihre Primaerstammbildungen, Unter Leitung von Helmut Rix und der Mitarbeit vieler anderer beearbeitet von Martin Kuemmel, Thomas Zehnder, Reiner Lipp, Brigitte Schirmer, Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag 1998, ISBN 3-89500-068-X > Does anybody know whether it could be purchased via internet? Reichert Verlag, together with some other purely scholarly-oriented publishers here, has not, AFAIK, made its holdings accessible through the usual book search engines (though this may be yesterday's news). So, you'd have to write to them personally. I don't have an e-mail address for them handy at the moment, but any powerful search-engine should turn one up. > I'm also after other "classics" such as Rick's Laut und Formenlehre des >Griechisches and Meiser's Laut und Formenlehre des Lateins... can they be >bought in the net? H. Rix: Historische Grammatik des Griechischen and Meiser: Historische Laut- und Formenlehre der Lateinischen Sprache have been published by the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft in Darmstadt. Their books usually don't turn up in normal search engines either, but they, at least, have a web-site of their own: http://www.wbg-darmstadt.de > Can somebody give me the reference of the Pokorny's CD version of his >roots dictionary? There is none. > Is there any more up-dated IE roots dictionary (I remember Beeke's >mentioning that the Dutch were working on a "new Pokorny". Has it come out >yet?) No, not yet. But when it does, it is most likely to be published by Rodopi/Amsterdam (www.rodopi.nl) in the "Leiden Studies in Indo-European" series; you could ask them to notify you upon publication (but as far as I understand it, this may still take some time) > Could anybody recommed a German dictionary organized by IE roots? >(something on the lines of Clairborne's The Roots of English or, still better, >of Robert's and Pastor's Diccionario etimológico indoeuropeo de la lengua >española). I'm sure that the Germans must have brought out some good stuff. Alas, they haven't. >And since I've mentioned German... > Is there such a dictionary for French? If you are after a general etymological dictionary (not of the type described above), you can still use E. Gammilscheg: Etymologisches Woerterbuch der franzoesischen Sprache, Heidelberg: C. Winter 1929 (as with other older books from that publisher, it might still be available in non-used form). > Dutch? P.A.F. van Veen: Etymologisch woordenboek. De herkomst van onze woorden, Utrecht/Antwerpen: Van Dale Lexicografie 1989, ISBN 90-6648-302-4 > Greek? (I'm afraid I'm still using Andrioti's etymological dictionary for >Modern Greek, which unfortunately doesn't usually take you far if you >don't use >an Old Greek etymological dictionary to go with it. Would Chantraine's >Dictionnaire étymologique still be your best recommendation?) Chantraine is a truly remarkable work. However, its main focus is on "etymologie - histoire des mots", whereas the "etymologie - origine" approach is better represented in Hj. Frisk: Griechisches etymologisches Woerterbuch, Heidelberg: Winter; but it is usually considered best by Hellenicists to have them both > Russian? M. Vasmer: Russisches etymologisches Woerterbuch, Heidelberg: Winter; there is an upbeat Russian translation of this with copious comments and amendments on almost every single entry > Final request: Ernout and Meillet's Dictionnaire étymologique de la >langue latine has been out of print for ages and my photocopies (yups!) were >never much good to start with. What shall I replace them with? Walde/Hofmann: Lateinisches etymologisches Woerterbuch, Heidelberg: Winter (yes, that publisher once was the Microsoft of publishers of etymological dictionaries); but W-H is not necessarily considered the best one of the "blue" et. dict. published by Winter (this prize goes, IMHO, to Frisk). I think it could be time to produce a new one. Any takers ? St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From jrader at m-w.com Mon Feb 28 09:38:25 2000 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 09:38:25 +0000 Subject: Jose Perez' questions [was: Re: *hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-?] Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: I have taken the Subject: from Stefan Georg's reply for postings relating to Mr. Perez' questions. --rma ] > From: "jose.perez3" > Hello IEists, > I've just started reading the list and was wondering wether any of you > might help me with the following: > Could you, please, give me the complete reference of the Lexicon der > Indogermanischen Verbum? > Does anybody know whether it could be purchased via internet? > I'm also after other "classics" such as Rick's Laut und Formenlehre des > Griechisches and Meiser's Laut und Formenlehre des Lateins... can they be > bought in the net? Helmut Rix's _LIV: Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben_, his _Historische Grammatik des Griechischen_ (the title I assume you mean), and Gerhard Meiser's _Historische Laut- und Formenlehre der lateinischen Sprache_ can all be purchased through Amazon.de, though they are not cheap. Perhaps if you are in Europe you can evade the astronomical shipping and handling charges that Amazon.de charges American customers for air shipment. Incidentally, does anyone on the list have an opinion on Meiser's book, which I have not seen? Jim Rader From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 29 03:14:46 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 19:14:46 -0800 Subject: Jose Perez' questions [was: Re: *hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-?] In-Reply-To: <000201bf7ffa$d305fdc0$68a608d4@joseperez3> Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: I have taken the Subject: from Stefan Georg's reply for postings relating to Mr. Perez' questions. --rma ] At 02:42 AM 2/26/00 +0100, jose.perez3 wrote: > Could you, please, give me the complete reference of the Lexicon der >Indogermanischen Verbum? > Does anybody know whether it could be purchased via internet? Ditto here. The copy at UCLA has "disappeared" (probably on indefinite loan to somebody). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From Georg at home.ivm.de Mon Feb 28 10:22:02 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 11:22:02 +0100 Subject: Nuristani (was k' > ts > c-hachek order of changes?) In-Reply-To: <200002280926.KAA20001@home.ivm.de> Message-ID: > Stefan George wrote: >>You are doubtlessly having the Nuristani languages of SE Afghanistan in >>mind, which are sometimes viewed as the third Aryan group besides Indic and >>Iranian. >Not to be too picky, but Nuristan is in *north*-eastern Afghanistan, on the >southern slopes of the Hindu Kush range. Obviously, sorry. >I would add that only >non-specialists in the region would deny the linguistic and ethnic validity >of the Nuristanis' place as a third group within Indo-Iranian. This is interesting. Being such a non-specialist (but not *denying* this, of course), I'd like to hear more about this. What would be most interesting, is: which criteria aside from the representation of /k'/ (the only criterion I have heard about, or better: I remember having heard about without reaching for the books) may be cited in favour of this view, e.g. from morphology ? Some references would be welcome, too (post-Morgenstierne). St.G. PS: as I just discover, your fine web-site contains some answers to my questions, and I'd like to recommend it for anyone interested. But maybe there are more features of N. lg. relevant for Aryan subclassification which could be mentioned ? Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 29 04:32:10 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 23:32:10 EST Subject: Nuristani (was k' > ts > c-hachek order of changes?) Message-ID: >strand at sedona.net writes: << From the cumulative evidence it would appear that the Proto-Nuristanis >were ethnically non-Aryas who were swept up in the earliest expansion of >those Aryas who later became Iranians -- we should be careful to maintain the distinction between ethnic and linguistic descriptive terms here. The Nuristani languages are unquestionably a subgroup within Indo-Iranian; possibly a coequal third part of that subgrouping. From edsel at glo.be Mon Feb 28 10:55:48 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 11:55:48 +0100 Subject: Celtiberian Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Friday, February 25, 2000 4:43 AM [snip] > "The 'first full manual' on the language appeared in 1998. Jordán > Cólera, Carlos. Introducción al Celtibérico. Zaragoza: Universidad de > Zaragoza. Wolfgang Meid's commentaries on Celtiberian Inscriptions > Archaeologica (Budapest 1994) have been considered authoritative. Francois > Villar's A new interpretation of Celtiberian grammar (Innsbruck 1995) > approaches the issues of both the non-Indoeuropean and what may be singular > indoeuropean aspects of the language. Some general observations: > The Iberian "syllabic" script that was used to write Celtiberian has often > been described as unable to represent the opposition of voiced and voiceless > consonants, as well as being limited to representing a limited range of final > consonants (s, m, r, n, l). These conclusions have been questioned > recently... On the basis of Latin scripts used in the last phase of > Celtiberian, it was concluded that the language fell into the Q-Celtic > category. However, it now appears that this may also have been the result of > the Latinization of the language in the late period, since some early texts > now seem to show signs of being P-Celtic... The lexical data shows that > Celtiberian innovated or borrowed a good many words and roughly half the > vocabulary is not known with real certainty... It has been said that > Celtiberian also contains some Indoeuropean archaisms, but far outnumbering > these are elements that remain to be explained - including the frequent use > of the genitive singular ending -o. [Ed Selleslagh] This could be a Basque-like (Iberian?) feature: the derivative -ko suffix, with some subsequent alteration (lenition....), cf. etxekoandrea = the mistress/lady of the house [house-of-lady-the]. >And while the predicted Indoeuropean > passive -r ending does not now seem to be present, some researchers feel they > have detected evidence of mutation (lenition) in the Celtiberian script... [Ed] Strangely enough, according to my own reading of a particular Iberian inscription (Sinarcas), this feature, or something resembling it, might be present in Iberian. But accompanied by a subject in an apparently ergative case. > There is also the difficult problem, mentioned above, as to whether > Latinization in the mid 2d century BC altered the language so that it was at > least dialectically different from the one used in the Iberian script. > Familiar structure that appears in Latin alphabet texts are not often > confirmed in the earlier texts. And this difficulty is amplified by the fact > that the accepted phonetic interpretation of early Celtiberian texts have not > proved especially useful in elucidating the original Iberian script...>> [Ed] The latter is well known and quite easy to explain: e.g. there is a redundancy of rhotics (r/R) and sibilants (s/s') when the script is used for Celtiberian (and deficiencies on the other hand: e.g. lack of voiced/unvoiced opposition). So, Celtiberian could never elucidate distinctions (in Iberian) it doesn't have itself. Imagine we had Latin texts in Arabic script: how far would we get in determining the meaning of all Arabic characters? > Regards, > Steve Long [Ed] A more general comment: Given the presence of Q-Lusitanian (maybe Celtic, maybe Italic, or an early form of both when they were still rather undifferentiated) on the one hand, and that of P-Celtic in Gaul on the other hand, plus the admixture of Iberian or a Basque-like language and later Latinization, Celtiberian may have gone through a whole series of stages. One can even imagine it was a kind of evolving creole grown out of a pidgin used to communicate among the various very different peoples in Iberia, or an adapted/modified Lingua Franca. Ed. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Feb 28 17:03:26 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 17:03:26 +0000 Subject: "Related" debate unproductive? Message-ID: Lloyd Anderson writes: [snip passages with which I mostly agree] > By considering primarily extreme cases where we probably all > agree, we make no progress towards handing the difficult ones. Indeed. But may I suggest that anyone wanting to discuss difficult cases should identify some *particular* cases which he sees as "difficult"? Most of the discussion so far has either centered on completely hypothetical scenarios or picked on cases which are anything but problematic, such as Germanic and Indo-European. Afrikaans and Michif have now been named as possibly difficult cases. Would anybody like to name some others? Or discuss these two further? > I would note first that it is probably impossible in practice to > avoid a mixture of ordinary language with technical usage. > When Whiting says today in response to someone's > >>Genetically (in your terms), English is equally related to both > >>French and Italian. > as follows: > >They're not my terms; I didn't invent them -- they are standard > >in historical linguistics textbooks. But I agree with the > >premise -- except that I wouldn't say "equally related"; I would > >say "related at the same level." > I of course agree. And so do I. > Perhaps our common reluctance to use the phrase > "equally related" here is that it has a portion of its ordinary-language > meaning, Well, it shouldn't. In linguistics, 'related' is a technical term, and in linguistic work it has, or should have, only its technical sense. We linguists must put aside all knowledge of everyday senses of the term when we are working, or we will only get hopelessly confused. I can cite a good parallel here. I used to be a physics teacher once, and, in physics, 'work' is a technical term, with a sense quite different from its everyday sense. And I can report that it is surprisingly difficult for beginning students to forget about the everyday sense when studying physics: they keep wanting to see work done where no work is done in the physical sense. And, as a result, they become confused and get things wrong. Once upon a time, related languages were sometimes called 'cognate languages'. This usage is now dead, I think, and we restrict 'cognate' to individual words and morphemes. Maybe that's unfortunate, if 'related' as a technical term is going to cause so much confusion. > and we know clearly English *is* especially closely related > to French, as *all* linguists recognize. No. I disagree flatly. I believe I have *never* seen a linguist declare that English is more closely related to French than to Italian, and I would not expect to see any such thing, because it's not true. > (English loans from > Hindi or Chinese or Afrikaans or whatever, are also not really > to the point, I think, because such extreme cases were not mentioned > by those wishing to question an overly narrow sense of "relationship". > So bringing *them* up is at least not to the point of what I > believe many of us are concerned with, such would also be red herrings.) Er -- "extreme" cases? In what sense are they "extreme"? English has borrowed a few words from Chinese and from Afrikaans, and rather more from Hindi. What's extreme about that? Anyway, I reiterate that our established sense of 'relationship' is in no sense "overly narrow". It is simply the way the term is used in linguistics, and that's the end of the matter. Mathematicians recognize classes of numbers they call 'rational' numbers and 'real' numbers. But these numbers are no more "rational", and no more "real", than any other numbers, in the everyday senses of these words -- and any outsider who tried to claim otherwise would be looked at strangely by mathematicians. Why should linguistics be different? > It is perhaps my personal interest and bias, > but the problem that remains as a subtle and sophisticated one, > and which has clearly *not* been resolved by previous scholarship, > is the handling of trees vs. dialect areas, Maybe not "resolved", but these issues are far from unfamiliar in linguistics, and they have been disussed for generations. > and the implications of > the following paragraph, which I did not write, > and which was referred to by Whiting today: > >(b) The idea that there must be a single language progenitor of > >daughter languages is widely disputed. Some people accept the > >idea that a collection of interrelated languages might never have > >had a single ancestor, but as far back as you care to go were > >simply a collection of inter-related languages. The > >language/dialect issue comes up here. We talk of IE "dialects" > >within PIE, but this is simply terminology. The point is that > >there is no need whatever for there to have been a single unified > >PIE language. We have already discussed this. The suggestions are fanciful, and the final sentence is false. > The example Whiting mentions of the Altaic "family" > (or perhaps not a family, if long contact and mutual influences > and massive borrowings were involved) > is closer to a propos to the view expressed > by the author of the above paragraph, it seems to me. No; this is a very different issue. All parties to the Altaic debate agree that there are just two possibilities: either Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic are genuinely related within a single larger Altaic family, or they are not, and the obvious connections among them are merely the result of prolonged contact among unrelated families. The parties differ as to which view they believe is the true one, but nobody I know of is arguing for any third view. > The possibility that PIE was some close complex of languages > which exchanged even morphology, but which retained traces > of various distinct substrates or whatever one wishes to discuss, > is a real possibility. It might be a hypothetical possibility, a la Dixon, but any such idea is heavily falsified by the data. IE is a simply terrible choice of example to illustrate this hypothetical scenario -- one of the worst examples possible. If anybody wants to pursue this scenario, how about showing us a *plausible* candidate? > Not necessarily to a great degree, > not necessarily as much as Altaic, but to some degree, > it is quite possible and an entirely reasonable hypothesis > consistent with *traditional* views of historical linguistics. > Merely one that is mostly not discussed, rightly or wrongly. It *has* been discussed. This idea that the IE family results from extensive diffusion across the boundaries of unrelated languages, and that PIE never existed, was put forward by Uhlenbeck, by Trubetzkoy, and by Tovar (at least). But this idea has been categorically rejected by specialists, because *it is in flagrant conflict with the evidence*. How many times do we have to say this? The evidence for the reality of PIE is *overwhelming*, and it is *not* consistent with any kind of "language- mixing" scenario. > This possibility, which may exist for many proto-languages, > *does* have practical, as opposed to purely terminological, > implications. In order to persuade anybody of this, you must first put forward some plausible candidates, and show how the family-tree model fails badly to account for the evidence. Until this is done, it is a waste of time to invent hypothetical but unsubstantiated scenarios and merely mutter darkly that these might contain some reality. It is perfectly conceivable that some human languages were introduced by alien visitors from another planet. In fact, just such a proposal was once made for the origin of Basque (naturally). But no linguist is prepared to spend time in considering such a scenario. And why should we? Nobody has made a good case that any particular language must have such an origin, and so what is the point of discussing it? > To recognize that this is a possible situation > for a proto-language, > we must handle vocabulary and morphological > distributions across *portions* of the dialect network of any > proto-language in *at least* the frameworks of the following Sorry, but this is putting the cart before the horse. We cannot identify any possible cases of variation within a proto-language before we have first identified the proto-language itself. > 1) simple family tree, innovations on one branch, > replacement on one branch, etc. branch then dividing. Familiar. > 2) wave spread of items across a part of a dialect network, > which may have no relation to the family-tree structure Familiar. > 3) persistence as areal dialect-net isoglosses of what were > substrate inheritances in only part of the territory of > an eventual proto-language, the substrate inheritances > in another part of that territory being from a different > language or languages. When substrates are strong, > and morphology can spread, the difference between > the various kinds of "inheritance" can become quite blurred. There are not different kinds of inheritance. Modern English has inherited from Middle English a number of words of Norman French origin. But Middle English did not "inherit" these words at all: it *borrowed* them from Norman French. This is just the way the terms are used in linguistics. Anyway, I can see absolutely no point in invoking hypothetical "substrates". If we have no hard evidence for the reality, and the nature, of a particular substrate in a particular case, then there is no point in raising the issue. > 4) proto-languages need not (not even by the narrow > definition of "genetically related") be completely uniform, > they need not be indivisible points with no internal dimensions > Living languages do not fit such a simple model, > so what business do we have insisting that dead languages did? > That would make them theoretical constructs, useful primarily > for making it easier for us to think about them, > so artificially simplified. But nobody has ever disagreed with this. Once again, *nobody* maintains that ancient languages were devoid of variation. It is merely that our methods, on the basis of the evidence available, do not allow us to reconstruct the full range of that variation, or even (usually) very much of it at all. And no more powerful methods exist. > In limiting special cases, sure, when a single family or village > migrated, and became the nucleus of a new language family. > But those are limiting special cases, they do not define a narrow > total range of possibilities which historical and comparative > linguistics should restrict itself intellectually to being able > to deal with. By what right do you assume that the origin of a language family in a single rather homogeneous speech variety constitutes a "limiting special case"? How do you explain the great success of linguists in reconstructing one proto-language after another? PIE, Proto-Uralic, Proto-Algonquian, Proto-Iroquoian, Proto-Oto-Manguean, Proto-Arawak, Proto-Dravidian, Proto-Austronesian... Where are the dozens or hundreds of cases in which reconstruction of a proto-language has proved impossible? > 5) Any proto-language need not be pure, There is no such thing as a "pure" language, and such a notion has no place in linguistic work. > it may share substrate > inheritances from quite a number of substrates, > substrates which either are known as separate language > families, or which have become extinct as independent > languages, or in an intermediate situation, which may appear > as substrates also for some other language or language family. > It may be possible to reconstruct part of the vocabulary even > of a language or family which survives *only* as substrates > to two or more other languages or language families, > if we can determine that the substrates within each of those > latter are indeed substrates, rather than being later innovations in > some area which crosses language boundaries, > or later loans from part of the area of one language or family > to part of the area of another language or family. Substrates again. Sigh. OK. One day when I have a little spare time, I'll post the entry on substrates from my new dictionary. > So let us sharpen our existing tools, develop new tools, > avoid oversimplifications, *and* recognize the inherited > wisdom of comparative and historical-reconstructive linguistics. > There is absolutely no reason we should need to choose > between these as if they were mutually exclusive alternatives. Between what? Between comparative linguistics and historical-reconstructive linguistics? What's the difference? > And let us treat the contributions of others by always trying > to find the *most* reasonable view of them, or the part of them > which we believe we can make the most productive contributions to, > rather than spending most of our words trying to defeat them. Well, again, let's stop introducing hypothetical but unsubstantiated scenarios, and let's stop illustrating these with dreadful examples like IE. Let's see some *genuinely* problematic cases. > There is absolutely no reason to throw out *any* of the tools > of comparative-historical linguistics. There *is* reason to > sharpen those tools and to add more tools and to add > less simplistic formats for recording results of using those tools. Sounds good, but what exactly is being proposed? And what on earth are you describing as "simplistic"? Grumble, grumble, grumble. Guess I must be in a bad mood today. ;-) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 29 05:29:21 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 00:29:21 EST Subject: English as a creole Message-ID: >brent at bermls.oau.org writes: >Native Norman French speakers in England appear to have died >out by the early 14th century. It is unlikely that their influence >would have lain dormant for the next 3 or 4 hundred years. -- Correct. Bartlett, in THE NEW OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLAND 1075-1225 shows strong evidence that, apart from the Royal court itself, the aristocracy became predominantly English-speaking within about 100 years of the Norman conquest. They continued to learn French, but as a secondary "learned" language. "Knowledge of 'correct' French was thus, by the later part of the twelfth century (if not before) a prestigious ability that the children of the aristocracy had to work hard to acquire". (Bartlett, p. 490). Incidentally, this isn't without relevance for the question of the spread of Indo-European languages. The Norman conquest of England presents a case where the entire aristocracy, their retainers, and the higher parts of the eccesiastical hierarchy were French-speaking, where contacts with France were close (politically and socially), where French was available in written form, and where French had immense social prestige as the language of government and 'high culture', yet where English prevailed within four or five generations at the utmost. This fact, and the nature of French loanwords in Middle English, suggest a parallel with the influence of Indo-Aryan on the Mitannians in the second millenium BCE Near East. From edsel at glo.be Tue Feb 29 11:36:47 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 12:36:47 +0100 Subject: English as a creole Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brent J. Ermlick" Sent: Friday, February 25, 2000 12:28 PM > On Wed, Feb 23, 2000 at 01:07:53PM +0100, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: > . . . >> English can be considered a mild case of creolization without an >> intermediate pidgin (even though the former existence of a pidgin cannot be >> ruled out entirely, but it would not have been the origin of modern >> English): not only the vocabulary was altered very seriously (which doesn't >> mean it's a creole), but syntax was moderately altered as well, e.g. lack >> word order inversion after an adverbial phrase (a typical error of French >> speakers who learn Dutch or German) and in some other cases, and the >> simplifications of the verbal system, including the disappearance of the >> participial prefix ge- that existed in Old English. > But the "ge-" shows up until the end of the Middle English period, > and even appears in Spenser as "yclept". The inversion after an > initial adverb or phrase still appears in Elizabethan English and > the King James Bible. One old piece of advice for Americans used to > be to imitate the syntax of the Pilgrim Fathers when trying to speak > Dutch. > Native Norman French speakers in England appear to have died > out by the early 14th century. It is unlikely that their influence > would have lain dormant for the next 3 or 4 hundred years. [Ed] You're right of course, I should have mentioned Middle English. About the influence of native Norman French speakers: it is not because there weren't any left that their influence didn't continue. You could look at this as an inoculation or injection with a slow acting poison. Or foundations attacked by termites. Basically, it's a weakening of the awareness of its roots and idiosyncrasies, leading to vacilation when applying syntactic rules. The texts you are referring to are 'high' style, probably voluntarily archaicizing (Lawyers still do it : 'What say you?'). Do we know how the ordinary people were (already) speaking in the 16-17th century? There are lots of monolingual Brussels French speakers who continue to transmit Flemish-influenced deviations (including pronunciation) to their children and grandchildren, even though none of them can speak Flemish Dutch. Of course, the situation is not entirely the same (there are still 10-15% Flemings in Brussels, but they have little social contact with strictly monolingual French speakers - who tend to be very defensive/isolationist). In the 19th century, Victor Hugo noticed similar things in then entirely French (and/or Walloon) speaking Wallonia where nobody knew any Dutch; he thought it was German influence. In short, I am not convinced Norman French wasn't still influencing English 'posthumously'. But I try to keep an open mind on this. Ed. Selleslagh. From edsel at glo.be Mon Feb 28 17:32:22 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 18:32:22 +0100 Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard M. Alderson III" Sent: Friday, February 25, 2000 8:23 PM [snip] > In anticipation, >> Really, 500 years. Kind of Italian (1500AD) to Italian (2000AD) - except of >> course for the lack of gender in Hittite - and some other small matters like >> that. Nothing important. > How about English (1000CE), which had grammatical gender in nouns, and > English (1500CE), which did not? French (1200CE), which had a case system in > nouns, and French (1700CE), which did not? [Ed] Two remarks: 1) French? A 'case system' consisting of nominative and accusative can hardly be called that. (the plural -s was/had become a more or less independent feature). The V.Latin/Romance genitive had given rise to new words, considered to be nominatives. Very soon, the (morphological) accusative was used for all cases, like in virtually all Latin languages (with loss of the final nasal, which had already begun in Latin). 2) A comparison with the case of 20th century Dutch in Holland and Flanders is interesting : in the Netherlands (starting in Holland proper), the grammatical M/F distinction for inanimates and animals has virtually vanished in the last 60 (yes: sixty!) years or so (the neuter is maintained, but not generalized to all inanimates - except ships - like in English): they all became formally 'male'. In Flanders there is no sign of that, probably due to the fact that in local dialects the articles, demonstratives etc... are still flected differently for M/F (and neuter) (which makes a speaker much more aware of grammatical gender, cf. German), while this is no longer the case in the standard language after the end of Middle Dutch (except in artificially archaïcizing book language until WW II, a bit like Greek Katharévousa). Example: the indefinite article (M/F/N): Standard: een, een, een.(/@n/) Many Flemish dialects: ne, en, e. (e = /@/): ne man, en vrouw, e kind (a man, woman, child) [snip] >> On the other hand, if early IE were as undifferented as being claimed here, >> many of these problems in discipherment logically should not have occurred. > One would think so, but then, one would have only to look at things like > early Latin inscriptions, some of which have not been satisfactorily > deciphered to this day, to know that logic has nought to do with the > question. After all, we are supposed to *know* Latin... [Ed] How true this is! A few years ago I read two different Spanish translations (by actual linguists!) of a sentence from Strabo(:n) about the Iberians: according to one (A. García y Bellido) they had a 6000 year old tradition of poems, laws etc. in verses, according to the other (J. Caro Baroja) they had poems 6000 verses long (hexakischilio:n epo:n). Aren't we supposed to know Classic Greek? Ed. Selleslagh From maxdashu at LanMinds.Com Mon Feb 28 23:33:19 2000 From: maxdashu at LanMinds.Com (Max Dashu) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 15:33:19 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000224225116.009c34d0@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: >>The I-H hypothesis I believe has Hittite < PIE. >Not at all. In fact the very *form* of the word implies exclusion of >Anatolian from IE proper I'm puzzled by why the IE languages have come to be referred to as "Anatolian." What then do they call non-IE tongues like Hurrian? (Or are non-IE languages other than Hurrian known in Anatolia?) Max Dashu From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 29 01:20:07 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 17:20:07 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <31.1a4b89c.25e5fe44@aol.com> Message-ID: At 10:23 PM 2/23/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >-- Kind of like Anglo-Saxon (1000 AD) and Early Modern English (1500 AD), >actually. Massive freight of Romance loan-words, drastic grammatical >simplification, and -- right around 1500 -- an equally drastic set of >sound-shifts. This is better than my example. It is especially interesting that many of the borrowed Romance words are in the area of government and religious ritual, given what happened in Hittite. >The sum total of extant Thracian consists of a small series of short >inscriptions in Greek script, which are difficult to translate because of >problems in word division. (This is characteristic of _short_ inscriptions.) Even in longer inscriptions word division can be an issue, just not quite so critical. Our convention of spaces between words makes quite a difference. > There are some glosses found in Hesychius and Photius which give us about 30 >certain Thracian terms. The rest of our information comes from personal and >place-names. >In sum, we have less than a hundred Thracian words -- most of them names. >Those we do have, are transparently IE, and present no particular difficulty: > -para, 'settlement', -bria, 'town', for instance. Not to mention the river names, which are equally transparent. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 29 03:28:01 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 19:28:01 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <200002252237.OAA10978@netcom.com> Message-ID: At 02:37 PM 2/25/00 -0800, Richard M. Alderson III wrote: >No, it wasn't. It was being used as an easily accessible example of the large >number of similarities which "leap off the page" to anyone familiar with both >languages. ... >Absolutely nothing. Similar sets from each pair of IE languages can be set >up, as well as sets from larger groups; several have been posted in the last >couple of days. Indeed I have a stack of paper about a foot tall consisting almost entirely of such sets sitting in one corner of my room. It is my copy of Pokorny. If he wants to look at more examples he can go to the library and look at their copy. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 29 08:03:56 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 03:03:56 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: In a message dated 2/28/2000 11:09:16 AM, Rich Anderson wrote: >Full bibliographical citation, s'il vous plai^t. Only Thracian data I know of >is some small inscriptions (personal names and the like) and glosses in Greek >texts. >Full texts in Thracian would excite entire generations of Indo-Europeanists. >So please, where are these to be found? Fighting sarcasm with sarcasm, I'm sure some IEists would be more excited about at least two of the text if 'agnis/ignis' were found in them, but unfortunately it appears there's more cognate and common morphology written over the starter in my late model automobile ('ignitio/ignition') then there is in those Thracian text. But the lack of obvious - jump off the page - reflex doesn't mean that Thracian wasn't IE. But it might mean that it is very old IE. Of course, somehow the question of time of separation keeps on getting reduced to Indoeuropean-ness, which of course is not the question at all. Going back to what all this was supposed to prove, what is supposedly "leaping off the page" is NOT IEness. What is supposed (according to the original premise in this thread) to "leap off the page" is the time of separation. No one argues that Thracian is not Indoeuropean. The problem is not indoeuropean cognates or morphology. The problem is that what little we have can't be read. I'm sure that might be of interest to some IEists. You are quite correct, they are Thracian "inscriptions", but hardly 'personal names and such.' And they certainly appear to be complete if small "texts". I only have my old notes with me from an old post that's in the archive on Thracian (I think related to ancient Balkan languages.) But of course I had to answer this before it became too old: "The Ezero inscription was found in a Thracian burial mound with all the context and res gestae to identify it as Thracian. It made up of [either 61 or 81 - I can't read it] Greek charcters engraved on a golden ring. The reading of the letters poses no difficulties but division of the text into words is uncertain. Up to now there appeared more than 20 translations of this text [See D. Detschew, Die thrakischen Sprachreste, Wien, 1957, pp.567-582], none of them being commonly accepted. The Kjolmen inscription was carved on a stone tablet found in another Thracian grave. It is also written with Greek characters but in bustrophedon: a line written from right to the left and the next from left to the right. (a practice found in Greek in the 6th century BC) It contains 51 characters and no acceptible translation has been made. Note is made that the arrangement of the characters in these inscriptions often match identically thsoe found on the more numerous fragements at Samothrace and elsewhere, so that the fact that they actually represent Thracian has not been in dispute." "There are several more smaller inscriptions mentionrd by Duridanov in The Thracian Language and duNays in Origins of Romanian. ." The above was extracted from Duridanov (1985) and duNays, which I don't have date for right now - but which is excerpted on the web and the URL should be in the archives. I actually have a jpg of a close-up on the Ezero inscription and a separate gif of the text on this harddrive and would send these if that would be okay on the list. These shots are from a web page on a tour of US museums a few years ago it went on along with pottery fragments with writing on them. The text accompanying the pottery say that "the phrases" on them "make no sense in the ancient Greek language." If Thracian is ever deciphered, many IE reflexes will no doubt "leap off the page." But these my not genuinely yield any more absolute date than "ignitio/ignition" Regards, Steve Long by ARA From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Feb 27 08:08:52 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 08:08:52 -0000 Subject: reality of PIE Message-ID: Thanks for your patience, Larry, with what might seem a tedious debate. I'm happy to concede that I have overstated (or even grossly overstated) the point I was trying to make, and you seem happy with the idea that genetically related languages can derive from different varieties of the same language. (I hope that's a fair statement?) Is that a good place to draw stumps and quit the field? Peter From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Feb 29 11:27:12 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 11:27:12 +0000 Subject: reality of PIE Message-ID: Steve Long writes: > I cannot think of stronger, more compelling evidence in favor of the actual > existence of PIE than what Ante Aikio presented in his list of PIE borrowings > in Uralic. This external confirmation is indeed gratifying. But it's not essential. The IE-internal evidence is already sufficiently strong to justify the reconstruction of PIE. > The claim that PIE can be reconstructed accurately is always going to be > confirmed by internal evidence, after all that is what the reconstruction is > made of. There's really no way to disprove it internally, because by > definition it was created to be consistent with the evidence. Oh, no. Not so. You're overlooking something vastly important. We can't just choose some arbitrary languages and "reconstruct" a common ancestor for them. For example, we can't choose Norwegian, Basque and Zulu and "reconstruct" a Proto-NBZ. The data simply won't allow this. But the IE languages *do* permit the reconstruction of PIE. > But to see it confirmed in Uralic is very, very impressive. That's > predictability. It is certainly helpful in persuading non-specialists that our methodology really works. > It is very hard to be cynical about the actual existence of *PIE when you > have that kind of external evidence. I wonder if the full impact of that > work has been appreciated. Linguists certainly appreciate it. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 29 00:11:25 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 01:11:25 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000225185738.009bddf0@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: Stanley Friesen wrote: >At 07:55 AM 2/23/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >>Stanley Friesen wrote: >>>[Though I actually question tracing B-S back to Corded Ware]. >>G-B-S. >I am coming from the position of being unconvinced of the reality of >Germano-Balto-Slavic. In fact I cannot consistently place Balto-Slavic in >the IE tree. Depending on how I analyze it, it either comes out linked to >Germanic (as you suggest), or linked to the Greek and Indo-Iranian groups. Actually, I'm not suggesting a GBS genetic node. I think Germanic "broke away" quite early on (while "Balto-Slavic" was still more or less undifferentiated eastern PIE). Afterwards, Germanic and Balto-Slavic came into close areal contact (a "GBS Sprachbund", possibly in the Corded Ware period). In fact, the opposite of what Ringe seems to be suggesting (GBS, later areal Gmc-Ital/Celt contacts). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 29 03:36:51 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 19:36:51 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.20000226235841.006e7d4c@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu> Message-ID: At 12:02 AM 2/27/00 -0600, roslyn frank wrote: >I believe that there may be a slight problem with the notion of >"sacrificed" and/or "sanctified" when read through the framework of modern >thought. In traditional cultures even a 'tree' can be understood to be >giving up its life when cut down; or an herb when plucked from the soil. I >would argue that we need to be careful about rendering judgements on past >ritual practices based on the secular view that dominates western thought >vis-a-vis the natural world and the way that its 'resources' are regularly >utilized. >Ritualization of the death of an animal, asking its forgiveness when the >hunter is about to take its life, it not unusual in traditional cultures, >whether that animal be a bear or a rabbit. If *that* is the sort of rituals the IE horse rituals were, this would be meaningful. But they do not have the structure of ritualized prayers for forgiveness - at least not *from* the horse. (Some variants may have been supplications for forgiveness from Dye:us P'ter - but the horse's permission was not asked for). Indeed the common elements of horse rituals that show up in all the early IE cultures are more associated with martial pursuits, or at least competition, than with hunting. >Therefore, I would be interested in knowing what the source is, i.e., the >ethnographic data base, for the statement "... animals that are *primarily* >food animals are rarely sanctified." I was thinking more in terms of the sorts of treatments where the horse stands in for some other person or activity. Shamanistic sanctification is of a different sort. > In the case of the traditional >cultures with which I'm familiar, it is precisely those animals and plants >that are used by humans for food that receive the most elaborate and >special ritual treatment, not others that are left alone and not harvested. Certainly the ones *left *alone* are not given special religious significance. My point was that the horse in PIE culture was *even* *more* central to the culture than if it were a domesticated food animal. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 29 04:56:20 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 23:56:20 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>-- and currently around 800 million speaking Indo-European languages there, >>which if you add in Iran, eastern Anatolia and central Asia, comes to over 1 >>billion. >That wasn't my point. -- well, it was my point. The Indo-Iranian expansion into these areas was _later_ than the probable Indo-Europeanization of Europe, but comparable in scale... and demonstrably due to the infiltration of elements ultimately derived from the Eurasian steppe zone. If Iran/India, why not Europe? >I consider Welsh (including its Latin component) to be pretty >solid linguistical evidence. -- of a Celtic language _in Wales_. In the absence of written records, it would be virtually impossible to show that there had ever been such a language in most of England. Even the place-names of minor landscape features are mostly Germanic; those Celtic names that do survive are few and often the product of misunderstanding -- eg., a number of western English rivers are called "Avon", which means... 'river'. >>>In Northern Europe, there were no cities and no sizeable political >>>structures to take over. >>-- well, that makes things easier for incomers, not harder; >In general it doesn't. -- there are plenty of examples to the contrary; in Africa, particularly. (Eg., the spread of Somali, Maa and Luo in East Africa.) In the absence of large-scale state structures, there's no possibility of large scale _resistance_ to a folk-migration. >>-- not according to Cavalli-Sforza, who shows a wave of migration starting >>north of the sea of Azov and spreading throughout Europe. >Yes, *precisely* according to Cavalli-Sforza. -- he shows two migrations into Europe, one in the early neolithic from the south-east, and one in the late neolithic, from the east. How do you valorize the earlier one over the later? >How so? The linguistic evidence confirms that there is a sizeable >Pre-Germanic substrate element, which fits exactly with the genesis of the >TRB culture in the area around Denmark. -- a pre-Germanic substrate in _Germanic_, not in the rest of the IE languages. In fact, Baltic and Slavic -- closely adjacent -- show the _least_ evidence of pre-IE substrates. >Early infiltration in the Baltic area fits with the PIE borrowings into >Uralic -- nonsense. Much too far to the west. There's virtually universal agreement that the Uralic languages dispersed from the _Ural_ area (that's why they're called "Uralic", of course) and any contact with PIE which produced loans present in all the Uralic languages would have had to be in that area -- thousands of miles east of the Baltic. >But linguistic information gives no absolute dates. There's nothing about the "linguistic information" that "rules out" a date of 5500 BC. -- sure there is. It's too early, unless we make radical assumptions about slow differentiation; which is chopping and fitting the linguistics to fit the pots. >Not wiped out entirely by historical times was Etruscan-Lemnian in the >Aegean area. -- I would point out that there is, to put it midly, no consensus on the origins or genetic relations of Etruscan. Except that it's generally agreed Etruscan is non-IE. >But that glosses over the origin of the Corded Ware horizon. -- no; it just acknowledges that we don't _know_ the origin of the Corded Ware horizon. We do know that it spread rapidly (within a few centuries) over previously highly differentiated local archaeological cultures from the Rhine delta to east of the Volga. It was also, of course, in contact with the steppe cultures of the Ukraine (over a broad front) and shared some features with them. (Cord-marked pottery and stone battle axes, wheeled vehicles, the plow, etc.) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 29 04:59:09 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 23:59:09 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >frank at uiowa.edu writes: >Ritualization of the death of an animal, asking its forgiveness when the >hunter is about to take its life, it not unusual in traditional cultures, >whether that animal be a bear or a rabbit. -- in some. In others, they just kill the damned thing. Primarily ritual _use_ of an animal is usually fairly easy to distinguish from routine use, whether the later is accompanied by ritual or not. Eg., if you find the complete skeleton of a horse in a grave, with no disturbance of the bones or butchering marks, it's a sacrifice. From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 29 17:12:47 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 12:12:47 EST Subject: Hittite /wheel Message-ID: >Steve Long writes: >> (When I asked Sean Crist to identify the "telltale signs of borrowing" that >> he offered that would tell him if "the wheel word" was borrowed in at least >> some IE languages, he never replied.) In a message dated 2/29/2000 8:33:58 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk wrote: >OK. I'm no IEist, and I can't evaluate the IE evidence here. But I can >illustrate the general point Sean was making with a Basque example.(snipped) >But, in the early medieval period, Basque underwent a categorical >PHONOLOGICAL CHANGE, in all but the easternmost dialects, by which plosives >were uniformly voiced after /n/. >Now, the word in question is *everywhere* <(h)anka> in Basque, and no such >form as *<(h)anga> is recorded anywhere. Therefore, the very form of the word >is enough to *prove* that it was not in the language AT THE TIME OF THE >CHANGE, and must have entered the language later -- from whatever source. >(snipped) >But, even if we didn't know the source, the form of the word would tell us at >once that this is a late entry into the Basque lexicon, and therefore >probably a borrowing. (Caps are mine.) I think you may be making a rather different point. The issue was not whether "signs of borrowing" would show up AFTER pertinent sound changes - telltale signs or flat-out obvious signs. The question was how borrowing would be evidenced IF it occurred AFTER PIE dispersal but BEFORE the sound changes that show up in those words. I made the assertion that the sound changes in the wheel words did not necessarily occur right at the moment of PIE dispersal or even soon after. Crist asserted that he could find tell tale signs of borrowing even if the sound changes HAD NOT occurred yet. I ask for examples of such pre-change signs. No answer. Your example, on the other hand, depends on sound changes already having occurred. So though it is interesting, it doesn't appear pertinent. Regards, Steve Long by ARA From alderson at netcom.com Tue Feb 29 00:30:40 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 16:30:40 -0800 Subject: Indo-Hittite Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <84.1e38fb2.25e7f737@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Fri, 25 Feb 2000, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: > Actually, I've tried to figure out how the UPenn tree could possibly > 'confirm' the Indo-Hittite hypothesis and I think that the term may have been > misapplied in the papers that are available on this subject. > You may recall that the top of the UPenn tree was diagrammed on this list as: >> PIE >> / \ >> / Anatolian > This is not the I-H hypothesis, which would yield something like this: >> PIH >> / \ >> PIE P-Anatolian > The premise being that PIE and proto-Hittite/Anatolian are sister languages > with a common parent. Let's stop here for a moment, and revisit what the UPenn tree purports to do, vis-a-vis the standard models presented in linguistics texts. The standard model has for years been a 10-way branching from a central node labeled PIE, sometimes with minor branches provided for languages like Phrygian and Thracian. This model is always accompanied by text to the effect that we know that there must have been binary or trinary branches at some point, but that we don't really know where they go. (NB: That's 10 branches including Anatolian, and accepting Balto-Slavic. If we remove Anatolian--the "Indo- Hittite hypothesis"--there are 9.) The UPenn work is supposed to provide exactly the information we have lacked till now, that is, where to put in branches. Having generated their branching structure, they then picked a root position such that Anatolian branches away from the entire rest of the family, all of which can be viewed as going back to a single proto-language. This is *precisely* the position taken by Sturtevant and his followers: That we can reconstruct a "narrow PIE" (to use one correspondent's characterization) that is opposed to Anatolian under a higher branching structure. Under that reading of the UPenn tree, ignoring the actual label placed on the root of the tree, the Indo-Hittite hypothesis is *indeed* "confirmed"--or at least made plausible if one accepts their placement of the root. > My understanding is now that the difference between these approaches is not > trivial. The reconstruction of the hypothesized PIH gives substantially more > weight to the Anatolian languages than does a reconstruction of PIE that > makes Hittite et al a mere branch of Indo-European. Actually, in its original form, the IH hypothesis *trivializes* the data of the Anatolian languages with regard to "Indo-European proper" (the more common term in IH writings): We know everything we need to know to reconstruct the proto- language from which all 9 branches derive, and need not look at those pesky Anatolian languages at all! Oh, sure, they're interesting, with those funny obstruents that match up with Saussure's _coe'fficients sonantiques_, but they have nothing to say to us about the wonderful PIE we've worked on for so long. > And although the I-H hypothesis has been associated with, e.g., the new > version of the IE obstruent system offered by Hopper, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, > I'm told that the actual scope of its possible ramifications for PIE > reconstruction has not yet been explored. I've just laid out its ramifications: It *has* *NONE*! It *doesn't* *MATTER*! But it has nothing at all to do with, at least, Hopper's proposal regarding the PIE stop system. When Paul Hopper made his proposal about 30 years ago, two things were true of Indo-European studies: Almost no one accepted the Indo- Hittite hypothesis, and a large number of IEists rejected the laryngeals at the stage of IE immediately prior to breakup. Hopper's proposal had to do rather with the question of the phonological naturalness of the reconstructed stop system, and nothing to do with "the Indo-Hittite hypothesis" or "the laryngeal theory". > I do not believe - again, from the papers we have - that the algorithm used > on IE at UPenn ever produced an 'unrooted tree'. Contrary to what has been > said on this list in the past, the external adjustments appeared to have been > made directly to the algorithm from the outset. What we see in the papers is > a model of a 'unrooted tree', but I could not find one that represents the IE > languages. Since the papers available on their website state that it was an unrooted tree to which they added rooting information, you appear to be accusing the group of deliberate falsehoods. I'd be very careful of that, were I you. Rich Alderson From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 29 03:56:00 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 19:56:00 -0800 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <000801bf7fb8$0a101780$3454113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: At 05:44 PM 2/25/00 +0000, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >But, let us approach this from another avenue. >1) What I believe we find in the earliest IE is one vowel, /*e/, which has a >conditioned variant , /*o/. Many have tried to make this so. But all attempts I have seen come up short. At the level of the final unity, there are many minimal pairs that differ in /*e/ vs. /*o/. It is simply not possible for them to have been conditioned variants anymore well prior to the breakup. It is possible that some pre-PIE language had such conditioned variation, but any such conditioning factor had disappeared by the time we reach the reconstructible time layers. [One viable possibility is an old accent system as the conditioning factor, with conditioning destroyed by a shift in the accent pattern to the one reconstructed for PIE]. Note, when there is only one non-high vowel in a language, it is *always* best viewed as /a/, not /e/. (It may have /e/ as an *allophone* in some environments, but its neutral allophone will always be low). >2) I believe with Benveniste that /*u/ and /*i/ are to be accounted as >avocalic instances of /*w/ and /*y/. I can only accept this where there is good evidence of alternation with /*ue/ or /*eu/. There are just too many cases where there *is* no such variation visible. [The obvious examples are mostly inflectional ending and pronouns, but there are certainly others as well]. One *additional* reason for this is that languages without high vowels are exceeding rare in the world. They are topologically marked - highly so. Typologically reasonable vowel systems include: /a/, /i/, /u/; /e/, /o/, /i/, /u/; and so on. (There are a fair number of languages in which the high-back vowel is non-rounded, but there are reasons to reject that for PIE). >3) I also believe that all /*a/ and any long vowels are due to the presence >of "laryngeals", and that /*a(:)/ cannot exist in a syllable that did not >contain a "laryngeal" at some earlier stage. I strongly suspect that this *is* the case. [In a number of cases, I treat some words as later borrowings: words found only in Europe I do not treat as going back to PIE]. I am still struggling with the number and phonetic nature of the laryngeals. In my own notes I generally, and tentatively, use H for H1, X for H2, and X^w for H3. [I am fairly confident that the o-coloring laryngeal had to be labialized, since that fits so well with the PIE obstruents, and explains its phonetic effects so well]. If I were to accept the evidence for voicing in (some instances of) H3, I would probably want to add two more laryngeals, to make a more consistent set (that is I would tend towards both voiced and unvoiced variants of both H2 and H3). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 29 03:59:03 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 19:59:03 -0800 Subject: "Upper limit" of PIE In-Reply-To: <3e.13de478.25e624da@aol.com> Message-ID: At 01:08 AM 2/24/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Probably rather later. My own take would be "sometime after 4000 BCE" for >the split with Anatolian; "Sometime after 3500" for the beginning of the >breakup of the rest of PIE. I would agree entirely. I was just stating a terminus non ante quem. Any earlier date is just too unlikely to be considered seriously, and that date was (intentionally) on the extreme side. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From Georg at home.ivm.de Tue Feb 29 03:13:00 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 04:13:00 +0100 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: <200002270829.p2342@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: >>I don't have an Armenian dictionary on hand -- does anyone? >.. < what do you understand by 'Armenian' ? >Eastern? Or Western? or hopefully, Graban? /e:sh/ "donkey" is the same in EArm, WArm and in ClassArm ("graba*r*"). Maybe, before trying to show off one's erudition, one should make sure to have some. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 29 05:43:03 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 00:43:03 EST Subject: Domesticating the Horse Message-ID: >proto-language at email.msn.com writes: >>By the way, Pokorny lists *u.lkwi: for 'female wolf'. Where do you get >>*ulkwiha? -- Carl Darling Buck's _A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages_. Old High German "mariha" is a reflex. >Well, perhaps. But 'mustang' comes very close, does it not, to being a 'wild >horse'? -- "feral horse", actually, rather than "wild". And it's a recent North American dialect term, borrowed from the Spanish "mestengo", meaning "a stray or ownerless beast". From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 29 05:48:59 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 00:48:59 EST Subject: Domesticating the Horse Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >>Your saying *-iha denoted a wild animal, but it only shows up in the female >>ending. (eg., *ulkwiha, 'she-wolf). -- to be more precise, that it is the femine ending when denoting a wild animal. Thus, *ulkwos, (male) wolf, *ulkwiha (female) wolf. If the term "wolf" had denoted a domestic animal, we might expect **ulkweha. >In Germanic, could have ended in -eha? -- no. Eg., OHG 'meriha'. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 29 05:54:55 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 00:54:55 EST Subject: Domesticating the Horse Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >This should apply to other domestics and wild species, but I'm pretty sure >it doesn't. -- *H(1)el(1)niha, "female elk", which is a feminine noun regularly derived from *h(1)elh(1)en, "elk". etc. >and that use is obviously derivative. -- well, of course it is. It's the way you made the ending for a feminine noun when the subject was a wild animal. See above for 'elk'. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 29 05:58:55 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 00:58:55 EST Subject: Domesticating the Horse Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >A number of Greek historians tell us the Celtic word for horse was , >never mentioning or or any other name. -- wrong, and completely wrong at that. Eg., the following Celtic words for "horse", deriving from *ekwos: Old Irish: ech Gaulish: epo (plus "equos", as the name of a month) Welsh ebol (colt) You really should be more careful... 8-). From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 29 08:10:38 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 09:10:38 +0100 Subject: Domesticating the Horse In-Reply-To: <003401bf7fbf$cb7fe1a0$72d31b3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >From: >> In animal names a derived feminine in *-eha seems to denote a domestic >> animal (eg., PIE *h(1)ekueha, 'mare') and in *-iha denotes a wild animal. >> (eg., *ulkwiha, 'she-wolf). Therefore the original meaning of *markhos was >> probably specifically a wild horse. > >Another point of view. It seems to me that IE *-y and *-H(2)e are both >established as feminine formants; and I would need several more examples to >be convinced that females are differentiated by wildness through these >suffixes. >By the way, Pokorny lists *u.lkwi: for 'female wolf'. Where do you get >*ulkwiha? For read

(or ). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From rdrews at richmond.edu Tue Feb 29 14:10:44 2000 From: rdrews at richmond.edu (Robert Drews) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 09:10:44 -0500 Subject: non-Anatolian PIE In-Reply-To: <1a.df651e.25e9d776@aol.com> Message-ID: At 08:27 PM 02/26/2000 EST, you wrote: >>X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >>The one glitch is that it is not the proto-Hittites/Anatolians who left, but >>the 'Indo-European' community - the first splitting or branching occuring in >>either case. >-- that simply does not work and makes no sense. Eg., Hittite is intrusive >in Anatolia, the internal relationships of the other IE languages show none >of the links one would expect (eg., Greek is not particularly closely related >to Anatolian), etc. Although it has been assumed since Hrozny's time, there is no evidence that Hittite was intrusive in Anatolia. Intrusive in the Halys arc, yes, but "Hittite" seems to have come to Hatti from the south, where Luwian and other Anatolian languages seem to have been spoken as far back as there were permanent settlements. Three years ago in a JIES article, "PIE Speakers and PA Speakers," I tried to make this point, and also the point that PIE must have arisen as a result of a population movement FROM western Anatolia, and from this population's subsequent separation from its western Anatolian roots. When I wrote the article, Ryan and Pitman had not yet published their Black Sea Flood discovery. Now that flood will have to be taken into account by anyone speculating how the community that gave us PIE could have been severed from the community that gave us PA. Robert Drews (for spring of 2000) Department of Classical Studies University of Richmond Richmond, VA 23173 Telephone: (804) 289:8421 e-mail address: rdrews at richmond.edu From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 29 17:10:31 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 12:10:31 EST Subject: Bandkeramik and non-Anatolian PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 2/29/2000 6:20:54 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- that simply does not work and makes no sense. Eg., Hittite is intrusive >in Anatolia, the internal relationships of the other IE languages show none >of the links one would expect (eg., Greek is not particularly closely related >to Anatolian), etc. First you say that Greek is intrusive than you say Hittite must be intrusive because it is not related to Greek. Well, then my explantion is either Hittite's intrusive or Greek's intrusive and that's why they don't have to be closely related. Using a language that came from somewhere else to prove that another language came from somewhere else - because the two languages are not closely related. That makes NO sense. So the answer is - Hittite should not be closely related to Greek, if Greek is intrusive. So Greek proves nothing about Hittite's lack of intrusiveness. If you even looked at my post for a moment to see what I actually was saying, you'd see that I'm NOT sure that Renfrew (not the Bible) might not need to be revised about Greek - not as sure as you might be about ALL such things anyway. JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Hittite is intrusive >in Anatolia, the internal relationships of the other IE languages show none >of the links one would expect... I know this is a waste of time, but what SPECIFIC internal relationships are you talking about? What SPECIFIC links would you expect? And what do you mean by other IE languages? I know you won't answer any of these, but I'll ask anyway. What do you think Hittite is closely related to? Where was it supposed to be intruding from? In your last post, you have the entire Ukraine and maybe even the Balkans occupied by a Greek-Sanskrit-Armenian dialectical continum. You have Anatolia completely encircled. So where do you think Hittite came from? What PRECISELY is Hittite supposed to be closely related to in this scheme? Are you hinting at something extraterrestial? I wrote: >>My read on this is that "PIE minus Anatolian" forms on the Danube and becomes >>Bandkeramik. >-- leaving what, exactly, in the Balkans and the Mediterranean areas which >were neolithicized via an east-to-west movement? Well, if you didn't snip out the answer in my original post, you'd have already have half an answer. <> Cardial Ware cultures in the Italian and Iberian peninsulas pose a different problem. These are somewhat distinct from Bandkeramik and not clearly related in assemblages to the earlier Balkan-Anatolian culture. And Cardial really is a group of related assemblages without the coherence of Bandkeramik. Miguel Carrasquer Vidal I believe thinks Cardial Ware represents non-Indoeuropean speaking cultures. Renfrew in 1987 has it coming out of the Balkans, but a number of its features can now be associated very early with the Levant and Cyprus and as someone else mentioned elsewhere on the list there may be some North African evidence - particularly I think with regard to the genes found in some domesticates. Where Cardial culture was present, we find the only indisputable evidence of non-indoeuropean languages in western Europe (aside from perhaps the Picts.) The ranges of Basque, Iberian, Etruscan, non-IE Ligurian and other vestiges of non-IE languages in Italy all match almost identically the former territory of Cardial Ware - with IE languages generally appearing intrusive. It's obvious that along most of the Mediterranean coast, neolithization would not have been the province of IE speakers. Clearly there were other neolithic settlements or conversions going on throughout the Near East and around the Mediterranean and those cultures emerge as not being IE speaking. Cardial Ware may have represented somesuch cultures. I wrote: >(and possibly proto-Phrygian-Thracian, though don't hold me to that.) JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- good thing you added the qualifier, since Phrygian shows close links to >Greek and none in particular to Anatolian. Once again, I'll have to ask you what SPECIFIC links you are talking about. >From all I know, Phrygian doesn't show much of anything and its evidence is about a 1000 years later than Luwian and Hittite. I wrote: >>the language of the first large, widespread technically advanced population >>in Europe - adept at trade, agriculture, building and metallurgy - >>whom must have by the way had an extremely adequate language of their own, >>but who nevertheless left no substrate. JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: >-- you have evidence for there being no LBK substrate in, eg., proto-Germanic? Couldn't be better evidence against it. The linguistics match almost perfectly with the material when it comes to attributing that substrate to something else besides Bandkeramik. It is easy to attribute the proposed Germanic substrate to the successful and somewhat isolated mesolithic culture found in Jutland and thereabouts. The demarcation line is almost a perfect match for the resulting hybrid TRB and the earliest locations of Germanic speakers. The ONLY place where funnel beaker (TRB) shows up is in historic Germanic (and some western Slavic) territories. The supposed substrate in Germanic does not appear in Celtic. TRB does not appear in historic Celtic territories. You couldn't have a better correlation between material cultural and a substrate. And because Bandkeramik extended from Holland to the Ukraine, you couldn't have a worse fit for the unique substrate alleged in Germanic. I wrote the Bandkeramik-narrow PIE theory has the... >>the advantage of plausibility - for what that is worth in this crazy world. JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- if one disregards all linguistic considerations, which is odd, when one is >trying to solve a _linguistic_ problem. Now I'm disregarding ALL linguistic considerations, am I? The ability to understand this special meaning of "linguistic considerations" must be very exclusive. It may even be only understood by only one person. Most of us will ever be able to fully grasp it, no matter how deeply we drink of its mysteries. Am I right? Regards, Steve Long by ARA From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 29 05:34:34 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 00:34:34 EST Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: >petegray at btinternet.com writes: >English of a slightly earlier time (still intelligible today) shows good >similarities in person endings, eg: Thou hast, thou makest; she hath, she >maketh >du hast, du machst, sie hat, sie macht -- But the English of today -- and of the past few centuries -- uses much simpler forms: You have, you make, she has, she makes. There's been a radical loss of inflection (not to mention the loss of grammatical gender, the declension of the noun, the role of word order in forming sentences, etc.) By way of contrast, early Greek and Sanskrit share many retained PIE features -- the present, aorist and perfect, for instance. From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Tue Feb 29 12:19:17 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 14:19:17 +0200 Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Re:=20Tocharian=20A=20w=E4s,=20B=20yasa?= In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Feb 2000 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >> anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi writes: >> 1) What was the Proto-Tocharian form? (If it was something like *wVsV with >> front vowels, it fits quite well with Proto-Samoyed *wesä. A loan Samoyed >> > Tocharian is also geographically the most sensible alternative, if >> Tocharian was connected with the Afansevo culture.) > -- Tocharian A/B 'was' and 'yasa' from proto-Tocharian *wesa. >> 2) Is there any other plausible etymology for the Tocharian word? > -- Proto-Tocharian *wesa from *haues (with metathesis) from PIE *haeus > PIE *haeusom, 'gold' also producing Old Latin 'auron', Old Prussian 'ausis', > Lithuanian 'auksas'. Thank you for the information. So, Samoyed *wesä ~ Tocharian *wesa seems like chance correspondence. But, assuming that the Toch. form requires an irregular (?) metathesis, the loan etymology perhaps remains as a(n unlikely) possibility? - Ante Aikio From colkitto at sprint.ca Tue Feb 29 12:31:08 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 07:31:08 -0500 Subject: R and r Message-ID: I forget the exact reference, but there may well have been one in Common Germanic. See Runge, The Pronunciation of Prmitive Germanic R Robert Orr >-- Begin original message -- >> From: "Artem V. Andreev" >> Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 00:19:25 +0300 (MSK) >> The question is: is there any language in the world which has a *phonemic* >> opposition between dental vibrant /r/ and uvular *vibrant* /R/? >-- End original message -- [ moderator snip ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Feb 29 02:39:46 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 20:39:46 -0600 Subject: R and r In-Reply-To: <004601bf8093$289a1e40$6702703e@edsel> Message-ID: In (some varieties of) Brazilian Portuguese and (among some speakers of) Caribbean Spanish you see (non-initial) as tap /r/ and initial and as a uvular trill For me the question is what is exeactly meant by "vibrant". I'm not a linguist and I interpreted it as meaning "trill" Arabic may qualify in that ghayn is similar to a uvular trill, and it also has that I've heard as both trilled and tapped by speakers of different dialects An Armenian housemate in college told me that they have "uvular r" and "trilled r" yet his /r/ sounded a lot like American /r/, even though he was from Lebanon [ moderator snip ] >[Ed Selleslagh] >(Brazilian) Portuguese? What do the native speakers say? >Maybe also Classical Greek (rho / rho with spiritus asper or daseíon)? >Ed. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From mclasutt at brigham.net Tue Feb 29 15:33:36 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 08:33:36 -0700 Subject: R and r In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >> The question is: is there any language in the world which has >> a *phonemic* >> opposition between dental vibrant /r/ and uvular *vibrant* /R/? Assuming you mean the uvular fricative (IPA turned R) as in French and the dental/alveolar trill (IPA lower case r). "Vibrant" isn't an English phonetic term. I've got records of this phonemic contrast occurring in (I use Ruhlen's labels for consistency) Yukaghir, Bats, Ingush, Avar, Yaghnobi, Yami, Kabardian, Riff, Budux, Tamasheq, Shughni, Tsaxur, Khakas, Lezgi, Aramaic, Ubyx, Xvarshi, Western Arabic, Xinalug, South Arabian, Tabasaran, Okanagan, Talysh, Burushaski, Karakalpak, Chaplino, Karachay, Ukrainian, Abipon, Yazgulami, Rimi, Mapos, Maninka, Hinux, Tatar, Chechen, Altai, Pashto, Wakhi, Dido, Ishkashmi, Tajiki, Chulym, Adygh, Hunzib, Gilyak, Georgian, and Bezhta (48 out of 1017 in sample). Obviously, the original materials varied in phonemic sophistication, but that's a fairly sizable group of languages from widely scattered parts of the world, although there seems to be a high concentration of them in the Caucasus/Central Asia region. 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 petegray at btinternet.com Tue Feb 29 20:20:54 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 20:20:54 -0000 Subject: R and r Message-ID: Ed suggested a contrast in Classical Greek (rho / rho with spiritus asper or dasemon)? I cannot think of any words where there would such a contrast. In the absence of such words, the presence or absence of the spiritus asper is purely mechanical, and therefore not phonemic, so there cannot be a phonemic contrast. Some modern publications no longer even print the spiritus asper, since it is so predictable. Peter From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 29 03:04:44 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 19:04:44 -0800 Subject: Basque In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 09:46 AM 2/24/00 +0000, Larry Trask wrote: >is no way the borrowing language can inflect the borrowed verb-stem. Arabic >loans into Turkish are a good case in point: there is no earthly way that an >internally inflected Arabic verbal root can be handled within the purely >suffixing Turkish verbal morphology, which requires verb-stems to contain >vowels. Umm, what will get borrowed into Turkish is one of the "expanded" variants *with* its vowels, which will then be treated as a Turkish verb stem, and inflected according to the Turkish rules. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Tue Feb 29 19:27:44 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 13:27:44 -0600 Subject: Basque <(h)anka> (was Re: Hittite /wheel) Message-ID: At 04:35 PM 2/27/00 +0000, Larry Trask wrote: [snip] >All but the westernmost dialects of Basque have a word <(h)anka> 'haunch', >and also 'buttocks', 'leg', 'paw', 'foot' in places. This word is regarded by >all Vasconists as a loan from Romance. >A certain long-ranger has recently been interested in finding evidence of a >genetic link between Basque and the two North Caucasian families. He has >noted that Basque <(h)anka> looks quite a bit like something in Caucasian, and >he therefore denies the loan status of <(h)anka>, insisting that the word >must be native and ancient in Basque, and therefore cognate with the Caucasian >item. How can we reply to him? >Well, the problem is that cluster /nk/. This was indeed perfectly normal in >Pre-Basque. But, in the early medieval period, Basque underwent a categorical >phonological change, in all but the easternmost dialects, by which plosives >were uniformly voiced after /n/. >For example, the Latin word 'anvil', which was borrowed early >into Basque, appears today as in all but the easternmost dialects. >Likewise, the native adverb-forming suffix <-ki> appears today as <-gi> after >/n/. For example, 'beautiful' forms 'beautifully', but >'good' forms 'well' in all but the easternmost dialects, which alone >preserve . >Now, the word in question is *everywhere* <(h)anka> in Basque, and no such >form as *<(h)anga> is recorded anywhere. Therefore, the very form of the word >is enough to *prove* that it was not in the language at the time of the >change, and must have entered the language later -- from whatever source. >As it happens, we know the source: it is the very widespread Romance >'haunch', with regular regional developments like French , all >ultimately from a Frankish *. >But, even if we didn't know the source, the form of the word would tell us at >once that this is a late entry into the Basque lexicon, and therefore probably >a borrowing. There does seem to be a good case that could be made for <(h)anka> being related to the French/Romance forms mentioned above and consequently a recent borrowing. But what is one to make of the Basque word ( in composition) that means 'leg, foot, calf' and its phonological variant in ( in composition) with the same meanings? Are we to assume that 1) it that isn't related in anyway to <(h)anka>; 2) that Euskera borrowed a French form and then added a sibilant to it; 3) that Euskera has two totally unrelated words, one borrowed and the other native; or 4) that Euskera has two words, one clearly a recent borrowing and yet another that derives from a deeper layer, i.e., a western European substrate that gave rise to the Romance items as well. If one were to choose the fourth alternative, it would provide a slightly different source for the Old French and one wouldn't have to rely only on an unattested Germanic/Frankish form, but rather there would also be an amply attested word field available for comparative purposes in Euskera. Finally, there is another aspect of that I've always found curious. Although metaphoric conventions can pass from one language to another, much as lexical loans do, at times the metaphors call attention to themselves. For example, in Euskera the Labourdin expression is defined as 'pantorrila/mollet/calf of the leg'. However, since in Euskera actually means 'fish roe' there is an explicit connection made between 'fish roe' and 'calf of the leg'. This same metaphor occurs in Russian and Dutch among the Indo-European languages, while in the Finno-Ugric languages the examples are very abundant. According to Otto J. Von Sadovszky (_Fish, Symbol and Myth: A Historical Semantic Reconstruction_ Budapest/Los Angeles 1995: 3), "there is no equation between the two items ['fish roe' and 'calf of the leg'] in any of the Romance or Celtic languages, and geographically the closest [to Euskera], where it occurs, are [the] Dutch, Slavic and Finno-Ugrian languages". In terms of the analogy, obviously we are speaking of the way that the shape of the muscle in the calf moves under the skin, the way it suggests the form of an egg-laden ovary of a fish. Or at least that would be my interpretation of this analogy. Again it suggests familiarity with, if not direct knowledge, of the gestation cycle of fish, as well as the fact that the eggs in question might have been a source of food for the name-givers. Stated differently, we might argue that the metaphor in question would be typical of a people familiar with harvesting fish such as sturgeon and salmon, for example, as opposed, say, to populations occupying a steppe or desert zone. Here I am only pointing out the sort of information that one might derive from finding such a metaphor in the lexicon of a given language. As I said, metaphoric conventions can arise independently or pass from language to language. In the case of the expression , while the use of this metaphor doesn't necessarily attest to the antiquity of the word , it does suggest that we are dealing with a type of association that is attested in other languages, most abundantly in Finno-Ugric languages. Roz Frank From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Feb 29 14:15:50 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 09:15:50 EST Subject: possessive [form of a] pronoun Message-ID: It has taken some time to get to the bottom of the differences in the use of terminology here, but I think we have arrived: To summarize into its most succinct form: The relation: he :: his is from syntactic and semantic points of view essentially the same as the relation the man we met yesterday :: the man we met yesterday's and this parallel extends to many different uses of the apostrophe-s form, whatever one wishes to call it, whether the syntactic relation marks possession, part-whole relation, or agency or object-status relative to a verbal noun. * Therefore the form "his" can quite properly be referred to as the possessive or genitive form of "he", just as much as the form "the man we met yesterday's " can quite properly be referred to as the possessive or genitive form of "the man we met yesterday". *EVEN* using "pronoun" in a purely distributional meaning, the reading "possessive [form of a] pronoun" for "possessive pronoun" is fully legitimate. Possessive pronouns, so meant, were originally case-forms of (nominative) pronouns, and are still to a considerable extent so analyzable -- (or substitute whatever term one wishes instead of "case" -- if the English " 's " is not considered a case form, but is considered for example something of a clitic, since it can follow entire NPs including a relative clause, as illustrated above, it need not follow only simple noun stems). * At the *same* time (and neither of these excludes the other), on the basis of a distributional analysis, just as Trask says, the possessive forms of NP's do not substitute for nouns, they substitute for NP's (whether pronoun, or whether complex NP including relative clause). * Therefore, there are legitimate syntactic and semantic reasons to use the terminology "possessive pronoun" in this way, where "possessive pronoun" can quite plausibly be taken as meaning "possessive form of a pronoun", and that can be meant primarily based on syntatic and semantic grounds rather than on morphological or slot-filler analysis. This is true whether or not it is someone else's standard terminology. We all know what Pat Ryan has been referring to, and we all are capable of understanding his terminology and giving it the best interpretation we can, to proceed to discuss content. End of argument, as far as I am concerned. In the future, I will simply refer back to this message. Lloyd Anderson From garatea at gaia.es Thu Feb 24 18:15:41 2000 From: garatea at gaia.es (Jokin Garatea) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 19:15:41 +0100 Subject: call for papers Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: This was sent to the administrative address for the mailing list. Since there have been some discussions of related topics here, I have decided to pass it on, so that those interested may act on it as they wish. I have *not* included the usual "Reply-To: indo-european at xkl.com" header, because I don't see any benefit to the list in continued discussion here. --rma ] Dear madam/sir, I would like to inform you on the above mentioned congress that could be of your company interest. In case of being so, please do not hesitate to contact us. call for papers Multilinguae congress. A way to promote the use of ITs, Multimedia and language industries in lesser used languages. San Sebastian, Spain 8-9 November 2000. Please forward this notice to any people/lists interested in this proposed event to be held in San Sebastian, Spain. Papers and/or workshops (of up to 30-45 minutes duration) from academics, software and multimedia developers and distributors, experts in the digital distribution channel and information organisations (including libraries, government, and the private sector) are sought for presentation at the congress. All papers & presentations should be designed for non-specialist audiences, and connect theory and practice. Abstracts of up to 500 words should be sent to me directly (garatea at gaia.es) for consideration by the committee, before end of march (31st of March). BACKGROUND Within the European Union, there are more than 40 autochthonous languages in everyday use. Of these, only 11 are official languages of the Union: Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. In addition, Irish is a "treaty language". Of Europe's 370 million citizens, nearly 50 million speak a language other than the official language of the State in which they live. These other languages are an integral part of our cultural heritage. They include some of the oldest languages in the Western world, and most of them have rich cultural, literary and folk traditions. Technology is simply one of the tools with which we involve as community members in learning and using minority languages in our daily lives. It is also a link with the culture that surrounds most of us today and which is so attractive to the younger generations. What we would like to present, briefly in this Congress is that new technologies have, among others, the potential to: * Document and promote culture and minority speech * Help to revitalise language * Promote the status of the language as a viable medium of communication expand and strengthen minority language communities by creating an audience and purpose for writing in minority languages * Make Minority language resources available beyond educational institutions. * Expedite production and distribution of relevant, quality Minority language materials and resources. * Provide opportunities to create multimedia projects * Excite learners to become motivated, engaged in the learning process and producers in the target language. * Aspects of multi-modal capability include integrated text, sound, and graphics which are suitable for a range of learner types * Increase student-student communication and collaboration * Enhance and expand instructional strategies * Build upon/enhance existing and effective pedagogy * Promote literacy skills * Promote computer literacy. Computers add to the study of minority language, and computer skills that are learned transfer to other courses and aspects of students' lives. For all the above mentioned we must have a clear idea of the following statements: * The market is there. 50 million of potential European users/buyers, as minority speakers. * The industry is there but a bit dispersed and not very well known. OBJECTIVES The organisation of the Multilinguae International Congress, which is organised by GAIA, the Telecommunications Cluster of the Basque Country and will be co-financed by the European Commission (DG XXII), intends, on the one side, to facilitate contacts between small and medium European companies, technologists, content providers, and researchers belonging to the Multimedia and Software sector working for Minority or endangered languages (if we are talking about IT, apart from English almost all languages of the world), and, on the other side, to provoke the utilisation of this Multimedia tools by the education, administration bodies and end users coming from minority communities. The general objective of the MULTILINGUAE congress is to develop channels, links and activities between institutions representing similar collectives in different cultural and geographical areas where minority languages are spoken for interchange of experiences, best practices and for the realisation of joint actions with a view to promoting Multimedia Development and the Linguistic Diversity of the EU. All this, providing: competitive expansion of the companies of the sector, the development of new business activities, promotion of employment and innovation in the creation of support infrastructures for the European Linguistic Diversity and for technological and socio-economic development, by giving incentives to investment in research, training and inter-regional and inter-company co-operation. Why to organise the multilinguae international congress. It will take more than conferences to keep most European Minority Languages from becoming extinct. If all it took was conferences, then the minority languages would not be in the sad condition that most of them are in now because many of them have been exposed to conferences before. If not conferences, what then? Lots of different approaches have been tried. These are not startling innovations; what we need is a critical mass of committed people, and this critical mass can only be created through continuous capillary infiltration of information and encouragement. This conference is intended to be a part of such an effort. It will be disseminated not only to those who attended of the sessions, but to a much wider audience consisting of Minority and non-Minority individuals and institutions because of its needed market oriented approach. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------- Jokin Garatea GAIA International Department C\ Camino Portuetxe, 14 Email: garatea at gaia.es Edificio Ibaeta 1 20018, San Sebastian Spain Tel. +34 943 31 66 66 Fax. +34 943 31 10 66 ---------------------------------------------------------------- From fabcav at adr.dk Tue Feb 29 21:52:48 2000 From: fabcav at adr.dk (Fabrice Cavoto) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 22:52:48 +0100 Subject: PU *nimi / PIE *HneH3men- (was: Re: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >> But if you reconstruct *H3 phonetically as *[Yw], this should give PU *x >> (which was phonetically most probably *[Y]). > The reconstruction of *H3 as Yw is Indo-European, not Indo-Uralic. I > suggest: > PIU *(n)newme- or *(n)neYme- > Pre-PIE (with analogical -men) *H1neH3men > PIE *H1noH3mn [Fabrice Cavoto] The use of analogies is one of the things which has made long range comparativists so unpopular years ago. If analogies do indeed happen from time to time and must be accepted, either as paradigmatic analogies, or as recurrent for the same elements (that is, for this precise topic, if one could prove that there are other cases where a root ending in *-me has become, analogically, a *-men- stem in IE, and it is not sure there are other examples of this), the fact is that recurring to those is often interpreted by skeptics as the proof that we don't know exactly what happened. However, in this precise case, why should analogy be invoked at all? Couldn't it simply be that the root itself in PIE was *H1neH3m-, and that it was formed by the addition of the whole *-men- suffix: *H1neH3m-men-. Do we have any case at all of geminate nasals in IE roots? Because if we don't, as I think, then one only needs to assume that the sequence *-mm- was reduced, by a regular sound law, to simple *-m-. This way, we can avoid the use of analogies (which problem is also that when they don't belong to one of the categories above, they simply can't be verified), and instead have a set of regular evolutions. As for the Uralic part, if the root itself is identical with IE, then the stem formation doesn't have to be. In the same way that IE has a productive *-men-suffix, Ural. has also different stem formations, more or less productive, and can simply have choosen another one, thus *-e. However, what I just proposed can't, I am afraid, be used for or against the Indo-Uralic (or older) origin of the word. I think that both options might have their argumentation. > PU-Yuk *niwme > PU *nime > Finnish nimi >> But you can't reconstruct PU *-a for this item: the reconstruction must be >> *nimi (= traditional *nime). > Why are you reconstructing an *-i for traditional *-e ? From what I know, > *-e > Finnish -i, whereas Finnish -e < *-eC. [Fabrice Cavoto] I don't see why neither. *-e and *-a seem to be needed, but I don't see why *-i. From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Tue Feb 29 08:37:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 08:37:00 GMT Subject: "name" - was: evidence for "Urheimat" Message-ID: SG>you probably mean /Chukchi/ .. thank you so much. But I hate the //ch//. Just a personal tick. SG>welcome to the beautiful land of Ruhlenistan .. excuse me for not to own any work of Ruhlen;-(( You might have observed that different sources give different spellings. In this case it seemed not nessessary to name the village/dialect of the speaker,the year and author of the wordlist. What I started to demonstrate by my selection of 'name'-representations: It seems to me that "name" is a widespread "Wanderwort", for in any language contact you will ask after for the *name* of your counterpart. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover, (no mails >16kB please). From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 29 23:56:01 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2000 00:56:01 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000228190939.0099c240@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: Stanley Friesen wrote: >At 08:42 PM 2/26/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>Especially since the original PIE word itself -- *h(2)rtkos -- is itself >>probably a nominalized adjective (via a stress shift), from *h(2)rektes; see >>Sanskrit raksas, "destruction". >This brings up a little hypothesis of mine: the principle origin of the >thematic inflection of nouns (the o-stems) was via nominalization of >adjectives. >How reasonable is this? Pretty reasonable. The o-stems show a good number of pronominal endings, and may well once have been definite adjectives, comparable to the later development in Balto-Slavic. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Tue Feb 29 09:20:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 09:20:00 GMT Subject: Hypergeometric? [was Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?)] Message-ID: MAI>What is meant here by "the hypergeometric"? A stochastic distribution used in many cases to guess outcomes of independent losses or drawings, e.g. in poll events, wildlife abundance, industrial rejections, loss of linguistic features, and many others. It is too difficult to explain it in a nutshell here. I am still trying to work out a short version in a personal discussion with SGeorg. For further information, see e.g. the Kotz/Johnson 'Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences'. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover, (no mails >16kB please). From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Tue Feb 29 09:25:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 09:25:00 GMT Subject: Assumptions in Computing phylogenies Message-ID: SF>Actually, properly done, cladistic analysis *determines* which SF>characters are innovations and which are retentions. .. In my humble understanding it is vice versa. The biologist or linguist decides which features are retentions vs. innovations, and the cladistic algorithm computes the 'optimal' tree. See my parallel mail for a textbook on the topic. But perhaps it is a misunderstanding. SF>Unfortunately the most powerful method, outgroup comparison is not SF>available in linguistics at this time depth .. correct. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover, (no mails >16kB please). From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Tue Feb 29 10:11:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 10:11:00 GMT Subject: Indo-Hittite Hypothesis Message-ID: >I do not believe - again, from the papers we have - that the algorithm >used on IE at UPenn ever produced an 'unrooted tree'. Contrary to what >has been said on this list in the past, the external adjustments >appeared to have been made directly to the algorithm from the outset. >What we see in the papers is a model of a 'unrooted tree', but I could >not find one that represents the IE languages. .. see Warnow/Ringe/Taylor in 'Proceedgs 7th Ann.ACM-SIAM Symp on Discrete Algorithms', p.318: "In Linguists, ..., we are interested in /minimal/ trees." Minimal trees are not inferring additional (ancestral) nodes (cf. Kruskal 1956). And exactly out of this reason Warnow explained: p.319 "(note that it is a rooted tree, because our encoding of our linguistic judgements includes the directionylity constraints)." On the same page, you will further find that decisions were partly made on single (!) lexemes, and if not fitting, these were simply declared as undetected borrowing (!). Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover, (no mails >16kB please). From ALDERSON at mathom.xkl.com Wed Feb 2 02:36:18 2000 From: ALDERSON at mathom.xkl.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 18:36:18 -0800 Subject: Apologies for peculiar mail Message-ID: Dear Readers, Most of you will have received at least one, and possibly two, very peculiar postings from the Indo-European list in the last 18 hours or so. My apologies for the confusion. As most of you know, I run this list by hand, using a very old e-mail system on an antique operating system. In an attempt to keep the mail flowing while dealing with more than 60 new entries in the queue, I set up some batch jobs to handle breaking the queued messages down into groups of about 20--and quite without thinking named the batch files in a way that caused them (and their partial logs) to be treated as inputs to the mail system, at least by the batch jobs themselves. I have taken steps to insure that this partiuclar error cannot recur. Again, my apologies. Rich Alderson list owner and moderator From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 1 17:47:28 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 12:47:28 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >sarima at friesen.net writes: >For instance when Lois and Clark went through the area, the Dakota were not >yet living in the Dakotas!) -- the Navaho are recent arrivals in their current location as well. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 1 18:17:45 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 13:17:45 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: << Everything can be borrowed, and there are examples for everything actually >having been borrowed at some point in space and time. >> -- true, although of course some things are more _likely_ to be borrowed than others. Numerals, body parts, family relationships, and so forth, are less likely to be loan-words. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Feb 1 06:22:47 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 00:22:47 -0600 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000128223834.00997690@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: You're talking about massive upheavals triggered by the arrival of major imperialist powers poseessing overwhelming technical advantages. This was not an everyday occurance. Of course there were major migrations in South Africa and the Americas after Europeans arrived --but because of extraordinary events. >At 04:25 AM 1/25/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>Myself, I'd say that since population movements of various sorts (conquests, >>folk-migrations, refugees, colonizations, etc.) are common as dirt in the >>historical record as far back as we can see, and since they're also common in >>preliterate societies whenever these come under the observation of literate >>observers (18th and 19th-century Africa is full of them, for instance) then >>we have to assume that this was the case in prehistory. >Not to mention North America. It is unpopular to say so, but there are >clear records of major Indian migrations *after* the arrival of Europeans >in the Americas. (For instance when Lois and Clark went through the area, >the Dakota were not yet living in the Dakotas!) >-------------- >May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From edsel at glo.be Tue Feb 1 22:10:45 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 23:10:45 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stefan Georg" Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2000 10:28 AM >>AA>there is internal evidence in Uralic supporting the loan origin of p-U >>AA>*weti 'water'. >>.. Please try to fancy that there /could/ have been a common origin of >>that word ! >>I do not know a single linguist who would confirm that a word like 'water' >>could be object to borrowing! > Well, I can introduce you to at least one such person: > Tamil borrowed /udakam/, one of its "water"-words, from Sanskrit. > Gogodala (/wi/), Awin (/wae/), and Gira (/wai/), three Papuan languages, > borrowed Austronesian *wayEG (reconstructed by some Austronesianists as > *vaSeR, which does remind me of a language I know, but I cannot remember > which one ;-). > Several non-Semitic languages of Ethiopia have borrowed their word for > "water" from Ethiosemitic (I'll have to dig for the details both in my > memory and my files, if you insist). > I have encountered more examples. It may not happen all too often, but, > say, every ninth or tenth time I inspect a list of loan-words exchanged by > languages in close-contact I haven't seen before, a "water"-word is among > the suspects (and in most cases then it is found guilty too). [Ed] What about a.Grk. to hydo:r that was replaced by mod.Grk. to nero'? Was this borrowed too? Where from? [ Moderator's comment: No. This is an internal development in Greek, from the water-carrier's cry _to neron hydo:r_ "fresh water!". --rma ] > The claim that signifiants of some semantic notions are "so basic" that > they cannot be subject to borrowing is just one of those myths our > discipline seems to have real trouble to rid itself from. It is not true. > There are no such concepts. Everything can be borrowed, and there are > examples for everything actually having been borrowed at some point in > space and time. [Ed] Tagalog speaking Pilipinos count in Spanish. Ed. Selleslagh From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Tue Feb 1 15:08:44 2000 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 16:08:44 +0100 Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? Message-ID: "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: > In my opinion, there is an interesting possibility that *(H)e- is cognate > with a verbal prefix j-, used in the formation of hieroglyphic Old and Late > Egyptian verbal forms. I never came across such a prefix in Old Egyptian. Would you be so kind and quote a _text passage_ which illustrates the function of this /j-/? ***************************** Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet M?nchen Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 D-80539 M?nchen Tel.: +89-21805343 / Fax: +89-21805345 Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ ***************************** From rao.3 at osu.edu Tue Feb 1 10:57:46 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 05:57:46 -0500 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: I remember a post from J. E. Rasmussen in a previous incarnation of this list arguing that the augment has left traces outside Greek, Armenian and Indo-Iranian. I don't remember the details and though I think that I archived the message, I can't find it. > In Greek only the sigmatic aorist has an augment (gr?pho - ?grapsa), > not the asigmatic one (e.g. mod. Grk. vrisko - vrika [was: eureka]), > while the latter is probably older, like the 'strong' verbs in Germanic. > I once heard that the augment was basically prosodic, because the > -sa ending didn't allow a stressed syllable preceding it. > Is the Indic mechanism similar? Is the lack of augment in asigmatic aorist absolute in Homeric/Attic Greek? I remember reading that there is a strong correlation in Homer, but not absolute. On in RV are unaugmented forms found. Hoffman (Injunctive im Veda) showed that unaugmented forms were tenseless. Post-RV Sanskrit does not have unaugmented forms except in prohibitions. So the Indic mechanism is not similar. --- There is an interesting typological problem here. According to Bybee et al (The evolution of grammar), unmarked past vs marked present is unknown in extant languages. This makes the usual classification of forms in Hittite (and PIE) quite unusual. I remember asking about this before. Miguel suggested Akkadian as another such example, quoting Lipinski to argue that iprus was preterite, iparras was present. But in `Outline', Lipinski explicitely assigns iparras to imperfective (putting present-future in quotation marks). So the anamoly still unexplained. From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 1 00:58:04 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 19:58:04 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: I wrote: There is a huge gap of time potentially there. And if this particular word for wheel entered after PIE dispersed but before those sound changes, then we'd should have exactly the same outcome. In a message dated 1/31/00 7:02:46 PM, sarima at friesen.net wrote: <> Yes, well, the only way to examine 'more than just a few words' is one word at a time - because otherwise that statement becomes incontrovertible. And please recall that we are not just talking about ONLY words here - the only reason those words have any value in dating PIE is that they are tied to some object. IF THE DATE OF THAT OBJECT CHANGES, THEN IN THEORY THE DATE OF PIE CHANGES. So, we have questions as to: A. the date of the sound changes (after PIE's dispersal) B. the latest date of the object C. whether the word in fact referred to the object or was an extension of an earlier meaning (e.g., *kuklos as a round object.) D. whether the sound changes visible in the word can be explained otherwise (e.g *rot(H)o- may be pre-Celtic) You wrote: <> The horse was known on the Steppes before 6000BC. How does this help you give a late date for PIE? I will try to get to metals and the axle shortly. None of this looks very fortuitous to say the least. You wrote: << It is not the drasticness, it is the regularity and *opacity* of the changes. For instance., modern Lithuanian has round vowels, so mapping borrowed words with 'o' to 'a' would be odd, to say the least. And changing t > d is totally unexpected in early German borrowings (and vice versa). Thus the differences seen above would be unusual, at least, in borrowed words, but completely normal in shared heritage.>> Would you care to address this thought by Miguel Carrasquer Vidal about one of the two words for wheel that are claimed to demonstrate a date for PIE? <<...whether *rot(H)o-, might not be a (pre-)Celtic borrowing in the other IE lgs. that have it (Latin, Germanic, Baltic, Indo-Iranian). The root *ret(H)- "run", besides the word for "wheel", does not have any semantic development (or e-Stufe forms) outside of a bit in Baltic and Germanic, but especially in Celtic. On account of the *o, the word can't be Germanic or Baltic (with the above caveats, but this is a merger *o > *a). If the word is a borrowing from Celtic, we can also dispense with the laryngeal. Celtic, like Armenian and Germanic, probably had started aspirating the IE tenues at an early stage (which would account for the loss of *p in Celtic [and Armenian]). A Celtic *rotos ([rothos]) would have been borrowed as *rathas in Indo-Iranian, and as there was no root *ret- (*rat-) in I-I, there would have been no pressure to make the word conform to its non-existent native cognates.>> Regards, Steve Long From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Tue Feb 1 02:51:19 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 20:51:19 -0600 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: At 07:01 PM 1/28/00 -0800, Stanley Friesen wrote: >At 02:55 AM 1/22/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >>In a message dated 1/22/00 12:12:34 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >><>of PIE unity. And if it was borrowed later, it wouldn't show the >>characteristic sound-shifts of the daughter languages... and it does. >>Therefore if it was borrowed, it was borrowed into unified PIE.>> >>Excuse me, but what are the dates on those specific sound changes you are >>talking about? And what makes you think they occurred immediately after PIE >>was disunited? >At least *some* of the individual sound changes must have occurred by the >break up of the unity, by *definition*. As long as there were no >differences between the speech in the different areas, PIE was still *by* >*definition* united. Then does the IE model posit that PIE, understood here as an actual unified linguistic system, was a linguistic isolate? It would seem that the model would have to do this. Otherwise one would be confronted with a simulation of linguistic prehistory in which PIE could be viewed as merely one member of a language family existing at that point in time. Stated differently, although I haven't heard this point discussed on the list, a cladistic model requires the end point to coincide with a linguistic system that is viewed as a total linguistic isolate. And even if PIE were posited as an isolate, would one not have to propose that, nonetheless, the proto-language, too, would have had the full characteristics of a human language, with the likelihood of suppletions, irregularities and substrata. And I believe that it is this latter point that creates problems. How does the model guarantee that the ultimate origin of the "common vocabulary" should not be traced back, for example, to the substrata that PIE, if understood as a natural language, must have had? >And the simple observed facts are that languages cannot spread beyond the >range of daily contact for very long without diverging, at least within two >or three centuries. For a pre-modern language to have been spread over a >large part of Europe without local divergence for *millennia* is just not >possible. (And millennia of non-divergence is what would be required for >the PIE speakers to have spread during the neolithic revolution and still >have the observed unity of Bronze age vocabulary) Hence, are we to understand PIE as a convenient shorthand for a set of sharted characteristics or as a term standing for a reified linguistic system spoken in prehistory? And if it is understood as the second, according to the model, how long did it just tread water? Stated differently, if one chooses the second version, then one must ask how long the unified (undifferentiated) linguistic system, as portrayed by the reconstructions, go unchanged. Languages do change. Are we to assume that PIE was different? It seems to me that this is a very slippery aspect of a cladistic modeling of the data. On the other hand, if we choose the first alternative, that PIE is a convenient shorthand, it acts like a frame in a moving picture: a convenient way of portraying a stop-action of events that are otherwise inevitably in motion. >>This has been brought up before a long time ago. The identifiable sound >>changes in the *kwelos group are prehistoric. The amount of time that lapsed >>between the end of PIE unity and the time those sound changes took effect is >>undetermined, except that they all occured before attested records. >True, for any given *specific* word, this objection is meaningful. But the >vocabulary placing PIE in the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age consists >of more than just one word, indeed more than just a few words. Could you (you'all) list, say, ten vocabulary items, excluding verbs, that are considered most representative of the PIE lexicon that you are talking about. And as an aside, are there explict criteria set forth that determine which items are most representative. I'm speaking of crtieria along the lines of those that have been suggested by Larry Trask (and debated by many) concerning the selection of items in Pre-Basque. I would be most interested in knowing if such criteria have been debated and/or laid out explicitly at some point in the past. For example, how many language groups must the item be attested in for it to quality? I assume, for example, that identifying cognates/reflexes of the same item in Sanskrit and Celtic would be sufficient for the item to qualify? Or is the bar set higher for these PIE items, e.g., that the item must be attested in Sanskrit, Germanic and Celtic or Hittite, Slavic and Romance, etc. For example, just glancing over the entries in Buck, it would seem that there isn't as much uniformity for "wheel" across IE languages, as there is for, say, "cart" which shows up most IE languages (obviously with the help of Latin). Thanks, Roz From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 1 03:20:30 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 22:20:30 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 1/31/00 8:40:36 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> I think if you consider it further you'll recall that experimental science often deals with probabilities, but of course in the lab there is more opporyunities for 'controls' - testing things different ways to see if the probabilities change. If I seem to be resisting probabilities, it is first of all because I am not sure how they are being calculated. I was not sure for example that there wasn't a linguistic principle that would take care of the cushion period between PIE unity date and the specific sound change date. And it becomes important to be insistent on that kind of question, because they can sometimes be minimized. But because I know about calculating probabilities, I can tell you they should not. As far as my purposes: my purposes have to do with understanding why there should be a conflict - if in fact there truly is one - between different views of what happened back then. I don't know that anything that you've written on this matter is incorrect - but asking why you believe would not seem to be inconsistent with honest scholarship. In case you think that I have some nefarious purpose in mind, I can forward you messages I've sent to archaeologists where I've brought up linguistic arguments I learned here to challenge their statements. I don't think it is fair to say that the evidence we have been discussing is inconsistent with linguistics or that external information has not been used in reaching some of the conclusions we've discussed here. (If you really want to see something 'external to linguistics' take a look at http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/Indo2.html (watch the wrap) where you'll find an article (co-authored by an environmental scientist at the Oak Ridge National Labs) reprinted from Current Anthropology that proposes to settle the supposed 'irreconcilable conflict between Renfrew and paleolinguistics' by hypothesizing that IE spread through Europe at the end of the Ice Age. It's called 'Did Indo-European Languages spread before farming?' and it offers dates of roughly 10,000BC. I believe that this sort of hypothesis gains credibility only because of that alleged 'irreconcilabilty' line. And I don't think that the conflict would stand up and give credibility to this sort of thing if experts like yourself were involved in an improved dialogue between one another - a better dialogue than I can hope to supply . I can't believe that linguistics and archaeology can not take different paths but ultimately end up at the same destination.) Regards, Steve Long From edsel at glo.be Tue Feb 1 14:29:38 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 15:29:38 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2000 9:28 PM > In a message dated 1/29/00 3:19:23 AM Mountain Standard Time, edsel at glo.be > writes: >> So, the linguistic spread of these words is not necessarily (in my view NOT) >> related to spread of the 'wheel technology' nor to its dating. If the >> technology had been responsible for the spread of the word(s), it is likely >> that all IE lgs. would have adopted the same word, quod non. > -- the fact that the _same_ words are used over so many language familes is > strongly indicative. [Ed] They aren't: Actually, basically three different, and very ordinary, words that probably exist (I mean words with these meanings) in any language. As I said before: all these words seem to have had different original meanings (*kwekwlo/'round, circle', *rotho/'revolve', *droghos (trochos-tropos)/'turn (back)'...). Different languages (or groups) picked different pre-existing words to describe the wheel, chariots, wagons etc. Since there are only three such words that were actually used for the wheel (I can't think of many other semantically related words than those meaning 'round', 'rotate' and '(re)turn' for 'wheel'; wagons are another matter), no wonder they appear, BUT seldom together, in tens of IE languages. e.g. in Du. 'rad' and 'wiel' do exist side by side, but the former is archaic and probably a loan from H.German, or from another dialect. It seems that 'rad' (meaning '(cart)wheel' has 'never' been used in spoken language, as far as we can know. Even the round ponds created by the vortex behind breaches in dikes are called a 'wiel' in Flanders. BTW, I wonder if the Du. word for whirlpool, '(draai)kolk' has any relationship with '*kwe(kw)los'. Ed. From alderson at netcom.com Tue Feb 1 03:07:00 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 19:07:00 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: (JoatSimeon@aol.com) Message-ID: In a reply to Steve Long, S. M. Stirling wrote: >>You are saying that here is Celtic was unchanging for 700 years. >-- no, I said saying that the Gallic form of around 100 CE is identical to >that of the Ogham inscriptions 200-300 years later. Actually, what was originally written on 25 Jan 2000 was: >Observers as late as the 4th century CE said that the Gallic-Celtic of Lyon, >in the Rhone valley, was mutually comprehensible with that of the Galatians of > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >Anatolia (who arrived from the Balkans about 270 BCE). All that is required of the underlined phrase is that speakers from the two regions be able to do what we are told (in another current thread on this list) speakers of Spanish and Portuguese can do. In other words, the languages need not be *unchanging* for any length of time. Rich Alderson From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 1 03:44:45 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 22:44:45 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: In a message dated 1/31/00 10:20:09 PM, sarima at friesen.net wrote: <> The question you are addressing has to do with whether Renfrew ever said that Celtic or pre-Celtic migrated to western Europe before 4000BC. My understanding is that he was simply saying that an early indo-european language did, not that anything identifiably Celtic did. Let me ask you how your comment is relevant? Regards, Steve Long PS - You wrote 'the claim that the words for things like 'wheel' were borrowed into IE *after* it spread throughout Europe - by over a thousand years.' But actually if we give a generous 4000BC date to wheeled-transport (as opposed to wheels in general or just plain round objects) and remember that in Hittite the word for wheel is different - we can squeeze in a time spread for the word that matches Renfrew's 4000BC date for western Europe to a 't' - presumably before of course the specific sound changes observed in e.g., '*kweklo' occurred in the attested IE daughters. Since those SPECIFIC changes could have happened a bit later (I believe) - there wouldn't be anything amazing about this, would there? From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 1 05:21:38 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 00:21:38 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >All that Renfrew's statement 'requires' is that "an early indoeuropean >language" arrive in europe 'north and west of the alps' before 4000BC. -- 7000 BCE, actually, for the start of the process. Agriculture in north-central Europe long predates 4000 BCE, and Renfrew attributes the spread of IE languages to the spread of agriculture. >AND that the Celtic languages were - perhaps very distant - descendents of >that language. -- well, that's what I said he said. >***And there is nothing in what Renfrew wrote that precludes the Celtic >languages from first developing as such at any particular time - even in >250BC.*** -- developing FROM WHAT? >From PIE? Is PIE supposed to have been around in 250 BCE for the Celtic languages to develop from? That's the whole POINT here. The time-gaps are ridiculous! As is the geographic spread. You do not GET uniform languages over large areas. The IE languages when first encountered are NOT DIFFERENTIATED ENOUGH to have bee separated by that depth of time! >great-great-grand parent IE language arrived in western europe in the >middle-late European neolithic. -- No. Renfrew specifically attributes the arrival of the IE languages in Europe to the EARLY neolithic; to the introduction of agriculture as such. >Even in Renfrew's map of the migration he expressly avoids labeling the arrows >of movement because 'attested divisions as we know them had not yet >occurred.') -- yes. Thus stating that the period of PIE unity dates to the beginning of the Neolithic; which, as has been pointed out, is linguistic nonsense. From mclasutt at brigham.net Tue Feb 1 07:49:10 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 00:49:10 -0700 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000128223042.00997cb0@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: > At 04:05 AM 1/25/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >> And one language does not replace another easily, or without very good >> reason. For adults to learn another language is _hard_. [Stanley Friesen replied] > Language replacement usually involves a prolonged period of bilingualism. > With the two languages undergoing various shifts in popularity and prestige > until eventually one dies out. Which one is hard to predict, given the > back-and-forth nature of the dance. Not necessarily. Witness what has happened in the Americas, especially in the western United States. Until the 1890s, the Native American languages were spoken predominantly by monolinguals. Over the next 50 years, the boarding school system took children away from their parents and made them speak English exclusively. After only a century, about half of these languages are extinct and the great majority of the others are only spoken by a dozen or so old people, none of whom are monolinguals. That's not "a prolonged period of bilingualism" nor is there any "back-and-forth dance". While Stanley's scenario may be the case in some parts of the world at some times, it is not the only scenario. Language use is determined, by and large, by local power. If it is more locally advantageous to use Language A rather than Language B, then Language A will survive and B will dwindle. As local power changes, B may be revived. However, if the relative power of A is much greater than B, B will simply die. This is not a recent phenomenon either. Remember what happened to the Gaulish, Etruscan, Oscan, Umbrian, Punic, and who knows how many other languages as the Roman Empire grew. Similar things happened as the Islamic world expanded and Arabic supplanted local languages. Even in ancient times, Aramaic spread with the Neo-Babylonian Empire and replaced other languages in its path. In 586 BCE, Hebrew was the native language of the Jews, but by their return to Palestine just a few decades later, their native language was Aramaic. Depending on the relative power of each language involved, language replacement can happen over centuries or just decades. Remember, it only takes one generation that doesn't learn the old language and the language is doomed. 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 stevegus at aye.net Tue Feb 1 12:37:16 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 07:37:16 -0500 Subject: NE Germanic Message-ID: Stanley Friesen writes: > From a different direction, the most believable derivations of the *name* > "Goth" link it with "Gotaland" in Sweden and/or the island "Gotland". > This suggests a northern origin for the tribe. My further understanding is that the name of -Gdansk- in Poland represents *gudaniska, which looks Germanic, and suggests a Gothic connection on the south shore of the Baltic. -- Sella fictili sedeo Versiculos dum facio. From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 1 19:23:34 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 20:23:34 +0100 Subject: Frisian In-Reply-To: <005d01bf6a47$65bbec20$2f03703e@edsel> Message-ID: "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >I'm afraid I can't tell you much more, except that: >-it is generally accepted that West-Flemish dialect (the oldest source of >literary Dutch, spoken from the Scheldt mouth to Dunkirk) is related to >Frisian. It is still the most archaic one. >-Frisian is also spoken (of course) in German E. Friesland and - I believe - >also on the German and Dutch coastal islands. >I think Miguel Carrasquer once wrote a well-informed e-mail to this list on >the subject of the coastal spread of Ingwaeonic/Frisian and its dating. Well, I could look it up sometime. I think was complaining about the notion of a coastal Ingwaeonic Sprachbund (*after* the Anglo-Saxon settlement of England and across the North Sea), as it's usually presented, as opposed to the IMHO more straightforward (and historically attested) explanation of Frisian settlement along the coast as far south as Dunkirk in late-Roman/ post-Roman times. At least for "Ingwaeonisms" on this (the continental) side of the North Sea. Are West Flemish and Hollands Ingwaeonized Frankish dialects or Frankish dialects on a Frisian substratum? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From sarima at friesen.net Wed Feb 2 02:21:46 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 18:21:46 -0800 Subject: Frisian In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 06:18 PM 1/27/00 -0800, Max Dashu wrote: >Ed Selleslagh writes, >>I'm anything but a specialist in Frisian, but I hear and read some from >>time to time. >Nevertheless, I'm going to ask you if you know anything about the >distribution of Frisian in medieval times. I've read that it extended over >more of the Netherlands than currently, and also towards Denmark. I have also read this. I also have it on good authority that the name Friesen is common as far east as Bremen, which extends the scope of the tribe, if not the language, into modern Germany. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 1 18:13:24 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 19:13:24 +0100 Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter In-Reply-To: <001101bf6bda$d509e020$7fae01d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: "petegray" wrote: >On inflectional morphology being borrowed, isn't the English plural -s >exactly such an example? The short answer is: "no". A somewhat longer answer can be found at . ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 1 19:11:43 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 20:11:43 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000128191248.009c4ef0@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: Stanley Friesen wrote: >At 01:53 AM 1/23/00 +0000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >>**n'akut-. The problem is the fate of stressed **i and **u, for >>which we can hypothesize spontaneous diphthongization to *ei, *eu >>(unlikely, I'd say, but an interesting possibility to account for >>possible Pre-PIE long *i: and *u:), or loss as in the case of the >>Slavic jers (with, as in Slavic, occasional retention to avoid >>excessive consonant clusters, e.g. **CiC > *C^C, but **CiCC > >>*C^eCC, likewise for **CuC > *CwC, **CuCC > *CweCC). >Why is it necessary to go this way? IMHO, there are sufficient instances >of 'i' and 'u' in PIE the do *not* alternate with ablaut variants such as >'eu' and 'ei' to suggest the inheritance of those vowels from the Pre-PIE >stage, at least in some environments. I'm not so sure. There are certainly "loose" *i's and *u's among the pronouns (e.g. *tu/*tu:), in affixes like *-i (dat/loc, "present tense"), but IMHO anomalously few among common nouns/adjectives and verbs. For instance, I don't think Benveniste's root-theory allows *i and *u in the V position (or does it?). It would be nice to have statistics. Surely the existence of *kw, *k^ etc. suggests that some high vowels were lost, passing their front- or backness to the adjacent consonants (is there another explanation?). Coupled with the comparative rarity of non-zero grade *i and *u, I think it's clear that *something* happened to the high vowels at some stage of Pre-PIE. The question is exactly what. In which environments (phonological or morphological) did *i and *u survive as such? What happened when they didn't? In itself, the loss/decimation/weakening of *i and *u is not a strange phenomenon. Besides the Slavic case, there is also Tocharian, where they merge [also *e] as (oops, that's a-umlaut), and some accounts of Afro-Asiatic vocalism (such as it is) also imply *i, *u > *@ (or viceversa!). On the subject of non-velar labialized/palatalized consonants, I was wondering: since in Greek *pj > pt, could not such old chestnuts as , be derived from palatalized *p^ (*p^lH-). I know Baltic "city" is in itself no supportive evidence (-il- [-ir-] is the normal Baltic development, even tough Baltic and Slavic offer anomalous cases of *ul, *ur which might be worth investigating) and Skt. pu:r- might be seen as counterevidence (but p- is a labial after all), but I still would regard *p^lH- as a neater solution than e.g. Beekes' *tplH- (CIEL, p. 190). Another thing to look at might be cases of Gmc. /i/ for expected /e/ and viceversa. * "fish" because of *-sk^-? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 1 15:26:56 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 10:26:56 EST Subject: Horses Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >The fact that Hittites use Sumerograms and Akkadograms does not mean that they >didn't meant them to be read aloud as native Hittite words >> -- correct. Of course, this is extremely frustrating, since it means we don't get a transcription of what the native Hittite word _was_. From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 1 18:10:20 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 19:10:20 +0100 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: <389267F3.5C02@cvtci.com.ar> Message-ID: Vartan and Nairy Matiossian wrote: >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> But Armenian eys^ (< *ek^wos) means "donkey". >Actually, it's es^ (<*ek^wos), genitive is^oy "donkey" (the s^ is >phonetically "sh"). Forgive me, I prefer to write in ASCII since I cannot write e-macron (and suggests a phonological length that probably wasn't there). At least it's historically correct (PIE *ei > Pre-Armenian *ey > Class.Arm. > Mod.Arm. /e-/, not /je-/). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 1 19:44:22 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 20:44:22 +0100 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Stefan Georg wrote: >That's Sumerian, and not Anatolian. (aside: the genitive morpheme is .A >only; the writing .RA has been used by specialists to argue that this term >is not really Sumerian, but pseudo-Sumerian invented by Akkadian-speaking >scribes. I'd be grateful if some specialist could confirm/debunk this). If I look at Thomsen's Sumerian quotes (e.g. from the Gudea inscriptions), I see many cases of this kind of spelling (e.g. Gudea cyl. A XX 23: {d}A.nun.na "Anuna Gods", i.e. "seed" () "of the prince" () Recently on the ANE list, Bob Whiting ("Re: ANE Horses in North Syria") wrote that the Sumerian word for "horse" was *, written descriptively (not phonetically) as "foreign equid/donkey". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Feb 1 20:25:29 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 20:25:29 -0000 Subject: Horses Message-ID: Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stefan Georg" Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2000 7:28 PM on *ek'wos >>-- but it doesn't mean "donkey" in Anatolian, the earliest attested IE >>language of the area, and Armenian is intrusive there. > Not really. It does, if we take into account the Sumerogramme > ANShE.KUR.RA - > ANShE 'Esel, ass' > KUR 'Berg, mountain' > RA - genitive-morpheme That's Sumerian, and not Anatolian. (aside: the genitive morpheme is .A only; the writing .RA has been used by specialists to argue that this term is not really Sumerian, but pseudo-Sumerian invented by Akkadian-speaking scribes. I'd be grateful if some specialist could confirm/debunk this). The fact that Hittites use Sumerograms and Akkadograms does not mean that they didn't meant them to be read aloud as native Hittite words (nor does it mean that they used the Sumerian/Akkadian terms as a loan-element). [PR] This is not meant as a criticism of R-S but only for the information of the readership of the list. Thomsen, p. 90 "The genitive posposition is /-ak/, but it is never written with the sign AK." *Very commonly*, the -a, which is written, is combined with the previous consonant so that spelling like e(2) lugal-la, house-king-of, is the rule rather than the exception. Therefore, no valid inference about origin should be made from a spelling like kur-ra ('of the mountain'). I believe there are no Sumerian "specialists" who would argue in this way. 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 X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 1 12:47:20 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 07:47:20 EST Subject: Horses in War Message-ID: I wrote >Well, that was my original point - that PIE was apparently not being spoken >by charioteers in the 2d millenium BC Near East. In a message dated 2/1/00 6:46:50 AM, sarima at friesen.net replied: <> Yes, we are. Although the dates of appearance of the chariot or spoked wheel in the evidence may be pertinent to other issues (e.g., the possible post-PIE use and spread of *rotHo as a word for wheeled transport), they appear to be too late to be to be relevant to the question of PIE dispersal. Others on the list may feel differently. I wrote: <> You wrote: <> Here we have a problem. I just don't find that kind of support for the idea of the chariot being a 'decisive' tactical unit. If the Egyptians introduced the idea of the chariot as an archer platform, as it said in that piece I quoted, then before that the chariot's other best function appears to be mounted infantry - as it appears in Homer - so that it acted as transport like APCs but not in combat. Most military histories that I've looked at are pretty insistent that the idea of using chariots for a direct charge would have been a losing proposition. Which relates to <> <> The stirrup seems to arise in India and to be transported to Europe by the Huns. Long before this cavalry appears to have replaced chariotry almost everywhere as the basic mounted unit. The assyrians are apparently developing cavalry before 1000BC and dropping chariots. By 600BC Persians and Scythians and Mesopotamians are all on horse back and chariots have pretty much been relegated. But the West Point book says that the first use of the horse in an offensive tactic was with the development of the Macedonian heavy cavalry and 'the hammer and anvil' scheme employed by Phillip and Alexander. Even there the anvil was the phalanx and the horse was employed in flanking operations - much as described by Clancy in Armored Cav. The British and Gauls appear to use the chariot as a pre-game psychological device, but all their main battles appear to feature footsoldiers versus footsoldiers. The original statement was or was supposed to be that the horse was not 'decisive' in any battle before 1000BC - and that includes Kadesh (an interesting word). And I believe that still stands up. Regards, Steve Long From mclasutt at brigham.net Tue Feb 1 15:47:28 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 08:47:28 -0700 Subject: Horses in War In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000128221943.009b9ae0@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: Just a few notes to clear up some things from a part-time military historian (I don't spend ALL my time with linguistics) since there's been quite a bit of speculation about the role of cavalry/chariotry vs. infantry in the horse discussion. There's a very ancient triumvirate in military structure: cavalry (which includes chariotry), heavy infantry (shields, armor, spears, swords), and light infantry (slingers, archers). In looking at history, there is also a "scissors-paper-rock" relationship among these three elements. Heavy Infantry will defeat Cavalry, Light Infantry will defeat Heavy Infantry, and Cavalry will defeat Light Infantry. While you can name a counterexample or two for each of these relationships, the vast preponderance of evidence supports it. Thus, while a poor power's army may have consisted only of light infantry, as it grew it also developed heavy infantry and cavalry. Once the horse was domesticated, it very quickly became a part of the army-building process wherever it went--whether pulling a battle platform or carrying a rider. It's most important function was never attacking the shield wall of the heavy infantry, but in scattering the enemy archers and slingers because it's speed could carry it "under the guns" well before it was eliminated. It's second function was as counter-cavalry to protect its own light infantry. Now, to the issue of stirrups. These have been highly overrated in the history of cavalry. Many great cavalry armies have existed and been quite successful without the benefit of stirrups. The Mongols and Arabs are particularly fine examples of stirrupless cavalry-heavy armies that kicked up a lot of trouble (even for those armies whose saddles had stirrups). Throughout history, technological innovations have had MUCH less influence than they are given credit for. They make their impact only when combined with effective leadership. The Battle of Hastings is often cited as the point when the stirrup came into its own, but William would have won the battle even without stirrups, and probably won it in much the same way--he had light infantry on the field along with heavy infantry and cavalry and it was these that defeated the English heavy infantry (Harold died with an ARROW through his eye) after the English shield was broken by incessant archery fire. The cavalry's main role at Hastings was to mop up. As far as chariotry is concerned. The comments that chariots were only useful for limited transport is absolutely false. The chariot was the cavalry arm of most of the major Near Eastern armies for centuries. When chariotry was used in battle, its greatest successes were always against the light infantry which was usually arrayed on the flanks of an enemy army. Once the light infantry broke, the heavy infantry was left unprotected on its flanks (heavy infantry can't easily turn) and it broke. It remained a powerful tool (although expensive) for routing enemy light infantry until confronted by Alexander the Great's combination of heavy infantry (which it couldn't defeat) and horse-borne cavalry in the fourth century BCE. Alexander also dispersed the light infantry into smaller units dispersed among the heavy infantry which could protect them from the chariotry. The Greeks had also developed a more maneuverable horse cavalry and this easily defeated the Persian chariotry. Don't underestimate the importance of the chariot in ancient warfare (it was, in a real sense, equivalent to the modern tank) and don't overestimate the importance of the stirrup. 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 X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 1 14:48:44 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 09:48:44 EST Subject: Horses and chariots. Message-ID: In a message dated 2/1/00 7:21:23 AM, you wrote: <> I don't know how the dates jive - but the move to cavalry by the Assyrians is apparently connected to developments in the saddle and armor. Almost all representations of riders from the period show no stirrups in the Near East and Europe - including most Scythian and Thracian evidence. That's plainly true in Greek and roman times. I still think that archers in chariots - from the point of view of concentration of forces - is very inefficient as Clancy et al points out with regard to the horse in general. SciAm for example published an article on slingers awhile back that seemed to give them the big edge as a projectile-using force with incredible range when used en masse. The mobility the archer on chariot gained was hardly worth the concentration of force and accuracy you'd get from massing standing archers. I suspect once again that the use of the archer on chariot was an elite matter in big battles and had to do more with very specific targets or separate battles between better armor-clad and mounted aristocrats. That's why they got the press they did. To a main force of archers or slingers, chariots would have been very vulnerable at great distances. They would never have been able to do anthing more but harass a main line of infantry - which is what we see historically. Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 1 15:29:48 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 10:29:48 EST Subject: Horses and chariots. Message-ID: >rao.3 at osu.edu writes: << If chariots came to Egypt from Mittani Aryans, this doesn't make sense. In >India, all chariot mounted warriors used the long bow. >> -- the bow was commonly used in the Middle East, too; eg., there are Hittite sculptures showing the Hittites using the chariot as an archery platform. It's been suggested that Egyptians couldn't show foreigners shooting from chariots because that was an iconographic symbol of conquest and victory. From edsel at glo.be Tue Feb 1 16:35:35 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 17:35:35 +0100 Subject: Frisian Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Gustafson" Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2000 4:33 AM > Max Dashu writes: >> Nevertheless, I'm going to ask you if you know anything about the >> distribution of Frisian in medieval times. I've read that it extended over >> more of the Netherlands than currently, and also towards Denmark. > According to the map in Robinson (Old English and its Closest Relatives), > Frisian was once spoken along almost the entire coast, from Bruges in the > southwest to just over the current Danish border in the northeast, > apparently with a gap at the mouth of the Elbe. Robinson also cites > Tacitus, who reports Frisii between the Rhine and the Ems. [Ed. Selleslagh] The very probably related (Ingwaeonic) West-Flemish dialect was and is spoken from French-Flanders (e.g. Dunkirk etc., where it has almost disappeared since Louis XIV conquered it) to the mouth of the River Scheldt (Schelde, Lat. Scaldis) in (Dutch) Zeeland. It shares a number of characteristics with Frisian, e.g. absence of diphtongation, but so did, apparently, Hollands (Dutch coastal area except Friesland, including Rotterdam and Amsterdam and some more inland cities) before it was mixed with (Frankish) Brabants (strongly diphtongating like English) in the 16th century, during the mass emigration of the protestants. Preservation of -(i)sk (or a later -isch /isx/ in all but a one West-Flemish dialect) - instead of becoming -/is/ - is limited to Frisian and West-Flemish. BTW, I'm not aware that Frisian proper was ever spoken in Bruges (Du.: Brugge, the capital of West-Flanders). The early Dutch of the author Jakob Van Maerlant (from Damme, the former port of Brugge. 1225-1295) is basically 'polished' (Middle-)West-Flemish. But many agree that some form of Ingwaeonic was spoken from Dunkirk to Sylt, i.e. along all of the original Atlantic 'haffen' coast. Ed. From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Feb 1 20:01:44 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 20:01:44 -0000 Subject: PIE and Uralic Message-ID: Dear Ante and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ante Aikio" Sent: Monday, January 31, 2000 1:26 PM On Thu, 27 Jan 2000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: [AA wrote] They can be identified with phonological and distributional criteria. The earliest loans show PU *k and *x as substituents of IE laryngals, and they have wide distribution in Uralic. The newer loans show the PU retroflex sibilant *S as a substituent of PIE *H, and have a more restricted distribution. The introduction of a new sound substitution pattern (IE *H > U *S instead of earlier IE *H > U *x/*k) seems to be connected with the fact that PU *x disappeared as an independent phoneme in all U language branches, and these developments probably took place at quite an early date. Some of the later loans also show other post-PU characteristics (e.g., labial vowels in non-initial syllables, see the examples below). The following serve as examples of later loans. All appear -only- in Finnic, except number 2 which also has cognates in Saamic and Mari. All etymologies derive (once again) from Jorma Koivulehto. (PU *S > Finnish h is a regular development). 1) Finnish rehto 'row (of constructions of one type or other)' (< *reSto) < PIE / Pre-Germanic *rH-ts- (> Germ. *radha- 'row etc.') 2) Finn. lehti 'leaf' (< *leSti) < PIE / Pre-Germ. *bhlH-ts- (> Germ. *bladha- id.) [PR] II am so glad that someone with your background has begun to participate in this list. I have two questions. 1) Why do the Uralists feel that it is necessary to reconstruct a transitional /S/ on the way to Finnish /h/? 2) Have Uralists speculated that the older responses (/k,x/) might be the result of the PIE "laryngal" being realized as a stop /?/ and a spirant /h,H,x/? [AA wrote] PU *peli- 'fear' < Pre-U ?*pelxi- < PIE *pelH- PU *puna- 'plait' < Pre-U ?*punxa- < PIE (zero grade) *pnH- PU *pura- 'drill' < Pre-U ?*purxa- < PIE (zero g.) *bhrH- PU *aja- 'drive' < Pre-U ?*xaja- < PIE *Hag4- PU *kdliw- 'brother/sister-in-law' (-w- is a suffix) < Pre-U ?*kdlxiw- < PIE *ghlHi- [PR] Would it be possible, in your opinion, for an alternate explanation that the words might have been borrowed before the *-H- root-extensions? I do have an axe to grind here but, mercifully, I will not grind it on this list. Of course, those who have been to my website know that I consider that a strong case can be made for ultimate common origin. 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 X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Feb 2 05:38:43 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 00:38:43 EST Subject: PIE and Uralic Message-ID: I wrote: <> [First let me correct the above to the extent that it refers to the mesolithic theories that are also mentioned in the same context by Dolukhanov (1996) p.46. This was read to me over the phone and I see looking at it now that Hajdu actually places proto-Uralic 'from the Baltic to the Urals' between 10,000-7000BP.] In a message dated 2/1/00 3:06:48 PM, anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi wrote: <> Just to take this one point at a time. Hajdu's date of proto-Uralic unity has it ending about 5000BC. Your 4000BC or earlier is as you say compatible from one point of view. But that 5000BC is noteworthy I believe for PIE. The extra thousand years or more could make a big difference. You wrote originally: <> BUT THE FIRST BIG QUESTION IS: What was the location of proto-Uralic? THE REASON THIS IS A BIG QUESTION IS: The 4000BC+ date for p-Uralic final unity could put it in contact with MORE THAN ONE CULTURE that might be the source of those 'PIE' loans. AND THOSE INCLUDE THE FIRST NEOLITHIC CULTURES in southeastern Europe. (Hajdu's 5000BC date makes this just as likely.) Neolithicism (including animal domestication) appears to enter eastern Europe/Ukraine from the Balkans in the packaged form of the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture. Dates for the initial wave begin at about 5500BC. By 4500, a middle stage of the culture has moved east and north to reach 'east of the Dniestr, penetrating to the Southern Bug catchment and reaching the Dnieper.' By this time copper metalurgy is also present, with ornaments and copper axes being found. Cucuteni-Tripolye culture shows many attributes distinctly relating it to the Balkan-Anatolian 'ceramic' neolithic culture that predated it to the south, including copper metallurgy. Also arising about this time to the east is the Sredni Stog culture - located 'in the forest-steppic interfluve between the Dnieper and Don rivers.' Early and middle Sredni Stog has been dated in the area of 4500BC. And it is a prime candidate for the first domestication of the horse, though remains show a primary reliance on other domesticates. It is a question whether animal domestication came to Sredni Stog from the south east across the Caucasus or from the west. There are also other developed neolithic cultures in the area at this time - Gumelnita and Michaelovka - located fundamentally on the Black Sea coast between the Danube and Dniester. North of all the cultures mentioned above is a long. slender band of river basin semi-neolithic settlements extending from the upper Prut to perhaps the Volga - not much further north than the modern north Ukraine - which is called Dniestr- Donetsian (5000-3500BC). Imported Bandkermik pottery - hallmark of the middle neolithic - is found throughout these sites. NOW THE IMPORTANT QUESTION: where is it that you understand Uralic might be in contact with any of these cultures 5000-4000BC? THE POINT: The evidence I have suggests that the PIE loans you describe could easily be associated with contact made with the first penetrations of neoliticism into south eastern Europe. So that perhaps what the loans represent not 'wide PIE' but post-Anatolian 'narrow PIE' - based on 'the neolithic hypothesis.' Here is my understanding of the situation north of these areas. I have that about this time apparently a continum of cultures with very similar typology ran from the Baltic eastward to the Volga - the Finnish 'Sperrings', Narva, Upper Volga and Volga Kuma - all roughly dating from 6000-4500 BC. Soon after this my sources describe an expansion of 'pit and comb' cultural markers southward (starting about 4500BC) that will cross into the areas described above - extending into the regions occupied by both Cucuteni-Tripolyte and Sredni Stog - but most of all, Dnieper-Donetsian. Dolukhanov identifies 'pit and comb' as likely the southward migration of "Finnish speaking peoples' from the north - based on continuity with Narva and Upper Volga typology - and the persistence of Sperrings and Narva in situ into the 2d millenium BC. CONCLUSION: All this suggests that these PIE loans might be most easily associated with the contacts coming alongside of the first neolithic ceramics to the Narva-Sperrings-Volga group. Or - on the other hand - with the coming of 'pit and comb''s later expansion into neolithic areas in the south. All dating before 4000BC. Please correct me, update me or whatever. Regards Steve Long From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Wed Feb 2 12:15:22 2000 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 13:15:22 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >> Georg at home.ivm.de writes: > << Everything can be borrowed, and there are examples for everything actually >> having been borrowed at some point in space and time. >> > -- true, although of course some things are more _likely_ to be borrowed than > others. Numerals, body parts, family relationships, and so forth, are less > likely to be loan-words. Why? Do you refer to statistics [which would be rather problematic] or do you think of some kind of 'motivated constraints' on borrowing "[n]umerals, body parts, family relationships, and so forth"? What kind of constraints would you think of? Cognitive, knowledge based, social (habitual) constraints? I agree with Stefan: everything can be borrowed and linguists should be prepared to accept the possibility of borrowings even if such an event does not fit into the general line of arguments. Linguists should 'obey' to languages, but languages never 'obey' to linguistic generalizations... Best wishes, Wolfgang -- ***************************** Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet M?nchen Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 D-80539 M?nchen Tel.: +89-21805343 / Fax: +89-21805345 Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ ***************************** From lmfosse at online.no Wed Feb 2 12:08:24 2000 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 13:08:24 +0100 Subject: SV: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com [SMTP:JoatSimeon at aol.com] skrev 01. februar 2000 19:18: > -- true, although of course some things are more _likely_ to be borrowed than > others. Numerals, body parts, family relationships, and so forth, are less > likely to be loan-words. For the record, I believe English numerals tend to be borrowed into Hind-Urdu. The reason is that phonetics have played havoc with the numerals from 1 - 100 (you more or less have to learn them all by heart), so that when you go above 20, English numerals are easier to use. But please correct me if I'm wrong! 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 Wed Feb 2 12:34:36 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 13:34:36 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >>Georg at home.ivm.de writes: ><< Everything can be borrowed, and there are examples for everything actually >>having been borrowed at some point in space and time. >> >-- true, although of course some things are more _likely_ to be borrowed than >others. Numerals, body parts, family relationships, and so forth, are less >likely to be loan-words. But in view that they are subject to borrowing after all, this "unlikeliness" cannot be used as a heuristic for demonstrating relatedness. Likely or un-, a case has to be made for every single instance of shared (or merely similar) vocabulary being not due to borrowing, before a claim of relatedness can expect the attention of the more skeptical parts of the audience. The "unliklely"-approach is a cul-de-sac. Given a sufficient degree of language-contact, the borrowing of every lexical item with every conceivable meaning is equally likely. If it weren't so, we had to watch out for a theoretical justification of the alleged resistence of some words to borrowing. What exactly makes them so "hard-wired" into the brains of language-users that they'd hardly give thought to using a different term for, say, "water", than all their ancestors did. What, for that matter, makes them "know" in the first place that, speaking of fully bilingual individuals, this term is "ours" and that one is "theirs". Lest this sounds naive, I'll add that frequency of use may be one firewall against borrowing (though not, as we see from empirical observation, an impermeable one). Structural differences, I have in mind drastic differences of phonological inventories, between languages in contact may also counteract large-scale borrowing, but, then, these tend to dwindle under a lonmg-standing areal pressure as well. Of course, I don't deny a general difference of borrowability between names for cultural items and every-day expressions. New technology changes hands together with terminology, more often than not. But "hand", "eye", "I", "water", "brother" aso. are not safe. They simply don't bear a label "Attention ! Native word! Don't replace by foreign gobbledeegook !" on them. Since it happened at some time, somewhere, it can happen anywhere. "Basicness" of vocabulary may be one factor slowing down large-scale borrowing processes. A different factor, one which may speed up the process, is intimateness and longevity of contact (and there are different kinds of language contact, which equally have to be taken into account). And the latter may overrule the former. The reason why I'm polemicising so determinedly against the "unlikely to be borrowed" mantra is that I see here the danger of a shortcut to the detection of genetic relationships being advocated. I don't maintain that anybody on this list actually thinks that, but I know people who do, hence my zeal. I think this started with the question whether Uralic *wete is borrowing from IE or common Indo-Uralic inheritance. I hope I'll be forgiven for being imprecise, but as far as I know the main argument for the borrowing scenario (general skepticism against Indo-Uralic can of course not play the role of a major argument here) builds on the fact that there seems to be another "water"-term in Uralic, shared only (??) by Saami and one (or both ??) Ob'-Ugric language, which gives the impression that *wete was a secondary intruder from outside, gradually replacing this original term in most of Uralic, but not reaching its extreme fringes. This is not "proof" of borrowing, but it is a state-of-affairs which squares neatly with such a scenario, so it shouldn't be brushed away, certainly not by saying "unlikely and that's that". I forgot the term itself, shoot, but I read about it a few days ago in a source I cannot pin down at the moment. If this source will turn out to be one of the postings on this list during the last week or so, you'll have evidence of my slightly deranged state of mind these days (and shoot again) ... St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Wed Feb 2 14:53:01 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 16:53:01 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <200001311807.p326@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: On Mon, 31 Jan 2000, Hans Holm wrote: (I wrote:) >>There is a misunderstanding here. We are -not- dealing [with random phono-semantic look-alikes between proto-IE and proto-U] (Hans Holm asked:) > .. who is 'we'? "We" is everyone who is dealing with the putative PIE loan words in Uralic. So that includes also you. (HH cited me:) >>precisely - >>radically >>has already been found out >>all of them have failed >>this has not been succesful I fail to see the point in citing these words from my mail without their proper context. If you wish to maintain this discussion at a sensible level, please quote me properly. (HH asked:) > E.g. it is much more likely for a > cultural concept like 'wheel' to be borrowed - as opposed to 'water', > isn't it? I couldn't agree more. But so what? It is obviously true that a word for e.g. 'cappuchino', 'neutron bomb' or 'virtual reality' is more easily borrowed than one for 'water'. But, for the third and last time, this does ABSOLUTELY NOT imply that a word for 'water' cannot be borrowed. (I wrote:) >>Of course, it is impossible to -prove- (...) that the lexical similarities >>are not due to common genetic origin. But then, it is impossible to >>disprove -any- proposed genetic relationship. (HH replied:) > .. Here we can agree. But: > "Relationship" is _always and only_ a question of degrees and ways. Just > try to calculate the number of _unrelated_ ancestors for you or me before > 10^n generations or years and your calculator will soon respond with > 'overflow'. This has nothing to do with relationships between languages. The genetic relationships between biological organisms and "genetic" relationships between languages are not analogous. A human, a horse, a latimeria or whatever has always two immediate ancestors, but a language (with the exception of creoles) has precisely ONE. Thus, a genetic relationship between two languages is not a question of degree, but of time depth. (I wrote:) >>Because of this, the task of proving belongs to those who propose a >>genetic relationship, and this has not been succesful for proto-Indo- >>Uralic or Nostratic. (HH asked:) > .. you know everything about that to be so sure? I know enough of the Nostratic hypothesis to say that there is little that distinguishes it from wishful thinking. However, I am not interested in entering any thorough discussion concerning the validity of this hypothesis, and I believe this is also outside the subject matter of this list. Those who are actively interested in Nostratic linguistics can of course discuss this question in other forums. (I wrote:) >>these contain at least 30 proto-IE loans, I'd say that chance >>correspondence is ruled out (HH replied:) > .. nobody denies that there are loans IE -> P-U, or? The conditions of > these contacts were object of a conference held in Finland, published by > Julku/Wiik 1998 at Turku "The Roots of Peoples and Languages of Northern > Eurasia". I am not familiar with this publication, but I know the views of Julku and Wiik quite well. It should be pointed out here that neither of these retired professors is a Uralist (Wiik is a phonetician and Julku a historian), and their fanciful theories concerning the origin and development of the U and IE languages have next to no support among Uralists. There isn't a single linguist in Finland who conforms with Julku and Wiik's views; on the contrary, J and W have received severe and justified criticism from specialists in Uralic linguistics, as well as Finnish IE-ists and Germanists. A final note concerning your message: I am not interested in continuing this kind of indescreet discussion. When you have some serious linguistic argumentation to support your views with, and are ready to discuss in a matter-of-fact manner, come back and talk. - Ante Aikio From mclasutt at brigham.net Wed Feb 2 15:29:13 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 08:29:13 -0700 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > Rick Mc Callister > You're talking about massive upheavals triggered by the arrival of > major imperialist powers possessing overwhelming technical > advantages. This > was not an everyday occurrence. Of course there were major migrations in > South Africa and the Americas after Europeans arrived --but because of > extraordinary events. > Responding to Joat Simeon >>>Myself, I'd say that since population movements of various sorts (conquests, >>>folk-migrations, refugees, colonizations, etc.) are common as dirt in the >>>historical record as far back as we can see, and since they're also common >>>in preliterate societies whenever these come under the observation of >>>literate observers (18th and 19th-century Africa is full of them, for >>>instance) then we have to assume that this was the case in prehistory. Rick is right and wrong in responding to Joat. He is right in saying that massive migrations and conquest are often related to technological developments and are not everyday occurrences. After the introduction of the horse into western North America in the 18th century, the Comanche moved from Wyoming to Texas and wiped out the Plains Apache there. After the introduction of the gun into northeastern North America, the Ojibwa expanded to the west driving everyone else before them--the Dakota, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho. When these displaced exiles ran into the sedentary tribes along the Missouri River and the Kiowa in the central Plains, they drove these tribes into smaller and smaller agricultural settlements and out of the area entirely (the Kiowa wound up being caught in a vise between the Comanche and the northern Plains invaders). In a nonconquest development, the Iroquois confederacy virtually depopulated the regions north and south of Lakes Erie and Ontario to the point that linguists have no clue as to who lived south of the lakes and along the upper Ohio River just before the arrival of the Europeans. Rick is incorrect when he tries to tie this only to "overwhelming technical advantages" and linking it to the modern era. There are many premodern examples of a people overrunning and overwhelming an older people--the Aryan invasion of India, the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England, the Roman conquest of southern and western Europe, the movement of the Southern Athapaskans from Canada to Arizona where they drove out native Pueblo and Papago farmers, the movement of the Aztecs into Central Mexico, and the spread of the Bantu in sub-Saharan Africa. These were all violent conquests that involved massive displacement and assimilation of older populations. None of them can be considered to have happened in modern times. Most of them involved no overwhelming technological advantage. While not necessarily and "everyday occurrence", conquest and depopulation is not a strictly modern event. The events have become more global in scale as transport is easier, but that is only a matter of scale, not of whether or not similar things have happened in the past. There are various kinds of evidence that demonstrate these events--the Pygmies still exist in Central Africa, but they now speak Bantu languages; there is an identifiable layer of substrate vocabulary from the Baltic Coast inhabitants in Germanic; there are historical records of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England and the Roman conquests; there are archeological records of the Babylonian expansion in the ancient Near East and the spread of Aramaic with it; there are folklore accounts of the invasions of the Aryans and Aztecs; there is linguistic evidence for the invasion of Bantu and the Athapaskan move south. The only difference between modern man, ancient man, and prehistoric man is one of scale. NOTE: In an earlier post, someone mentioned "Lois and Clark". It should be "Lewis and Clark" of course. "Lois and Clark" was an hour-long U.S. TV series in the mid-1990s about Superman and Lois Lane. It was also a cartoon strip in the newspapers. 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 mcv at wxs.nl Wed Feb 2 23:13:06 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 00:13:06 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>sarima at friesen.net writes: >>For instance when Lois and Clark went through the area, the Dakota were not >>yet living in the Dakotas!) >-- the Navaho are recent arrivals in their current location as well. Missed that the first time. It really says "Lois and Clark" :-) Were Ms. Lane and Mr. Kent's first names consciously chosen to resemble those of that other famous team? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl [ Moderator's comment: Probably not uppermost in the creators' minds 70 years ago. I took it to be a more subtle comment by Mr. Friesen; further discussion of this point should be taken to private e-mail. --rma ] From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Feb 2 23:14:07 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 00:14:07 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>Georg at home.ivm.de writes: ><< Everything can be borrowed, and there are examples for everything actually >>having been borrowed at some point in space and time. >> >-- true, although of course some things are more _likely_ to be borrowed than >others. Numerals, body parts, family relationships, and so forth, are less >likely to be loan-words. Numerals are relatively likely, though. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mclasutt at brigham.net Wed Feb 2 02:19:53 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 19:19:53 -0700 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000128224928.0099fb00@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: > Stanley Friesen > A) language is a biological phenomenon, and behaves like other such. Wrong. Language is not a biological phenomenon, but a cognitive one. The physical structures which allow complex human language evolved along biological lines, but language change is note like biology. When two species diverge, they can no longer influence each other. A Grevy's Zebra cannot interbreed with a Plains Zebra no matter how many times they try. However, Basque can (and has) borrow words from its unrelated and mutually unintelligible neighbors. Morphology and syntactic structures can also be borrowed as well as sound systems (I'm thinking in terms of areal features here). This ability to mix varieties even after differentiation is a fundamental difference between biological descent and linguistic descent. > B) language differentiation acts *very* much like biological speciation, > except for happening much faster. See above. The speed factor is, indeed, a critical one. > C) the 'mutual comprehensibility' definition of separate languages is > almost exactly equivalent to the biological species definition as a > criterion for recognizing species. But, as stated above, once species have differentiated they can no longer influence one another. Languages retain that ability no matter how long they've been separate. We even have examples of languages which are half one language and half another (mixed languages like Michif) as well as languages (creoles) that are created from stumps of other languages and sprout into complex human languages like every other. Species cannot arise from the leg of one animal and pieces cropped here and there from others. > D) as others have been pointing out here, the similarities are so close > that it is even useful to apply cladistic methodology in the study of > historical linguistics. There are just enough similarities to allow this on a limited scale, but tree diagrams have difficulty expressing relationships within a dialect chain and cannot show features due to geographic proximity. > In other words, the two sets of phenomena are so extremely similar that it > is ineffective to try and treat them very differently. While there is similarity, there is no "extremely similar" here. 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 Feb 2 14:48:11 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 14:48:11 +0000 Subject: "is the same as" Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Stanley Friesen writes: [LT] >> At least in biology, such relations as "can interbreed with" or "cannot >> readily be distinguished by eye from" need not be transitive -- I agree. >> But by what right can we identify the relation "is the same as" with one of >> these? And what would be the point of doing this? > Because: > > A) language is a biological phenomenon, and behaves like other such. Not really. Our language faculty, in the view of most linguists, is part of our biology, but the language faculty is not the subject matter of historical linguistics: it is the same for everybody. Historical linguistics deals in the particularities of individual languages, and these are not biological in nature. Rather, they are largely social. And, *pace* Richard Dawkins, social phenomena do not behave like genes. > B) language differentiation acts *very* much like biological speciation, > except for happening much faster. "Very much" in some respects, but not in all. There are important differences. Biologists recognize a certain amount of gene transmission between species, but only within limits -- ignoring our own genetic engineering. But languages allow sideways transmission without limit. Note, for example, the enormous Latino-Romance influence upon the very distantly related English and upon the unrelated Basque. In biological terms, this is rather as though ostriches had received massive gene transfusions from tigers or starfish. > C) the 'mutual comprehensibility' definition of separate languages is > almost exactly equivalent to the biological species definition as a > criterion for recognizing species. Really? I doubt it. Mutual comprehensibility is a continuum ranging from 0% to 100%, with everything in between. It is also not fixed: with exposure, mutual comprehensibility can greatly increase. The same is not true of biological species. We do not find pairs of species which can interbreed only at the 86% level, or only at the 32% level. And chimps and gorillas do not become more inter-fertile by living alongside each other. > D) as others have been pointing out here, the similarities are so close > that it is even useful to apply cladistic methodology in the study of > historical linguistics. This has been widely done, and almost every possible parallel has been noted. See, for example, Roger Lass's latest book. But historical linguistics is still not biological taxonomy. > In other words, the two sets of phenomena are so extremely similar that it > is ineffective to try and treat them very differently. Sorry; I disagree strongly. The differences are large and important. Just to take an obvious example: what would you say was the linguistic equivalent of the biological gene? This strikes me as a pretty big difference. > [P.S. the salamander ring I mentioned is formally considered one species > for taxonomic purposes]. So it is. And a dialect continuum is sometimes treated as a single language for linguistic purposes. But the decision is largely arbitrary. Difficulties and all, biological species are a lot more real than are languages. [LT on the Romance dialect continuum] >> Indeed, and this is a common state of affairs. But how does this constitute >> an argument for treating "is the same as" as a non-transitive relation? >> Better, I suggest, to forget about this last relation altogether, and to >> speak instead of some more appropriate relation, such as "is readily >> mutually comprehensible with" -- which again I agree is not going to be >> transitive. > That is more or less what I *mean* by "the same as". Well, if that's all you mean by "is the same as", why not drop the vague wording and stick to the explicit one? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From sarima at friesen.net Wed Feb 2 02:35:43 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 18:35:43 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 11:58 PM 1/27/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >It does not matter if they occured otherwise. The question is WHEN they >occurred. None of this dates these changes back to PIE dispersal. The wheel >may have been introduced BEFORE PIE *k ==> Germanic 'h' occurred BUT >AFTER IE dispersal. In each individual case, yes. But by the time you add in ALL of the shared words for late Neolithic technology found in IE languages, you have almost all of the major sound changes represented. This puts the origin of these words back to a time when virtually *none* of sound changes had occurred. This is, by definition, prior to the loss of unity. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From Georg at home.ivm.de Wed Feb 2 17:30:48 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 18:30:48 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <008301bf6cc7$2fa1fc60$6a01703e@edsel> Message-ID: >BTW, I wonder if the Du. word for whirlpool, '(draai)kolk' has any >relationship with '*kwe(kw)los'. Dat kan niet, wegens Krimm's (;-) wet. "kolk" behoort bij "keel", en dat behoort bij Lat. /gula/, Russ. /glotat'/ etc. Groeten, St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Feb 2 16:24:28 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 16:24:28 +0000 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: Roz Frank writes: > Then does the IE model posit that PIE, understood here as an actual unified > linguistic system, was a linguistic isolate? It would seem that the model > would have to do this. No; certainly not. The recognition and reconstruction of PIE does not, in itself, carry any implications at all as to whether PIE did or did not have relatives. Likewise, the reconstruction of Proto-Celtic or of Proto-Germanic carries no such implications. In the case of Celtic and Germanic, it can be demonstrated that these families have discoverable relatives, including each other. In the case of PIE, it has not so far proved possible to identify any secure relatives among known families, though people keep trying, and maybe one day they'll succeed. > Otherwise one would be confronted with a simulation > of linguistic prehistory in which PIE could be viewed as merely one member > of a language family existing at that point in time. That is exactly what everyone believes. But it does not follow that any discoverable relatives of PIE survived long enough to be recorded. If they didn't, we're just out of luck, and our reconstruction can proceed no further back in time. > Stated differently, > although I haven't heard this point discussed on the list, a cladistic > model requires the end point to coincide with a linguistic system that is > viewed as a total linguistic isolate. No; certainly not. No one believes Proto-Celtic or Proto-Germanic to be an isolate. It's merely that the reconstruction of one of these generally pays no attention to anything outside the particular family being investigated. And the case is no different for PIE. > And even if PIE were posited as an > isolate, would one not have to propose that, nonetheless, the > proto-language, too, would have had the full characteristics of a human > language, with the likelihood of suppletions, irregularities and substrata. Of course, except that there is no particular reason to posit any significant substrate influences. > And I believe that it is this latter point that creates problems. How does > the model guarantee that the ultimate origin of the "common vocabulary" > should not be traced back, for example, to the substrata that PIE, if > understood as a natural language, must have had? The items assigned to PIE are the items that can be reconstructed for PIE. How they got into PIE in the first place is another matter. But, regardless of origin, if they were present in PIE, then they were part of PIE, and they were available to be continued into the several daughter branches. That's all that counts for the reconstruction. > Hence, are we to understand PIE as a convenient shorthand for a set of > sharted characteristics or as a term standing for a reified linguistic > system spoken in prehistory? The second. > And if it is understood as the second, > according to the model, how long did it just tread water? Stated > differently, if one chooses the second version, then one must ask how long > the unified (undifferentiated) linguistic system, as portrayed by the > reconstructions, go unchanged. It did not remain unchanged for even a single generation. Our version of the Uniformitarian Principle, a cornerstone of all scientific investigation, requires that ancient languages should not have been different from modern ones. Since all living and recorded languages are or were constantly changing, so were ancient ones, and so was PIE. > Languages do change. Are we to assume that > PIE was different? No; of course not. > It seems to me that this is a very slippery aspect of a > cladistic modeling of the data. It is not. Remember, what we are reconstructing is the proto-language *at the last moment* at which it was still a more-or-less unified system, just before it began breaking up. The earlier changes which had doubtless occurred within the ancestral stages of PIE cannot be identified by comparative reconstruction, at least not without some secure relatives of PIE -- which we don't have. But it is possible in principle to reconstruct back further within PIE by using another method: internal reconstruction. And precisely this has been attempted by some specialists, perhaps most notably by W. P. Lehmann, who believes that he can identify at least one, maybe two, significantly earlier stages ancestral to the PIE that we reconstruct by the comparative method. > On the other hand, if we choose the first alternative, that PIE is a > convenient shorthand, it acts like a frame in a moving picture: a > convenient way of portraying a stop-action of events that are otherwise > inevitably in motion. That is exactly how we see it, but within the second alternative. > And as an aside, are there explict criteria set forth that determine > which items are most representative. I'm speaking of crtieria along the > lines of those that have been suggested by Larry Trask (and debated by > many) concerning the selection of items in Pre-Basque. But the two cases are very different. We have lots of IE languages, and so our main tool is the comparative method here. But Basque is isolated, and so the comparative method is of minimal use, and only internal reconstruction is available. Hence different criteria are appropriate in the two cases. > I would be most > interested in knowing if such criteria have been debated and/or laid out > explicitly at some point in the past. For example, how many language groups > must the item be attested in for it to quality? I assume, for example, that > identifying cognates/reflexes of the same item in Sanskrit and Celtic would > be sufficient for the item to qualify? Or is the bar set higher for these > PIE items, e.g., that the item must be attested in Sanskrit, Germanic and > Celtic or Hittite, Slavic and Romance, etc. There is no unchallengeable answer to this question. By Meillet's Principle, we require cognates in at least three branches of IE before we can reconstruct an etymon for PIE. But this is only a rule of thumb, and skilful specialists need not adhere to it slavishly. > For example, just glancing over the entries in Buck, it would seem that > there isn't as much uniformity for "wheel" across IE languages, as there is > for, say, "cart" which shows up most IE languages (obviously with the help > of Latin). But loan words don't count for the purpose of reconstruction. If an identifiable Celtic word is borrowed into Latin, from where it descends into the Romance languages and is borrowed into Germanic and elsewhere, it is still only the Celtic word which counts. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From alderson at netcom.com Wed Feb 2 21:32:41 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 13:32:41 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.20000131203549.006d8460@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu> (message from roslyn frank on Mon, 31 Jan 2000 20:51:19 -0600) Message-ID: Roz Frank wrote: > Then does the IE model posit that PIE, understood here as an actual unified > linguistic system, was a linguistic isolate? It would seem that the model > would have to do this. Not so much "posit" as "treat": With very few exceptions, the first 175 years or so of Indo-European linguistics held as a tenet that while PIE probably had relatives, we didn't know enough about PIE (yet) to give the question further consideration. > And even if PIE were posited as an isolate, would one not have to propose > that, nonetheless, the proto-language, too, would have had the full > characteristics of a human language, with the likelihood of suppletions, > irregularities and substrata. Of course. We have always recognized (i. e., I was taught as an undergrad ;-) that our information about PIE will always be incomplete, since methods such as internal reconstruction smooth away irregularities, as do natural processes like paradigmatic re-modeling (which can get rid of suppletions altogether). We know that there were suppletive verb paradigms in the language--some have survived into modern languages like English and Spanish. All of these teachings assume that nothing like Nostratic will ever be workably reconstructed to the degree that PIE has been, and tacitly urge that until such material *is* available, we needn't look at it at all. > How does the model guarantee that the ultimate origin of the "common > vocabulary" should not be traced back, for example, to the substrata that > PIE, if understood as a natural language, must have had? The model does not even address this question: PIE is defined as what we can reconstruct by the comparative method alone. Anything else, whether achieved by internal reconstruction or lexical inspection, is assigned to a nebulous past by calling it "pre-(P)IE", or is assigned to borrowing from a known external source. > ... are we to understand PIE as a convenient shorthand for a set of sharted > characteristics or as a term standing for a reified linguistic system spoken > in prehistory? And if it is understood as the second, according to the model, > how long did it just tread water? Stated differently, if one chooses the > second version, then one must ask how long the unified (undifferentiated) > linguistic system, as portrayed by the reconstructions, go unchanged. > Languages do change. Are we to assume that PIE was different? Coming out of the comparative method, it's "a convenient shorthand". Viewing it as "a reified linguistic system spoken in prehistory" is an interpretation of that shorthand, and an ill-advised one at that. We can assign some relative timelines to our reconstructions (e. g., "thematic stem formations are late"), but we should not allow ourselves to believe everything we can reconstruct from the data in the daughter languages, or by internal reconstruction on those results, ever formed a single coherent language at a single point in time. NB: I certainly am not denying that such a language existed, as some have been led to do (like Trubetzkoy and Boas), only that what we reconstruct represents accurately and completely any single stage thereof. Rich Alderson From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Feb 2 23:52:14 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 00:52:14 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <008301bf6cc7$2fa1fc60$6a01703e@edsel> Message-ID: "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >They aren't: Actually, basically three different, and very ordinary, words >that probably exist (I mean words with these meanings) in any language. As I >said before: all these words seem to have had different original meanings >(*kwekwlo/'round, circle', *rotho/'revolve', The primary meaning of *ret(h)-/*rot(h)- is apparently "to run". >BTW, I wonder if the Du. word for whirlpool, '(draai)kolk' has any >relationship with '*kwe(kw)los'. Surely not. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Tue Feb 1 19:19:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 19:19:00 GMT Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] JS>Observers as late as the 4th century CE said that the Gallic-Celtic of JS>Lyon, in the Rhone valley, was mutually comprehensible with that of the JS>Galatians of Anatolia (who arrived from the Balkans about 270 BCE). .. "mutually comprehensible" here should be seen quite relative. I remember a parallel: Most scholars would regard the branches of Turcic as different languages, wouldn't they? In spite of that, in a recent TV-film, a native speaker of Turcish presented himself talking to people of different Turcic languages (e.g. Uighur) on a bus-tour in central Asia with only little difficulties. But that seemed to be a very rudimental 'small' talk. And in such a sense the above cited "observer" could (should?) be understood. JS>This requires either no change, or perfectly synchronized change, in pre- JS>Celtic across thousands of miles, ... .. I propose "little change". And there are much more examples. JS>, ... for 4000 years. Which is in blatant violation of everything we know JS>about languages and how they develop. .. Is it? This is an IE group, but if we take a look beyond our IE nose, e.g. to Australia, we find about 70 % covered by speakers of Pama-Nyungan, the languages/dialects of which are regarded as very closely related. And archeologists now redate the first settlements back to more than 50.000 years (for a up-to-date overview see Stringer in Antiquity 73/99:876). Of course these must not be the direct predecessors of Pama-Nyungan. Back to IE: Renfrew's farmers in Ireland must not have been direct predecessors of Gaelic speakers, at least their language must not at all have been a predecessor. Mit freundlichen Gr??en Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover Tel=FAX x49-511-9585714. From strand at sedona.net Thu Feb 3 10:36:02 2000 From: strand at sedona.net (Richard F.Strand) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 05:36:02 -0500 Subject: Indo-Iranian Message-ID: >Rick Mc Callister inquired: > Why does Old Persian look as far removed [or more] from Avestan as >any of the others? What's the time difference? Is the difference between >Avestan and Old Persian as great as the chart would indicate? Old Persian is not so far out if you consider the evolution of IE palatals in Early Iranian to have proceeded through a dentalization process: k' > c > ts g' > j > dz The dental affricate stage persists in the Nuristani branch of Indo-Iranian, as discussed on my website (http://users.sedona.net/~strand/Nuristani/nuristanis.html). Subsequently, affrication was lost in most Iranian regions, with the dentalized affricates becoming /s/ and /z/; but Old Persian retained the dentalization while deaffricating /ts/ > /th/ and /dz/ > /d/. As to the time difference, inscriptional Old Persian dates from ca. 521 BC. Avestan has been traditionally dated from the 6th Century BC, but Burrow has argued for a date up to 500 years earlier. Richard Strand Richard Strand's Nuristan Site http://users.sedona.net/~strand From Georg at home.ivm.de Wed Feb 2 10:25:19 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 11:25:19 +0100 Subject: Indo-Iranian In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Looking at Watkins's chart of correspondences >IE Sanskrit Avestan Old Persian OCS Lithuanian >k s' s th s s >kw k/c k/c k k/c^/c k >g j z/g g/d z z >gw g/j g/j g/j g/z^/z g >gh h g/z g/d z z >gwh gh/h g/j g/j g/z^/z g > Why does Old Persian look as far removed [or more] from Avestan as >any of the others? Well, it's of course a different language ;-) I don't think the differences as evidenced by this list of correspondences are very dramatic. We have a secondary development s > th here (of course, it seems logically possible that Avestan went through an intermediate stage *k' > th > s, in which case the Old Persian stage would be a bit more archaic; I don't see at the moment how to decide this). With the labiovelars, Watkins' list shows k/c for Awestan (with /c/ as the result of the Law of the Palatals), but only /k/ for Old Persian. Well, this doesn't seem correct to me (and I can't tell from here whether the fault is really Watkins'), viz.: -ca: < *-kwe, -ciy < *kwid, shiya:ta "happy" < *kwje:tos (rules: kwe > ca, kwi > ci, kwj [or better: kwi _V] > shiy; so no real difference here. g' > d is indeed peculiar for Persian. On the whole, I don't find these differences, and others holding between OP and Aw. really drastic, but of course, they are different languages. > What's the time difference? Hard to say. The Achaemenid inscriptions are easily datable, they fall mostly in the 6th/5th centuries B.C. Traditional datings of Zarathushtra put him in the same time (mostly as a contemporary of Dareios I., but this has been challenged, lately by Mary Boyce, who assigned him a date considerably earlier on the time-scale (at least half a century up). More important than the time difference is, I think, a difference in location. Wile OP is essentially the dialect of Fars in SW Iran (with a smattering of Median influence, which language centered around the location of present-day Teheran), the dialectal basis of Avestan is considerably further in the East. Whether Avestan may already be classified as "Eastern Iranian" is a matter of debate, for some researchers the distinction between E and W Ir. begins to make sense only in Middle Iranian times; but, then, few will take issue with OP being called "Old (South) West Iranian"; quite naturally, then, Aw. would have to be called "Old E Ir.", but the snag is that it would be "East Iranian" without distinctive East Iranian features. Geographically, at least, it can be roughly located in the regions of Bactria, Mawarannahr (= Central Asian "Mesopotamia"), i.e. Northern Afghanistan, Southern Uzbekistan in modern terms. But the figure of Zarathushtra and the events of his religious revolution are quite elusive and have not been pinned down by historians with last certainty. I leave the rest to the experts. >Is the difference between >Avestan and Old Persian as great as the chart would indicate? Gut feeling: no. If you read texts in both languages you'll always "feel" them being quite closely related languages, what you've learned in the OP class, will help you in the Avestan class, and vice versa. Avestan has the reputation of being one of the "hardest" older IE languages to master, but this - at least for the Gatha dialect - is imho more due to the arcane contents of the texts, the proper understanding of which demands an intimate knowledge of Zarathustrian religion and its peculiar system of religious semantics, something few people can boast to have. OP texts, othoh, are more of the "I am the greatest and if you dare stand up against me I will smite you, some day XY tried and I smote him"-type, that's why they are preferred in beginners' classes (it's like Julius Caesar, who "simply cannot have been a great man, since he wrote only for beginners' Latin classes", as a popular saying has it here). Old Persian is, due to the limited number and stereotypical content of its extant texts, also more defectively preserved, so a good deal of its morphology is simply unknown (e.g. only one verb is attested in the optative and only one in the perfect; incidentally, both verbal categories are attested in one and the same hapax legomenon etc.). St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From jer at cphling.dk Wed Feb 2 15:39:18 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 16:39:18 +0100 Subject: Indo-Iranian In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 29 Jan 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Looking at Watkins's chart of correspondences > IE Sanskrit Avestan Old Persian OCS Lithuanian > k s' s th s s > kw k/c k/c k k/c^/c k > g j z/g g/d z z > gw g/j g/j g/j g/z^/z g > gh h g/z g/d z z > gwh gh/h g/j g/j g/z^/z g > Why does Old Persian look as far removed [or more] from Avestan as > any of the others? What's the time difference? Is the difference between > Avestan and Old Persian as great as the chart would indicate? First, the chart is not accurate, probably due to inaccurate copying (I don't know the exact source). In the IE column, kw, gw, gwh are obviously meant to include also plain velars (i.e. non-palatal k, g, gh), while the "IE k, g, gh" of the chart stand for palatals only. Second, some haceks are missing in the Lithuanian part of the chart (and of course understood in Sanskrit, Av., OP where "c, j" are traditional notations of c^, j^). It should be: > IE Sanskrit Avestan Old Persian OCS Lithuanian > k^ s' s th s s^ > k/kw k/c k/c k/c k/c^/c k > g^ j z d z z^ > g/gw g/j g/j g/j g/z^/z g > g^h h z d z z^ > gh/gwh gh/h g/j g/j g/z^/z g Thus, as regards palatalization (th alternative options following the slants), the two Old Iranian languages behave the same, and just like Sanskrit. The only difference between Avestan and Old Persian is now in the phonetics of the old palatals. It is known that the Proto-Iranian pronunciation of the old palatals was that of dental affricates [ts], [dz], because (1) there are loanwords in Tocharian and Armenian that retain this form, (2) inherited *-ts- comes out the same (Skt. matsya- 'fish' : Av. masiia- : OP unattested *mathiya- behind Mod.Pers. mahi:g), (3) the Iranian dialect distribution of zasta-/dasta- 'hand' shows d- in dialects that otherwise have z-, this being interpreted to represent a dissimilated reflex of Proto-Iranian [dzasta-] with loss of the first sibilant prior to the change of dz to z (Klingenschmitt's observation). Thus, the Avestan (and "Medic") developments ts > s and dz > z are as in French (Lat. palatalized c > OFr. [ts] > Mod.Fr. [s]), or Greek or Latin (nepo:s from *nepo:t-s), while the Old Persian ts > th is as in Spanish (and Albanian). The sibilant release of the old palatal was assimilated to the dental more and more, giving a change from ts' to ts and further to tth (i.e. stop t + fricative th, all within the duration of the old palatal), the final step being loss of the occlusion whereby ts became s, and tth became th. The voiced palatal must have a similar history: dz' > PIran. dz > Av. (etc.) z, pre-OPers. ddh (stop d + spirant dh release) > plain spirant dh > stop d (or ddh > d directly?). Thus the Avestan and Old Persians reflexes are straightforward further developments of the same Proto-Iranian stage. In most other respects, Old Persian is so plainly a close relative of Avestan that this has never been questioned, and indeed cannot seriously be. The Indic development, then, cannot represent the Proto-Indo-Iranian pronunciation unchanged. The palatal s' must have had some occlusion in PII, since there is still some in PIran. [ts], so this phoneme will have to be posited as [ts'] for PII; in parallel fashion, the reflex of IE *g^ (which has retained its occlusion in Indic j) must be PII [dz'], and its aspirated counterpart [dz'h]. In Iranian the aspiration was conbsistently lost in voiced consonants, so that both of these became [dz] (> z/d), while the late palatals j^ and j^h (i.e. [dz^h]) fell together as j^ (conventional notation j). In Indic the voiced assibilated affricates lost their buccal traits and simply gave a voiced [h]. The Proto-Indo-Iranian phonetic values of the IE palatals thus were [ts'], [dz'], [dz'h], or, in a simpler notation *c', *j', *j'h with an acute accent on the affricate to indicate prepalatal position (as opposed to the hacek on *c^, *j^, *j^h denoting a more central palatal position of the younger palatals). It appears that the IIr. occlusion of the old palatals is also retained in the Finno-Ugric renditions of the oldest loanwords that have been taken from a prestage of the Indo-Iranian protolanguage. Jens From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Wed Feb 2 21:38:46 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 15:38:46 -0600 Subject: Address for John Robb Message-ID: Would anyone on the list know the whereabouts of John Robb? I'm trying to locate an email and snail mail address for him. In the early '90s he was at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Just for the record he wrote two articles that I found quite original: "Random causes with directed effects: the Indo-European language spread and the stochastic loss of lineages" in Antiquity 65 (1991):287-91 and "A Social prehistory of European languages" in Antiquity 67 (1991):747-60. Thanks in advance, Roz From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Feb 2 14:30:19 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 14:30:19 +0000 Subject: SV: Indo-Hittite Message-ID: Stanley Friesen writes: > So far the "cladistic linguistics" I have seen has fallen far short of what > biologists do - many of the solutions to statistical issues that biologists > have come up with are not applied. But our problems are not identical to those of the biologists, and their solutions do not necessarily work for us. For one thing, the biologists have a lot more material to work with than we do. They have genes, but we don't. They have fossils, but we mostly don't. It is, in my view, an error to assume that comparative linguistics is isomorphic to biological taxonomy, and that what is true or successful in one field must be true or successful in the other. As for statistical (probabilistic) approaches, some linguists have been trying very hard to develop these, but the difficulties are considerable, indeed almost refractory, and so far no one has been able to come up with a probabilistic approach which can be regarded as generally satisfactory. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From pie at AN3039.spb.edu Wed Feb 2 15:58:26 2000 From: pie at AN3039.spb.edu (Alex Nikolaev) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 18:58:26 +0300 Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? In-Reply-To: ; from "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" at Jan 29, 100 2:52 Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote > Sean Crist wrote: >> To answer a few of the other points you bring up: >> -You suggest that Gmc /g/ could be the reflex of a laryngeal in ge-. In >> cases where we're lucky enough to have evidence from the other branches >> for a word-initial laryngeal, Germanic uniformly has zero (minus a very >> technical point regarding the development of the Gmc strong verb classes >> which isn't relevant here). If a laryngeal developed into Gmc */g/ in >> this case, it would be the only such case we have, and it would be >> inconsistent with all of the other Gmc words descending from a PIE word >> with an initial laryngeal. > There are a few cases where a non-word-initial laryngeal seems to > appear in Germanic as a velar stop (e.g. quick < *gwiH3wos), but > the result is always /k/, not /g/. There is a possibility, that the velar reflex of the laryngeal in this word may owe its existence to the assimilation with the initial labiovelar (note, that it's most likely for H3 to have had a labial appendix), thus IE *gwiH3-wo-s > Germanic kwikwaz. Then it's not directly PIE -H- > Germanic -k-. One could recall the Sapir-Martinet's "contiguous H's" (of the type costa/osteon, halina/gloios) to tie together lat. c-, p.-germ. g- and greek e-, but i know of no cases, where the *first* H were involved in this kind of "hardening". Best wishes, Alex From jrader at m-w.com Wed Feb 2 15:12:51 2000 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 15:12:51 +0000 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: I believe several scholars have claimed that the preverb in Old Irish, which is obligatory with the imperfect indicative, the secondary future, and the past subjunctive, is a functional replacement of the augment. Of course, etymologically is clearly unrelated to the Greek and Indo-Iranian morpheme, and it has other functions in Old Irish, serving as a semantically empty preverb to which infixed personal pronouns and relative markers are appended. Jim Rader > I remember a post from J. E. Rasmussen in a previous incarnation of this > list arguing that the augment has left traces outside Greek, Armenian > and Indo-Iranian. I don't remember the details and though I think that I > archived the message, I can't find it. >[Vidhyanath Rao] From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Feb 2 23:43:37 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 00:43:37 +0100 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) In-Reply-To: <00a001bf6ca3$45316f80$9471fe8c@lucent.com> Message-ID: "Vidhyanath Rao" wrote: >There is an interesting typological problem here. According to Bybee et >al (The evolution of grammar), unmarked past vs marked present is >unknown in extant languages. This makes the usual classification of >forms in Hittite (and PIE) quite unusual. I remember asking about this >before. Miguel suggested Akkadian as another such example, quoting >Lipinski to argue that iprus was preterite, iparras was present. But in >`Outline', Lipinski explicitely assigns iparras to imperfective (putting >present-future in quotation marks). So the anamoly still unexplained. Still, the unmarked form is a simple past, while the marked forms are the imperfective ("durative", "present-future") with geminated C2, and the perfect (CtCC [iptaras], with infix -t-). Such a system is potentially very close to one with unmarked past vs. marked present (all it takes is the loss of the perfect). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Wed Feb 2 20:18:33 2000 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 14:18:33 -0600 Subject: NW vs. E Gmc Message-ID: >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Sean Crist" >Sent: Friday, January 28, 2000 4:08 PM >>> The Gothic passive (actually, a PIE middle formation) has West >>> Germanic parallels, such as OE _ha:tte_ 'is named' (cf. Gothic >>> _haitada_), contrasting with active _ha:tT_ (T = thorn) 'calls' >>> (Gothic. _haitiT_). >[Ed Selleslagh] >In Du. 'heten' and Ger. 'heissen' (Eng. be called, named, bear a name, Fr. >s'appeler) the verb seems active, intransitive, but in Du. the past participle >'geheten' has a transitive meaning, or a passive one (called so and so by >somebody else, having received a name). This is rather confusing to me : could >you clarify? Since Sean Crist was quoting me, perhaps I had better clarify. In (at least) German and Dutch, the meanings which once required passsive morphology with _heissen/heten_ no longer do. Thus we find Er hat Meyer geheissen. 'His name was Meyer.' (Active, or rather, unspecified morphology; clearly intransitive. Patient ["theme"] "Case Frame", to use a useful expression from Case Grammar.) Er hat mich einen Dummkopf geheissen. 'He called me an idiot.' (Same morphology, transitive construction because of the Agent-Patient "case Frame".) >> It's true that an old passive form is fossilized here, but the speakers of >> OE and OHG almost certainly considered this word to be a separate lexical >> item in its own right. A similar case: most speakers of modern English >> probably consider "forlorn" a separate lexical item and are completely >> unaware that the word contains a fossilized old past participle of "lose". One could also cite _born_, kept distince even in spelling from _borne_, the normal participle of _bear_. Leo Connolly Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at memphis.edu University of Memphis From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Feb 2 23:17:11 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 00:17:11 +0100 Subject: NE Germanic In-Reply-To: <000701bf6cb1$1357de00$c1c407c6@oemcomputer> Message-ID: "Steve Gustafson" wrote: >Stanley Friesen writes: >> From a different direction, the most believable derivations of the *name* >> "Goth" link it with "Gotaland" in Sweden and/or the island "Gotland". >> This suggests a northern origin for the tribe. >My further understanding is that the name of -Gdansk- in Poland represents >*gudaniska, which looks Germanic, and suggests a Gothic connection on the >south shore of the Baltic. Or even better, *gUtaniskU (with g(U)t > gd). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Feb 2 19:37:17 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 19:37:17 -0000 Subject: Horses Message-ID: Dear Miguel and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2000 7:44 PM > Stefan Georg wrote: >> That's Sumerian, and not Anatolian. (aside: the genitive morpheme is .A >> only; the writing .RA has been used by specialists to argue that this term >> is not really Sumerian, but pseudo-Sumerian invented by Akkadian-speaking >> scribes. I'd be grateful if some specialist could confirm/debunk this). [MCV] > If I look at Thomsen's Sumerian quotes (e.g. from the Gudea > inscriptions), I see many cases of this kind of spelling (e.g. > Gudea cyl. A XX 23: {d}A.nun.na "Anuna Gods", i.e. "seed" () > "of the prince" () > Recently on the ANE list, Bob Whiting ("Re: ANE Horses in North > Syria") wrote that the Sumerian word for "horse" was *, > written descriptively (not phonetically) as > "foreign equid/donkey". [PR] In this connection, one might want to notice Egyptian s(j)s(j), 'hurry', and ssm, 'horse'; could these be connected with IE *se:i-, 'throw'? 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 alderson at netcom.com Thu Feb 3 01:47:32 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 17:47:32 -0800 Subject: Horses in War In-Reply-To: <35.ca93b7.25c82fd8@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: Steve Long wrote: > the chariot's other best function appears to be mounted infantry - as it > appears in Homer - so that it acted as transport like APCs but not in combat I thought we had had this part of the discussion already. By Homer's time, chariots had been out of use in Greek warfare for centuries; it is clear that, other than traditional vocabulary, he has no idea how they really worked, and describes their use as if they were cavalry horses, doing things no chariot every did (leaping ditches, forsooth!). On chariots, Homer is colorful but completely unreliable. Rich Alderson From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Wed Feb 2 02:39:48 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 20:39:48 -0600 Subject: Basque butterflies (and phonemes) again Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] At 05:12 PM 1/24/00 +0000, Larry Trask wrote: [LT] >In Hualde's alternative view, initial */b d g/ in Pre-Basque had facultative >voicing: that is, they could be realized, indifferently, either as [b d g] or >as [p t k] -- "indifferently", because there was no contrast of voicing in >word-initial plosives in Pre-Basque. So far, this view is not significantly >different from M's view, but now comes the difference. Hualde proposes that, >because of this facultative voicing, Pre-Basque word-initial */b d g/ >sometimes develop into modern /b d g/ but sometimes into modern /p t k/. In >other words, he reckons, one or the other voicing possibility was selected >arbitrarily for each word, with some words receiving both treatments in >different parts of the country. Larry, what you describe Hualde as proposing doesn't seem to coincide with the contents of the paper that I read. As you may recall, the last time you paraphrased Hualde's position, saying that he argued that Pre-Basque had facultative voicing, Hualde himself wrote a response to the list. Yet I notice that you are repeating the same thing again here. So I'm confused. Here is the rrelevant passage from an earlier exchange between the two of us that you sent to the list on Mon. 13 Sept 1999. I had already read Hualde's book on Basque phonology and I was asking you to clarify what you meant when you presented Hualde's position as one of believing that the voicing of initial plosives was "facultative". > [LT] >> Hualde has since developed his position in an article. In fact, he does >> not challenge Michelena's reconstructed phoneme system at all. Rather, >> he proposes to assign different phonetic features to the proto-phonemes. >> In particular, while he agrees with Michelena that Pre-Basque had no >> voicing contrasts in word-initial plosives, he believes that the voicing >> of initial plosives was facultative, rather than phonetically >> consistent. [RF] > Could you explain a bit more what is meant by the term "facultative" as > opposed to "phonetically consistent" by giving a few examples? LT] Well, facultative variation is free variation: a speaker may choose either variant freely, and it makes no difference. Michelena's reconstructed Pre-Basque plosive system is */(p) t k b d g/, where the symbols should not be taken too literally: they are chosen to represent the usual modern reflexes of the segments. (Note that */p/ was rare at best.) The two series, "fortis" */p t k/ and "lenis" */b d g/, contrasted only word-medially and mostly only intervocalically. Elsewhere the contrast was neutralized, and word-initially only the lenis plosives appeared. In M's view, lenis */b d g/ have generally developed into modern /b d g/, and hence ancient words generally do not begin with any of /p t k/ (from */p t k/), unless some identifiable process has intervened to bring about such a result. But Hualde's view is that word-initial */b d g/ were facultatively voiced: that is, speakers sometimes realized them as voiced [b d g], but at other times as voiceless [p t k], in an indifferent manner. ****************** And in response to LT's statements cited above Hualde sent the following to the list on Mon 16 1999: [JIH] Good morning everyone. I hope I am allowed to post this message, even though I am not a member of this list. Dale Hartkemeyer has forwarded me two or three recent messages regarding the ancient Basque plosives and I would like to be given the opportunity to clarify my position, since it has been the subject of some exchanges. The problem of the ancient Basque plosves, as stated by Martinet and others before him, can be summarized as follows: " How come Basque, which has a robust opposition between voiceless and voiced oral stops in intervocalic position, shows a much weaker contrast in word-initial position?" From Martinet's structuralist standpoint this is a problem because the word-initial position is supposed to be the one where the greatest number of contrasts is found in any language. To solve this problem, Martinet made up a story that has to do with an ancient contrast between fortis and lenis stops which was later somehow replaced by the modern voiced/voiceless contrast. Michelena adopts a version of this hypothesis, which has become the standard account. My view is different. Basque differs from most languages presenting assimilation in voice across morpheme- and word-boundaries in that it is the morpheme- or word-initial consonant that assimilates to the preceding morpheme- or word-final one, instead of the other way round. So in Basque /s+d/ becomes [st], etc., whereas in, say, Spanish, /s+d/ becomes [zd]. E.g. the initial /d/ of "s/he is coming" becomes /t/ in [estator] "s/he is not coming", [menditi(k)tator] "s/he is coming from the mountain", etc. Or, to give you another example, whereas "head"starts with a /b/, the same morpheme starts with /p/ in, say, [ajspuru] "stone head". Nowadays, there is little chance that Basque speakers will identify initial [p] and [b] as allophonic variants, bacause of (a) their familiarity with Spanish or French and (b) because the assimilation rule tends to apply only in restricted phrasal contexts. BUT assuming that this assimilation applied more frequently in the past (as Michelena also assumes) it stands to reason that if and , and , and so on for lots of plosive-initial words, are variants of the same word in different phonological context, this would inevitably lead towards a merger of the voiced and voiceless oral stops in morpheme- and word-initial position (where the alternation is found) but not morpheme-internally. End of the story. The more complicated Martinet-Michelena hypothesis (which in addition requires an unexplained transformation from ancient to modern Basque) is, in my view, simply not needed and has no serious evidence in its favor. Thanks for allowing me to clarify my position. **************** Are we talking about a terminological problem? I mean when you use the term "facultative" does it correspond to what Hualde describes. In other words, does the following sentence by you mean the same thing or infer the same thing that Hualde has stated? >Pre-Basque had facultative voicing: that is, they could be realized, >indifferently, either as [b d g] or as [p t k] -- "indifferently", Stated differently, and please excuse me if I'm being obtuse, can the terms "facultative" and "indifferently" be used to refer to a situation in which the voicing is conditioned by certain phonological constraints, i.e., that the voicing was phonological consistent when those constraints were present. Could it be that you are saying the same thing as Hualde but I don't understand the terminology that you are using. Confused, Roz From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Feb 2 12:36:45 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 12:36:45 +0000 Subject: Basque butterflies again (again) Message-ID: Roz Frank writes: [on my objections to Lloyd Anderson's attempts at seeing certain Basque words for 'butterfly' as ancient] > Well I guess that one can draw quite different inferences/conclusions from > the same data. The point I tried to make throughout my previous discussion > was precisely the opposite of "the lesson" that Larry drew from it, namely, > that the referentiality of the items discussed was, indeed, motivated. > Hence, if has a clear etymology, it does not follow that to > use the same term in a compound to refer to a butterfly, a daisy and a > poppy would demonstrate "multiple unrelated senses" for an individual > formation, quite the opposite, for the three objects would be projected as > analogically similar; metaphorically the same, if you wish. To refer to a > colorful flower fluttering in the wind and a colorful butterfly with the > same term isn't any less motivated, in my opinion, than referring to the > front end of a rocket as a 'nose-cone', or to a kite as a 'cerf-volant'. > It's simply a demonstration of the capacity homo sapiens sapiens have for > analogical thinking (cf. Lakoff, Turner, Johnson, et. al.) Oh, I agree that this *might* be so in particular cases. But it does not appear to be generally true in Basque. A particular expressive formation sometimes has such a diverse array of senses that a common semantic thread is, at best, extremely elusive. > What is less clear, however, is how one ought to go about explaining the > etymology of the second element *<-leta>, assuming, of course, that it is, > indeed, derived from what was once a meaningful suffixing element in the > language, perhaps a compound one (as opposed to being merely an > "expressive" ending). If you look at the full panoply of formations, I think you'll find that all those final elements like <-leta>, <-lota>, <-papa>, <-dola>, and so on are one-offs. They do not recur in multiple formations, and hence they are best regarded as meaningless (non-morphological) elements selected purely for their agreeable sound. > To examine the question in depth, one would need a > listing of all words in Basque ending in *<-leta> and then, after examining > them, attempt to see whether any sort of a pattern of meaning could be > detected, particularly if one were to view *<-leta> as a compound suffix. Are there any others? I can't think of any. I exclude, of course, cases like the surname , in which the /l/ is clearly part of the stem (here 'wide'), and the final part is merely the familiar suffix <-eta>. > Today there is no evidence in Basque for a productive suffix in *<-leta>, > as Larry has rightfully pointed out. However, if *<-leta> is viewed as a > compound suffix in *<-le-eta> things begin to look rather different. This > approach to the data would posit *<-le-eta> as a compound suffix that was > once productive in the language but no longer is and, hence, it is > encountered only as a fossilized suffix in compounds such as *. "Compounds such as"? Can you think of any others? > In favor of this thesis/hypothesis one could muster the following facts. > First, it should be noted that <-eta> itself is not in any way an uncommon > suffix in Basque where it confers the notion of a "collective" or "abstract > extension" to the root-stem (e.g., 'thief, to thieve' becomes > 'theft; the act of thieving' [and, yes, <-eta> has a variant in > <(k)-eta>). It shows up in compounds that are a bit harder to translate > into English, e.g., (sg.) '(processes involved in) thought, > thinking, desiring, remembering', from 'memory, desire, > consciousness, thought'. In the notion is conceptualized > in terms of an "abstract extension" of , i.e., an abstraction or > concept derived from the meaning of the root-stem. At other times <-eta> > appears to refer to the place where X or an abundance of X is found, > 'a place characterized by hawthorns, a hawthorn grove'. Agreed. But the evidence points pretty strongly to the conclusion that the collective sense was the earliest sense in Basque. And most specialists believe, or suspect, that this <-eta> is borrowed from the Latin collective suffix <-eta>, itself the direct source of the Spanish collective suffix <-eda>, as in 'chestnut grove' and 'poplar grove'. > Furthermore as Larry and others have pointed out, the same suffix of <-eta> > is used as the marker of grammatical plurality in the oblique cases. An identical marker. I myself believe it is the same suffix, and at least some of my colleagues agree, though I don't know if all do. > Indeed, this along with other aspects of <-eta> suggest that it existed in > the language before the system acquired the concept of singular/plural > contrast which is now has. This was my own suggestion a few years ago, though more specifically I suggested that this <-eta> was used to construct plural forms for the local cases, after a plural had been created otherwise for the grammatical cases. > The evidence suggests that previously this > suffix had a slightly different function in the noun phrase (or lexical > chain) than it does today. More work needs to be done on Basque along the > lines of what Lucy (1992) did for Yucatec Mayan since in Basque the marking > for number (as singular and plural) appears to be a relatively recent I agree, though I don't know how many of my colleagues agree. > and > not fully consolidated phenomenon as demonstrated by certain aspects of the > morpho-syntactic structure of the language, e.g., <-eta> as a suffixing > element still crops up with its older meaning and it has even been > suggested that in its modern meaning of 'and' is etymologically > linked to the same entity. Possibly, but I find this idea a bit hard to swallow. Not impossible, though. > For example, today it is not particularly > unusual to find a sentence in a novel or book of essays that begins with > (or 'Mikel-eta') and this expression is understood to refer to > 'Michael and (the rest)' or it might be glossed as 'the collection of > Michael'; as 'Michael in his extended form'. It's not all that easy to > render the Basque meaning into English. Stated differently, there is every > reason to believe that the suffix <-eta> shouldn't be considered the new > kid on the block, rather it would seem that it dates back to > morpho-syntactic structures found in Pre-Basque. Not if it's borrowed from Latin, which it very likely is. After all, Basque has borrowed lots of word-forming suffixes from Latin and Romance. > And in the case of <-le>, it, too, is quite common in Basque being an > agentive suffix (does it have another name?), 'Agentive' is correct: it derives an agent noun from a verb-stem -- though normally only from verb-stems of a certain class: those containing the prefix * in their non-finite forms. > regularly used with verbal > stems to refer to 'actors', e.g., from the non-finite verbal form 'to see', one constructs 'spectator'; it can also be added to > non-verbal stems where the compound takes on the same meaning, i.e., of an > 'agent' or 'actor', even when the compound refers to a non-animate entity. Sorry; I don't follow. I don't think <-le> is ever added to anything but a verbal stem, except in a couple of ill-formed neologisms. > For instance, from the same root-stem, i.e., based in turn on > a palatalized form of , we have 'that which lights, > animates, illuminates, enlivens, brings to life; brings about conception' > (Azkue II, 174) where demonstrates a totally normal compounding > process. Well, no. First, this isn't a compound, but a derivative. Second, it is far from being totally regular, since a <-tu> class verb like cannot normally take the suffix <-le>: it "should" take the other agent suffix. This is recorded by Azkue only for Lapurdian and High Navarrese, where it competes with the regular derivative . I don't have a date of first attestation, so I don't know how old it is, but I suspect not very. > Also, it is clearly related to 'to live; to be alive', Well, no; I can't agree. The word is not a verb, but only a noun meaning 'life' or an adjective meaning 'alive'. You can only obtain a verb from it by applying a suitable derivational process. One derivative is the compound intransitive verb 'live', 'be alive', 'dwell', with the auxiliary 'be'. Another is the transitive verb ~ 'light, kindle, ignite', 'animate', with the verb-forming suffix <-tu>. > e.g., we have examples of and even one document, Leizarraga's > translation of the New Testament, in which appears (cf. Agud & > Tovar III, 147). Again, there is no reason to assume that <-le> is a recent > addition to the language. Agreed. It shows every sign of being ancient. > Compounds, such as are of interest for another reason since they > show that non-finite verbs such as can be utilized to form new verbs > by the addition of the verbalizing suffix <-tu>. No; I'm sorry, but is not a verb. You can't add <-tu> to a verb to obtain another verb. You can add <-tu> to almost anything else -- noun, adjective, adverb -- but not to a verb. > In the case of , > the final /i/ is lost in the compound. Derivative. And, yes, this loss of /i/ is regular. > And as we have seen, the palatalized > form of went on to become a free-standing form, i.e., , > at least that is a relatively standard interpretation of events. Yes, but was a free form to begin with. > That means > a non-finite verb in produced a free-standing stem. Nope. Sorry; I can't agree. > I mention this > since Larry has argued that this never happens, This is not quite what I said. What I said was that a verbal root -- by which I mean a root that takes the prefix * in non-finite verb-forms -- never appears bare (unprefixed) in any derivative. The *stem* (prefix * plus verbal root) can occur as the first element in word-formation, though not as the last. > i.e., with reference to > whether the stem in could be related to the verbal radical > or stem <-bil-> in . However, I must say that I agree with Larry in > that (at least today) non-finite verbal stems (such as ) do > not tend to produce free-standing root-stems nor, for that matter, > non-finite verbs in <-tu>. Indeed. No verbal stem ever takes <-tu>, nor is there any evidence that such a process has ever been possible in Basque. I except here the process of borrowing Romance verbs by replacing the Romance infinitive ending with <-tu>, as in 'claim', from Spanish . > When speaking of the way that verbs can be constructed in Basque using > <-tu>, the following is one of the more curious examples of Basque's > morpho-syntactic ingenuity. The verb is which Mikel Morris > translates in his _Euskera/Ingelesa/Englis/Basque Dictionary_ (1998) as 'to > pass away, to give up the ghost; to disappear.' If one were to try to > unravel the etymology of this word following the normal discovery > procedures one would fail miserably. I mean that the normal strategy > involves looking first at the other lexical items demonstrating what > appears to be the same or a highly similar root-stem, i.e., phonologically > similar items. Er -- Roz, who says it is "normal" to look at phonologically similar but semantically unrelated items? Especially when the etymology of is transparent? > In this case, we would find dozens of examples of compounds > in and it is well known that in the case of these other examples the > root-stem has a phonological variant in and that that variant > derives in turn from 'of what (indeterminate)'. So one's first > inclination would be to assume that the etymology of should be > traced back somehow to, say, 'how many'. *Whose* "first inclination"? ;-) > But that would be wrong > for is a non-finite verb that has been constructed from a finite > verb form of the verb 'to be', concretely from the conjugated form > of the third person singular past tense 's/he/it was'. > Actually one might argue that is based on a relative clause > 's/he/it that was'. For instance, it is commonplace in Basque to speak with > respect of the deceased. So when talking about one's mother who is > deceased, one might say, '(My) deceased > mother did it this way [the way you/the interlocutor are doing it]' where > is which > converts the relative clause into an ergative subject. Hence, a root-stem > of derives from a relative clause that in turn is based on a third > person singular past tense of a verb. I must admit that the English > translation '(My) deceased mother' fails to capture the affectionate and > respectful tone of the Basque phrase. Almost, but not quite. The interesting verb has the following origin. In Basque, is a finite verb-form meaning 'was', a typically irregular inflection of 'be'. Like any finite form, this one can take the relative suffix <-n>, producing here the regular relative form 'who was', still normal in the language today. But this relative form has become specialized as a lexical adjective meaning 'late', as in 'the late Michelena'. And it is the *adjective* which takes the verb-forming suffix <-tu>, quite regularly, to yield the derived verb 'pass away, die'. Note also that both in the sense of 'late' and its derivative are recorded only from the 1850s. They do not appear to be ancient. The only parallel case I can think of is ~ 'all, every', derived from a relative form of 'is'. The original sense of was therefore 'which is'. But this is recorded no earlier than 1761, and it too is not ancient. > Which other languages do this sort of thing? I know that in Slavic > languages there are some pretty nifty ways of creating verbal compounds in > noun phrases. But I don't know of any thing that would correspond very > closely to what happens in the Basque example. Any ideas? This process is not productive in Basque, and the two examples just cited are the only two I know of. > In conclusion, a much more rigorous analysis of the data concerning the > suffixing element *<-leta> would be needed before alleging that 1) it is a > compound suffix composed of *<-le-eta> and/or 2) that <-leta> in > (*) is actually derived from that suffix > and not from a totally unmotived expressive formation. Not possible, I'm afraid. The agent suffix <-le> is added to verbal stems, and only to verbal stems. But (and variants) is not a verbal stem. > However, given that > 1) the old collective suffix in <-eta> gaves rise to the plural marker in > oblique cases in Basque Possibly. > and 2) it is found as a semi-fossilezed form in > toponyms, Indeed. It is common in toponyms and in surnames, but it is unproductive and rare to nonexistent in the ordinary lexicon. > it follows that previously formations in <-eta> were more common Well, quite likely, though I'm nervous about that "it follows". > and that consequently if *<-le-eta> was once a producive suffixing element, It couldn't have been. First, <-le> is only ever attached to verbal stems. Second, <-le> is never followed in any known case by another suffix -- though it can *follow* another suffix. Third, Agent-Collective makes no semantic sense in a word for 'butterfly'. Fourth, there is no trace in Basque of any such word-forming suffix as *<-le(e)ta>, in any function at all. > a formation like * could be considered to date back to > Pre-Basque. It's all in how one looks at the data. No, sorry; it isn't. We can look at the data any way we like, but the results are always the same: contains no recognizable suffixes, it cannot contain agentive <-le>, and it cannot be ancient. > I would close by saying that Azkue lists: > 'butterfly'; > 'butterfly' (var. in ); > 'daisy, poppy, butterfly' > 'daisy, poppy, butterfly'. > Was the protoypic form *? I don't really know. The argument > outlined above is simply one way of looking at the data. Indeed, until > additional examples in *<-leta> *What* additional examples? There don't appear to be any. > are subjected to rigorous analysis, the > case for * must remain a highly tentative one. I'd say it can be rejected out of hand. Sorry to be such an old grouch, as usual, but the evidence is uniformly against any such analysis. > It could be that > * dates back to an earlier stage and integrated what > was at that time a productive suffixing element made up of <-le> and > <-eta>. Over time the compound suffix fell into disuse and ceased being > productive in the language. At that point the suffix's phonology would have > become unstable, as often happens when a once meaningful element in a > compound can no longer be disambiguated. But at the same time we need to > remember, as has been mentioned previous on this list, there is a > possibility that the Spanish suffixes in <-ota/-ote> may have played some > role here. > So it would appear that once again Larry and I will need to agree to > disagree, at least on some of these points. OK. I agree to disagree. ;-) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Feb 2 07:17:39 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 08:17:39 +0100 Subject: Basque In-Reply-To: Message-ID: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote: >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal writes: >> Given Mitxelena's reconstruction of "fortis" consonants and your >> interpretation of them as geminates, wouldn't it be preferrable >> to derive: >> gurdi + bil > gurdbil > gurbbil > gurpil >> ogi + bil > ogbil > obbil > opil ? >I formerly favored this view myself, and I would very much like to favor >it now. Unfortunately, I can't, because the evidence is against it. >One piece in particular. The Basque word 'highway' is a >transparent compound of 'king' and 'road'. The final /e/ >of the first element is lost regularly. The analysis suggested above >would require * --> * --> * --> >. But the word is explicitly recorded in the medieval (early >12th-century) Fuero General of Navarra as : >Libro III, tit. VII, cap. IV, p. 53: > "...en logares en la cayll, que dize el bascongado erret bide." >This in fact is just one of several attestations of the form , but >it is the clearest one. And this, to my mind, is enough to settle the >matter. Much as I might prefer the other analysis, the facts point clearly >to a change of the first plosive ina plosive cluster to */t/. It's good evidence (esp. in view of beg(i) + ile > bet-ile), but maybe I'm too used to Catalan orthography to consider it decisive (-t- is used as a device to write geminated consonants, with or without historical justifaction: /semmana/ "week", /amel^l^a/ "almond", <-atge> /-addZe/, or "girl (Mall.)" (<*arlota). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From edsel at glo.be Wed Feb 2 11:16:52 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 12:16:52 +0100 Subject: Basque Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Monday, January 31, 2000 5:25 PM > Ed Selleslagh writes: > [on Basque * 'round'] >> What about *gorda-bil, where the first element could be a Romance loan (< >> corde, cuerda), i.e. coiled up rope? > Interesting, but I don't know this word, and I can't find it in any of my > dictionaries. I also note it carries an asterisk for some reason. > What's the source, please? [Ed] It was just a suggestion for a potential etymology. The asterisk was to indicate that it is a reconstruction (if my guess is right, of course). The word 'gorda' does not exist, nor can it be found in the historical documents available. It could have existed as a phonetically adapted (lost) loan from Romance. We just don't know. Ed. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Feb 2 17:16:26 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 17:16:26 +0000 Subject: Basque Message-ID: Roz Frank writes: > Conclusion: if there is a relationship between the Basque root-stem > and the IE materials, one needs to consider the time depth involved, i.e., > for determining when the "copying" or "borrowing" would have taken place. A problem with all proposed IE loans into Basque which cannot be derived from Latin or Romance. So far as we know, the first IE languages to reach the Basque-speaking area were the Celtic languages, probably in the middle of the first millennium BC. At the time of the Roman conquest, Aquitanian/Basque was apparently bordered by Celtic to the north (Gaulish) and to the south (Celtiberian). The position to the east, in the Pyrenees, is uncertain, but the neighbor there may have been the non-IE language Iberian. To the west, we have clear evidence for IE speech, but of uncertain affiliation. All I can say is that the sparse evidence is seemingly consistent with Celtic speech, but does not require Celtic speech. Of course, it is conceivable that some unknown branch of IE might have reached the area even before Celtic, but, if so, this hypothetical language seemingly disappeared without trace -- and I don't much care for positing hypothetical languages. But even Celtic loans into Basque are surprisingly few, given the long centuries of contact. We have only two or three certain cases, plus a few more doubtful cases. Accordingly, very little can be concluded, except that the evidence for IE loans into Basque before the Roman conquest is sparse to non-existent. > I > don't know whether anyone has tried to assign a time depth to Class I verbs > in Basque, although I believe Larry would agree with me that they can be > assigned to Pre-Basque with no difficulty. Perhaps Larry can add some > additional insights into the problems that are involved here. Almost certainly, even though we have no contemporary records. The reasoning goes like this. Early Basque had a suffix <-i> for making the participles of verbs. This suffix occurs in all prefixing verbs (those with the prefix *). It also occurs in a few denominal verbs, such as 'break, smash', from 'dust, powder'. (These last have no * because their roots are nominal, not verbal.) This <-i> was displaced in its function of making participles by <-tu>, which was borrowed from Latin <-tu(m)>. Basque borrowed Latin verbs in the form of their participles: for example, 'hear, understand', from Latin . This <-tu> has been the only productive participial suffix in the language for a long time. Now, the form <-tu> is conservative. Latin <-tu> developed regularly into Romance *<-do>, preserved today in Castilian as <-do>, but variously reduced in other Romance varieties -- for example, there is almost nothing left of it in French. So, if <-tu> was borrowed early, from Latin before the major Romance sound changes had occurred, and if it displaced <-i> as the productive participial suffix, then <-i> must already have been present in the Pre-Basque of the Roman era. More than that we can't say. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From edsel at glo.be Wed Feb 2 12:47:04 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 13:47:04 +0100 Subject: Basque * 'round' Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Monday, January 31, 2000 5:04 PM > Ed Selleslagh writes: > [on my puzzlement over a suggested PIE source] >> What I meant was this (I'm sorry for having been so elliptic), and you may >> agree or not: *kwekwlo (or *kwekulo) looks to me like a reduplicated form, >> probably inspired by the reconstruction from Grk. kyklos. Indeed, it is the >> logical thing to assume if you try to reconstruct from Germanic (Eng. wheel, >> or Du. wiel < hwi:l- < *kwelo), and we know the Old Greek tendency to >> reduplication and insertion of quasi-dummy syllables for basically >> 'prosodic' reasons, like in the sigmatic aorist etc. So, it is not >> unreasonable to assume (no hard evidence!!) that *kwelo gave rise to a >> Basque re-interpretation *bel-, via some intermediate (most likely IE) stage >> *(h)wel-. > "Not unreasonable"? > Well, first the vocalism is wrong. Basque does indeed have another ancient > stem of the form *, but this means 'dark', not 'round'. [Ed] I'm aware of that. Maybe it's the reason why the vowel changed, to mark the difference (A form of dissimilation) > Also, what has happened to the final vowel of the PIE form? I don't think > * was a PIE word-form, and Basque does not normally lose final vowels > in borrowed words. [Ed] That could be a problem, but not necessarily insurmountable. After all, my guess was that it would be a very ancient loan word, from an unidentified IE language. > Finally, for what it's worth (probably not much), medieval Spanish > was borrowed into Basque as , not as . Note Basque 'keep' > from Castilian or a related Romance form. [Ed] In medieval times, and from Spanish: yes. In modern times 'bapo' was derived from 'guapo', probably because the g is hardly pronounced (e.g. in the Spanish re-interpretation of indigenous toponyms in Latin America, gu- /gw/ almost always stands for /w/; sometimes hu- /w/ is used instead). In PB times we hardly know, and a lot depends on the intermediate language's phonetic adaptation of the PIE word. Had it *kw > gw, or w, or hw....? > [on the Basque temporal suffix <-te>] >> It is also part of (compound) 'extent' suffixes like -ate, -arte, ...You're >> right if you consider -te in isolation. > Sorry, but I don't recognize <-ate>. What is this, and where does it occur? [Ed] E.g. sagar-ate. See P. Mujika, e.g. > As for , this is not a suffix, but a noun meaning 'interval', 'space > between'. This often occurs as a final element in compounds, but it's still > not a suffix. Of course, it is possible that itself contains the > suffix <-te>, but there appears to be no way of investigating this. > [LT] >>> Finally, an original * should *not* develop into . There is no >>> parallel for such a development. >> Right, but not impossible for such an old term. > Not impossible, perhaps, but not supported by any evidence, either. > Anyway, if some ancient stage of Basque voiced intervocalic plosives, then > we have a problem with all those seemingly ancient words like 'door', > 'mud', 'piece', 'rag', 'drown', 'have', > 'denial, refusal', 'segment', 'father', and many others. > Why didn't they undergo voicing? [Ed] Probably because of complex etymological (derivation) reasons (cf. your comments on erret-bide) to be considered case by case. > [on my assertion that 'river' is a derivative of 'valley', > perhaps originally 'water meadow'] >> Agud and Tovar in Dicc. Etim. Vasco don't think so and neither do their >> numerous sources. They seem to find it rather problematic (the final r of >> ibar is rr). > No. Agud and Tovar, as usual, express no opinions at all, but merely report > the (numerous) proposals in the literature, which range from the sober > through the speculative to the silly. Nor do they describe the loss of the > final rhotic as problematic. Instead, they merely report Michelena's > observation that loss of a final rhotic in a first element in word-formation > was once regular. This is true for both Basque rhotics, which in any case > were probably not distinguished in final position in Pre-Basque. Note, for > example, that such words as 'earth', 'horn', 'thigh' and > 'grass', all of which have a final trill today, exhibit the combining > forms , , and , respectively, in a number of > compounds and derivatives. > [on and ] >> Two remarks: >> 1. There are clear indications that Iberian and Basque share some words, >> suffixes and some external features, probably through contact or other >> exchange mechanisms. > Typological features, probably -- maybe areal features. > Morphemes, possibly, but we hardly ever know the meaning of anything in > Iberian. > Contact, quite possibly, but contact is not a license for interpreting > Iberian as Basque -- which it plainly is not. [Ed] Personally, I think it went a little further: interpenetration. But they are probably not related in any normal sense (maybe they are, but very remotely: their arrival in Spain is probably separated by a not so small number of millennia: see e.g. H. Haarmann's article on Basque ethnogenesis in FLV). Both are clearly suffixing agglutinating languages, but so is Quechua. >> Quite a few Iberian toponyms could just as well be Basque (Oriola, > Looks vaguely Basque, but what would the Basque etymology be? [Ed] I saw it also spelled, archaically, as Uriola. Now it's called Orihuela, with Castilian diphtongation. Oriola is Valencian. It is near the ancient mouth of the Rio Segura in the fan-delta that is now the Vega Baja. All Iberian settlements are along that old beachfront (except Ilici near Elche/Elx, on an island in tha ancient mouth of the Vinalopo, in the same delta), nowadays the altitude line of 22 m above sea level (Spain is capsizing: the Med. coast rises, the Atlantic coast sinks). >> Aspe, > Looks a bit like the known Basque toponym , depending on how that > sibilant is interpreted. But the Basque name is late and secondary in its > form. It derives from * 'crag' + <-be> ~ <-pe> 'below', itself a > reduced form of -- and a very suitable name if you've seen the place. > Is the Iberian place also located under a towering crag? [Ed] Not a towering one. >> Ibi, > Not very distinctive, and I've already argued that modern Basque 'ford' > is late and secondary, from original *. >> Tibi..... > No. No native Basque word or name begins with /t/, or even with /d/. [Ed] In many compounds the t- of a suffixed element can appear or not: -(t)egi, -(t)alde, for instance. Word-initial t- may have existed in Antiquity, but we don't know about that. In Iberian it certainly does, and, remarkably, apparently as a variant of the same word ibi/tibi, eban/teban, in a number of cases. I wouldn't be surprised if word-initial t- had existed in Basque at an early date. >> and maybe Calpe). > But that initial /k/ is also intolerable in Basque, assuming that we are > really looking at a /k/, and not at a /g/. [Ed] In the written sources of Basque, yes. But there are not so few people who at least accept the possibility that a number of word-initial h- are remnants of an ancient k- (e.g. (h)arri < *karri). Note that the resort of Calpe on the Costal Blanca is under the towering Pe?on d'Ifach. >> So looking for a Basque-like etymology is >> not far-fetched, even though it hasn't been proven that this is admissible. > The Iberian texts have been meticulously scrutinized for possible links with > Basque. The two major figures here, Tovar and Michelena, both concluded > independently that a Basque-Iberian link could not be maintained, apart > perhaps from a few areal features and a few loan words. >> 2. The Romans (after the Greek) called what is roughly Georgia 'Iberia'. >> This is probably derived from Kartvelian 'bari' meaning 'valley' (of the >> Araxes one can guess). > Maybe, but what has this to do with Basque? [Ed] To be read in context. It was about the old idea that Iberia in Spain and in the Caucasus had something to do with each other; one reason (among many others, like ergativity) for a belief in a Basque-Caucasian relationship that was popular at some time. > [on a possible IE source for Basque <(h)artz> 'bear'] >> Grk. arktos (and related IE) looks like a pretty good candidate to me. Of >> course, it is possible that it is a shared substrate. > Eh? The Greek word has an excellent PIE etymon. [Ed] That's true, but it cannot be excluded that the word belongs to an older (than PIE) layer. The bear-symbolism seems to be older than our 'linguistic time depth'. > Anyway, Greek should not have been borrowed as <(h)artz>. Given > what we know of early borrowings, we would have expected something like > *<(h)artotz> -- just as we would have expected from Celtic *. [Ed] I didn't say it was necessarily borrowed from Greek : in fact, most IE lgs. (including extinct ones we don't know about) that have (had) preserved the root, and were anywhere near Basque at some time, would do. It was probably a cult word. > [on possible genetic links for Basque] >> I am familiar with your viewpoint and I respect it. But there are those that >> think this is an unfinished business that needs to be looked into. > Well, be my guest. But be aware that practically every language in the Old > World has already been scrutinized for a possible link with Basque, and > yet nothing of interest has ever turned up. There can hardly be many stones > left unturned. [Ed] I wouldn't say that. The main problem seems to be the great time depth. >> If one never leaves the beaten track, it is hard to find anything really new >> or unsuspected: a priori theories and speculation are OK as long as 1) one >> is aware of it being speculation, 2) it is followed by verification, and the >> results of that, be they negative or positive, are accepted. It's the way >> science works. >> That's why I said myself that it was speculation, and hoped it would >> stimulate others to think about the problems involved. > Er -- what problems? Why does the existence of native words in the > genetically isolated language Basque constitute a problem? [Ed] The problems of determining which elements, even structures, that appear in Basque (potentially ancient PIE roots, suffixes like -(z)-ko...), are more general and how this relationship (if any) can be explained. I have no problem with native roots. I just can't believe that Europes oldest language couldn't have anything (apart from straight loans) in common with the other languages. I don't believe in genesis in situ, either. As I said, the biggest problem is the time depth, and hence, ancient languages like Iberian (unfortunately extremely poorly understood) that have been in contact for maybe millennia, could help in this respect. Ed. From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Feb 2 07:25:46 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 07:25:46 -0000 Subject: Re Personal pronouns Message-ID: Dear Larry and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Monday, January 31, 2000 4:33 PM [PR wrote previously] >> It is obvious that "she" can stand for either "(the) woman" or the fuller >> NP: "(the) woman (that) we are supposed to meet". [LT] > Nope. That 'she' cannot take the place of 'woman', and that is the end > of it. [PR] I think we shall just have to 'agree to disagree' on this question. The definition of 'pronoun' in your dictionary includes the phrase: "... and whose members typically have little or no intrinsic meaning or reference." Your position is obviously consistent. It is hard for me to accept that this is the consensus position. [PR previously] > [on 'possessive'] >> An interesting question for another time. Frankly, I believe that the >> definition of "possessive" can be rather simply stated. [LT] > Well, I'd certainly like to see your effort! ;-) [PR] Well, I may live to regret my audacity, but here goes: For any class of nominals, A, 'possessive' denotes the relationship between A and B, any nominal sub-class of A. 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 roz-frank at uiowa.edu Thu Feb 3 04:58:47 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 22:58:47 -0600 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: At 08:11 PM 2/1/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: [big snip] >On the subject of non-velar labialized/palatalized consonants, I >was wondering: since in Greek *pj > pt, could not such old >chestnuts as , be derived from palatalized *p^ >(*p^lH-). I know Baltic "city" is in itself no >supportive evidence (-il- [-ir-] is the normal Baltic >development, even tough Baltic and Slavic offer anomalous cases >of *ul, *ur which might be worth investigating) and Skt. pu:r- >might be seen as counterevidence (but p- is a labial after all), >but I still would regard *p^lH- as a neater solution than e.g. >Beekes' *tplH- (CIEL, p. 190). A couple of questions. 1) what then is the standard reconstruction proposed for Skt. pu:r-, Greek and Baltic ? And the prototype meaning assigned to it? 2) is this set considered a good candidate for admission to the (P)IE lexicon? Stated differently, does attestation in Sanskrit, Greek and Baltic languages suffice for a data set to be considered part of the (P)IE lexicon? Thanks, Roz From sarima at friesen.net Thu Feb 3 07:25:58 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 23:25:58 -0800 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 08:11 PM 2/1/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >Stanley Friesen wrote: >>Why is it necessary to go this way? IMHO, there are sufficient instances >>of 'i' and 'u' in PIE the do *not* alternate with ablaut variants such as >>'eu' and 'ei' to suggest the inheritance of those vowels from the Pre-PIE >>stage, at least in some environments. >I'm not so sure. There are certainly "loose" *i's and *u's among >the pronouns (e.g. *tu/*tu:), in affixes like *-i (dat/loc, >"present tense"), but IMHO anomalously few among common >nouns/adjectives and verbs. For instance, I don't think >Benveniste's root-theory allows *i and *u in the V position (or >does it?). It would be nice to have statistics. I think Benveniste's root-theory is somewhat artificial. I doubt the speakers actually thought of things that way. I admit there are not *many* roots in 'i' and 'u', but there are *some* roots that cannot be clearly reconstructed as having had an 'e' or 'o'. >Surely the existence of *kw, *k^ etc. suggests that some high >vowels were lost, passing their front- or backness to the >adjacent consonants (is there another explanation?). Coupled >with the comparative rarity of non-zero grade *i and *u, I think >it's clear that *something* happened to the high vowels at some >stage of Pre-PIE. I agree that some loss is likely. I was question *total* loss. At least that was how I interpreted your original model, since you discussed loss or change to e/o in all environments. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Feb 3 06:16:43 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 01:16:43 EST Subject: Horses Message-ID: In a message dated 2/2/00 6:04:58 PM, proto-language at email.msn.com quoted: <> Now the 'mountain' part of this was not really the original issue, I don't think. It was the donkey/ass connection. Just to go back to the original point I think... That I believe was Mr. Crist's statement that Armenian using an *ekwos word for donkey/ass was merely semantic drift. And of course if a Mesopotamian word for 'horse' was also somehow related to the donkey than that might be noteworthy - and it apparently was.... > ANShE.KUR.RA - > ANShE 'Esel, ass' > KUR 'Berg, mountain' > RA - genitive-morpheme When we shift to Hittite, we find the same symbol/?/ being used for horse, apparently also connecting it to the donkey. But... Dr Stefan Georg wrote: <> I take this to mean that the Sumerian/Akkadian horse symbol used in Hittite may have been nothing more than an ideogram and therefore give no phonetic information about the sound of the Hittite word. My question then becomes how often Hittite does this sort of thing - use a Sumerian symbol with no phonetic correspondence. It could not be all the time or we would have no basis for sounding the Hittite language. I take it that the following also suggests this phonetic/typographic split: In a message dated 2/2/00 5:43:41 PM, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: <, written descriptively (not phonetically) as "foreign equid/donkey".>> (Childe mention that the Sumerian symbol persists into Akkadian usage as horse (1954).) Let me suggest then that the answers to two questions that may help a little here: - What was the word/symbol for donkey in Hittite? - What was the word for horse in Armenian? If Hittite did not adopt the Sumerogram for donkey (ans^e-?), what did it use? (And why?) If Armenian used the *ekwos word for donkey, what is the source of its word for horse? (And does that explain perhaps the 'semantic drift'?) Thanks, Steve Long From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Thu Feb 3 15:59:04 2000 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 16:59:04 +0100 Subject: Horses Message-ID: "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: > [PR] > In this connection, one might want to notice Egyptian s(j)s(j), 'hurry', and > ssm, 'horse'; could these be connected with IE *se:i-, 'throw'? 'Horse' = an animal which throws the rider from its back???? If you relate Egyptian s(j)s(j) 'hurry' to ssm 'horse' (which sounds reasonable as for the semantics), what can you tell us about the final -m in Egyptian? Is it derivationbal? What function? What, if ssm stems from something like *sm with initial reduplication? No *zizi or what so ever connection anymore! By the way: Why is it so difficult to accept that Sumerians used to term horses 'donkeys (that stem from / of) the mountains' and that they might have used the term ans^e-kur(r)a as it appears ('phonetically' speaking)? Wolfgang ***************************** Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet M?nchen Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 D-80539 M?nchen Tel.: +89-21805343 / Fax: +89-21805345 Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ ***************************** From sarima at friesen.net Thu Feb 3 07:32:40 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 23:32:40 -0800 Subject: Horses in War In-Reply-To: <35.ca93b7.25c82fd8@aol.com> Message-ID: At 07:47 AM 2/1/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Stanley wrote: ><war weapon. Prior to 1250 BC all of the major powers made the chariot >corps the mainstay of their army. Entire combat units operated out of >chariots, not merely the brass. They would not have put so much money into >this sort of combat unit if chariots were useful only as non-combat >transport.>> >Here we have a problem. I just don't find that kind of support for the idea >of the chariot being a 'decisive' tactical unit. If the Egyptians introduced >the idea of the chariot as an archer platform, as it said in that piece I >quoted, Even if they introduced *archery* to the chariot, there are still thrown spears. > then before that the chariot's other best function appears to be >mounted infantry - as it appears in Homer - so that it acted as transport >like APCs but not in combat. Most military histories that I've looked at are >pretty insistent that the idea of using chariots for a direct charge would >have been a losing proposition. Agreed. The prior decisive tactical use was as a mobile missile platform, though not necessarily for *archers*. A sudden, dense, rain of darts on a combat line is a pretty effective way to disrupt it, or at least shake it up. It was only after the development of effective infantry defenses against these tactics that the chariot devolved to use as a mere troop carrier. >The original statement was or was supposed to be that the horse was not >'decisive' in any battle before 1000BC - and that includes Kadesh (an >interesting word). And I believe that still stands up. Some analyses I have seen of Qadesh would dispute this. [I cannot comment on the reliability of these analyses - I just point out there is disagreement]. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Thu Feb 3 07:37:43 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 23:37:43 -0800 Subject: Horses and chariots. In-Reply-To: <54.fb1369.25c84c4c@aol.com> Message-ID: At 09:48 AM 2/1/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >force and accuracy you'd get from massing standing archers. I suspect once >again that the use of the archer on chariot was an elite matter in big >battles and had to do more with very specific targets or separate battles >between better armor-clad and mounted aristocrats. You might suspect it, but you would be wrong. Prior to the Invasion of the Sea Peoples, the largest arm of the Egyptian army was the charioteers. They fielded division-sized chariot units at Qadesh, as did the Hittites. This is not what one would see if it were just the elite in the chariots. [There is also the matter of the financial records from Mykenean Pylos, which indicate a *large* outlay for the maintenance of a substantial chariot force]. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Thu Feb 3 07:02:41 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 23:02:41 -0800 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:22 AM 2/1/00 -0600, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > You're talking about massive upheavals triggered by the arrival of >major imperialist powers poseessing overwhelming technical advantages. This >was not an everyday occurance. Of course there were major migrations in >South Africa and the Americas after Europeans arrived --but because of >extraordinary events. This is not clear. There is reasonable evidence, from various lines of argument, for prior migrations. But in the absence of written records, these are harder to substantiate. For instance, one point of view on the combined linguistic and cultural evidence places the Proto-Souixan peoples in the Ohio Valley, which they left *prior* to the arrival of Europeans. (These were the ancestors not only of the Dakota, but also certain other tribes, ones that *preceded* the Dakota into the Great Plains). Also, it is extremely unlikely that the Navaho migrations were triggered by European incursion. First, they moved from the Northwest (probably modern western Canada) into the Southwest. This is the wrong direction for an event triggered by Europeans. Second, the migration was rather earlier, before significant European presence in western North America. [It is not even certain the Dakota migration westward can be laid at the feet of Europeans - the proximal cause was war with neighboring tribes, especially the Ojibwa] -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Feb 3 04:42:04 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 22:42:04 -0600 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I don't want to create an "I'm right, you're wrong" thread here. When I say major upheaval, I'm referring to catastrophic events along the lines of European invasions I should have added the fall of major empires: e.g. the fall of Rome, etc. with the subsequent scramble to pick up the pieces. The Anglo-Saxon conquest ties into this because when the legions left, the Britons were disunited and relatively indefended. In and of itself, I wouldn't qualify it at the same level as the turmoil created by the Europeans in America and Africa. However it was part of the major upheaval created by the fall of the Romans. The Bantu expansion was possible because of superior technology --the Basntu were iron-age agriculturalists who expanded at the expense of hunter-gatherers I don't know the particulars about the Athabaskan expansion but my understanding from popular literature/magazines is that they moved in during or at the end of a catastrophic drought The Aztec expansion was a product of instability produced by the fall of Tula and ultimately by the fall of Teotihuacan --evidently the first major imperial state in Meso-America [the Olmecs seem to have been a group of city-states and the Zapotec state under the aegis of Monte Alban was limited to the Oaxaca area] My overall point is that extraordinary events such as these are few and far between. >Rick is right and wrong in responding to Joat. He is right in saying that >massive migrations and conquest are often related to technological >developments and are not everyday occurrences. [ moderator snip ] >Rick is incorrect when he tries to tie this only to "overwhelming technical >advantages" and linking it to the modern era. [ moderator snip ] From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Wed Feb 2 18:01:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 18:01:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: SG>Gogodala (/wi/), Awin (/wae/), and Gira (/wai/), three Papuan SG>languages, borrowed Austronesian *wayEG (reconstructed by some SG>Austronesianists as *vaSeR, which does remind me of a language I know, SG>but I cannot remember which one ;-). ..you really don't mean German?;-)))) SG>The claim that signifiants of some semantic notions are "so basic" SG>that they cannot be subject to borrowing is just one of those myths SG>our discipline seems to have real trouble to rid itself from. .. of course that is correct; so nothing can be generalized. The cases you cited seem to be due to situations where water is quite precious. Except the Papuan cases, which could be doubted? SG>There are no such concepts. Everything can be borrowed, and there are SG>examples for everything actually having been borrowed at some point in SG>space and time. .. I agree here. And you could agree I think that there in fact are tendencies for words or meanings to be borrowed first or/easier, e.g. cultural words, not only because this is mainstream opinion. HJH From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Thu Feb 3 20:52:59 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 22:52:59 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <200001311807.p326@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: On Mon, 31 Jan 2000, Hans Holm wrote: > "Relationship" is _always and only_ a question of degrees and ways. No. Relationship is an absolute. Either two (or more) languages are related or they are not. This is the basic hypothesis of historical linguistics. It is based on the observation that certain languages have greater similarities than can be accounted for by chance or borrowing (= convergence). The hypothesis is that such languages were once one and the same language. Genetically related languages were once the same language. There is no other way to define genetic relationships in historical linguistics. The "degrees and ways" are only a matter of how long the languages have been separated, whether they have been completely isolated from each other during that time, and how many and what kinds of changes they have undergone since they separated. But genetic relationship in historical linguistics means "sprung from some common source." > Just try to calculate the number of _unrelated_ ancestors for you or > me before 10^n generations or years and your calculator will soon > respond with 'overflow'. This is totally irrelevant. If one wants to adopt a biological model for languages, it must be mitosis, not meiosis. Languages do not need a mommy language and a daddy language to have baby languages. At the point at which a language splits both (all) parts are identical. As the daughter languages exist in isolation they diverge more and more over time (and yes, the parent is also a daughter -- when an amoeba reproduces by mitosis there is no way to tell which is the original and which is the offspring). But two genetically related languages have only one common ancestor, not the myriad unrelated ancestors that biological entities that reproduce sexually require. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 3 21:13:32 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 16:13:32 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: In a message dated 2/2/00 5:08:22 AM Mountain Standard Time, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: << Of course there were major migrations in South Africa and the Americas after Europeans arrived --but because of extraordinary events. >> -- no, common as dirt. We have plenty of examples long before the European expansions. This is the common framework of human history. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 3 23:00:06 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 18:00:06 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: In a message dated 2/2/00 9:22:49 PM Mountain Standard Time, W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de writes: >Why? -- because they simply aren't borrowed as often. Yes, such words can be borrowings; no, they aren't as likely to be. Look at the extant languages. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 3 23:02:27 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 18:02:27 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: << But in view that they are subject to borrowing after all, this "unlikeliness" cannot be used as a heuristic for demonstrating relatedness. -- "good enough for Government work" as the saying goes. Any single word may be borrowed, but the _corpus_ of basic vocabulary is remarkably stable in most languages and is useful for doing a "first cut". Being painstaking about details is all well and good, but we should beware of being able to see the forest for the trees. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 3 23:08:10 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 18:08:10 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >But "hand", "eye", "I", "water", "brother" aso. are not safe. They simply >don't bear a label "Attention ! Native word! Don't replace by foreign >gobbledeegook !" on them. -- effectively speaking, they do. After all, when presented with a new language, what's the first thing we do to determine whether it's IE or not? We look at the numerals from one to ten, the family relationship terms, and so forth. Later on more detailed examination is necessary, but that's the first step. In fact, that's how the fact that there _is_ an IE family of languages was discovered in the first place. >Since it happened at some time, somewhere, it can happen anywhere. -- well, no. _Frequency_ or _likelihood_ is the determinative factor here. The fact that, when flipping a coin, you may come down "heads" six times in a row does not alter the fact that over time you'll have a 50-50 split between heads and tails. From sarima at friesen.net Thu Feb 3 07:13:04 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 23:13:04 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 10:44 PM 1/31/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 1/31/00 10:20:09 PM, sarima at friesen.net wrote: ><things like 'wheel' were borrowed into IE *after* it spread throughout >Europe - by over a thousand years!>> >The question you are addressing has to do with whether Renfrew ever said that >Celtic or pre-Celtic migrated to western Europe before 4000BC. My >understanding is that he was simply saying that an early indo-european >language did, not that anything identifiably Celtic did. Let me ask you how >your comment is relevant? Because unless the Celtic speakers arrived *much* *later*, by that very migration process that Renfrew tries to avoid, this widespread IE language *must* be a predecessor of Proto-Celtic, as there is no other possible candidate. I am simply making the logical conclusion from Renfrew's basic "party line" that no significant migrations have occurred in the right time frame to spread IE languages. If this is so, then Proto-Celtic cannot have spread by late occurring migrations either. Ergo, that widespread IE language he talks about is effectively pre-Proto-Celtic. >PS - You wrote 'the claim that the words for things like 'wheel' were >borrowed into IE *after* it spread throughout Europe - by over a thousand >years.' >But actually if we give a generous 4000BC date to wheeled-transport (as >opposed to wheels in general or just plain round objects) and remember that >in Hittite the word for wheel is different I seem to remember somebody posting a Hittite cognate with a reasonably similar meaning. > - we can squeeze in a time spread >for the word that matches Renfrew's 4000BC date for western Europe to a 't' - >presumably before of course the specific sound changes observed in e.g., >'*kweklo' occurred in the attested IE daughters. Since those SPECIFIC >changes could have happened a bit later (I believe) - there wouldn't be >anything amazing about this, would there? Not THAT much later. So you've cut it down from 3000 years to a "mere" 1000 years. Big deal! No widespread language has *ever* maintained unity that long! -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Thu Feb 3 07:15:02 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 23:15:02 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <47.12db94c.25c7c762@aol.com> Message-ID: At 12:21 AM 2/1/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- No. Renfrew specifically attributes the arrival of the IE languages in >Europe to the EARLY neolithic; to the introduction of agriculture as such. Worse, given that the Neolithic is *defined* by the advent of agriculture, he places the arrival of IE languages at the *base* of the Neolithic! -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Thu Feb 3 07:20:00 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 23:20:00 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:49 AM 2/1/00 -0700, Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote: >[Stanley Friesen replied] >> Language replacement usually involves a prolonged period of bilingualism. >> ... >Not necessarily. Witness what has happened in the Americas, especially in >the western United States. Until the 1890s, the Native American languages >were spoken predominantly by monolinguals. Over the next 50 years, the >boarding school system took children away from their parents and made them >speak English exclusively. Admittedly there is wide variation in the extent of bilingualism, and the rate of replacement. But even here I bet those children, at least those that had already learned to speak, became effectively bilingual! [This is an extreme case - for instance, even at their most oppressive the Romans never went this far]. >While Stanley's scenario may be the case in some parts of the world at some >times, it is not the only scenario. I would say it is the *majority* scenario. Forcible replacement of that sort is rare. >Language use is determined, by and large, by local power. If it is more >locally advantageous to use Language A rather than Language B, then Language >A will survive and B will dwindle. As local power changes, B may be >revived. However, if the relative power of A is much greater than B, B will >simply die. I believe that is more or less what I have tried to indicate - but the power need not be strictly military. It is mainly a matter, as you say, of what is locally advantageous to the people. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Feb 3 05:04:47 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 23:04:47 -0600 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <200002012119.p423@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: re: Gaulish of Trier & Galatian Wasn't it St. Jerome [correct me if I'm wrong] that said that and is it true that he had never been to Galatia to find out? Also, when did Galatian become extinct? If it were still spoken, we would be looking at about 600 years or so of separation, less than the difference between say Swedish and Norwegian, Spanish and Portuguese, Czech and Slovak, English and Scots So you would expect them to understand one another unless there was a strong substrate or one of the languages had become extinct. Now, if, as some on the list say, Old Irish was so close to Gaulish inscriptions at c. 700 CE. How did it become so radically different by 1400 CE? As far as I know, these changes were not due to the Viking and English invasions or to Latin influences. I throw out some possibilities Is it possible that WRITTEN Old Irish was NOT the direct ancestor of Gaelic? i.e that it held the same relationship to Gaeilge and Gaidhlig that Classical Latin held to Romance? Is it possible that WRITTEN Old Irish was only a literary language? Is it possible that WRITTEN Old Irish was the language of an elite of Briton or Gaulish origin and did not represent the speech of the majority? Other than the arcane reference to Iarn-Belre and references to Cruithne/Picts, is anything known of other speech varieties in early Ireland? Please answer with light rather than heat and with reasoned replies rather than appeals to received authority [snip] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 3 21:37:10 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 16:37:10 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >mclasutt at brigham.net writes: >Aramaic spread with the Neo-Babylonian Empire and replaced other languages in >its path. >> -- Aramaic began to spread long before the Neo-Babylonian period; it was carried by a folk-migration of nomads out of the desert fringes. Aramaic tribes were plaguing the Assyrians as early as the 11th century BCE and there was a concurrent spread into Syria. The adoption of Aramaic as a chancery language by the Babylonians and later the Persians certainly helped the spread of the langauge, but they didn't initiate it. Likewise, Arabic had displaced Armaean in the desert fringes of the Middle East long before the great Islamic expansion. From r.clark at auckland.ac.nz Fri Feb 4 00:02:57 2000 From: r.clark at auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 13:02:57 +1300 Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >>> Hans Holm 02/02 8:19 AM >>> >JS>This requires either no change, or perfectly synchronized change, in pre- >JS>Celtic across thousands of miles, ... >.. I propose "little change". And there are much more examples. >JS>, ... for 4000 years. Which is in blatant violation of everything we know >JS>about languages and how they develop. >.. Is it? This is an IE group, but if we take a look beyond our IE nose, >e.g. to Australia, we find about 70 % covered by speakers of Pama-Nyungan, >the languages/dialects of which are regarded as very closely related. And >archeologists now redate the first settlements back to more than 50.000 >years (for a up-to-date overview see Stringer in Antiquity 73/99:876). Of >course these must not be the direct predecessors of Pama-Nyungan. Apart from the highly uncertain claim that the common ancestor of Pama-Nyungan goes back to the first human settlement of Australia, the description of these languages as "very closely related" is extremely misleading. They could be considered closely related only by contrast to the highly diverse (lexically and typologically) other families of the north and west of Australia. Consider just the immediate neighbours of Dyirbal, as described by Dixon: Yidin (27% shared vocabulary), Mbabaram (18%), Warungu (47%), Wargamay (60%) >Back to IE: Renfrew's farmers in Ireland must not have been direct >predecessors of Gaelic speakers, at least their language must not at all >have been a predecessor. Mit freundlichen Gr??en Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover Tel=FAX x49-511-9585714. From edsel at glo.be Thu Feb 3 11:56:24 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 12:56:24 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2000 5:24 PM > Roz Frank writes: >> And even if PIE were posited as an >> isolate, would one not have to propose that, nonetheless, the >> proto-language, too, would have had the full characteristics of a human >> language, with the likelihood of suppletions, irregularities and substrata. > Of course, except that there is no particular reason to posit any > significant substrate influences. [Ed] Nor to posit the contrary, since we don't know the origin(s) of (wide) PIE. Unless you believe in the Nostratic hypothesis and the like. Nonetheless, we might find some elements in common with other, reputedly older, language groups like Uralic, or even Basque (e.g. via some extinct early parent or relative of one, that evolved in another area) , which could be interpreted as loans from those groups (or as a common substrate or heritage), although it is not always possible to determine which way the loan went. After reading Ante Aikio's contributions, I suspect Uralic might begin to shed 'some' light on this matter. On the Basque side we have the intriguing matter of a number of suffixes that also pop up in IE (e.g.-z-ko <> -(s)ko in Slavic, basically with the 'same' meaning and use). Ed. From edsel at glo.be Thu Feb 3 12:00:18 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 13:00:18 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2000 12:52 AM > "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >> They aren't: Actually, basically three different, and very ordinary, words >> that probably exist (I mean words with these meanings) in any language. As I >> said before: all these words seem to have had different original meanings >> (*kwekwlo/'round, circle', *rotho/'revolve', > The primary meaning of *ret(h)-/*rot(h)- is apparently "to run". [Ed] Or "to ride" maybe? Ed. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 3 21:22:52 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 16:22:52 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >frank at uiowa.edu writes: >Then does the IE model posit that PIE, understood here as an actual unified >linguistic system, was a linguistic isolate? It would seem that the model >would have to do this. -- no. To use a historical example, Latin was a member of a group of related languages ("Italic"). Eg., Latin "bos" is probably a loan from a related Italic language, since the regular shift from PIE *gwous would give "vos" in Latin, However, the group of Italic languages didn't expand; Latin, alone, did, and then diversified into the Romance languages we're familiar with. The other Italic languages were blotted out by the expansion of Latin. The PIE situation is similar, with the _possible_ exception of the Anatolian group. >For example, how many language groups must the item be attested in for it to >quality? I assume, for example, that identifying cognates/reflexes of the >same item in Sanskrit and Celtic would be sufficient for the item to qualify? -- two in widely separated IE languages is usually considered indicative, three fairly definitive; if you had a word in, say, Anatolian, Germanic and Indo-Iranian. >For example, just glancing over the entries in Buck, it would seem that >there isn't as much uniformity for "wheel" across IE languages, as there is >for, say, "cart" which shows up most IE languages (obviously with the help of >Latin). >> -- late loan-words can be distinguished. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 3 21:24:42 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 16:24:42 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >I can't believe that linguistics and archaeology can not take different paths >but ultimately end up at the same destination. >> -- we're not talking about linguistics and archaeology; it's linguistics and one small group of archaeologists. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 3 21:31:48 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 16:31:48 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >I don't think it is fair to say that the evidence we have been discussing is >inconsistent with linguistics or that external information has not been used >in reaching some of the conclusions we've discussed here. >> -- we're not talking about evidence; we're talking about the _interpretation_ of evidence; that is to say, which interpretation is most reasonable. That agriculture spread across Europe from south-east to north-west between about 7000 BCE and about 4000 BCE is not in dispute. The question at issue is whether this should be associated with a _linguistic_ change; ie., the spread of Indo-European languages. The _linguistic_ evidence is that it was not. Quite probabibly _some_ language/language family was spread across Europe by "demic diffusion" in the early Neolithic; but whatever it was, it wasn't PIE. Renfrew's theory requires PIE to exist in 7000 BCE, and linguistic evolution to produce, 5500 years later, the first observed IE languages in around 1500 BCE. This just isn't possible, according to everything we know about linguistics and have observed of the process of linguistic change. The degree of differentiation observable in the early recorded IE languages is just incompatible with a common origin in the early neolithic; so is the nature of the PIE vocabulary. Renfrew's hypothesis is not based on any new physical _evidence_; it simply represents an effort to "torture" the linguistic evidence -- hacking and chopping at it to fit it on the Procrustean bed of an archaeological _system of interpretation_. Not "evidence"; just an _hypothesis_. From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Thu Feb 3 09:00:12 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 11:00:12 +0200 Subject: PIE and Uralic In-Reply-To: <007101bf6cef$442c4a00$3bc71a3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: (Patrick Ryan asked:) > I have two questions. > 1) Why do the Uralists feel that it is necessary to reconstruct a > transitional /S/ on the way to Finnish /h/? Finnish h in root morphemes goes always back to PU *S (with the exception of the PU cluster *kt, which - like PU *St - gives Finnish ht). The change *S > Proto-Finnic *h is relatively late, and there are Proto-Germanic loan words which predate this change (e.g. Finnish kana 'chicken' < Germ. *hanan-; Germ. *h- gives Finnish k- because there was no h yet at the time of loaning). Thus, it would be anachronistic to assume a direct substitution PIE *H > Pre-Finn. *h. There are also loans in other U languages which show the same substitution IE *H > U *S, e.g. IE *pewHeno- 'sieve' > Pre-Permic *pewSinV- > Komi poZ(n-), Udmurt puZ(n-). (The Permic languages have retained PU *S as a retroflex.) > 2) Have Uralists speculated that the older responses (/k,x/) might be the > result of the PIE "laryngal" being realized as a stop /?/ and a spirant > /h,H,x/? The loans words may no doubt reveal something about the phonetic value of the laryngals, and the different substitutions (PU *k, *x, *S) might also, to some extent, reflect different phonetic values of the laryngals in different (P)IE dialects. Thus, my hypothesis of PU vs. Pre-U loans is of course debatable. An interesting question, which has not yet been touched upon, is if the Uralic substituents of *H1, *H2 and *H3 differ in any way. Regarding the sound values, it should be mentioned here that the phonetic value of PU *x is not entirely clear. However, there seems to be some evidence suggesting that it was actually a voiced velar fricative (and could thus be more properly written as *g). There are also two loan etymologies that support this: PU *wixi- 'take (somewhere)' < PIE *weg?h- id., PU *mexi- 'give, sell' < PIE *mey-gw- 'sell' (in the latter one PU *-x- instead of *-jx- because the latter would have been a phonotactically illegal cluster). (P.R. asked:) > Would it be possible, in your opinion, for an alternate explanation that the > words might have been borrowed before the *-H- root-extensions? I'd rather let IE-ists answer that. But I'd like to suggest another alternative explanation to the (Pre-)IE > Pre-U loaning hypothesis I put forward in my last mail. It is possible that e.g. PIE *pelH- did not give Pre-U *pelxi-, but rather directly PU *peli-; i.e., the laryngal was left without a substituent because PU *-lx- was phonotactically impossible. > I do have an axe to grind here but, mercifully, I will not grind it on this > list. Of course, those who have been to my website know that I consider that > a strong case can be made for ultimate common origin. I am familiar with your web site, and thus I know that we probably couldn't disagree more here. But I agree with you on that Nostratic etc. discussions should not take place on this list. But I have no need for mercy - I am not afraid to defend my views on the relatedness of U and IE. It's just that I don't have the time nor the interest for such a discussion at present. - Ante Aikio From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Feb 3 05:20:26 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 23:20:26 -0600 Subject: Indo-Iranian In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >On Sat, 29 Jan 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> Looking at Watkins's chart of correspondences >> IE Sanskrit Avestan Old Persian OCS Lithuanian >> k s' s th s s >> kw k/c k/c k k/c^/c k >> g j z/g g/d z z >> gw g/j g/j g/j g/z^/z g >> gh h g/z g/d z z >> gwh gh/h g/j g/j g/z^/z g >> Why does Old Persian look as far removed [or more] from Avestan as >> any of the others? What's the time difference? Is the difference between >> Avestan and Old Persian as great as the chart would indicate? >First, the chart is not accurate, probably due to inaccurate copying (I >don't know the exact source). The chart appears exactly as shown in Calvert Watkins, ed. The American Heritage Dictioanry of Indo-European Roots, rev. ed. Boston: Houghton, 1985. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 3 23:35:36 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 18:35:36 EST Subject: Indo-Iranian Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >The Achaemenid inscriptions are easily datable, they fall mostly in the >6th/5th centuries B.C. Traditional datings of Zarathushtra put him in the >same time (mostly as a contemporary of Dareios I., but this has been >challenged, lately by Mary Boyce, who assigned him a date considerably >earlier on the time-scale >> -- I would agree, given the _extremely_ close correspondances between the earlier Avestan and Vedic Sanskrit. From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Feb 2 19:51:13 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 19:51:13 -0000 Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? Message-ID: Germanic *ga- related to Latin co-: There is a discussion of this in Collinge, The Laws of IE, p 207, and reference to a paper by Bennett (1968) and a book by E Rooth, 1974, Das vernische Gesetz in Forschung und Lehre, Lund/Gleerup. Collinge's summary is that the connexion still puzzles people. Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Feb 3 05:30:00 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 23:30:00 -0600 Subject: NE Germanic In-Reply-To: Message-ID: In popular magazines [maybe National Geographic?, but publications along this line], etc. I've seen various references that claim Gdansk comes from a Germanic word for "Danish". >"Steve Gustafson" wrote: [ moderator snip ] >>My further understanding is that the name of -Gdansk- in Poland represents >>*gudaniska, which looks Germanic, and suggests a Gothic connection on the >>south shore of the Baltic. >Or even better, *gUtaniskU (with g(U)t > gd). >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal >mcv at wxs.nl From sarima at friesen.net Thu Feb 3 07:48:12 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 23:48:12 -0800 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 07:19 PM 2/1/00 -0700, Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote: >> Stanley Friesen >> A) language is a biological phenomenon, and behaves like other such. >Wrong. Language is not a biological phenomenon, but a cognitive one. Cognition is a biological process. Ergo, so is language. >The >physical structures which allow complex human language evolved along >biological lines, but language change is note like biology. When two >species diverge, they can no longer influence each other. Not always true. Closely related species can often exchange a limited amount of genetic material. Full cross sterility takes time to evolve. This means an occasional hybrid can move genes across a species boundary. And in prokaryotes, genetic transfers can occur between *distant* relatives. > A Grevy's Zebra >cannot interbreed with a Plains Zebra no matter how many times they try. But lions can interbreed with leopards, and most oak species are inter-fertile. >> B) language differentiation acts *very* much like biological speciation, >> except for happening much faster. >See above. The speed factor is, indeed, a critical one. Not that I can see. It just makes it easier to observe. >> D) as others have been pointing out here, the similarities are so close >> that it is even useful to apply cladistic methodology in the study of >> historical linguistics. >There are just enough similarities to allow this on a limited scale, but >tree diagrams have difficulty expressing relationships within a dialect >chain and cannot show features due to geographic proximity. Similar issues occur in biology. Cladistics has trouble with intra-specific variation, and can get confused by cross-species genetic transfer, especially in groups where it is frequent (such as bacteria). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Feb 2 19:21:31 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 19:21:31 -0000 Subject: "is the same as" Message-ID: On biology and historical linguistics: a reminder, that (quote) > C) the 'mutual comprehensibility' definition of separate languages (unquote) is very far from accepted, acceptable, or workable. It ignores psychological and political factors (already discussed recently on this list). I write because whoever posted that snippet seemed to be assuming that this definition had the same validity as the parallel in Biology - which it certainly does not. Peter From mclasutt at brigham.net Thu Feb 3 19:14:35 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 12:14:35 -0700 Subject: Re Personal pronouns In-Reply-To: <001201bf6d4e$ba2f4540$139f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: > [Pat Ryan wrote previously] >>> It is obvious that "she" can stand for either "(the) woman" or the fuller >>> NP: "(the) woman (that) we are supposed to meet". > [Larry Trask] >> Nope. That 'she' cannot take the place of 'woman', and that is the end >> of it. > [PR] > I think we shall just have to 'agree to disagree' on this question. The > definition of 'pronoun' in your dictionary includes the phrase: "... and > whose members typically have little or no intrinsic meaning or reference." > Your position is obviously consistent. It is hard for me to > accept that this > is the consensus position. It is. Larry's quite clear in his explanation why it is so. 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 JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 3 21:09:29 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 16:09:29 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Well, I've seen recent dates- coinciding with the Balkan-Anatolian pottery >group - putting the intial expansion into Europe at 6000-5500BC. -- Cereal domestication in the Middle East and Anatolia is dated to 9000 BCE and earlier. Farming had spread to the whole of the Balkans by 7000 BCE and well into what's now France by 5000 BCE. This is unlikely to change, except possibly for earlier dates for plant/animal domestication. >The hypothesis does not require that those languages change slowly at all. -- yes it does, because the first recorded IE languages are still so similar. Any "intermediate steps" would have involve very little change for the descendant languages to be so close. Short form: linguistic nonsense. >But the hypothesis does actually reasonably suggest that Greek's >'grandparent' and Hittite's 'grandparent' should have had a closer >relationship than a coeval IE language located across the continent. -- yes. And they DON'T. >But you get a much better time-spread in which Greek and Sanskrit can make >whatever connection is there - which after all is based on similarities that >I believe are post-PIE. -- the similarities are the result of _common origins_. They can't be due to subsequent contact. >I don't believe that any current theory is that Greek and Sanskrit managed >to split-off from PIE in the Ukraine and went their separate ways sharing >innovations that are not found in PIE. -- that is precisely the current consensus theory. Both Greek and Sanskrit (and Armenian and Phyrgian) belonged to an east-central group of dialects within PIE. They lost contact sometime in the course of Indo-Iranian's spread to the east and pre-Greek's movement south. This accounts parsimoniously for all the observable linguistic data. > to consider how a change in data -- there has been no change in the relevant data; only in (Renfrew's) _interpretation_ of the data; ie., saying that a linguistic change requires a massive amount of archaeological evidence associated with fundamental technological-economic transformation. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 3 22:48:45 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 17:48:45 EST Subject: NE Germanic Message-ID: .stevegus at aye.net writes: >My further understanding is that the name of -Gdansk- in Poland represents >*gudaniska, which looks Germanic, and suggests a Gothic connection on the >south shore of the Baltic. -- the first historical mention of the Goths places them on the Vistula, in what's now Poland. There is also a layer of specifically Gothic loan-words datable to the Common Slavic period. My own guess (no more than that) would be that the Goths, then the easternmost Germanic group, received some sort of leadership element from Scandinavia, roughly the way the nascent Russian state did, and the origin myth of this ruling group was taken over by the much larger, hybrid group that came into history as "Gothic". From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 3 22:56:14 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 17:56:14 EST Subject: Horses in War Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >If the Egyptians introduced the idea of the chariot as an archer platform -- no, they did not introduce the idea of the chariot as an archery platform. This is simply wrong. It long antedates Egyptian use. Any standard text will so inform you. >the first use of the horse in an offensive tactic was with the development >of the Macedonian heavy cavalry -- incorrect. If you look at the Assyrian wall reliefs, you will see cavalry being used both for mounted archery and carrying armored lancers. >>and that includes Kadesh (an interesting word). -- Kadesh was a chariot battle virtually _pur sang_. 1275 BCE was towards the _end_ of the period when massed chariots were the decisive arm of middle eastern warfare. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Feb 3 06:07:07 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 00:07:07 -0600 Subject: Basque In-Reply-To: Message-ID: There's the possibility that Lusitanian may have been non-Celtic and to get from Central Europe to W. Iberia, it presumedly would have been in contact with Basque, correct? True, not too much is known about Lusitanian and it does seem similar to Celtic and Italic [snip] >A problem with all proposed IE loans into Basque which cannot be derived >from Latin or Romance. >So far as we know, the first IE languages to reach the Basque-speaking area >were the Celtic languages, probably in the middle of the first millennium >BC. At the time of the Roman conquest, Aquitanian/Basque was apparently >bordered by Celtic to the north (Gaulish) and to the south (Celtiberian). >The position to the east, in the Pyrenees, is uncertain, but the neighbor >there may have been the non-IE language Iberian. To the west, we have >clear evidence for IE speech, but of uncertain affiliation. All I can say >is that the sparse evidence is seemingly consistent with Celtic speech, >but does not require Celtic speech. >Of course, it is conceivable that some unknown branch of IE might have reached >the area even before Celtic, but, if so, this hypothetical language seemingly >disappeared without trace -- and I don't much care for positing hypothetical >languages. [snip] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Feb 4 01:36:24 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 20:36:24 EST Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: >frank at uiowa.edu writes: << 1) what then is the standard reconstruction proposed for Skt. pu:r-, Greek > and Baltic ? And the prototype meaning assigned to it? -- *pelh(x), "fort, fortified place". There's a possible cognate in Armenian -- 'k'alak', meaning "city". >2) is this set considered a good candidate for admission to the (P)IE >lexicon? Stated differently, does attestation in Sanskrit, Greek and Baltic >languages suffice for a data set to be considered part of the (P)IE lexicon? -- a dialect word of the south and east of the PIE world, at least. There's also *uriien, 'fort', which gives Mycenaean 'rijo', promontory, and Tocharian 'ri', 'town'. From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Feb 4 03:14:35 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 04:14:35 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.20000202225635.0075b6f8@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu> Message-ID: roslyn frank wrote: >A couple of questions. >1) what then is the standard reconstruction proposed for Skt. pu:r-, Greek > and Baltic ? And the prototype meaning assigned to it? *pl.His "citadel" (Pokorny: *pel- "Burg") [Did I say pu:r-? I did. Should be pur- (nom.sg. pu:r)] >2) is this set considered a good candidate for admission to the (P)IE >lexicon? Stated differently, does attestation in Sanskrit, Greek and Baltic >languages suffice for a data set to be considered part of the (P)IE lexicon? Well, yes: it's in Pokorny. At the very least it suffices for being considered a solid East-PIE etymon. On the downside, it's not attested in the Western languages (Italic, Celtic, Germanic) or in Anatolian; it's unclear whether Pokorny is correct in his unmotivated assignment of the word to the undisputable PIE root *pelh1- "full, to fill"; the formation with zero grade in the root *plH- and in the suffix *-is can hardly be ancient. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Feb 4 03:20:05 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 04:20:05 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000202232126.00995800@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: Stanley Friesen wrote: [**i and **u] >I agree that some loss is likely. I was question *total* loss. At least >that was how I interpreted your original model, since you discussed loss or >change to e/o in all environments. I don't really have a model (yet). I was merely playing with the Slavic parallel. I forgot to mention Class. Armenian, where *i and *u (but not *a, *e and *o) were dropped in unstressed (pretonic) position, at least orthographically (in some cases they were still pronounced as [@]). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Feb 4 03:53:10 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 04:53:10 +0100 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: <3899A5C8.E96C4E95@lrz.uni-muenchen.de> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Wolfgang Schulze wrote: >By the way: Why is it so difficult to accept that Sumerians used to term >horses 'donkeys (that stem from / of) the mountains' and that they might have >used the term ans^e-kur(r)a as it appears ('phonetically' speaking)? It's not difficult to accept, it's just that the Sumerian word apparently (according to Miguel Civil) *was* (usually written , just like "smith" was usually written , to quote Robert Whiting on ANE). It's of course the same word as Akkadian sisu^ "horse", but the Akkadian is also borrowed from an unknown source. Given the phonetic shape (*tsitsi-), one might think (just a thought) of some reduplicated form *dzidzei- connected with Skt. hayah. "horse" and Arm. ji, jioy ([dzi]) "horse" < PIE *g^hei- (satem *dzhei-). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Feb 4 04:10:01 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 05:10:01 +0100 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: <33.d21795.25ca774b@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Dr Stefan Georg wrote: ><they didn't mean them to be read aloud as native Hittite words (nor does it >mean that they used the Sumerian/Akkadian terms as a loan-element).>> > >I take this to mean that the Sumerian/Akkadian horse symbol used in Hittite >may have been nothing more than an ideogram and therefore give no phonetic >information about the sound of the Hittite word. In fact we can be pretty sure it *was* an ideogram. >My question then becomes how often Hittite does this sort of thing - Too often... >use a >Sumerian symbol with no phonetic correspondence. It could not be all the >time or we would have no basis for sounding the Hittite language. Indeed. Some words, though, are never spelled out using the syllabary subset of cuneiform, and we only have the ideogram. >[...] >Let me suggest then that the answers to two questions that may help a little >here: > >- What was the word/symbol for donkey in Hittite? ANS^E (ideogram, pronunciation unknown, I think). There is a Luwian word, apparently (I.M. Dunaevskaja, "Jazyk xettskix ieroglifov") or , syllabic . I don't know if one can segment tark-asna, which would allow a connection with Sum. ans^e, Grk. onos, Lat. asinus, Gafat ans^@la, Argobba hansia, etc. >- What was the word for horse in Armenian? ji >If Armenian used the *ekwos word for donkey, what is the source of its word >for horse? (And does that explain perhaps the 'semantic drift'?) *g^hei- "antreiben, lebhaft bewegen (schleudern) oder bewegt sein". Skt. hayah. "horse". See my other message. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Feb 3 22:40:04 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 22:40:04 -0000 Subject: Horses Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Wolfgang and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Wolfgang Schulze" Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2000 3:59 PM "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >> [PR] >> In this connection, one might want to notice Egyptian s(j)s(j), 'hurry', and >> ssm, 'horse'; could these be connected with IE *se:i-, 'throw'? >[WS wrote] > 'Horse' = an animal which throws the rider from its back???? If you relate > Egyptian s(j)s(j) 'hurry' to ssm 'horse' (which sounds reasonable as for the > semantics), what can you tell us about the final -m in Egyptian? Is it > derivational? What function? What, if ssm stems from something like *sm with > initial reduplication? No *zizi or what so ever connection anymore! > By the way: Why is it so difficult to accept that Sumerians used to term > horses 'donkeys (that stem from / of) the mountains' and that they might have > used the term ans^e-kur(r)a as it appears ('phonetically' speaking)? [PR] The evidence to make a definite determination about these matters dos not yet seem to be present so these ideas are all purely speculative. As for 'throw (a rider)', I had a connection more along the lines of 'move quickly' / 'cause to move quickly' in mind, rightly or wrongly. -m is not currently recognized as a formant for Egyptian though I believe there are other examples of it as an elative (for example in sDm, 'hear', which I connect with IE *sta:-mo- and Hittite iStamaS-, 'hear'). 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 friesen.net Fri Feb 4 04:45:01 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 20:45:01 -0800 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: <33.d21795.25ca774b@aol.com> Message-ID: At 01:16 AM 2/3/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >I take this to mean that the Sumerian/Akkadian horse symbol used in Hittite >may have been nothing more than an ideogram and therefore give no phonetic >information about the sound of the Hittite word. That is correct. This is somewhat of a truism in reading cuneiform. Within that speciality they use the term "Sumerogram" for ideograms that trace back to the Sumerian roots of the writing system. >My question then becomes how often Hittite does this sort of thing - use a >Sumerian symbol with no phonetic correspondence. It could not be all the >time or we would have no basis for sounding the Hittite language. Not all the time, but still fairly frequently. There is a standard stock of Sumerograms that most cultures using cuneiform continued to use out of tradition, regardless of the language they spoke. One of the most prominent of these is the glyph for "king". But it is understandable that horse/donkey is also written this way. The phonetic values of the cuneiform symbols are used mostly for those words not covered by the standard Sumerograms. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Feb 4 19:21:33 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 14:21:33 EST Subject: Horses Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >My question then becomes how often Hittite does this sort of thing - use a >Sumerian symbol with no phonetic correspondence. -- quite often. It's equivalent to having English write "maison" and prounounce "house". It's a major handicap with Hittite documents. Luckily they didn't do it all the time, but it's fairly frequent. From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Fri Feb 4 07:52:57 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 07:52:57 GMT Subject: Horses in War Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:- >> (from Tom Clancy - who also mentions cavalry's superiority to chariotry:) > Only once the modern stirrup was invented. I once saw on TV a reconstruction of a Roman cavalryman :: on each skirt of his saddle was a sideways projection, which the rider hooked his knee round, and that held him quite firm against impacts. From sarima at friesen.net Fri Feb 4 04:13:35 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 20:13:35 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <200002012119.p423@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: At 07:19 PM 2/1/00 +0000, Hans Holm wrote: >JS>, ... for 4000 years. Which is in blatant violation of everything we know >JS>about languages and how they develop. >.. Is it? This is an IE group, but if we take a look beyond our IE nose, >e.g. to Australia, we find about 70 % covered by speakers of Pama-Nyungan, >the languages/dialects of which are regarded as very closely related. And >archeologists now redate the first settlements back to more than 50.000 >years (for a up-to-date overview see Stringer in Antiquity 73/99:876). Of >course these must not be the direct predecessors of Pama-Nyungan. Indeed they almost certainly are NOT. The very fact that they are so similar indicates a *very* recent date for their arrival in most of their current localities. For a first guess as to the homeland of the Pama-Nyungan languages, one might look to the area with the greatest diversity of languages in the group in the smallest area (suggesting greater time depth for differentiation in that area). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Feb 4 04:18:43 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 23:18:43 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: In a message dated 2/2/00 12:43:52 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: [objecting to Renfrew's 4000BC date for an 'early IE language' in western Europe that was an ancestor of Celtic] <> Is this differentiation is quantifiable? Are you sure it works in your favor? Let's try this. [As much as 5500 years might separate Anatolian and wide PIE from the above languages. But I'm going with non-Anatolian PIE and a 5000BC date because the subject is Celtic.] Following Renfrew, roughly 4000 years separates non-Anatolian PIE from Mycenaean (1200BC), Sanskrit (1000BC?) and Latin (500BC). How 'differentiated' are those three languages? On a scale of 1 to 10? Using the 3300BC date of last unity: - roughly 2000 years would separate PIE from Hittite (1600BC), Mycenaean (1200BC) and Sanskrit (1000BC?). Again, degree of differentiation, 1-10? - roughly 3500 years would separate PIE from Germanic (500AD), Tocharian (500AD), Old Irish (700AD) Armenian (500AD) and Church Slavonic (800AD). How differentiated are these languages - 1 to 10? And you say there is too little differentiation for Renfrew's scenario to be true? Some would say that there is too much differentiation for the 3300BC date to be correct!!!! But once again, based on any objective standard at all, what is the measure of differentiation and how do you apply it against the ancient IE languages so you know what date is too much and what is just enough? <<<< A very specific question! Regards, Steve Long From r.clark at auckland.ac.nz Fri Feb 4 06:26:11 2000 From: r.clark at auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 19:26:11 +1300 Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >>> Hans Holm 02/02 8:19 AM >>> JS>This requires either no change, or perfectly synchronized change, in pre- JS>Celtic across thousands of miles, ... >.. I propose "little change". And there are much more examples. JS>, ... for 4000 years. Which is in blatant violation of everything we know JS>about languages and how they develop. >. Is it? This is an IE group, but if we take a look beyond our IE nose, >e.g. to Australia, we find about 70 % covered by speakers of Pama-Nyungan, >the languages/dialects of which are regarded as very closely related. And >archeologists now redate the first settlements back to more than 50.000 >years (for a up-to-date overview see Stringer in Antiquity 73/99:876). Of >course these must not be the direct predecessors of Pama-Nyungan. I think you mean "may not" or "cannot", and indeed it is most unlikely that the common ancestor of Pama-Nyungan dates to the period of the earliest human occupation of Australia. In fact we have hardly any idea of the time depth of this family. And "very closely related" is a very misleading way to describe these languages. They may sometimes be described as closely related, but only by way of contrast to the other language families in the north and west of Australia, which are lexically and typologically highly diverse. Consider the immediate neighbours of Dyirbal, as described by Dixon (1972): Yidin (27% common vocabulary), Mbabaram (18%), Warungu (47%) and Wargamay (60%). Only the last shows any structural similarity to Dyirbal, and Dixon is uncertain whether this is the result of a relatively close genetic relationship or a long period of contiguity and convergence. All this is within Pama-Nyungan, in fact within a 100 km radius in one small corner of Queensland. Ross Clark From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Feb 4 14:24:59 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 15:24:59 +0100 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000202230556.0099a220@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: Stanley Friesen wrote: >>But actually if we give a generous 4000BC date to wheeled-transport (as >>opposed to wheels in general or just plain round objects) and remember that >>in Hittite the word for wheel is different >I seem to remember somebody posting a Hittite cognate with a reasonably >similar meaning. As far as I know, the Hittite word for "wheel" is . No relation to the *kwel-words. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Feb 4 05:53:07 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 00:53:07 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: I wrote: >It does not matter if they occured otherwise. The question is WHEN they >occurred. None of this dates these changes back to PIE dispersal. The wheel >may have been introduced BEFORE PIE *k ==> Germanic 'h' occurred BUT >AFTER IE dispersal. In a message dated 2/3/00 3:02:06 AM, sarima at friesen.net wrote: <> I simply MUST point out what is happening here. Much of your 'late Neolithic technology' - aside from the wheel - no longer supports the unity dates they once did and they do not necessarily refute the neolithic hypothesis regarding PIE. in the Ukraine, metal smelting appears about 4500BC - hammered metal appears well before that. The domesticated horse is now at about 4000BC and horse bones are in the food pits a thousand years before that. Alot of this 'late' neolithic technology is now arriving in the Ukraine with neolithicism or just afterwards. The list of objects that will establish PIE unity in say 3300BC in the Ukraine is now fast dwindling. Heck, even red ochre graves were identified in the Bug-Dniestr sites dating before 4500BC. Now the question becomes - if all of these other objects with any confidence can only hold a last date of say 4500BC - how can wheeled transport still be used to preserve PIE unity as much as 1500 years later? And that is why the relative dates of the sound changes of wheeled transport ALONE do matter - because they almost ALONE argue for a later last date of unity than neolithicism. BUT they can only really be used to establish that the wheel came before those sound changes occurred - not necessarily establish the last days of PIE unity. And in the process they may suggest other locations where an earlier PIE unity occurred. Regards, Steve Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Feb 4 06:46:33 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 06:46:33 -0000 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Ed and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Eduard Selleslagh" Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2000 12:00 PM >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" >Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2000 12:52 AM >> "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >>> They aren't: Actually, basically three different, and very ordinary, words >>> that probably exist (I mean words with these meanings) in any language. As >>> I said before: all these words seem to have had different original meanings >>> (*kwekwlo/'round, circle', *rotho/'revolve', >> The primary meaning of *ret(h)-/*rot(h)- is apparently "to run". >[Ed] >Or "to ride" maybe? [PR] I have established (to my own satisfaction, at least) that Egyptian ' [hand on outstretched arm] corresponds to IE *dh/th. On that basis, I believe that a comparison of Egyptian r', 'sun' (ideographically written: a circle with *central dot* [=axle?]) and IE *rot(h)o-, 'wheel', is likely. Therefore, I would opt for a primary meaning of 'wheel', secondarily 'roll'. 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 mcv at wxs.nl Fri Feb 4 16:53:38 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 17:53:38 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <5b.18357d5.25cb4dc4@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Renfrew's hypothesis is not based on any new physical _evidence_; Indeed not. In fact, Renfrew's theory when published in 1987 wasn't even a _new_ theory. Similar proposals had been made by the Spanish historian Pere Bosch-Gimpera and others. Take for instance this excerpt from the introduction to Colin McEvedy's Penguin Atlas of Ancient History (1986?): "... the "Danubian" [i.e. LBK, Bandkeramik or Linear Pottery --mcv] culture, the earliest Neolithic culture of Central Europe, has a comparatively small area of contact with the old-established Neolithic communities of the Balkans which indicates that its originators were few; it undoubtedly represents a spread by these originators because the type of shifting agriculture they had evolved would rapidly disperse any population practicing it. And the density of a Neolithic people being greater than that of a mesolithic one by a factor of at least ten, the ethnic contribution of the aborigines -- even if they were absorbed rather than exterminated or expelled -- must have been insignificant [this is indeed borne out by the genetic data --mcv]. And given that the "Danubians" were a genuine people and remained so until provincial differences began to appear among them a millennium after they had expanded across Central Europe, it is difficult to avoid the view that their movement created an Indo-European heartland which must be postulated for roughly this time and place on purely linguistic grounds. Therefore the "Danubian" culture represents the arrival and establishment of the Indo-Europeans in Central Europe." As usual, McEvedy makes a lot of sense. If we now turn to the map for 4500 bc (i.e. 5500 BC calibrated), the Balkan cousins of the "Danubians" (labeled Starc^evo) are also marked as Indo-European, which comes very close indeed to Renfrew. Maybe it's a Colin thing, but it certainly has nothing to do with immobilist Procrustean beds. There's plenty of arrows and quite a lot of population movements going on in McEvedy's maps that follow. Note that equating the Linear Pottery movement, together with its eastern offshoots into the Pontic area [Tripolye, Dnepr-Donets], with the spread of Proto-Indo-European fits in rather nicely with the other evidence we have. There is contact with Proto-Uralic in the Baltic/Forest steppe zone by 5000 BC, as must be assumed on the basis of PIE ~ PU linguistic contacts. There is contact and eventually assimilation (TRB culture, ca. 4000 BC) of a sizeable autochthonous group in Denmark and Southern Scandinavia, which explains the important non-IE substrate in Germanic. At the same time, the Balkanic (and ultimately Anatolian) roots of the Linear Pottery culture explain the close connection with Lemnian/Etruscan in the Aegean area, and provide one possible explanation for the linguistic contacts with Semitic ("bull", "wine", numerals, etc.) or Kartvelian (numerals, "heart/chest", "yoke", etc.). There were horses in the Linear Pottery area, and although knowledge of the wheel must have spread from the Near East at a slightly later date, it stands to reason that the LBK-Pontic area was still linguistically relatively uniform until about 4500-4000 BC. This doesn't mean one has to take a static view on the further development (and spread!) of Indo-European, which entered a new phase at about 3500 BC with the Corded Ware/Bell Beaker cultures in the western area and the Kurgan culture (Yamnaya kul'tura) in the eastern, initiating the eventual Indo-Europeisation of Atlantic and Mediterranean Europe as well as Central Asia and beyond. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Feb 4 16:54:28 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 11:54:28 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 2/4/00 8:15:15 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> First, let me say again that 7000BC dates for neolithicization in Europe beyond the Balkans are off by 1500 years, and for western Europe and the Ukraine by another 1000 years. All the diffusion needs to represent linguistically is 'narrow PIE' and not the beginnings of agriculture in the Near East. The cultural separation between Anatolian-Balkan assemblages and Danubian cultures becomes clearly distinct about 5500BC. Addressing the evidence and your interpretations: -You have a population of speakers sharing strong cultural affinities from the Ukraine to Holland that culminates about 3500BC - for a period their settlements and artifacts often replicate the same patterns no matter where they are found. -It is plain to see that as these speakers migrated, their populations grew exponentially and they cleared and settled areas almost to the extent that they are settled today from northwestern Europe to the western Ukraine. - By 4200BC, these unknown speakers were building the largest buildings in the world, erecting megaliths, developing a large array of specialized domesticated animal and plant species, becoming adept metallurgists, maintaining extensive trade contacts with the Near East, building fortified settlements against one another, laying out roads - not paths - along the same routes as modern highways follow today and just possibly beginning to co-invent wheeled transport. - Almost all evidence points to the notion that this population of speakers has remained fundamentally indigenous in most of this areas to the present day And yet you find it linguistically plausible that the language of this mass of technically advanced speakers across Europe was completely substituted without leaving any thing remotely resembling a substrate by a language of a thinly populated culture that first dispersed from the Ukraine in 3500BC and that did not even bother to leave a relative behind in its haste to spread from the Ireland to India in a mere 3000 years. Not to mention that a large part of the Ukraine had already been neoliticized when this happened - and most probably by these speakers of the lost neolithic language of Europe. - By 3300BC, evidence of a new influx from the east comes into the eastern fringes of the post Bandkeramik areas show this influx were all also neolithicized, shared animal husbandry, agricultural and metalurgical characteristics with middle Bandkeramik cultures - and in their original locations they were for the most part demonstrably already under the influence of Bandkeramik cultures. Plus the population movement represented by this 'influx' appears at best to be relatively small and reaches no further than the eastern half of previously neolithicized Europe. - General areas where this particular group of neolithicizing cultures did NOT colonize - Spain, the Italian peninsula, the Uralic northeast - all show in historic times substantial evidence of non-IE speakers - Iberian, Basque, Etruscan, Finnish, etc. You say with definiteness that this rather massive population of European speakers represented "_some_ language/language family was spread across Europe by "demic diffusion" in the early Neolithic; but whatever it was, it wasn't PIE." Linguistically, you have no a substrate across this vast region to support such a claim. Linguistically, you are relying upon many objects developed by this group of European cultures to date a last possible date for what you consider a foreign language - PIE. Linguistically, you are changing the languages of a massive group of speakers across the middle of a continent on the basis that a starting date (narrow PIE) from the Danube of 5500BC is too early. Yet your best evidence of the substitute language yields a rather weak latest date of dispersal of 3500BC - and you have no way of accounting for where that language was or what it looked like in 5500BC. If we know anything about Steppes culture at this time, it is that it moved eastward out of the Ukraine, carrying clear emblems of influence imported from the west and south - ceramic agriculture, animal husbandry, metallurgy. Not the other way around. Linguistically, you have this other evidence of proto-Uralic borrowings from PIE that are dated no later than 4000BC, but I believe are more often dated at no later than 5000BC - in an area possibly not 500 miles from one of the original center of Bandkeramik. I must suggest to you that linguistically AND archaeologically your interpretation has some serious holes in it. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Feb 4 05:09:58 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 00:09:58 EST Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 2/2/00 12:43:52 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- 7000 BCE, actually, for the start of the process. Agriculture in north-central Europe long predates 4000 BCE, and Renfrew attributes the spread of IE languages to the spread of agriculture.>> Well, agriculture may have been first developed in the Levant - so you have him there, too. And of course you'll find agriculture in the Far East and in the Americas and presumably IE languages did not accompany those developments. Seems this theory is falling apart:) I'll try to address this again from this angle. --- Actually, what Renfrew does is associate the original spread of IE languages in Europe with PARTICULAR CULTURAL REMAINS (assemblages) that coincide - in many but NOT all cases - with the diffusion of agriculture. The appearance of agriculture itself of course cannot possibly in all instances equal IE - this should be apparent. Here's a rough chronology of that cultural evidence - very rough now - that may help straighten this out with regard to Celtic: @7000BC - farming in Anatolia and southern Greece (cultural uniformities not yet visible) @6500 - 5400BC - the neolithic culture associated with Balkan-Anatolian painted ware develops and reaches the Danube. @5400BC - early stages of 'Bandkeramik'; beginning of expansion east and northwest; beginnings of C-T in the western Ukraine @4900BC - early 'Bandkeramik' reaches Holland; evidence for regular trade contacts with the Danube - extremely small populations, few settlements, 'remarkable uniformity' in remains evidenced @4600BC - expansion beyond the early narrow Bandkeramik corridor north of the Alps and northwestern Europe @4200BC - pollen evidence shows first extensive clearances of land in peripheral areas, exponential growth in populations and settlements; differentiation in local cultures @4000BC - megalithic period begins, evidence of metallurgy (smelting) has expanded from the Balkans to Denmark, northern Italy and the Ukraine; beginnings of the secondary products revolution; beaker and corded ware cultures begin to appear By 4000BC, there is enough differentiation between regional expressions of Bandkeramik to suggest that the former cultural unities are giving way to local identities in western Europe and north of the Alps. [Southwestern Europe is a different matter not addressed here.] So if we were going to hypotheize a corrolation between language and these events we MIGHT do something like this: @5500BC - 'Wide PIE' splits into Anatolian and "narrow PIE" @4900BC - Migration spreads 'Narrow PIE' @4600BC - A north western European version of [narrow PIE] arises @4000BC - An "early IE language" develops in parts of western Europe and north of the Alps. @3500BC - Local differentiation in this 'early IE language' begins @2200BC - A dialect of one of these languages becomes 'pre-Celtic' @1500BC - A dialect of 'pre-Celtic' becomes 'proto-Celtic' near the Alps @ 800BC - A dialect or dialects of 'proto-Celtic' become associated with, expand along with and control a trade network that spreads iron metalurgy,etc. in western Europe. @ 600BC - Celtic languages make their first apparent appearance in the Lepontic tablets, using a Ligurian (non-Celtic) script. @ 350BC - Celtic languages begin to appear in other scripts. Speakers of early Gaulish - a Celtic language associated with southeastern France/southwestern Germany migrate to other areas in eastern and western Europe - partly due to incursions coming from the direction of Italy and northern Germany Some might at first have a problem with this scenario feeling that this puts too much time - 5500 years - between "narrow PIE" (the theoretical ancestor of all IE languages minus Anatolian) and say Celtic at say 1BC. But does it really? Let us consider another language as it would have developed under a later, Ukraine homeland theory. @3300BC - Wide PIE disperses, speakers leave the Ukraine @ between 3000 and 2000BC - an early IE language arrives in Italy. @ between 2000 and 1500BC - perhaps a dialect becomes Pre-Latin @ between 1500 and 1000BC - perhaps a dialect becomes proto-Latin @ between 1000 and 300BC - a dialect becomes early Latin @ between 300BC and 600AD - Latin scripts show a 'remarkable uniformity' from Britain to Persia and Africa @ between 600AD - 1000AD - dialects of Latin become Romance languages @ between 1000AD - 2000AD - scripts in the Romance languages appear from Quebec to Ethiopia, showing 'a remarkable uniformity.' Italian is particularly Latin-like. Perhaps more importantly, inscriptions appearing in Latin, on the US Dollar, on religious objects and at the end of e-mail messages (but not on ogham sticks) show NO CHANGE IN THE LANGUAGE at all - 1800 years later! The journey is 5300 years and it seems to show all the same evidence you object to in the Renfrew scenario. Regards, Steve Long From sarima at friesen.net Fri Feb 4 04:36:08 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 20:36:08 -0800 Subject: SV: Indo-Hittite In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 02:30 PM 2/2/00 +0000, Larry Trask wrote: >Stanley Friesen writes: >> So far the "cladistic linguistics" I have seen has fallen far short of what >> biologists do - many of the solutions to statistical issues that biologists >> have come up with are not applied. >But our problems are not identical to those of the biologists, and their >solutions do not necessarily work for us. To some extent. But things like long-branch attraction are *certainly* potential trouble-spots in linguistics as well as in biology. And the UPenn trees were done in a way that is particularly prone to that particular malady. So simply ignoring the work of the biologists is not the way to go. What must be done is an analysis of the applicability and utility of each process. (Also, I am not certain the UPEnn people paid enough attention to the issue character selection and its potential for introducing a bias in the results: character selection is ultimately necessary, but must be done with extreme care to avoid bias). >For one thing, the biologists have a lot more material to work with than >we do. They have genes, but we don't. They have fossils, but we mostly >don't. These are relatively minor points. In many cases neither has been available to biologists either. >It is, in my view, an error to assume that comparative linguistics is >isomorphic to biological taxonomy, and that what is true or successful >in one field must be true or successful in the other. I am not making *that* assumption. But what I have read of the papers from UPenn show a lack of awareness of even the most basic precautions needed to make cladistic analyses truly reliable - precautions against potential problems that are intrinsic to the *method*, and do not depend on the realm of application. Long branch attraction is a mathematical feature of basic model, and sampling issues are fundamental to any mathematical analysis, but are especially important when one is doing statistical analyses (which is what cladistics is). Some while back I posted a *long* article on the weaknesses in the method described in the one paper I have analyzed in detail. If it is not available in archives somewhere, I could send it to you directly. (I will not repost it here, unless there is mass demand for it). >As for statistical (probabilistic) approaches, some linguists have been >trying very hard to develop these, but the difficulties are considerable, >indeed almost refractory, and so far no one has been able to come up with >a probabilistic approach which can be regarded as generally satisfactory. The same is true in biology. In fact I have, on several occasions, discussed the problem of statistical significance in cladistic analysis in the dinosaur mailing list. As yet this has only been solved for gene sequence analysis. It is an unsolved problem for character based analysis. Even with my training in statistics I have been unable to come up with a model that can be used to compute significance statistics for comparing cladograms that differ by only a few steps. I am not complaining about *that* here. Indeed if *that* were the only problem I saw in the UPenn trees, I would consider them well established. My biggest beef is that, due to the way they did the analysis, few, if any, of the major branches of the tree can be said to be clear of long-branch attraction, making the basal branching sequence dubious, at best. This is why, in another post, I said I would have been more confident in their results if they *had* used Luwian to help test the Indo-Hittite hypothesis. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Fri Feb 4 08:31:02 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 10:31:02 +0200 Subject: Basic vocabulary borrowing (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: <6a.8ad589.25cb645a@aol.com> Message-ID: >> But "hand", "eye", "I", "water", "brother" aso. are not safe. They simply >> don't bear a label "Attention ! Native word! Don't replace by foreign >> gobbledeegook !" on them. > -- effectively speaking, they do. > After all, when presented with a new language, what's the first thing we do > to determine whether it's IE or not? > We look at the numerals from one to ten, the family relationship terms, and > so forth. Later on more detailed examination is necessary, but that's the > first step. > In fact, that's how the fact that there _is_ an IE family of languages was > discovered in the first place. This is irrelevant. This is what a linguist would do, but one must remember that a linguist is not a normal speaker (I prefer this term to the widely used "naive native speaker"). Normal speakers don't even have the concepts of "IE" or "related language" unless they've been taught to them in school. From experience I can say that most speakers find it hard to perceive even obvious borrowings as e.g. Finnish pelaa- 'to play' < Swedish spela, Finnish (s)kaappi < Swed. sk?p. I would like to elaborate it is a different thing for a word to be borrowed and for the borrowing to become established. Words are borrowed because they are recognised as foreign and the speakers want to use them precisely for this reason (e.g., many young people in Finland who want to sound "cool" use words like "anyway", "cool", "about", "shit", "place" etc. because they are English and not Finnish). If the borrowed word remains in use for a couple of generations, it may undergo phonological nativization. Then it becomes established, because it is no longer recognised as a borrowing. A note: the migration discussion is also very interesting, but perhaps the subject line should be changed? There is not much in common between the U / IE contacts and the Bantu expansion, I believe... :) - Ante Aikio From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Fri Feb 4 09:07:08 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 11:07:08 +0200 Subject: basic vocabulary borrowing (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: (Joat Simeon wrote:) >-- true, although of course some things are more _likely_ to be borrowed than >others. Numerals, body parts, family relationships, and so forth, are less >likely to be loan-words. What is likely to be borrowed and what is not in a given circumstance depends on many factors. In U languages, the numerals are largely cognate and there are no known borrowings except for 'seven', 'hundred' and 'thousand'. But even numerals can become cultural items; e.g. the loan origin of Ob-Ugric/Hungarian *s?pt? '7' (< Aryan / Iranian) and Samoyed *sejpti (< Tocharian?), replacing PU *s?exs?imi '7', is perhaps connected with the 7-day week. Words for '100' and '1000' are probably related to trade; for the same reason, even lower numerals may have been borrowed to some languages, since counting is important in trading. (A note on the U numerals: Samoyedic has curiously replaced the U numerals 3-6 with roots of unknown origin; this is perhaps connected with the strong lexical substrate from an unknown source that seems to be present in Samoyedic. The U word *wixti '5' is generally considered to survive in Samoyedic in the meaning '10', but the semantics seem peculiar to me. Does anyone know any parallels?) Kinship terms can become subject to borrowing in situations where intercultural marriages between two language groups are common. This probably explains the loaning of such words as e.g. Finnish ?iti 'mother' (< Germ.), morsian 'bride' (< Balt.), sisar 'sister' (I can't quite recall the precise IE source of this one at the moment). Curiously, words for female relatives appear to have been more freely borrowed by the U languages than words for male ones. This perhaps tells something about how marriages were organized. As for body parts, there is hardly a real "reason" for replacing native words by foreign ones in any circumstance (other than the wish to be considered fashionable, of course). - Ante Aikio From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Fri Feb 4 09:54:30 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 11:54:30 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 24 Jan 2000, Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: [snip] > We need very specific evidence to tell whether Anatolian had separated > from the rest or not by the time of the oldest loans in Uralic [snip] This popped into my mind. The PU word for 'name', *nimi-, shows curious variation: the Mordvin and Mari forms show and irregular *l- (< PU *limi-). *nimi has been considered an IE loan (< PIE *nmen-). Now as far as I know, Hittite shows irregular initial l- in the word for 'name', but the other IE languages have uniformy *n-. This might be pure speculation, but do you think there is any chance of Mordvin-Mari *limi- instead of regular *nimi- resulting from Pre-Anatolian influence or even being a separate loan from Pre-Anatolian? (If I recall correclty, Koivulehto may have suggested something like this, but I can't recall the exact source right now.) Of course, the changes might be coincidental, but this would seem a bit weird since both of them are irregular, as far as I understand. But then again, there are a couple of words in Mordvin with a dialectal alteration between initial n- and l-, but these seem to be relatively late descriptive formations. - Ante Aikio From Georg at home.ivm.de Fri Feb 4 12:47:25 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 13:47:25 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <6a.8ad589.25cb645a@aol.com> Message-ID: >After all, when presented with a new language, what's the first thing we do >to determine whether it's IE or not? >We look at the numerals from one to ten, the family relationship terms, and >so forth. Later on more detailed examination is necessary, but that's the >first step. That'd make Thai Sino-Tibetan (or Japanese, for that matter), but it isn't. Or it'd make a lot of languages what they aren't (if only in the first step). It may be even *my* first step when presented with completely new data, but I'd insert some further steps *before I write down what I "found" in the first step* and rush it out to publishers (no personal snide intended, I have in mind other people than those present here ...). >In fact, that's how the fact that there _is_ an IE family of languages was >discovered in the first place. Sorry, but that's not how the fact that there is an IE family of languages was discovered in the first place. The fact that there is an IE family of languages was discovered in the first place by looking at cognate verbal morphology. Best, Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From Georg at home.ivm.de Fri Feb 4 13:15:29 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 14:15:29 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <200002022001.p531@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: >SG>Gogodala (/wi/), Awin (/wae/), and Gira (/wai/), three Papuan >SG>languages, borrowed Austronesian *wayEG (reconstructed by some >SG>Austronesianists as *vaSeR, which does remind me of a language I know, >SG>but I cannot remember which one ;-). >..you really don't mean German?;-)))) Yes, thanks, that was the name. >.. of course that is correct; so nothing can be generalized. The cases you >cited seem to be due to situations where water is quite precious. I'm not beginning to understand ? Serbocroatian borrowed its word for "excrement" (balega) from Roumanian, and come to think of the English terms /faeces/, /manure/ or the gloss above. Surely, "high value" cannot really lurk behind the motivation for borrowing ? (addendum a: yes, I know that dung as fuel is precious in some societies; addendum b: yes, I know that taboo may play a role here; but, addendum c: I really don't think that pointing to a parameter of "value" as a motivation for borrowing is anything but [quite desperately] ad hoc. Addendum d: Water is pretty precious everywhere.). >Except >the Papuan cases, which could be doubted? Well, if you doubt them, then go ahead, but, then, I'd like to have some detailed reasons (which should not run along the lines of "nobody knows anything about Papuan languages, so we should doubt anything said on them or quoted from them in the first place"). Of course, this is a straw-man only, I'm sure this will not be your line of argumentation. >SG>There are no such concepts. Everything can be borrowed, and there are >SG>examples for everything actually having been borrowed at some point in >SG>space and time. >.. I agree here. And you could agree I think that there in fact are >tendencies for words or meanings to be borrowed first or/easier, e.g. >cultural words, not only because this is mainstream opinion. No reason not to agree here. I was only taking issue with your earlier statement that (not literally) "no linguist will maintain that a word such as one for 'water' could be subject to borrowing" (correct me if I misquoted; if so, no intention). It could, and there are, no shortcut. Best, St. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Feb 4 04:40:08 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 22:40:08 -0600 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000202225420.009a41c0@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: The Dakota mirgation was triggered by European technology in that the Ojibway acquired firearms from the French and used them to expel the Dakota from the NW Great Lakes area. Like the Comanches, later Dakota expansion was based on their skill in using horses for hunting and warfare --another mirgation triggered by European colonization [smip] >[It is not even certain the Dakota migration westward can be laid at the >feet of Europeans - the proximal cause was war with neighboring tribes, >especially the Ojibwa] >-------------- >May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Feb 4 19:29:59 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 14:29:59 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >I don't want to create an "I'm right, you're wrong" thread here. When I say >major upheaval, I'm referring to catastrophic events along the lines of >European invasions -- catastrophe is the norm of history. Eg., the rise of the Zulu kingdom (due to purely indigenous developments) killed half the population of South Africa, caused other upheavals like the Kololo migration which changed the language of the Upper Zambezi to a Sotho dialect from 1000 miles southwards, and sent Nguni-speaking war bands marauding as far north as Lake Victoria -- all within a single generation, all on foot, and all with a technology in most respects more primitive than that of the European neolithic. No wheeled vehicles or draught animals, to name only two aspects. (Archaeological traces of all this are nil, by the way. We wouldn't know about it at all if it weren't for written records and linguistic traces, like Sotho in Zambia and Ndebele in Zimbabwe.) The Galla migrations into the Ethiopian highlands, or the movement of the Maa-speakers into Kenya (the Maasai and Samburu) are other examples. Not to mention that the Germanics had been expanding at the expense of Celtic-speakers for centuries before the Romans came along; as a matter of fact, it was Caesar who forced them out of Gaul and back across the Rhine. What's now Southern Germany and the German-speaking parts of Switzerland was once Celtic-speaking territory. As was Bohemia, which became Germanic and then Slavic in turn. From HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu Fri Feb 4 13:17:54 2000 From: HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu (Herb Stahlke) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 08:17:54 -0500 Subject: Phonological symmetry and merger Message-ID: Pattern pressure, the tendency of sound change to turn asymmetrical phonological inventories into more symmetrical patterns, is a motivation for sound change that historical linguists have often discussed but with a sense of talking about a disreputable cousin. Most of the examples I've seen in texts dealt with it as an influence on phonological splits or the addition of new segments through borrowing, as in the development from the Old English system of voiceless fricatives that voiced between voiced segments to a late Modern English system in which all voiceless fricatives contrasted phonologically with corresponding voiced fricatives, even if the interdental and palato-alveolar pairs are only weakly contrastive. I have not seen discussions of phonological symmetry as a factor in patterns resulting from merger, that is, producing phonetic systems that are balanced even if the underlying phonological systems are not. I'm working on a problem of that sort in the vowel systems of Yoruba dialects. Proto-Yoruba can be reconstructed with a nine-vowel system with nine oral and seven nasal vowels. Mid and high oral vowels, as well as high nasal vowels, contrast for tongue root position [ATR], so that there are two each of high front, mid front, high back, and mid back, one ATR and the other RTR. The system changes in four dialects so that the tongue root contrast disappears as a phonological contrast in high vowels. However, the original system is reflected in one modern dialect in that the high RTR vowels may show up in prefixes on RTR roots and in another in that the high nasal vowels are RTR while the oral vowels are ATR. Thus the original pattern persists but in a phonologically non-contrastive way. I haven't this side of the phonological symmetry issue discussed. There are undoubtedly references I'm missing, and I'd appreciate any insights others may have into this problem. Herb Stahlke Ball State University From Georg at home.ivm.de Fri Feb 4 15:27:05 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 16:27:05 +0100 Subject: Indo-Iranian In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >>Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >>The Achaemenid inscriptions are easily datable, they fall mostly in the >>6th/5th centuries B.C. Traditional datings of Zarathushtra put him in the >>same time (mostly as a contemporary of Dareios I., but this has been >>challenged, lately by Mary Boyce, who assigned him a date considerably >>earlier on the time-scale >> >-- I would agree, given the _extremely_ close correspondances between the >earlier Avestan and Vedic Sanskrit. As far as I remember - and I remember this only vaguely at best - this was indeed part of the argument. Though, would archaicity of language *alone* *really* justify such a drastic readjustment of historical dates ? But maybe someone listening is better informed on this than I am, and there maybe more reasons. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From edsel at glo.be Fri Feb 4 15:49:01 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 16:49:01 +0100 Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2000 8:51 PM > Germanic *ga- related to Latin co-: > There is a discussion of this in Collinge, The Laws of IE, p 207, and > reference to a paper by Bennett (1968) and a book by E Rooth, 1974, Das > vernische Gesetz in Forschung und Lehre, Lund/Gleerup. > Collinge's summary is that the connexion still puzzles people. > Peter [Ed Selleslagh] A personal, rather uninformed suggestion: Could it be that there really are two different prefixes *ga-, one related to the most frequent use of Latin co(n)- (e.g. Gemeinde, Gesellschaft...) and the one in past participles, even though they still may have a common (PIE?) origin, but branched into two separate uses with their own dynamics. On the other hand, Lat. co- is ALSO used in a second type of context where the notion of 'collectivity, togetherness...' is absent, while the meaning is rather one of 'completion': comple:re, comedere.... So: It looks like both meanings exist in Latin and W.Germanic, but in one of the two the syntactic characteristics are quite different. Ed. From Georg at home.ivm.de Fri Feb 4 17:16:35 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 18:16:35 +0100 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000202234209.00997120@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: >>Wrong. Language is not a biological phenomenon, but a cognitive one. >Cognition is a biological process. Ergo, so is language. Language is a social phenomenon, which humans have been able to develop and are able to use and process for purposes intimately connected with social interaction, because they are furnished with certain cognitive abilities; which they are, because their physis meets certain biological prerequisites. The biological substratum furnishes the ability to develop, use and change the tool, it doesn't determine its shape. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From mclasutt at brigham.net Fri Feb 4 19:26:21 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 12:26:21 -0700 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000202234209.00997120@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: > Stanley Friesen >> (John McLaughlin wrote) The >> physical structures which allow complex human language evolved along >> biological lines, but language change is note like biology. When two >> species diverge, they can no longer influence each other. > Not always true. Closely related species can often exchange a limited > amount of genetic material. Full cross sterility takes time to evolve. > This means an occasional hybrid can move genes across a species boundary. > And in prokaryotes, genetic transfers can occur between *distant* > relatives. But prokaryotes are EXTREMELY simple creatures. Language is not simple. Can a horse and an ass produce a fertile offspring? Absolutely not, yet when French mixed with Cree it produced a completely "fertile" offspring--Michif. When a stump of English mixed with lots of Papuan languages, the result was a completely "fertile" offspring--Tok Pisin. You mention that a lion and a leopard can interbreed, yet is the offspring fertile? Or even capable of surviving to adulthood? The only instances of cross-species breeding among complex organisms in any case are man-caused and artificial. While cross-species permanent genetic influence is only found in very limited circumstances among very simple creatures (one-celled) and is not common, cross-linguistic influence is EXTREMELY common and languages that don't participate are extremely rare (if any even exist at all). It's like saying that there are a couple of Australians who know the Star-Spangled Banner, and therefore since all Americans know the Star-Spangled Banner (at least the chorus), Australians are Americans. Doesn't work that way. 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 sonno3 at hotmail.com Fri Feb 4 17:22:20 2000 From: sonno3 at hotmail.com (Christopher Gwinn) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 12:22:20 -0500 Subject: One World Language Message-ID: I wonder if anyone else saw this article? http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/020100sci-archaeo-language.html [ Moderator's note: This URL takes you to a registration page for the on-line _New York Times_. I assume this is the article written by Nicholas Wade about Joseph Greenberg and his Eurasiatic theory. I'll note here that Mr. Wade made use of the public archives of both the Indo-European and Nostratic mailing lists for deep background material. --rma ] From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Feb 4 23:55:12 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 00:55:12 +0100 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) In-Reply-To: <77.1403866.25cb4889@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- there has been no change in the relevant data; only in (Renfrew's) >_interpretation_ of the data; ie., saying that a linguistic change requires a >massive amount of archaeological evidence associated with fundamental >technological-economic transformation. That's not at all what Renfrew says. He's saying that "a massive amount of archaeological evidence associated with fundamental technological-economic transformation requires a linguistic change", as it were. Which is true. The Neolithic Revolution was the second most important such event in European history (the most important was the introduction of language --as we know it-- itself in the Upper Paleolithic, 50-40,000 BP). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Feb 4 18:24:38 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 18:24:38 -0000 Subject: Re Personal pronouns Message-ID: Dear John and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dr. John E. McLaughlin" Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2000 7:14 PM >> [Pat Ryan wrote previously] >>>> It is obvious that "she" can stand for either "(the) woman" or the fuller >>>> NP: "(the) woman (that) we are supposed to meet". >> [Larry Trask previously] >>> Nope. That 'she' cannot take the place of 'woman', and that is the end >>> of it. >> [PR previously] >> I think we shall just have to 'agree to disagree' on this question. The >> definition of 'pronoun' in your dictionary includes the phrase: "... and >> whose members typically have little or no intrinsic meaning or reference." >> Your position is obviously consistent. It is hard for me to >> accept that this is the consensus position. [JM wrote] > It is. Larry's quite clear in his explanation why it is so. [PR] I think you are coming into this discussion a bit late to be able to intuit the point I am trying to make, whether correctly or not. But, I will give you the benefit of the doubt; and ask, before I answer, "why it is so" refers to what point Larry is making? 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 proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Feb 3 21:50:20 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 21:50:20 -0000 Subject: Basque * 'round' Message-ID: Dear Ed and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Eduard Selleslagh" Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2000 12:47 PM ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Monday, January 31, 2000 5:04 PM > Ed Selleslagh writes: > [on my puzzlement over a suggested PIE source] >> So, it is not unreasonable to assume (no hard evidence!!) that *kwelo gave >> rise to a Basque re-interpretation *bel-, via some intermediate (most likely >> IE) stage *(h)wel-. [LT] > "Not unreasonable"? > Well, first the vocalism is wrong. Basque does indeed have another ancient > stem of the form *, but this means 'dark', not 'round'. [PR] For which a look at IE *pel- might be of interest. 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 mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Fri Feb 4 08:04:56 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 08:04:56 GMT Subject: Basque butterflies Message-ID: Among all this talk, it should be remembered that how a language handles a word depends somewhat on the named object or action's place in the life of the people. Butterflies are pretty little things, but they are not a central or essential part of life (unless the early Basques knew already of the connection between some species of butterfly and damage to crops from caterpillar infestations). Thus the word would be liable as centuries passed, to frivolous alterations and replacements. From sonno3 at hotmail.com Fri Feb 4 19:30:09 2000 From: sonno3 at hotmail.com (Christopher Gwinn) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 14:30:09 -0500 Subject: Basque Message-ID: The big problem with accepting Lusitanian as Celtic is that Lusitanian preserves the PIE -P- (lost by Celtic) in the word Porcom (Celtic *Orco- "pig" note British Orcades "Pig-land"). It is possible that Lusitanian may be a late survival of a type of Proto-Celtic, however. From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Fri Feb 4 16:11:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 16:11:00 GMT Subject: Basque Message-ID: This wonderful argumentation seems to be somewhat 'neo-grammarian'. Which has added much to our knowledge, but we know where the limits are. Of course we must try to find out rules, but we must accept that there always are many variations in natural languages and dialects, where these rules only exist in written 'classical' literature (cf. sanskrit). After all, this is an Indo-European list, and therefore I looked for a possible loan influence. HJH From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Fri Feb 4 16:10:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 16:10:00 GMT Subject: Basque Message-ID: No problem to change it a little: > What about being 'bil' a loan from Gaulish? > PIE *kwel- > Cel *kwi:l- > Gaul *pi:l > ! > bask. bil > cf PIE *penque > Cel *kwinkwe > Gaul *pimpetos (ordinal) 1) Regarding the semantics: Remember that the Celts were famous for their cartwright-technique. 2) Regarding the phonetics: loans are often changed to the next native sound available. Listen to a Bavarian trying to spell "German"! He most times will change the [dzh-]>[tsh-] (cave any Bav. reading here!). Of course the i-prefixed verbform is an argument /against/ borrowing from Celtic. HJH From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Feb 4 09:12:47 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 09:12:47 +0000 Subject: Hualde's view Message-ID: Roz Frank writes: > Larry, what you describe Hualde as proposing doesn't seem to coincide with > the contents of the paper that I read. As you may recall, the last time you > paraphrased Hualde's position, saying that he argued that Pre-Basque had > facultative voicing, Hualde himself wrote a response to the list. Yet I > notice that you are repeating the same thing again here. So I'm confused. In the quoted passage, Hualde elaborates somewhat on his views, but the fundamental point remains the same. In Michelena's view, Pre-Basque permitted only a single labial plosive word-initially, */b-/. This */b-/ develops regularly into modern /b-/, except in circumstances in which it becomes /m-/. Similar remarks apply to the other plosives. As far as I can see, Hualde agrees in not recognizing a "robust" (his word) contrast between */b-/ and */p-/ in initial position in Pre-Basque, though his view of the phonetics is different from Michelena's. But the crucial difference is as before: Hualde allows Pre-Basque */b-/ to develop variably into /b-/ and /p-/ in the modern language. He has elaborated on his account of this, but he doesn't seem to have changed his central view. [quote from Hualde] > The problem of the ancient Basque plosves, as stated by Martinet and > others before him, can be summarized as follows: " How come Basque, which > has a robust opposition between voiceless and voiced oral stops in > intervocalic position, shows a much weaker contrast in word-initial > position?" From Martinet's structuralist standpoint this is a problem > because the word-initial position is supposed to be the one where the > greatest number of contrasts is found in any language. OK; I'll try to respond to this. The view attributed here to Martinet is not one which most linguists, structuralist or not, would defend to the death. Look at English. English has three contrasting nasals in medial and final position, but only two in initial position. English has an [esh]-[ezh] voicing contrast in fricatives word-medially (even though the functional load is low), but not initially. And nobody seems to think that this is intolerable or impossible. > To solve this > problem, Martinet made up a story that has to do with an ancient contrast > between fortis and lenis stops which was later somehow replaced by the > modern voiced/voiceless contrast. Michelena adopts a version of this > hypothesis, which has become the standard account. Correct. > My view is different. Basque differs from most languages presenting > assimilation in voice across morpheme- and word-boundaries in that it is > the morpheme- or word-initial consonant that assimilates to the preceding > morpheme- or word-final one, instead of the other way round. So in Basque > /s+d/ becomes [st], etc., whereas in, say, Spanish, /s+d/ becomes [zd]. > E.g. the initial /d/ of "s/he is coming" becomes /t/ in [estator] > "s/he is not coming", [menditi(k)tator] "s/he is coming from the mountain", > etc. Or, to give you another example, whereas "head"starts with a > /b/, the same morpheme starts with /p/ in, say, [ajspuru] "stone head". Agreed. > Nowadays, there is little chance that Basque speakers will identify initial > [p] and [b] as allophonic variants, bacause of (a) their familiarity with > Spanish or French and Indeed, but, in the standard account, it is widely suspected that it was largely the influence of Romance which led to the introduction of voicing contrasts into initial plosives in Basque. > (b) because the assimilation rule tends to apply only > in restricted phrasal contexts. BUT assuming that this assimilation applied > more frequently in the past (as Michelena also assumes) it stands to > reason that if and , and , and so on for lots > of plosive-initial words, are variants of the same word in different > phonological context, this would inevitably lead towards a merger of the > voiced and voiceless oral stops in morpheme- and word-initial position > (where the alternation is found) but not morpheme-internally. End of the > story. The more complicated Martinet-Michelena hypothesis (which in > addition requires an unexplained transformation from ancient to modern > Basque) is, in my view, simply not needed and has no serious evidence in > its favor. Thanks for allowing me to clarify my position. First, I query that word "unexplained". The standard account holds that the explanation was mainly Romance influence. This influence led to the introduction of contrasts like 'wharf, quay' (a loan) and 'material' (a native word), and 'pair' (a loan) and 'slug' (zool.) (and other senses) (native). This doesn't look to me like the absence of an explanation -- though of course no one is obliged to buy this explanation. Second, why is this version less "complicated" than Michelena's? Michelena posits a Pre-Basque with no initial voicing contrast, developing under Romance influence into modern Basque, with initial voicing contrasts. Hualde appears here to be proposing a Pre-Pre-Basque with initial voicing contrasts, followed by a "merger" resulting in a Pre-Basque with no initial voicing contrasts, followed by modern Basque, once again with initial voicing contrasts. This is simpler? > Are we talking about a terminological problem? I mean when you use the term > "facultative" does it correspond to what Hualde describes. In other words, > does the following sentence by you mean the same thing or infer the same > thing that Hualde has stated? >> Pre-Basque had facultative voicing: that is, they could be realized, >> indifferently, either as [b d g] or as [p t k] -- "indifferently", > Stated differently, and please excuse me if I'm being obtuse, can the terms > "facultative" and "indifferently" be used to refer to a situation in which > the voicing is conditioned by certain phonological constraints, i.e., that > the voicing was phonological consistent when those constraints were > present. Could it be that you are saying the same thing as Hualde but I > don't understand the terminology that you are using. Yes, I *think* we are saying the same thing -- namely, that, in Pre-Basque, the voicing of initial plosives was non-contrastive. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Feb 5 02:57:47 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 21:57:47 EST Subject: Horses in War Message-ID: In a message dated 2/3/00 10:18:48 AM, alderson at netcom.com wrote: <> Gadzooks! But I must repeat what I reported at that time: Homer DOES NOT have chariots jumping ditches. He has Hector come up with that bright idea - Hector representing the brawn not the brains of the Trojan staff. He does suggest- and this was the only time I find it in Homer - "our horses shall lightly leap over the digged ditch." He is talked out of it by Polydamas, who points out the ditch "has sharp stakes set in it." Polydamas then patiently gives Hector an alternative suggestion: "As for the horses, let the squires hold them back by the trench, but let us on foot, arrayed in our armour, follow all in one throng after Hector; and the Achaeans will not withstand us,..." Illiad 12.50 et seq Apollo later sends a storm that tramps down the banks of the ditch protecting the Achaean ships and creates a causeway that the Trojans can cross, but they get banged up and have to beat a quick retreat and that's where Homer tells us precisely what happens when chariots cross a ditch: "nor was it in good order that they crossed the trench again.... tbe hosts of Troy, whom the digged trench held back against their will. And in the trench many pairs of swift horses, drawers of chariots, brake the pole at the end, and left the chariots of their lords...." Iliad 16.369 (et seq) As far as Homer's credibility in general, please recall that the ever-mentioned consensus at one time was that there was no Troy, there were no Greek-speaking Mycenaeans, the catalog of ships was pure fantasy, if there were chariots there would also have been mounted riders, etc. etc, etc. I remember being told a long time ago that if the Classicist has learned anything important in the last 150 years, it was don't bet against Homer - "it's like betting against the Yankees." The oral tradition that 'Homer' [or the Homers] put in writing keeps demonstrating that it had a powerful vein of accuracy running through it. With much forsooth, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Feb 5 06:14:25 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 01:14:25 EST Subject: Horses in War Message-ID: In a message dated 2/5/00 12:40:52 AM, mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk wrote: << X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:- >> (from Tom Clancy - who also mentions cavalry's superiority to chariotry:) > Only once the modern stirrup was invented. I once saw on TV a reconstruction of a Roman cavalryman :: on each skirt of his saddle was a sideways projection, which the rider hooked his knee round, and that held him quite firm against impacts.>> Yes - the principle was to either tie or grasp yourself to the saddle or tie or grasp yourself to the horse. The rudimentary stirrup (now dated to India 2d century BC) was a block of wood -essentially something to stand on. The improvement was of course the shifting of leverage of the rider's weight down to his or her feet. And the difference from the Roman knee grips is the difference between playing tug-of-war on your knees versus your feet. Or for that matter turning to shoot an arrow on your knees versus on your feet. The weight of armor of course gave other advantages to the stirrup - including getting on and not falling off. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Feb 5 07:19:58 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 02:19:58 EST Subject: Horses Message-ID: I wrote: <<- What was the word for horse in Armenian?>> In a message dated 2/4/00 11:16:42 PM, mcv at wxs.nl replied: <> I also wrote: <> mcv at wxs.nl replied: <<*g^hei- "antreiben, lebhaft bewegen (schleudern) oder bewegt sein". Skt. hayah. "horse". See my other message [which was:] Given the phonetic shape (*tsitsi-), one might think (just a thought) of some reduplicated form *dzidzei- connected with Skt. hayah. "horse" and Arm. ji, jioy ([dzi]) "horse" < PIE *g^hei- (satem *dzhei-).>> So this appears to be a different word for horse - coming from a different (?) root than *ekwos - with the sense "mover, self-mover, something that propels?" (I think.) I assume that *g^hei has not been suggested as >*ekwos or vice versa (that may be a mistake) so this suggests that the two words may reflect different 'traditions'. And the traditions possibly conflicted in Armenian or at least the outcome was that both words appear and either the *ekwos word was applied to donkey first or the *g^hei word was applied to horse first? And the other was applied by default? Does this make sense? And if it does, could it be possible that ji<*g^hei reflects a more native PIE word for horse or equid than *ekwos - which does not necessarily show known PIE roots (that's my understanding at least)? Also mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> Would this suggest that onus/asinus are not from PIE and that the occurence of 'ass' in IE languages happens late? Regards, Steve Long From edsel at glo.be Sat Feb 5 14:50:20 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 15:50:20 +0100 Subject: Horses Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" Sent: Friday, February 04, 2000 4:53 AM > Wolfgang Schulze wrote: >> By the way: Why is it so difficult to accept that Sumerians used to term >> horses 'donkeys (that stem from / of) the mountains' and that they might >> have used the term ans^e-kur(r)a as it appears ('phonetically' speaking)? > It's not difficult to accept, it's just that the Sumerian word > apparently (according to Miguel Civil) *was* (usually > written , just like "smith" was usually > written , to quote Robert Whiting on ANE). It's of > course the same word as Akkadian sisu^ "horse", but the Akkadian > is also borrowed from an unknown source. Given the phonetic > shape (*tsitsi-), one might think (just a thought) of some > reduplicated form *dzidzei- connected with Skt. hayah. "horse" > and Arm. ji, jioy ([dzi]) "horse" < PIE *g^hei- (satem *dzhei-). > Miguel Carrasquer Vidal [Ed] Note that in Basque, 'zezen' means 'bull'. At least it has four legs ;-) Coincidence? Another loan cum semantic shift? Or did these words originally mean 'big four-legged domesticated animal' or 'head of cattle' or something of that kind? Ed. Selleslagh From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Feb 5 03:30:23 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 22:30:23 EST Subject: Archaeologists Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 2/4/00 7:48:48 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- we're not talking about linguistics and archaeology; it's linguistics and one small group of archaeologists.>> It's not a small group, sir. And it's not one with small influence. But certainly it is a group that might offer some open minds, if anyone were looking for such an odd quality in a scholar. ;) Regards, Steve Long The Tyranny of Paradigms: An Americanist's Participant Observation of Archaeological Practice, Methods and Theory in Europe. By Maximilian O. Baldia Institute for the Study of Earth and Man Heroy Science Hall Southern Methodist University 3225 Daniel Avenue Dallas, Texas 75275-0274 USA. mobaldia at earthlink.net As an American trained archaeologist, dealing largely with Northern European archaeology, one is enabled to perceive the diverse paradigms that guide European archaeologists from various countries in the analysis of a single North European archaeological culture. This involuntary participant observation provides amazing insights into what is and is not considered archaeological fact. Examples are provided that show the weight that diverse paradigms bring to bear on chronology, explanations of culture change, and even the measurement and reconstruction of archaeological monuments from what may or may not be a single archaeological culture. From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Feb 5 04:09:16 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 23:09:16 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: In a message dated 2/4/00 12:17:35 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> It seems the only way to do this is one "factoid" at a time. I have a book here Harper-Collins Atlas of Archaeology (rev 1999) (with foreward by Colin Renfrew) that states that 'Agriculture reached the Balkans in the 7th millenium BC.' And I have here from A Whittle Neolithic Europe: A Survey a date for Kremikovci in Bulgaria - a mesolithic settlement in the Balkans acquiring agriculture about 5800BC. Now both of these clearly contradict your statement that 'farming had spread to the whole of the Balkans by 7000 BCE'. Might this apparent conflict with your information suggest that you might want to get more familiar with the subject matter? To paraphrase your own statements, what that statement may be is 'historical nonsense." Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Feb 5 04:45:10 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 23:45:10 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: In a message dated 2/4/00 12:17:35 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> Next 'factoid': "Farming had spread ... well into what's now France by 5000 BCE." Actually I have one site in France from this period - at the southern edge of the Bandkeramik corridor - Cuiry-les-Chaudardes. I'm not sure that it isn't slightly later than 5000BC and I'm not sure that it is a Bandkeramik settlement. (Any corrections are welcome, please.) However, core analysis of pollen deposits indicating forest clearance and the growth of domesticated plants have not yielded dates in France earlier than I believe 4600BC. The earliest Bandkeramik style sites in France I have been able to find is at Larzicourt which I believe yields a date of @4700BC. (Corrections, please, of course.) (Once again, any sign of farming by itself quite obviously does not correlate to the spread of IE languages. The origins of farming in the Near East - for example - do not appear to involve PIE.) As to your statement - ""Farming had spread ... well into what's now France by 5000 BCE." It appears that a more correct statement is that evidence of farming appears in France before 5000BC. It also appears that a more correct statement is that the evidence indicates "Farming had spread ... well into what's now France by @4500 BCE." This would be about the time - maybe a little later - that colonists from the Danube area would have populated the area sufficiently to settle in and begin to differentiate in their language. The circumstance is perhaps similiar to the first appearance of Spanish settlers in the Americas (@1492) and the differentiation in one sees in Latin American Spanish in 2000AD - 500 years later. Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Feb 5 05:13:05 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 00:13:05 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: In a message dated 2/4/00 12:17:35 PM, you wrote: <> So let's stick to linguistics and let's not find ourselves arguing the archaeological evidence - which seems to keep happening in the last posts. Let me suggest a date of @4500BC for the functional final unity of non-Anatolian 'narrow PIE' and located it at that time stretching from Holland across north central in a 6 degree lat band to the upper Dniestr, Dnieper and Bug - the extent of the Bandkeramik culture. (This is I think roughly half the expanse of Latin about100AD.) You are saying that that in 3500 to 4000 years this language would have given rise to more differentiation than is seen in the attested IE languages at those later dates (1000-500BC) Your 3500BC? date for wide PIE - 3500 to 4000 years later - would give us the IE languages of 1-500AD. Can you point to the increased differentiation in that period? It isn't that more languages are attested, is it? Because that is not differentiation, that's preservation. I'm beginning to suspect that 'linguistic nonsense' may be a two-way street. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Feb 5 05:42:01 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 00:42:01 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: I wrote: <<>But the hypothesis does actually reasonably suggest that Greek's >'grandparent' and Hittite's 'grandparent' should have had a closer >relationship than a coeval IE language located across the continent. In a message dated 2/4/00 12:17:35 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: -- yes. And they DON'T.>> And not a paragraph before that you say 'You do not GET uniform languages over large areas.' And then you talk about Latin. Or English for that matter. There's a new rule for every situation. Linguistic nonsense. I wrote: >great-great-grand parent IE language arrived in western europe in the >middle-late European neolithic. JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- No. Renfrew specifically attributes the arrival of the IE languages in Europe to the EARLY neolithic; to the introduction of agriculture as such.>> Yes. SORRY. But yes. Not 'the introduction of agriculture as such' - The term 'middle neolithic' as applied to Europe as a whole (not locally) encompasses my 4500-4000BC date. For some reason you are calling the whole process 'early neolithic'. Neolithic is basically a distinction from mesolithic. Early neolithic in Europe as a whole generally denotes the period before 5000BC. Locally the term is sometimes used when different sub-periods can be identified. But in terms of Europe, farming 'as such' is also being introduced in the late neolithic and in some areas even in the 'European iron age.' Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Feb 5 05:52:41 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 00:52:41 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com In a message dated 2/4/00 12:17:35 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<>I don't believe that any current theory is that Greek and Sanskrit managed >to split-off from PIE in the Ukraine and went their separate ways sharing >innovations that are not found in PIE. -- that is precisely the current consensus theory. Both Greek and Sanskrit (and Armenian and Phyrgian) belonged to an east-central group of dialects within PIE. They lost contact sometime in the course of Indo-Iranian's spread to the east and pre-Greek's movement south. This accounts parsimoniously for all the observable linguistic data.>> Now this is interesting. And it actually gets back to the subject of the thread. So you are saying a proto-language of Greek, Sanskrit, Armenian and Phrygian was located in the Ukraine? And this language was not PIE or even narrow PIE. What dates would you put on that language? Would you have any notion of how that group of speakers would correlate with archaeologically? What shared attributes would you suggest uniquely group those four languages as opposed to other IE languages? As far as the consensus goes - where do you find evidence of this consensus? (I mean apart from Mallory.) Is there a specific poll that was taken or is it something that's reflected in a count of recent papers on the subject? Regards, Steve Long From sarima at friesen.net Sun Feb 6 06:24:52 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 22:24:52 -0800 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:55 AM 2/5/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >That's not at all what Renfrew says. He's saying that "a >massive amount of archaeological evidence associated with >fundamental technological-economic transformation requires a >linguistic change", as it were. Which is true. The Neolithic >Revolution was the second most important such event in European >history (the most important was the introduction of language --as >we know it-- itself in the Upper Paleolithic, 50-40,000 BP). I think that date is rather too late. That is more likely the date at which language was introduced into Europe. How much earlier language was invented is unclear, but it could be as long ago as 200,000 years ago, with the first appearance of anatomically modern humans in Africa. The Upper Paleolithic (or its equivalent) begins earlier,and more gradually, outside of Europe. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From lmfosse at online.no Sun Feb 6 12:26:41 2000 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 13:26:41 +0100 Subject: SV: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal [SMTP:mcv at wxs.nl] skrev 05. februar 2000 00:55: >The Neolithic > Revolution was the second most important such event in European > history (the most important was the introduction of language --as > we know it-- itself in the Upper Paleolithic, 50-40,000 BP). Exactly how do you know that language as we know it was introduced in the Upper Paleolithic? Modern man has apparently been around for the last 300,000 years, with all the necessary bodily apparatus needed for speech production. Given that his success depended upon group work, I find it rather improbable that language as we know it did not develop much earlier than the Upper Paleolithic. So why should 50,000 BP be the limit? Best regards, Lars Martin Fosse Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114, 0674 Oslo Norway Phone/Fax: +47 22 32 12 19 Email: lmfosse at online.no From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 7 02:42:15 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 21:42:15 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: In a message dated 2/5/00 8:56:07 PM Mountain Standard Time, mcv at wxs.nl writes: >He's saying that "a massive amount of archaeological evidence associated with fundamental technological-economic transformation requires a linguistic change", as it were. Which is true. >> -- not necessarily. What Renfrew desperately wants to establish is that linguistic change (and therefore cultural change) can't happen _without being visible to archaeologists_. Many countries have gone through massive technological-economic changes without a change of language; conversely, many changes of language have not been accompanied by massive technological-economic change. Eg., for just one example, the spread of Slavic. Or of Indo-Iranian into Iran and India, for another, which is definitely post-neolithic. It's probable -- but unprovable -- that a new language/language family entered Europe with agriculture, but there's no evidence whatsoever that it was IE, and much that it wasn't. It would be nice to have a tidy archaeological sequence to associate with the spread of IE languages (incidentally, I'd bet the Corded Ware phenomenon is linked with the Indo-Europeanization of the area between the Rhine delta and Moscow) but the world doesn't arrange itself in so tidy a fashion. From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Sat Feb 5 05:15:36 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 23:15:36 -0600 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: At 08:36 PM 2/3/00 EST, you wrote: >>frank at uiowa.edu writes: ><< 1) what then is the standard reconstruction proposed for Skt. pu:r-, Greek >> and Baltic ? And the prototype meaning assigned to it? >-- *pelh(x), "fort, fortified place"..e. Could you elaborate a bit more in order to explain why the phonologicial shape of the Gk. and Baltic items take precedence over that of the Skt. pu:r-? Are there a general set of rules that show the regular correspondence of Sk. words in to Greek and Baltic , i.e., that there are other examples of the same transformations? >There's a possible cognate in Armenian -- 'k'alak', meaning "city". >>2) is this set considered a good candidate for admission to the (P)IE >>lexicon? Stated differently, does attestation in Sanskrit, Greek and Baltic >>languages suffice for a data set to be considered part of the (P)IE lexicon? >-- a dialect word of the south and east of the PIE world, at least. >There's also *uriien, 'fort', which gives Mycenaean 'rijo', promontory, and >Tocharian 'ri', 'town'. Do these examples imply that there was a loss of the initial plosive in the last example and that one could posit an earlier * or perhaps * for Tocharian? What are the data sources for the reconstruction *uriien? Do you mean to suggest by citing this example that there was a loss of the initial plosive in the case of Tocharian. If so, how is that explained? Is the correspondence regular between Sanskrit and Tocharian with respect to the loss of the initial plosive, i.e., does it occur with other words. Then with respect to the prototype meaning, is the choice of "fort, fortified place" based on the fact that such a location/structure would antedate an urban site such as "town" or "city"; or is there some other basis for this choice? And back to the candidacy of this item for admission into the (P)IE lexicon, does the presence of the various and sundry lexemes that make up Buck's entries under "town" (19.15) and "fortress" (20.35) indicate that it is assumed that there is no recoverable/identifiable (P)IE etynom for the concept "fort, fortified place"? In the case of , et. al. I once read that they believed that the referential object to which it once applied as an Iron Age "hill-fort", although I don't recall the exact citation. Thanks in advance for the info. Roz Frank From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Feb 5 09:37:40 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 10:37:40 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >>frank at uiowa.edu writes: ><< 1) what then is the standard reconstruction proposed for Skt. pu:r-, Greek >> and Baltic ? And the prototype meaning assigned to it? >-- *pelh(x), "fort, fortified place". (JoatSimeon at aol.com): >There's a possible cognate in Armenian -- 'k'alak', meaning "city". This is an Iranian loanword (also found in Georgian and Syriac) < MP /kl'k/ (OI * kala:ka-). An etymological connection with sthl. *pelh- othl. is completely out of the question. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Feb 5 11:21:43 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 12:21:43 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>frank at uiowa.edu writes: ><< 1) what then is the standard reconstruction proposed for Skt. pu:r-, Greek >> and Baltic ? And the prototype meaning assigned to it? >-- *pelh(x), "fort, fortified place". >There's a possible cognate in Armenian -- 'k'alak', meaning "city". Olsen "The Noun in Biblical Armenian", p. 952 [in teh section "words of unknown origin"], quotes a suggestion by Winter to derive k`aLak` from *pwlhs, which is the exact opposite of what I suggested (palatalized *p^). Indeed in Armenian, labialized consonants *tw, *sw and *kw merge as *kw (> ), so why not *pw? On the other hand, the word might simply be another Iranian loan (MP kala:G "fortress"), although Klingenschmitt proposes to derive both from PIE *klh- (Lith. kalnas "mountain"). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Feb 5 12:05:20 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 12:05:20 -0000 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: Miguel wrote: >For instance, I don't think > Benveniste's root-theory allows *i and *u in the V position (or > does it?). It would be nice to have statistics. Forgive my ignorance - I'm puzzled here. *CiC and *CuC roots are plentiful, e.g. *digh goat, *bhidh pot, *k'ik strap, *knid louse; *trus reed, *k'up shoulder, *k'udh dung, *lus louse etc etc. Could you help me understand what you meant here? Peter From edsel at glo.be Sat Feb 5 14:42:22 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 15:42:22 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Friday, February 04, 2000 2:36 AM >> frank at uiowa.edu writes: > << 1) what then is the standard reconstruction proposed for Skt. pu:r-, Greek >> and Baltic ? And the prototype meaning assigned to it? [Ed] And Slavic toponyms like Plzen' (Ger. Pilsen). > -- *pelh(x), "fort, fortified place". > There's a possible cognate in Armenian -- 'k'alak', meaning "city". [Ed] Could Celtic 'briga' (> Gmc. burg) be a cognate? (and what about the Phryges, Bruges?) >> 2) is this set considered a good candidate for admission to the (P)IE >> lexicon? Stated differently, does attestation in Sanskrit, Greek and Baltic >> languages suffice for a data set to be considered part of the (P)IE lexicon? > -- a dialect word of the south and east of the PIE world, at least. > There's also *uriien, 'fort', which gives Mycenaean 'rijo', promontory, and > Tocharian 'ri', 'town'. [Ed] But that exist in a whole series of non-IE lgs.: Basque i/uri (< PB ili), mod. Hebr. 'ir (long form yeru), Akkadian ur (like in Ur-Salimmu = Yeru-shala'im = Jerusalem), (Sumerian??) etc. Maybe 'Ilion' (Troy) is derived from that. So, even though it may have been part of the PIE vocabulary, it is apparently not exclusively IE. A loan? Ed. Selleslagh From varny at cvtci.com.ar Sat Feb 5 13:44:59 2000 From: varny at cvtci.com.ar (Vartan and Nairy Matiossian) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 10:44:59 -0300 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: frank at uiowa.edu writes: > << 1) what then is the standard reconstruction proposed for Skt. pu:r-, Greek >> and Baltic ? And the prototype meaning assigned to it? > -- *pelh(x), "fort, fortified place". JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > There's a possible cognate in Armenian -- 'k'alak', meaning "city". Unfortunately, Arm. k'al'ak' "city" is not IE, it comes from Sem. kalakku (e.g. the Neo-Assyrian city "Kalakku") -- Vartan and Nairy Matiossian Casilla de Correo 2, Sucursal 53 1453 Buenos Aires Argentina From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Feb 5 06:44:24 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 01:44:24 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: fX99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Are you sure it works in your favor? -- of course it does; and note that pretty well every linguist agrees with me. >Following Renfrew, roughly 4000 years separates non-Anatolian PIE -- rather more, actually. More like 6000. >from Mycenaean (1200BC), Sanskrit (1000BC?) and Latin (500BC). How >'differentiated' are those three languages? On a scale of 1 to 10? -- around 2. About as different from each other as the Romance languages today -- in a stage where the similarities leap off the page and where some words and phrases are still mutually comprehensible. Which is to say, with separation somewhere in the 1000 to 2000 years range. The dialects leading to Sanskrit and Greek would have separated sometime in the mid 3rd millenium BCE, with Latin a bit earlier. Try this: the word for "fire" in Sanskrit and Latin: Nom. sing. agnis ignis acc. sing. agnim ignem dative agnibhyas ignibus Latin and Greek still used nearly the same term for their principle god: Juppiter/Zeus Pater. The examples can be multiplied without end. The similarities between, say, Ancient Irish and Latin are also striking -- the Irish of the Ogham inscriptions is an orthodox IE inflected language, without any of the odd features that developed over the next couple of centuries. >And you say there is too little differentiation for Renfrew's scenario to be >true? -- far too little. Enormously too little. >But once again, based on any objective standard at all, what is the measure >of differentiation and how do you apply it against the ancient IE languages >so you know what date is too much and what is just enough? A very specific >question! -- and one which would require you to study the languages concerned for several years before you could understand it. That's the problem when you try to 'reinvent the wheel' in an unfamiliar field without an adequate knowledge base. Short form, even if ALL the IE languages changed as slowly as the MOST conservative IE language known (Lithuanian) Renfrew's date would still be utterly out of the question. And to so suppose is grossly improbable. The basic principle of science is uniformitarianism; in this specific instance, we must assume that linguistic behavior in prehistory covered roughly the same range as it does in historic times. That, of course, is precisely the principle that Renfrew violates. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Feb 5 07:27:40 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 02:27:40 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >As far as I know, the Hittite word for "wheel" is . No relation to >the *kwel->words. >> -- 'hurkis' is derived from PIE *hwergh, and cognate to TocharianA 'warkant' (wheel) and TocharianB 'yerkwanto'. The agreement between Hittite and Tocharian -- very widely separated IE languages -- would suggest PIE status for this word as well. There's a broad overlap in the 4 PIE words for wheel: 1. *kwekwlom -- Germanic, Phrygian, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Tocharian, Balto-slavic, and closely related terms in Celtic This probably referred to the wheels in a two-wheeled cart, given the dual form in Old Irish ('cul', from *kwolo via *kwolos). "The two roundy-roundy things". 2. *Hwergh -- Tocharian, Hittite 3. *dhroghos -- Celtic, Greek, Armenian 4. *roto -- Celtic, Latin, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Indo-Iranian, and possibly Tocharian. So while none of the 4 occurs in all the groups -- one wouldn't expect that, eh? -- every single one occurs in at least _two_ of the groups. Eg., Tocharian and Hittite share cognates derived from *hwergh, Tocharian has derivatives of *kwekwlom and possibly *roto, etc. They're all fairly transparent, too: "the round thing", "the thing that goes round and round", "the runner", and so forth. This is what you'd expect if proto-Indo-European speakers invented the wheel, by the way -- otherwise there should be at least one loan-word for "wheel", one that isn't resolvable into a PIE root. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Feb 5 08:13:53 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 02:13:53 -0600 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I seem to remember we went through this before and that someone --either expert, eloquent or both-- explained that Pama-Nyungan split up about 6,000 years ago or so and may or may not have something to do with an era of technological innovation around that time --e.g. introduction of the dingo, new types of tools/weapons, etc. And there was a suggestion that they may have originally have been an immigrant group from New Guinea or Indonesia or may have been a local group that expanded thanks to the new technology >>. Is it? This is an IE group, but if we take a look beyond our IE nose, >>e.g. to Australia, we find about 70 % covered by speakers of Pama-Nyungan, >>the languages/dialects of which are regarded as very closely related. And >>archeologists now redate the first settlements back to more than 50.000 >>years (for a up-to-date overview see Stringer in Antiquity 73/99:876). Of >>course these must not be the direct predecessors of Pama-Nyungan. >I think you mean "may not" or "cannot", and indeed it is most unlikely that >the common ancestor of Pama-Nyungan dates to the period of the earliest human >occupation of Australia. In fact we have hardly any idea of the time depth of >this family. And "very closely related" is a very misleading way to describe >these languages. They may sometimes be described as closely related, but only >by way of contrast to the other language families in the north and west of >Australia, which are lexically and typologically highly diverse. Consider the >immediate neighbours of Dyirbal, as described by Dixon (1972): Yidin (27% >common vocabulary), Mbabaram (18%), Warungu (47%) and Wargamay (60%). Only the >last shows any structural similarity to Dyirbal, and Dixon is uncertain >whether this is the result of a relatively close genetic relationship or a >long period of contiguity and convergence. All this is within Pama-Nyungan, in >fact within a 100 km radius in one small corner of Queensland. >Ross Clark From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Feb 5 07:29:05 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 02:29:05 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 2/5/00 12:22:51 AM Mountain Standard Time, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: << And in the process they may suggest other locations where an earlier PIE unity occurred. >> -- sigh. "There can be only one." Unity, that is. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Feb 5 07:33:33 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 02:33:33 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 2/5/00 12:22:51 AM Mountain Standard Time, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: << The domesticated horse is now at about 4000BC and horse bones are in the food pits a thousand years before that. >> -- which indicates precisely... nothing at all. Humans and pre-human hominids have been eating horses for more than 400,000 years, for God's sake! Horse bones with butchering markes are older than H. Sapiens Sapiens by a factor of two -- are you going to say we should hold our breaths for evidence than horses were domesticated by the Neanderthals? And Homo Ergaster? There is precisely _one_ indication of horse domestication as early as 4000 BCE; a set of teeth with wear-marks characteristic of a bit. Most of the horse bones recovered from the Ukrainian sites of that date do _not_ show signs of riding or bits; they show signs of butchering marks. Bit wear is extremely distinctive. And teeth are extremely durable. They last better than any other part of the skeleton. The evidence to date is that the horse was domesticated in the Ukraine, around 4000 BCE, on a very small scale. Use of horses as draught/riding animals thereupon spread, rather gradually at first, through the Ukrainian steppe zone, not becoming common for some centuries thereafter. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Feb 5 07:41:22 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 02:41:22 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: And, for example, cattle dairying -- well-attested from the PIE vocabulary, with words for 'to milk' (cows), curds, whey, 'cow rich in milk', butter, etc., is generally dated to the mid-4th millenium BCE. (eg., McCormick, 1992, "Early Faunal Evidence for Dairying", Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 11, 201-209). Note also that the genes for lactose tolerance (ability to digest cow's-milk as an adult) show a distinct drop-off in Mediterranean Europe and the Near East, but are high in northern and eastern Europeans. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Feb 5 07:50:43 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 02:50:43 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: Several distinct types of cloth production also dating to the 4th millenium -- eg., felting -- (see E.J.W. Barber, 1991, Prehistoric Textiles, Princton university press) also have PIE lexical references. Thus we have *pilso, "felt". There are also a number of words relating to weaving in general. But PIE does _not_ have a word for the warp-weighted loom, which was developed in the Danube valley and spread eastwards in the Late Neolithic. The Greek vocabulary for this type of loom is entirely borrowed, for example; none in Indo-Iranian either, etc. Hence PIE probably cannot have been spoken in an area and/or at a time when this technology was known. Hence there can't have been PIE speakers in the Middle Danube towards the end of the Neolithic. One more brick... From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Feb 5 07:52:50 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 02:52:50 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >proto-language at email.msn.com writes: I believe that a comparison of Egyptian r', 'sun' (ideographically written: a circle with >*central dot* [=axle?]) and IE *rot(h)o-, 'wheel', is likely. >> -- this would be interesting, if it weren't for the fact that the Egyptians didn't use wheeled vehicles (or the horse) until very late -- 2nd millenium BCE. And, of course, there's no evidence at all of a genetic relationship between Egyptian (or Afroasiatic) and PIE. From sarima at friesen.net Sat Feb 5 07:55:04 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 23:55:04 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:53 AM 2/4/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >I simply MUST point out what is happening here. >Much of your 'late Neolithic technology' - aside from the wheel - no longer >supports the unity dates they once did and they do not necessarily refute the >neolithic hypothesis regarding PIE. >in the Ukraine, metal smelting appears about 4500BC - hammered metal appears >well before that. The domesticated horse is now at about 4000BC and horse >bones are in the food pits a thousand years before that. Umm, circa 4000 BC is my current best guess for the time of unity. (I currently suspect the Sredny Stog culture of being the basic PIE culture). The horse as food doesn't fit with its place in PIE. > Alot of this >'late' neolithic technology is now arriving in the Ukraine with neolithicism >or just afterwards. >The list of objects that will establish PIE unity in say 3300BC in the >Ukraine is now fast dwindling. 3300 BC is rather late for the unity, IMHO. > Heck, even red ochre graves were identified >in the Bug-Dniestr sites dating before 4500BC. One doesn't expect the core PIE culture to be unrelated to adjacent cultures! And there is little in the use of ochre in burials to match with linguistic evidence. >Now the question becomes - if all of these other objects with any confidence >can only hold a last date of say 4500BC - how can wheeled transport still be >used to preserve PIE unity as much as 1500 years later? Umm, *I* am not talking about 1500 years later! Only about 500. The Neolithic starts at circa 7000 BC over most of eastern Europe. THAT is 2000 years earlier than the 4000 BC date for the combined presence of horses for riding, metal, and wheels,. And it is also important to realize that steppe nomads have always historically been dependent on adjacent agricultural societies to some degree. So even a steppe nomad culture must be deemed Neolithic, as it is almost certainly post-agriculture. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Feb 5 09:14:55 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 04:14:55 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >First, let me say again that 7000BC dates for neolithicization in Europe >beyond the Balkans are off by 1500 years, and for western Europe and the >Ukraine by another 1000 years. -- "The earliest neolithic settlements in southeastern Europe have been dated to around 7000 BCE... by 6000 BCE farming villages with pottery and other Neolithic features had become established throughout SE Europe as far north as the Danube Valley and the Great Hungarian Plain.... by 5300 BCE Bandkeramik settlement had spread along the major river valleys of central Europe, and communities of Bandkeramik farmers were established in eastern France and the Low Countries." Oxford Companion to Archaeology, 1996, p. 214. See also Cunliffe, "The Prehistory of Europe", 1994. -- Farming throughout Greece by 7000 BCE, throughout the Balkans and Hungary by 6000 BCE, and by 5300 BCE farming had reached NW Europe. By which time Renfrew's "PIE" would have been established over an area of hundreds of thousands of square miles for 1700 years... and we still have 4000 years until the first attested IE languages. That's 5700 years, most of which would have to pass with either (a) no linguistic change or (b) perfectly _synchronized_ change over the entire stretch of Europe from the Netherlands to Greece. Or we have to assume a rate of linguistic change more glacial than that of _any_ recorded IE language, over a period longer than all our records put together. 4000 years is a VERY long time in linguistic terms. 4000 years ago was 2000 BCE, when Greek hadn't emerged, and pre-proto-Germanic probably was still mutually comprehensible with pre-proto-Celtic and pre-proto-Balto-Slavic. See what I mean? Virtually all the recorded developments in the IE languages have happened in _half_ that time. Latin turned into French in 1500 years. Vedic Sanskrit turned into Hindi in 3000. >All the diffusion needs to represent linguistically is 'narrow PIE' -- which would have to extend from Holland to Greece by 5300 BCE, and then not change much for thousands of years. >You have a population of speakers sharing strong cultural affinities from >the Ukraine to Holland that culminates about 3500BC -- what on earth do you mean by "culminate"? That area was neolithic all the way by 5000 BCE or so. Earlier, in the western and central European parts. If agriculture was carried by PIE speakers, then they'd have to have been in place for thousands of years by 3500 BCE. Linguistic change never stops. It speeds up, it slows down, but it _never stops_. And thousands of years is long enough for _any_ living language to show massive change. >It is plain to see that as these speakers migrated, their populations grew >exponentially and they cleared and settled areas almost to the extent that >they are settled today from northwestern Europe to the western Ukraine. -- since the population of the entire earth didn't reach 200 million until Roman times, this is a bit much. Most of the European lowland forest zone wasn't cleared until late Bronze Age and Iron Age times. The whole Roman Empire had about 60 million people. And by using "speakers", you're conflating pots and language again. We have no idea what language(s) this area spoke at that time. None. And in the nature of things, we can't know. >Almost all evidence points to the notion that this population of speakers -- "speakers"? You're confusing language and genes. There are areas in Europe which have undergone 5 complete linguistic turnovers in the past 1500 years without much genetic alteration. Hungary, for example -- Dacian/Iranian/Germanic/Turkic/Avar/Slavic/Magyar. Two of those non-Indo-European, at that. >And yet you find it linguistically plausible that the language of this mass >of technically advanced -- Neolithic farmers in scattered hamlets. >speakers -- "speakers" =/= admissable term. You're assuming your conclusion again. >across Europe was completely substituted >without leaving any thing remotely resembling a substrate -- plenty of evidence of substrate influence in many IE languages, particularly in central and western Europe. Less so in Baltic/Slavic territory. Hundreds of words of the basic proto-Germanic vocabulary are not traceable to PIE roots, for instance. Much also in Celtic, some in Italic, considerable in Greek. >that first dispersed from the Ukraine in 3500BC and that did not even bother >to leave a relative behind -- what on earth do you mean? The Ukraine was Indo-European speaking at the earliest historic attestation. Indo-Iranian, to be precise; probably with proto-Slavic and proto-Baltic on the northern/northwestern fringe. Except for some Turkic in the southern parts, it has been IE-speaking territory ever since, too. >in its haste to spread from the Ireland to India in a mere 3000 years. -- incidentally, the spread of Indo-Iranian languages over a much _larger_ area than Europe took place within historic times and is not seriously disputed. If then, why not before? >Not to mention that a large part of the Ukraine had already been >neoliticized when this happened - and most probably by these speakers of the >lost neolithic language of Europe. -- so? The Romano-British were much more numerous than their Anglo-Saxon conquerors, and considerably more culturally advanced. Yet their language disappeared so completely that there are all of 12 Celtic loan-words in Anglo-Saxon when it emerged as a (very conservative West Germanic) written language 300 years later. The genes survived, albeit very mixed (the eastern English are more closely genetically related to the Danes than to the Welsh) but the language did not. The Welsh and Irish speak English now too, you'll note. So do the (largely West African, gentically) Jamaicans. Genes =/= language. >By 3300BC, evidence of a new influx from the east comes into the eastern >fringes of the post Bandkeramik areas show this influx were all also >neolithicized -- nobody has ever disputed that the PIE speakers were a neolithic culture. >You say with definiteness that this rather massive population of European >speakers represented "_some_ language/language family was spread across >Europe by "demic diffusion" in the early Neolithic; but whatever it was, it >wasn't PIE." -- yup. Too early. >Linguistically, you have no a substrate across this vast region to support >such a claim. -- the claim is based on the internal relationships and degree of differentiation of the early IE languages. Substrates have nothing to do with it. Although now that you mention it, proto-Germanic and Greek both show a substantial substrate influence, particularly in vocabulary items having to do with the sea (in the case of proto-Germanic) and the mediterranean flora/fauna and high-culture items (in the case of Greek). The Greek vocabulary for things like olive trees and typical Mediterranean flowers is non-IE, for instance. >Linguistically, you are relying upon many objects developed by this group of >European cultures to date a last possible date for what you consider a >foreign language - PIE. -- nope. >Linguistically, you are changing the languages of a massive group of speakers >across the middle of a continent on the basis that a starting date (narrow >PIE) from the Danube of 5500BC is too early. -- no, 7000 BCE. If PIE spread across Europe from the beginnng of the neolithic, it would have to remain in a unified form _from_ the colonization of Greece (7000 BCE) _through_ the settlement of Central Europe (around 6000 BCE) to the arrival of farming cultures on the Atlantic shore (5300 BCE). The, according to Renfrew, PIE would _already be in place across 2000 miles and hundreds of thousands of square miles_. You can't logically pick and chose a later time and a smaller portion. Either it was the whole sweep of agriculture from Greece to Holland, or it wasn't. Them's the choices. NB: in primitive conditions, a language so widespread quickly splits into dialects and the dialects become languages. So we'd expect to have a whole family of languages derived from the Renfrew-"PIE" with substantial internal differentiation by -- at the very latest -- about 4000 BCE. One group in Greece, another in the Balkans, more in Central Europe, and so forth. You (and Renfrew) have all these people linguistically "freezing in place" whenever it's methodologically convenient for you. That just won't do. >what [PIE] looked like in 5500BC. -- why should we? That's pre-PIE. It's linguistically unrecoverable because we have no descendant languages cognate with PIE (Anatolian possibly excepted), and we have no written records of the period. We can recover PIE by the comparative method because we have plenty of IE languages. We can't recover what came _before_ PIE, and our reconstructed picture of PIE is of the _last_ stage of PIE's development. >it is that it moved eastward out of the Ukraine, carrying clear emblems >of influence imported from the west and south - ceramic agriculture, animal >husbandry, metallurgy. Not the other way around. -- you're completely missing the point. The spread of PIE was the spread of a _language_. Nobody (except, I suppose, Renfrew) ever claimed that the PIE-speakers invented agriculture, ceramics, or animal husbandry. Where did you get the idea that anyone had? They probably domesticated the horse and _possibly_ invented the wheel. Apart from that, most of the neolithic toolkit had been around long before PIE was spoken. There's evidence (the absence of a PIE word for a weighted-web loom) that the PIE speakers were more primitive technologically, in some respects, than their neighbors. >Linguistically, you have this other evidence of proto-Uralic borrowings from >PIE that are dated no later than 4000BC -- nope. Starting at 4000 BCE at the earliest, and continuing on down through much later times, after 2500 BCE. Some of the loan-words in the Finno-Ugrian languages are demonstrably not PIE, but Indo-Iranian (Iranian specifically, at that.) >I must suggest to you that linguistically AND archaeologically your >interpretation has some serious holes in it. -- I, and virtually everyone else acquainted with historical linguistics, must point out that your interpretation is linguistic nonsense. From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Feb 6 03:25:43 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 22:25:43 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: <> In a message dated 2/5/00 3:03:50 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> Just a word about 'any new evidence'. Calibrated carbon-14 dating was not really worked out and applied to many already recovered artifacts until the 60's-70's so that the impact of the information (and arguments about the techniques) were not exactly settled until then. This most definitely DID make a difference in the authoritative dating of Bandkeramik. AND a substantial body of new evidence did enter the picture from a number of different sources, particularly with new access to eastern European findings and sites, after Renfrew's book. This information was particularly relevant to the status of things in the Ukraine during this period. And surprises continue to occur. The evidence of the significant Anatolian influence or migration in Greece just prior to 2000BC I've mentioned not only swung the gates on older migrationist theories, but also raises questions about how some distinctly 'Greek' cultural features got to Greece. This information was just beginning to come in at the time of Renfrew's book. mcv at wxs.nl also wrote: <> There are also quite a few local developments within these areas that fall short of looking like migrations, but definitely can account for a fair degree of differentiation that occurred between those local cultures on a regular basis. mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> Or possibly that that substrate actually reflects earlier IE influences that have not yet been identified. Specifically words like 'sail' which seem to indicate a later rather than an earlier introduction into Germanic. Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 6 15:07:45 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 15:07:45 +0000 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: Ed Selleslagh writes: > After reading Ante Aikio's contributions, I suspect Uralic might begin > to shed 'some' light on this matter. On the Basque side we have the > intriguing matter of a number of suffixes that also pop up in IE > (e.g.-z-ko <> -(s)ko in Slavic, basically with the 'same' meaning and > use). A suffix *<-ko> is commonly posited for PIE, and this developed an extended form *<-s-ko> in some branches, notably Germanic. Basque has a very common suffix <-ko>, and a compound suffix <-z-ko> (phonetic [-sko]). Many years ago, the late Antonio Tovar published a series of articles arguing that the PIE and Basque suffixes were so similar in their behavior that they must derive from a common source, which he took to be some (rather murky) kind of ancient contact. I have criticized this idea rather severely in various places. The problem is that the Basque suffix does not really behave very much like the PIE one. The PIE suffix was a word-forming suffix. It derived chiefly adjectives but also nouns. I have never seen any suggestion that it ever had a syntactic function. The Basque suffix, in great contrast, is primarily a syntactic suffix: it can be added to just about any adverbial constituent, regardless of internal structure, to produce a preposed adjectival modifier. That 'preposed' is significant, since lexical adjectives in Basque are postposed. Basque <-ko> also has two other functions, marginal by comparison. It can derive a preposed adjectival from an N-bar satisfying certain partly obscure conditions. And it can derive nouns from nouns. Now, the Basque suffix does not derive adjectives -- the chief function of the PIE *<-ko>. It does derive nouns, but only marginally. It is overwhelmingly a syntactic morpheme, while the PIE suffix is not. This doesn't look to me like a good case for proposing a common origin. Finally, Basque <-z-ko> is transparently only the instrumental suffix <-z> -- which is adverbial in function -- plus <-ko>. It cannot possibly be identified with the *<-s-ko> found in IE. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Sat Feb 5 07:51:42 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 09:51:42 +0200 Subject: Basic vocabulary borrowing (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: This is a correction to my previous message. The comment below was based on my crude misunderstanding of J. Simeon's message, which I apparently read too hastily. So, my apologies - please ignore the following: > This is irrelevant. .................... most speakers > find it hard to perceive even obvious borrowings as e.g. Finnish pelaa- > 'to play' < Swedish spela, Finnish (s)kaappi < Swed. sk?p. Instead: It seems to me that one reason why basic vocabulary is not loaned as easily is not that it's "too basic" but that it's not expressive enough. At least based on my own observations, speakers seem to borrow more or less expressive vocabulary more freely than non-expressive; and when non-expressive vocabulary is loaned it easily becomes expressive (e.g. English place gives Finnish slang /pleissi/ 'a place with some "action" (e.g. a bar, a night club)') So perhaps often when basic vocabulary is replaced it's first borrowed as pejorative / expressive etc. and then later becomes non-expressive, replacing the original term? - Ante From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Feb 5 11:27:14 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 12:27:14 +0100 Subject: basic vocabulary borrowing (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Kinship terms can become subject to borrowing in situations where >intercultural marriages between two language groups are common. This >probably explains the loaning of such words as e.g. Finnish ?iti 'mother' >(< Germ.), morsian 'bride' (< Balt.), sisar 'sister' (I can't quite recall >the precise IE source of this one at the moment) without having checked, I'd opt for Baltic (cf. Lith. sesuo, G. sesers) Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Feb 5 13:39:31 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 14:39:31 +0100 Subject: basic vocabulary borrowing (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Ante Aikio wrote: >What is likely to be borrowed and what is not in a given >circumstance depends on many factors. In U languages, the numerals are >largely cognate and there are no known borrowings except for 'seven', >'hundred' and 'thousand'. It has been claimed, though, that the affix -deksan (etc.) found in Finnic words for 8 and 9 is also of IE origin. (I doubt this is true). Permic *das "ten" is obviously of Iranian origin. I can't remeber what the story is on Hungarian . >But even numerals can become cultural >items; e.g. the loan origin of Ob-Ugric/Hungarian *sdptd '7' (< Aryan / >Iranian) and Samoyed *sejpti (< Tocharian?) Tocharian A has and B has . We would expect *septm. to give PToch *s^IptI (*s.a"pta"), which leads to the Toch. A form without much problems (*s^IptI > *s^IpIt > s^pIt). If the Toch. B form went through a stage *s^Iw(I)tI (*-p- > *-w-?, with -kt later by analogy from "8"), that might explain Nenets , Enets . But I can't see how *sejpti (based, I guess, on Nganasan etc.) might derive from Tocharian. The /b/ in the Samoyed forms rather reminds one of Germanic *sibum. >, replacing PU *s4exs4imi '7', As in Permic , Mordvin . Is this also agreed to be the prototype of Finnish ? >(A note on the U numerals: Samoyedic has curiously replaced the U numerals >3-6 with roots of unknown origin; this is perhaps connected with the >strong lexical substrate from an unknown source that seems to be present >in Samoyedic. The U word *wixti '5' is generally considered to survive in >Samoyedic in the meaning '10', but the semantics seem peculiar to me. Does >anyone know any parallels?) You can try to find them at Mark Rosenfelder's numbers list . Without having done that, I'd say that a shift 5 (e.g. "hand [sg.]") ~ 10 (e.g. "hands [du.]") doesn't look semantically very peculiar. Cf. PIE *ok^toh3 as the dual of Avestan "width of four fingers", and the Proto-Kartvelian forms *os1txwo- "4" (< PIE *ok^toh3 "8") and *arwa- "8" (< Akk. arba "4"). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From colkitto at sprint.ca Sun Feb 6 07:50:19 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 02:50:19 -0500 Subject: basic vocabulary borrowing (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidencefrom Uralic linguistics) Message-ID: As for body parts, there is hardly a real "reason" for replacing native words by foreign ones in any circumstance (other than the wish to be considered fashionable, of course). YES, THERE IS (if we consider exactly what is meant by foreign) A word is "borrowed" in a different meaning (cf. Latin cuppa > (Old High) German kop(f)) Later on, a (nativised) kopf is transferred (probably via slang) to become the (unmarked) word for head. The native speakers have not "borrowed" the word for head. there has been an internal semantic shift. But to sophisticated linguists it does look like a borrowing. I know this makes things more complicated, but it's probably the path most of these forms took. Robert Orr From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Feb 5 11:32:52 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 11:32:52 -0000 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: > No. Relationship is an absolute. .... >Genetically related languages were once the same language. Sorry, Bob, I can't agree, and I suspect you're in a minority these days (though I may be wrong!). (a) Unrelated languages do produce offspring - for example, creoles. It has even been suggested that the entire Germanic branch of IE is in fact a creole. I think it is unhelpful to restrict our understanding of relationship to a yes-no either/or. You might have trouble describing a creole without distorting facts to fit your definition. It is ultimately only a matter of which method of description we prefer, but I do believe it is unhelpful to restrict the term "related" to mean "genetically related". Genetically (in your terms), English is equally related to both French and Italian. I find it more helpful to accept a wider use of "related" in such a way that it allows me to indicate that plural forms and a range of other stuff in English actually are "related" to French but not "related" to Italian, and that therefore English has a different relationship to French and Italian, not an identical one (b) The idea that there must be a single language progenitor of daughter languages is widely disputed. Some people accept the idea that a collection of interrelated languages might never have had a single ancestor, but as far back as you care to go were simply a collection of inter-related languages. The language/dialect issue comes up here. We talk of IE "dialects" within PIE, but this is simply terminology. The point is that there is no need whatever for there to have been a single unified PIE language. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Feb 5 11:35:23 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 11:35:23 -0000 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: > After all, when presented with a new language, what's the first thing we do > to determine whether it's IE or not? > We look at the numerals from one to ten, the family relationship terms, and > so forth. Interestingly, these _failed_ to prove convincingly that Hittite was IE! It was the rather obscure -r/-n heteroclite declension that was the final clincher for some people. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Feb 5 11:09:59 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 11:09:59 -0000 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: > I believe English numerals tend to be borrowed into Hind-Urdu... > But please correct me if I'm wrong! You're not wrong. The last time this came up on the list, I checked it with Hindi speakers whom I teach. They knew the Hindi numerals, but agreed that in practice they often used English. They also agreed that this was not a statement, but a confession! The use of English is marked, and might be restricted to more casual areas of discourse, and perhaps to younger speakers. But I hardly had an adequate database to make any firm statements! Peter From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Feb 5 13:03:42 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 08:03:42 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: In a message dated 2/5/00 3:57:31 AM Mountain Standard Time, Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >Sorry, but that's [lexical comparison] not how the fact that there is an IE >family of languages was discovered in the first place. The fact that there is >an IE family of languages was discovered in the first place by looking at >cognate verbal morphology. -- no, sorry, that came slightly later. In 1767, Parson's "Remains of Japhet" demonstrated the close relationship of Irish and Welsh by comparing a list of 1000 vocabulary items and concluding that they were "originally the same", ie., derived from a common ancestor. (What we'd call Proto-Celtic; the terminology hadn't evolved then, of course.) He then compared Celtic, Greek, Latin and the Romance languages, the Germanic languages, Slavic, Indo-Aryan and Iranian -- using a list of the basic numerals, initially, on the basis that these were relatively stable items of vocabulary. ("Numbers being convenient to every nation, their names were most likely to continue nearly the same, even though other parts of languages might be liable to change and alteration", to quote. A perfectly reasonable statement.) Parsons then concluded _from this comparison of the numerals_ that all these languages were related and descended from a common ancestor. And the resemblance does leap out of the page at you when you put the numerals 1-10 in those languages side-by-side. He then listed the numerals in Turkish, Hebrew, Malay and Chinese, to show examples of unrelated languages. If that isn't discovering the existance of the IE group of languages, what is? Granted Parsons is somewhat obscure, and his book unreadable and full of assorted credulities and unsupported assertions, in this aspect he was entirely correct. Sir William Jones usually gets the credit for discovering IE, and he did quote the "forms of grammar" -- verbal morphology, perhaps, although I think he had the declension of the noun in Sanskrit and Latin in mind. However, he also mentions the "roots of verbs"; ie., the lexical items themselves. Then we have Rasmus Rask, who pointed out the uniformity of sound shifts which allowed the transformation of words in one IE language into another -- again, a reliance on -vocabulary-. And the actual term "Indo-European" derives from a review by Thomas Young in 1813 of Adelung's "Mithridates", based on comparisons of translations of the Lord's Prayer in a number of languages. So the initial discovery of Indo-European was produced by straightforward comparison of lexical items. That made it obvious, in a straightforward common-sense way, that the languages were related. Grammatical analysis followed. From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Feb 5 14:46:53 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 15:46:53 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Ante Aikio wrote: >On Mon, 24 Jan 2000, Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >[snip] >> We need very specific evidence to tell whether Anatolian had separated >> from the rest or not by the time of the oldest loans in Uralic >[snip] >This popped into my mind. The PU word for 'name', *nimi-, shows curious >variation: the Mordvin and Mari forms show and irregular *l- (< PU >*limi-). *nimi has been considered an IE loan (< PIE *nmen-). Now as far >as I know, Hittite shows irregular initial l- in the word for 'name', but >the other IE languages have uniformy *n-. This might be pure speculation, >but do you think there is any chance of Mordvin-Mari *limi- instead of >regular *nimi- resulting from Pre-Anatolian influence or even being a >separate loan from Pre-Anatolian? (If I recall correclty, Koivulehto may >have suggested something like this, but I can't recall the exact source >right now.) Of course, the changes might be coincidental, but this would >seem a bit weird since both of them are irregular, as far as I >understand. But then again, there are a couple of words in Mordvin with a >dialectal alteration between initial n- and l-, but these seem to be >relatively late descriptive formations. This word is sometimes seen as supportive of a PIE ~ Uralic genetic link, but it rather looks like a borrowing from IE into Uralic. The IE prototype contains two laryngeals (*h1neh3- or *h3neh3-) and the abstract suffix *-men [*], none of which finds expression in the Uralic word. Hittite has been dissimilated, as is not totally unexpected in a word containg only nasal consonants. Uralic *nimi has only two of them, but I believe (my Proto-Uralic is not that good) that the genitive case would add another -n-. Dissimilation would be a natural thing to happen. I don't think Mordvin-Mari necessarily offers any evidence of Uralic-Anatolian contacts. [*] Zhpu zber sha gb qrevir *u1abu3-zra < *?nan:xh-zra "gung juvpu vf zr" . ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From sarima at friesen.net Sat Feb 5 19:24:17 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 11:24:17 -0800 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <9e.b39033.25cc82b7@aol.com> Message-ID: At 02:29 PM 2/4/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- catastrophe is the norm of history. Eg., the rise of the Zulu kingdom >(due to purely indigenous developments) killed half the population of South >Africa, caused other upheavals like the Kololo migration which changed the >language of the Upper Zambezi to a Sotho dialect from 1000 miles southwards, >and sent Nguni-speaking war bands marauding as far north as Lake Victoria -- >all within a single generation, all on foot, ... These incidents bring up one source of evidence for past population movements that I think make it clear this has been happening in the Americas for a *very* long time. The sequences above resulted in a scrambling or intertwining of languages from disparate language families. A look at the map of the distribution of language families in the Americas, even *after* backing out the changes attributable to European incursions, is very informative in this regard. Most language families are so scattered and disjoint in distribution as to defy any simple analysis. This is especially true in South America, but even in NA, the presence of relatives of the Algonquian family near the *west* coast (Yurok and Wiyot), the odd distribution of Uto-Azrecan, and the existence of broad areas where "no one family is dominant" are clear signs of major pre-colonial movements. For instance, I suspect that the spread of the Siouan languages (including the Iowa, Mandan, and the Kansa-Omaha group) to their earliest historical locations in the Wisconsin-Indiana-Missouri area relate to the break-up of the Hopewell and/or Adena cultures. (The Mississippian Culture may be associated with the Muskogean or Caddoan family). >Not to mention that the Germanics had been expanding at the expense of >Celtic-speakers for centuries before the Romans came along; as a matter of >fact, it was Caesar who forced them out of Gaul and back across the Rhine. >What's now Southern Germany and the German-speaking parts of Switzerland was >once Celtic-speaking territory. In fact I think this area includes the most likely Celtic homeland. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Fri Feb 4 16:21:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 16:21:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: HH>radically >>has already been found out >>all of them have failed HH>>>this has not been succesful AA>I fail to see the point I hope somebody does see the point.. HJH From colkitto at sprint.ca Sun Feb 6 07:04:26 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 02:04:26 -0500 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: Actually, the problems with "wheel" are much greater than we might suspect. In "Guns, Germs, and Steel", which every linguist should read, Jared Diamond points out that the wheel was invented all over the world, it was only in Eurasia that it really became part of the lifestyle (availability of large domesticable animals which could pull loads), as opposed to a curio or a toy. Therefore linguistically the concept might go back much further than is commonly believed, and it should be reconsidered from the point of view of dating Indo-European. On a lighter note, what are we to do with Russian glagol ("verb") < *gol-gol? Sometimes wheels can be used as pedagogical devices for teaching verbs, etc. - any connection? Robert Orr From mclasutt at brigham.net Sun Feb 6 20:05:57 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 13:05:57 -0700 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > I'm not beginning to understand ? Serbocroatian borrowed its word for > "excrement" (balega) from Roumanian, and come to think of the English terms > /faeces/, /manure/ or the gloss above. Surely, "high value" cannot really > lurk behind the motivation for borrowing ? This would be due to avoidance. Reproductive body parts and elimination functions are generally subject to very high degrees of euphemism, conversion, and borrowing. Our (English's, since that's our common language) 'polite' words penis, vagina, eliminate, excrement, urine, and urinate are ALL borrowed. There are only a few dozen words of Karankawa recorded from the coast of Texas, but one of those words is their word for 'penis'--it's a borrowing of Comanche wya (y is barred i) 'penis', which is itself a conversion of the word for 'arrow', replacing an older .... 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 Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Sat Feb 5 10:10:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 10:10:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: RW>Either two (or more) languages are related or they are not. This is RW>the basic hypothesis of historical linguistics. .. is it? Nice to learn indeed. You will find defenders for or against relationships between any two languages. You can argue about the degrees and ways, about significance or chance resemblances. But you can't prove unrelatedness. We had that discussion already. Perhaps You should read Anttila 89:320.. RW>This is totally irrelevant You mean /you/ do not see the point. You might have missed that my ancestor example referred not to languages but to speakers. RW>Languages do not need a mommy language .. really? RW>But two genetically related languages have only one common ancestor, .. let me take an Indo-European example, e.g. Italian and French. Superficially seen they only have one ancestor: Latin. But this is only the dominant ancestor. If we look at e.g. French it has a lot of strata which can be called its fathers: The languages spoken by the pre-celtic cultures, the Celts themselves; later all the Germanic invaders not perfectly succeeding in learning the current states of that language. Anttila (and others) cite languages where you cannot even decide whether they should be named after their mother or their father. From mclasutt at brigham.net Sun Feb 6 20:00:20 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 13:00:20 -0700 Subject: Numbers as "Core Vocabulary" (was IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Numbers are one of the very WORST things to look at in order to make even a preliminary decision about relationship. The main problem with numbers (other than two and three) are that in the majority of hunter-gatherer societies, they are intimately tied to the way that fingers are used in counting. Throughout Native North America there are variants of systems like this: 'one' = 'finger'; 'two' = two; 'three' = 'one down' (i.e., one finger besides the thumb is still not raised); 'four' = 'all up'; 'five' = 'open', 'palm' or 'hand'; 'six' = 'two threes'; 'seven' = 'five + two'; 'eight' = 'two palms'; 'nine' = 'one missing'; 'ten' = 'whole'. There are variations on this including whether one raises fingers to count or lowers them, whether and when the thumbs are included, whether the count starts on the right hand or on the left, etc. As this number/finger systems starts to break down, other words can be borrowed or developed internally to fill the gaps, but the very unstable nature of counting means that number words should NOT be included in any list of "core vocabulary". 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 X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Feb 6 04:05:22 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 23:05:22 EST Subject: Uralic, PIE and motivatited borrowings. Message-ID: Someone wrote: <<.. of course that is correct; so nothing can be generalized. The cases you cited seem to be due to situations where water is quite precious.>> In a message dated 2/5/00 6:17:35 AM, Georg at home.ivm.de replied: <> I think my original question about why anyone would need to borrow a word for water was meant to carry a little irony with it. Ante Aikio seems to have said that these PIE borrowings made up something like 10-17% of the words recovered from the period. Words like 'water' and 'bring' individually may not seem to demonstrate much. But a list of a lot of basic words - and as high a number as one out of six would seem to say something a little more. The 'motivation' might be to use someone else's language often but without adopting it - so that a fair number of those words logically become habit among these native p-Uralic speakers. This also would suggest regular contact and enough to talk about to make the borrowings sooner or later feel natural. To see it as such suggests a stage of assimilation - like NY street Spanish - where you switch languages on the basis of not only the listener but also on the basis of subject - so that the word eventually continues to be used among native speakers alone. I also am reminded of Rick Mc Callister's observation: <> An extensive trade in goods might encourage a specific set of words borrowed without total bi-lingualism or conversion to the other language. Also, I'm reminded of Andrew Sheratt's newer theory that the large vats of the Bandkeramik were perhaps meant to hold malted beverage - a possible by-product of agriculturalism and a possible tool of assimilation. Do these borrowed words - 'water' (drink?) and 'bring' (six-pack?) possibly look like they may reflect this kind of regular contact and 'motivated' borrowing? Perhaps these PIE borrowings can be made to yield some coherent picture when taken together rather than one at a time. Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Feb 5 09:16:15 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 04:16:15 EST Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Actually, what Renfrew does is associate the original spread of IE languages >in Europe with PARTICULAR CULTURAL REMAINS (assemblages) -- yes, and without any evidence for doing so. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Feb 5 09:21:32 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 04:21:32 EST Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >@4900BC - Migration spreads 'Narrow PIE' -- 5300 BC for the spread of agriculture to the Atlantic, according to my sources (Cunliffe, Hodder), but what's half a millenium between friends? >@3300BC - Wide PIE disperses, speakers leave the Ukraine >@ between 3000 and 2000BC - an early IE language arrives in Italy. -- actually, most would say that Italic enters Italy rather later than that, sometime after 2000 BCE. Early Urnfield, perhaps. >@ between 2000 and 1500BC - perhaps a dialect becomes Pre-Latin >@ between 1500 and 1000BC - perhaps a dialect becomes proto-Latin >@ between 1000 and 300BC - a dialect becomes early Latin -- 500 for early Latin. 776 is the traditonal date of UAC. >Perhaps more importantly, inscriptions appearing in >Latin, on the US Dollar, on religious objects and at the end of e-mail >messages (but not on ogham sticks) show NO CHANGE IN THE LANGUAGE at all >1800 years later! -- this is a complete farce. Latin has been a dead language for 1500 years, preserved in fossilized written form. It's as irrelevant as Sumerograms in Akkadian. From sarima at friesen.net Sat Feb 5 19:00:16 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 11:00:16 -0800 Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario In-Reply-To: <73.f3d36e.25cbb926@aol.com> Message-ID: At 12:09 AM 2/4/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Here's a rough chronology of that cultural evidence - very rough now - that >may help straighten this out with regard to Celtic: >@7000BC - farming in Anatolia and southern Greece (cultural uniformities not >yet visible) >@6500 - 5400BC - the neolithic culture associated with Balkan-Anatolian >painted ware develops and reaches the Danube. >@5400BC - early stages of 'Bandkeramik'; beginning of expansion east and >northwest; beginnings of C-T in the western Ukraine >@4900BC - early 'Bandkeramik' reaches Holland; evidence for regular trade >contacts with the Danube - extremely small populations, few settlements, >'remarkable uniformity' in remains evidenced >@4600BC - expansion beyond the early narrow Bandkeramik corridor north of the >Alps and northwestern Europe >@4200BC - pollen evidence shows first extensive clearances of land in >peripheral areas, exponential growth in populations and settlements; >differentiation in local cultures >@4000BC - megalithic period begins, evidence of metallurgy (smelting) has >expanded from the Balkans to Denmark, northern Italy and the Ukraine; >beginnings of the secondary products revolution; beaker and corded ware >cultures begin to appear >By 4000BC, there is enough differentiation between regional expressions of >Bandkeramik to suggest that the former cultural unities are giving way to >local identities in western Europe and north of the Alps. Let's see, cultural unity maintained over much of Europe from 4900 BC to ca. 4000 BC. I don't believe it! Even 900 years is too long for maintenance of unity over that scale sans motor vehicles. The fact that the Bandkeramik culture *appears* uniform over this span is almost certainly an illusion due to lack of access to more distinctive sorts of artifacts (clothing, jewelry, paintings, etc.). In fact it is the changes at the 4200 and/or 4000 BC levels that are most likely associated with the spread of PIE. >@5500BC - 'Wide PIE' splits into Anatolian and "narrow PIE" >@4900BC - Migration spreads 'Narrow PIE' >@4600BC - A north western European version of [narrow PIE] arises >@4000BC - An "early IE language" develops in parts of western Europe and >north of the Alps. >@3500BC - Local differentiation in this 'early IE language' begins This is even worse. You now have local differentiation delaying for over well 1000 years!!!! That is absurd. Given normal rates of language change, this should have happened well before 4000 BC, probably by 4400 or 4500 BC (within your "Narrow PIE"). And an extra time depth of 600 years from the branching off of Anatolian and the rest of PIE would imply a *far* more differentiated Anatolian by its attestation ca. 1500 BC. That's a 4000 year time depth. That should make Anatolian about as distinct from Sanskrit as Farsi is from Hindi! -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Feb 5 10:52:27 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 10:52:27 -0000 Subject: Frisian Message-ID: >, which extends the scope of the > tribe, if not the language, into modern Germany. Pardon me, but surely Frisian (the language) _does_ extend into modern Germany - it lies mostly along the region from Denmark - Germany - Netherlands. Specifically, on the mainland East Frisian is found in Oldenburg (east of Kiel), North Frisian overlaps the Denmark-Germany border, and West Frisian is found entirely within Germany, (although also on the islands along that remarkable coast, some of which are claimed by the Netherlands). Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Feb 5 12:22:06 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 12:22:06 -0000 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: It is clear that the augment was originally separate, an adverb, and not a necessary and integral part of the verb, as it later became. Homer and the RV both preserve forms without augment that would later require it, and prosodic features are certainly a factor in the choice, but these are syllabic, not accentual, in both Homer and RV. I wish to ask: (a) what has the fact that sigmatic aorists have an accent before the sigma got to do with the presence or absence of augment? I see no connection. I also seem to remember that the Greek pattern of accentuation in verbs is a development within Greek - RV keeps the accent further back. (b) where is the evidence on the correlation mentioned between asigmatic aorists and absence of augment? Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Feb 5 11:04:03 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 11:04:03 -0000 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: >. According to Bybee et > >al (The evolution of grammar), unmarked past vs marked present is > >unknown in extant languages. This must surely be wrong - or at least disputable! Classical Hebrew has an unmarked tense-form whose natural and commonest tense meaning is the past. I believe Arabic, both classical and modern, has a similar structure. Peter From rao.3 at osu.edu Mon Feb 7 11:05:05 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2000 06:05:05 -0500 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2000 6:43 PM > "Vidhyanath Rao" wrote: >> There is an interesting typological problem here. According to Bybee et al >> (The evolution of grammar), unmarked past vs marked present is unknown in >> extant languages. This makes the usual classification of forms in Hittite >> (and PIE) quite unusual. I remember asking about this before. Miguel >> suggested Akkadian as another such example, quoting Lipinski to argue that >> iprus was preterite, iparras was present. But in `Outline', Lipinski >> explicitely assigns iparras to imperfective (putting present-future in >> quotation marks). So the anamoly still unexplained. > Still, the unmarked form is a simple past, while the marked forms > are the imperfective ("durative", "present-future") with > geminated C2, and the perfect (CtCC [iptaras], with infix -t-). > Such a system is potentially very close to one with unmarked past > vs. marked present (all it takes is the loss of the perfect). Is it s a simple past or narrative past? [zero forms do survive as subsequent forms even when they have been ousted from isolated sentences, conversation etc.] First: If something was imperfective rather than present/past, it had a role in past imperfective. So the loss of perfect(ive) can only lead to a perfective limited to past vs an imperfective. For what you propose happened, the imperfective must have split into a past imperfective and non-past imperfective and both the perfect and past imperfective must be lost while the non-past imperfective survived. Show me an unmistakable example. Secondly. the seeming simplicity does not take into account the fact that losses are not random, but display definite preferences. Perfect tends to oust past/perfective rather than the other way around. More clearly marked forms oust the unmarked forms rather than the other way around. [Both of these, I thought, were old and generally accepted. Didn't Kurylowicz put this in his methodological chapters in one of his books?] Isn't the whole point of typological studies that we should propose more likely alternatives over positing a string of unlikely events? From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Feb 6 02:23:50 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 21:23:50 EST Subject: Indo-Iranian Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: << Though, would archaicity of language *alone* >*really* justify such a drastic readjustment of historical dates ? >> -- perhaps not alone, but it's pretty startling. The Rig-Veda is conventionally dated before 1000 BCE, usually well before, and you get correspondences like (in Sanskrit - S, Avestan - Av and Proto-Indo-Iranian, PII): S tam amavantam yajatam Av taem amavantaem yazataem PII *tam amavantam yajatam suram dhamasu savistham suraem damohu saevistaem *curam dhamasu cavistham mitram yajai hotrabhyah mithram yazai zaothrabyo *mitram yajai jhaurabhyas From rao.3 at osu.edu Mon Feb 7 10:52:01 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2000 05:52:01 -0500 Subject: Indo-Iranian Message-ID: > The Proto-Indo-Iranian phonetic values of the IE palatals thus were > [ts'], [dz'], [dz'h], or, in a simpler notation *c', *j', *j'h with an > acute accent on the affricate to indicate prepalatal position (as > opposed to the hacek on *c^, *j^, *j^h denoting a more > central palatal position of the younger palatals). Is it correct to take this to be reason why *k'/g'/gh'+*t becomes s.t. (retroflex) in Sanskrit but *k/kw +*t etc become kt? Does this also have something to do with the peculiarities of Sanskrit ch (usually described as aspirated c)? It seems that in some dialects it was pronounced as cs' (ch is written cs' consistently in some manuscript groups). Also in sandhi, t+s' becomes cch (the tradition followed in printed editions, but not universal in manuscripts) and according to the grammarians, in some dialects, s' became ch after any stop, but in some others it never happened. People have argued for the last 100+ years about which is older. [The usual explanation for ch is sk' -> k's -> ks. -> ch, the last a ``prakritism''. I find it hard to understand how other ks. escaped this fate.] BTW, PIE morpheme final *k' becomes k when followed by s. (from *s) in several cases, the most common being from *drek' (ta:dr.k, adra:ks.i:t) etc, in some others it seems to change in extant texts (RV viks.u vs vit.s.u from Panini/upanishads on). ---- Returning to the general questions: How widespread is the merger of ruki s + *t with *k'+t etc, in particular in Nuristani, and what happens there to tk'? I am also curious about one objection raised by Sihler to the retention of occlusion in Nuristani. This is the assimilation seen in Sans. s'as'a etc, which is found in Nuristani as well. Hamp's reply to Sihler does not seem to address this. [I thought that this can be explained as Indic influence combined with mapping based on subconcious awareness of sound equilances. But the latter seems to be strongly rejected, to judge by another thread in this list.] --- From sarima at friesen.net Sun Feb 6 06:05:24 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 22:05:24 -0800 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 06:16 PM 2/4/00 +0100, Stefan Georg wrote: >>>Wrong. Language is not a biological phenomenon, but a cognitive one. >>Cognition is a biological process. Ergo, so is language. >Language is a social phenomenon, which humans have been able to develop and >are able to use and process for purposes intimately connected with social >interaction, because they are furnished with certain cognitive abilities; >which they are, because their physis meets certain biological >prerequisites. The biological substratum furnishes the ability to develop, >use and change the tool, it doesn't determine its shape. I think you misunderstand my point. I am not saying language is biologically *determined*, I am saying it operates under the rules of biological systems. Sociality itself evolved to because it provides certain biological advantages, and social interactions among humans are very much motivated by basic biological drives. In this context I was really only pointing out that language "suffers" from one of the main issues I see in all biological studies: fuzzy, imprecise boundaries. There is no precise way to distinguish one language from another. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Sun Feb 6 06:20:42 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 22:20:42 -0800 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:26 PM 2/4/00 -0700, Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote: >But prokaryotes are EXTREMELY simple creatures. Language is not simple. That is beside the point. The presence of lateral transmission of genes confuses cladistic analyses. Similarly interaction between languages in contact has the potential to confuse cladistic analysis of languages. Complexity does not enter into the issue. [As an aside, even the simplest known prokaryote is probably more complex in some measures than any human language] >languages, the result was a completely "fertile" offspring--Tok Pisin. You >mention that a lion and a leopard can interbreed, yet is the offspring >fertile? Yes. > Or even capable of surviving to adulthood? Yes. > The only instances of >cross-species breeding among complex organisms in any case are man-caused >and artificial. Incorrect. Interspecifc hybrids are quite common in nature, if one looks carefully enough. The oak example is particularly interesting. There are fossils of hybrid oaks from over a million years ago - hybrids between two species that are still producing hybrids today! (I believe this case was scarlet and black oaks). But there are hybrid zones between species in many parts of the world. There is a species of butterfly in the SW deserts that is absorbing a closely related species. But even then, this level of detail is less important than the simple point that there are fewer unique factors in historical linguistics than you believe. Of course NO analogy stands up to minute scrutiny. I do not intend this analogy to be carried to such extremes. The main point is that it is foolish to reject the accumulated wisdom of biology just because of some perceived differences in the problems being faced. Now, it is true that biologists have not yet fully dealt with the issue of cross-specific gene transfer in analyzing phylogenies,, since its importance has only recently been discovered. Thus it is quite possible that in this area linguists are actually ahead of the game. > While cross-species permanent genetic influence is only >found in very limited circumstances among very simple creatures It is only found *routinely* in the relatively simple prokaryotes. But it is not exactly rare even in land animals and flowering plants. The case of the absorption of one butterfly species by its cousin is a rather flagrant case of cross-species genetic influence. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Feb 6 06:25:46 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 06:25:46 -0000 Subject: "is the same as" Message-ID: Dear Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stefan Georg" Sent: Friday, February 04, 2000 5:16 PM >>Wrong. Language is not a biological phenomenon, but a cognitive one. >Cognition is a biological process. Ergo, so is language. [SG wrote] Language is a social phenomenon, which humans have been able to develop and are able to use and process for purposes intimately connected with social interaction, because they are furnished with certain cognitive abilities; which they are, because their physis meets certain biological prerequisites. The biological substratum furnishes the ability to develop, use and change the tool, it doesn't determine its shape. [PR] I am sure that many listmembers, recently trained under the social theories of more recent times, will be unable and unwilling to accept the following comments at face value however, there may be others who have yet to decide these issues; and it is for them that I write. Many linguists continue to maintain positions regarding the relationship of biological facts and language that are really quite antiquated; and were originated in the days when brilliants like Ashley Montague solemnly assured us that humans had only one instinct: fear of falling, a weakened version of Marxist "scientific" theory. Since then, Western science has determined that many human behavioral characteristics are biologically based, i.e. inherited through genetic transfer: e.g. schizophrenia, homosexuality, manic-depression, sociopathy; and, though disputed by socially hyper-aware apologists, intelligence --- to name just a few of significance. It is fatuous in the extreme to believe that genes, which control such complex behavioral assemblages, are *strangely* without any affect whatsoever on language --- especially, since even true believers must admit the biological basis of language ability. Similarly, I find it incredible that otherwise highly analytical thinkers can fail to acknowledge that genetics plays an important part in phonological development and change. Any objective non-linguist would, on the basis of common sense alone, agree that if the ratio of tongue mass to oral cavity or lingual mobility were genetically altered, it would affect phoneme production --- but, you will see, many linguists will dispute so simple and straightforward a proposition --- vehemently. We all know that biology-based theories have been misued in the recent past to buttress political objectives but a doctrinaire insistence on the total lack of influence of genetic factors on language is truly throwing out the baby with the bathwater. And it is high time that some linguists modernize their relationship with biology and genetics. 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 mclasutt at brigham.net Sun Feb 6 20:36:15 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 13:36:15 -0700 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Actually, the analogy I used in my last post didn't exactly correlate with the argument being made. A better analogy is that since a few Australians know the Star Spangled Banner and all Americans know the Star Spangled Banner, then all Americans are Australians! That's what relating linguistic change (Americans) to biological change (Australians) is really like. 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 Sun Feb 6 14:16:49 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 14:16:49 +0000 Subject: SV: Indo-Hittite Message-ID: Stanley Friesen writes: [Most of his posting was devoted to a critique of the UPenn work. Since I am not defending that work, I won't try to reply here. But there was one point that startled me.] [LT] > >For one thing, the biologists have a lot more material to work with than > >we do. They have genes, but we don't. They have fossils, but we mostly > >don't. > These are relatively minor points. In many cases neither has been > available to biologists either. I am simply staggered to see genes and fossils dismissed as "minor points". If these are your idea of minor points, what would you consider to be major points? ;-) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 6 15:13:38 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 15:13:38 +0000 Subject: Old Irish Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister writes: > I throw out some possibilities > Is it possible that WRITTEN Old Irish was NOT the direct ancestor > of Gaelic? i.e that it held the same relationship to Gaeilge and Gaidhlig > that Classical Latin held to Romance? > Is it possible that WRITTEN Old Irish was only a literary language? > Is it possible that WRITTEN Old Irish was the language of an elite > of Briton or Gaulish origin and did not represent the speech of the > majority? Don't know. But a philologist colleague did suggest to me once, years ago, that literary Old Irish might have been to a significant extent an artificial creation of the scribes, who delighted in introducing and maintaining every possible complication, producing as a result something which did not represent ordinary speech at any time in history. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 6 15:43:16 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 15:43:16 +0000 Subject: Turkic Message-ID: Hans Holm writes: > JS>Observers as late as the 4th century CE said that the Gallic-Celtic of > JS>Lyon, in the Rhone valley, was mutually comprehensible with that of the > JS>Galatians of Anatolia (who arrived from the Balkans about 270 BCE). > .. "mutually comprehensible" here should be seen quite relative. > I remember a parallel: > Most scholars would regard the branches of Turcic as different languages, > wouldn't they? > In spite of that, in a recent TV-film, a native speaker of Turcish > presented himself talking to people of different Turcic languages (e.g. > Uighur) on a bus-tour in central Asia with only little difficulties. But > that seemed to be a very rudimental 'small' talk. > And in such a sense the above cited "observer" could (should?) be > understood. Indeed. Uyghur is one of the most divergent Turkic languages, and a glance through a comparative vocabulary of the Turkic languages reveals a very modest proportion of shared vocabulary between Turkish and Uyghur. It is inconceivable that speakers of the two could communicate at anything beyond the most rudimentary level, if even that. I doubt that speakers could get much beyond the stage of smiling, nodding, pointing, and trying to guess what the other guy might be saying. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mclasutt at brigham.net Sun Feb 6 20:31:11 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 13:31:11 -0700 Subject: Re Personal pronouns In-Reply-To: <003001bf6f3d$19dd87a0$219f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: > [JM wrote] > > It is. Larry's quite clear in his explanation why it is so. > [Pat Ryan] > I think you are coming into this discussion a bit late to be able > to intuit the point I am trying to make, whether correctly or not. > But, I will give you the benefit of the doubt; and ask, before I answer, > "why it is so" refers to what point Larry is making? I'm not "coming in...late". I've been reading it all along and made another post earlier mentioning that all the intro textbooks in syntax use Larry's distinctions and Larry's methodology to arrive at the same conclusion. Larry is using standard linguistic methodology to define "pronoun" and "determiner". Just because I haven't been constantly flooding the "mailwaves" with messages doesn't mean (as you may be implying) that I don't know what you're writing about. You questioned Larry about how many linguists actually agree with this position. I'm answering as a linguist who does. However, I'm afraid that you're using a methodology to define linguistic terms that linguists don't use. You're using imprecise impressionistic methodology to say that, X means the same thing as Y, so therefore X is structurally the same thing as Y. Larry is generally saying that X does, indeed, mean the same thing as Y, but that does not mean that it's structurally the same. Semantically, "I run" is the same thing as "I'm a runner" (either could equally well answer the question, "What is your sport here at the Olympics?"). Yet no one would say that 'a runner' is a verb. Larry is doing what the vast majority of linguists do. He is defining grammatical categories not by meaning, but by structure. "Her" is a demonstrative because it passes all the structural tests of a determiner, but not all the structural tests of a pronoun. You may disagree if you wish, but you'd be on the opposite side of the fence from most linguists. 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 Mon Feb 7 12:29:38 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2000 12:29:38 +0000 Subject: language and biology Message-ID: Stanley Friesen writes: > Cognition is a biological process. Ergo, so is language. Sure. But the biological aspects of language, important though they may be, are not the subject matter of historical linguistics. Historical linguistics, by definition, deals with language change. And language change does not result from biological change: it results from social factors. I speak differently from my parents, and my young nieces speak differently from me. That's not for any biological reason at all: it's only the result of growing up in different social circumstances. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From jer at cphling.dk Sat Feb 5 15:49:50 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 16:49:50 +0100 Subject: Basque * 'round' In-Reply-To: <006b01bf6d7b$a3aea540$eb02703e@edsel> Message-ID: On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: [...] >>> What I meant was this (I'm sorry for having been so elliptic), and you may >>> agree or not: *kwekwlo (or *kwekulo) looks to me like a reduplicated form, >>> probably inspired by the reconstruction from Grk. kyklos. Indeed, it is the >>> logical thing to assume if you try to reconstruct from Germanic (Eng. >>> wheel, or Du. wiel < hwi:l- < *kwelo), and we know the Old Greek tendency >>> to reduplication and insertion of quasi-dummy syllables for basically >>> 'prosodic' reasons, like in the sigmatic aorist etc. So, it is not >>> unreasonable to assume (no hard evidence!!) that *kwelo gave rise to a >>> Basque re-interpretation *bel-, via some intermediate (most likely IE) >>> stage *(h)wel-. > [Larry Trask objected, i.a.:] >> Also, what has happened to the final vowel of the PIE form? I don't think >> * was a PIE word-form, and Basque does not normally lose final vowels >> in borrowed words. > [Selleslagh countered:] > That could be a problem, but not necessarily insurmountable. After all, my > guess was that it would be a very ancient loan word, from an unidentified IE > language. [...] Maybe the geographical position of the donor language can be narrowed down, for a word of the same shape found its way into Northern Europe in the specialized meaning of 'car' (cf. "wheels"). I'm thinking of course of Dan.-Norw.-Swed. bil 'car', which must be very old given the assimilation of the nominative marker in Icelandic bi:ll (from *bi:l-R pointing to PGmc. *bi:l-az). Since Eng. car _is_ Celtic, it is nice now also to have a Celtic-looking etymon for Nordic bil and a viable alternative to the fanciful derivation from the suffix (!) part of automobile. Any good Celtic etymon for German Auto? Jens From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 6 13:33:08 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 13:33:08 +0000 Subject: Basque Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister writes: > There's the possibility that Lusitanian may have been non-Celtic > and to get from Central Europe to W. Iberia, it presumedly would have been > in contact with Basque, correct? Presumably, yes, though not necessarily for any great length of time. > True, not too much is known about Lusitanian and it does seem > similar to Celtic and Italic Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Feb 6 06:30:10 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 00:30:10 -0600 Subject: Basque In-Reply-To: <200002041810.p589@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: >No problem to change it a little: >> What about being 'bil' a loan from Gaulish? >> PIE *kwel- > Cel *kwi:l- > Gaul *pi:l > ! > bask. bil >> cf PIE *penque > Cel *kwinkwe > Gaul *pimpetos (ordinal) >1) Regarding the semantics: > Remember that the Celts were famous for their cartwright-technique. >2) Regarding the phonetics: loans are often changed to the next native sound > available. Listen to a Bavarian trying to spell "German"! He most times > will change the [dzh-]>[tsh-] (cave any Bav. reading here!). I have some /tc^@m at n/ friends :> > Of course the i-prefixed verbform is an argument /against/ borrowing from > Celtic. Maybe, maybe not. The prefix could have been added after borrowing --but ask a specialist in Basque, don't take my word on it Risking the wrath of Larry Trask :> (who unlike me, has a reputation in linguistics to maintain); you may wish to consider the following notes (keeping in mind that any errors in copying are my own) see Basque ekarri "to bring" Basque ekarri; < Pre-Basque *e-kaR-i [lt/B] PN263 *kar- "to twist, to turn, to wind" [b/k], see IE *(s)ker- "to jump, to move in circles"? [p/IE] maybe "to turn > to return s.t. > to bring s.t." [mcv] Celtic carru, carricare, see Basque ekarri "bring, carry"; [wje] carry English and Basque ekarri [rmcc] Eng. carry is of French-Romance origin: Latin carrus, carruca = cart, carriage. My Latin dictionary says both are of Gallic origin. see Fr. charrier. Original meaning: transport by cart. [es] carpentum "two-wheeled wagon" Gaulish > Spanish carpintero "carpenter" [abi 4], French charpentier "carpenter" [wde 188-89]; < ? carru [rmcc] carru Gaulish "cart" > Spanish carro "cart" [abi 4]; char artisan term French; from Gaulish [cb62: 13] carro "car, cart" Spanish/Portuguese; from Celtic [jng]; carrum Celtic > French char "cart" [mh 241] carruca Gaulish > French charrue [wje 188-89]; charrue agricultural word French; from Gaulish [cb62: 13] carrum Romance < Celtic [wje 183] carrus "cart" Latin; from Celtic [nv 75-76] carrus Italian < Celtic [bm66: 25] carrus "4-wheeled covered wagon" Latin; from Celtic [lrp 53]; carro Spanish; from Celtic [rks 12-13] etorri "to come" Basque; < Pre-Basque *e-toR-i [lt/B] PN149 *tyar- "to advance to or toward an end or a goal; to attain or achieve a goal, to reach, to come to, to arrive at; to master, to become master of" [b/k; mcv] see Gaelic tar "come" [rmcc] tar, tair "come, get", plural tagaig? Gaelic; tagann "comes", tiocfaidh "will come", thiofadh "would come" see Basque etorri "to come" [rmcc] e-torr-i; root torr Basque [es] see IE *ter@, tr@, tra@ > tr? "to cross over, pass through, overcome"; Germanic *thur-ila > Old English thyr(e)l, thy:rel "hole < boring through"; Old English thurh, thuruh "thorough, through" < IE *tr at -kwe; Greek -tar "overcoming"; see Latin trans "across, over, beyond, through" < ? *tr?re "to cross over"; Latin trux < truc- "overcoming, powerful" < IE *tru-k-; Iranian thr?ya "to protect" < *tr?-yo [cw] see IE *tragh-, *dhragh- "to draw, pull, move"; IE dhreg- "to draw, glide" [cw]; i.e. "to make pass through/over" [rmcc] see IE *ter- base of derivatives for "peg, post, boundaries, marker, goal"; see Latin terminus "boundary marker" < IE *ter-men [cw] i.e. "thing to be passed" [rmcc] see IE *dhers- "to venture, be bold" [cw} i.e. "to pass a limit" [rmcc] see IE *der-, *dr- "to run, walk, step" [cw] see IE *dhregh ":to run" [cw] see IE *dhwer- "door, doorway" [cw]; i.e. "thing passed through/over" [rmcc] Abbreviations supplied upon request From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Feb 6 14:32:04 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 15:32:04 +0100 Subject: Hualde's view In-Reply-To: Message-ID: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote: >[quote from Hualde] >> (b) because the assimilation rule tends to apply only >> in restricted phrasal contexts. BUT assuming that this assimilation applied >> more frequently in the past (as Michelena also assumes) it stands to >> reason that if and , and , and so on for lots >> of plosive-initial words, are variants of the same word in different >> phonological context, this would inevitably lead towards a merger of the >> voiced and voiceless oral stops in morpheme- and word-initial position >> (where the alternation is found) but not morpheme-internally. End of the >> story. The more complicated Martinet-Michelena hypothesis (which in >> addition requires an unexplained transformation from ancient to modern >> Basque) is, in my view, simply not needed and has no serious evidence in >> its favor. Thanks for allowing me to clarify my position. >First, I query that word "unexplained". The standard account holds that >the explanation was mainly Romance influence. This influence led to the >introduction of contrasts like 'wharf, quay' (a loan) and >'material' (a native word), and 'pair' (a loan) and 'slug' >(zool.) (and other senses) (native). This doesn't look to me like the >absence of an explanation -- though of course no one is obliged to buy >this explanation. I think Hualde's "unexplained (transformation)" refers to the change from Pre-Basque lenis-fortis to Modern Basque voiced-voiceless [stops] / fricative-affricate [sibilants], in *all* positions, not just initial. But since this is a natural change (one can compare Dutch, which now has pure voiced-voiceless contrasts in its stop system, as opposed to general Germanic fortis(aspirated) - lenis(unaspirated)), I'm not sure what kind of explanation would be required. >Second, why is this version less "complicated" than Michelena's? >Michelena posits a Pre-Basque with no initial voicing contrast, developing >under Romance influence into modern Basque, with initial voicing contrasts. >Hualde appears here to be proposing a Pre-Pre-Basque with initial >voicing contrasts, followed by a "merger" resulting in a Pre-Basque with no >initial voicing contrasts, followed by modern Basque, once again with initial >voicing contrasts. This is simpler? I'm afraid that if Hualde is serious about the "merger", his explanation is not only not simpler, but leaves more things unexplained. In the first place, there are a good many indications that Pre-Pre-Basque initial **p-, **t- and **k- had simply been dropped (sometimes leaving an aspiration), as in the well-known cases of *karr- > harri "stone", Aquitanian Talsc- ~ Halsc-, morpheme variants such as -tegi ~ -egi "house, place" (maybe connected to Bq. etxe "house" < teg(i) + -xe (dim.)), etc. But one can dispute or dismiss this evidence. More seriously, a merger of voiced/unvoiced segments in initial position, while in itself acceptable for the cases of **k-/**g- > *g-, **p-/**b- > *b-, and (not sure how Hualde wants to interpret these) **ts-/*s- > *z-, *ts'-/*s'- > *s-, leads to more problems than Mitxelena's account already has in the case of supposed **t-/**d- > *d-. The problem is that there are no Pre-Basque words beginning with *d-. Hualde's merger doubles the problem of the missing initial dental, and fails to explain the superabundance of vowel-initial words. Another fact which contradicts the merger of voiced ~ voicedless stops in morpheme initial position is the phonological make-up of verbal roots, which can start with contrasting b-, d-, t-, g- and k- (e-man (*e-ban), e-dan, e-torr-i, e-gin, e-karr-i) [only *p- seems to missing, except as a variant of *b, as in ipini ~ ibeni "to put"]. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Feb 6 06:49:50 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 00:49:50 -0600 Subject: Hualde's view In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] >In the quoted passage, Hualde elaborates somewhat on his views, but the >fundamental point remains the same. In Michelena's view, Pre-Basque >permitted only a single labial plosive word-initially, */b-/. This */b-/ >develops regularly into modern /b-/, except in circumstances in which it >becomes /m-/. Similar remarks apply to the other plosives. >As far as I can see, Hualde agrees in not recognizing a "robust" (his word) >contrast between */b-/ and */p-/ in initial position in Pre-Basque, though >his view of the phonetics is different from Michelena's. [snip] How would pre-Basque have dealt with /m/ from other sources? Always as /b/? Could /m/ have been an allophone of /b/? Following Theo Vennemann's work, with some feedback from Roz and Ed, I've put together a list [still quite incomplete] of etyma with the form *mar-/bar- etc. that seem to share the meaning "soft, smear(able)" --mainly from the Pyrenees area. These may well turn out to be from different roots. They may be from IE or an unknown substrate. Roz felt that the Basque forms were not native. Any errors in copying, of course, are my own *mar-/*mer-/*mard-/*merd- "soft, smear" [rmcc]; possibly *bar/*bard- [rmcc] see IE *(s)mer- "grease, fat" (Pokorny smeru-); Germanic **smerwa "grease, fat" < IE *smer-wo-; OHG smero "fat" > German Schmiere "grease"; Germanic *smerwjan > OE smierwan, smerian > English smear; OHG smirwen, smerian > German schmieren "to smear"; possible Italic *merulla > Latin medulla "marrow" [cw]; see Latin merda "feces" [rmcc]; no known etymology [Ernout & Meillet 1932:578; cit. rf]; sometimes linked [by others] to Lithuanian smirdziu, smirdeti, v. sl. smruzdo, smrudeti 'puer'; see Gothic smarna 'Greek word' 'qui ne rend compte du d." [Ernout & Meillet 1932:578; cit. rf] *mardo "fat, soft" Basque [rf]; loanword or < *bard-? [rmcc] see Basque marda 'panza'; 'panzudo'; cuajo del ganado/caillette des animaux ruminants; estomago" [rf] see Basque mardo 'blando, suave'; robusto, rollizo' [rf] see Basque mardoera 'grosor' see Basque mardul 'robusto, rollizo, lozano, sustancioso' [rf] see Basque marduldu 'engordar/engraisser' [rf] *mard-an- "fat thing, soft thing" [rmcc] > Aragon?s mardano, Spanish marrano "pig", Catal?n mard?, marr? "ram" [wje 179] *mard-, *mart- "swamp" [rmcc] mart- "swamp, pond, pool" mart-, mart-in "swamp/pond/puddle thing" [rmcc] > "pond bird, swamp bird, puddle bird" [rmcc, tv] > Basque, English, French, German martin, Spanish mart?n --used in various bird names, i.e. "pond bird, swamp bird, puddle bird", note Basque /m/ < /b/ [tv96: 132]; Basque loanword [rf]; -in < ? diminutive [rmcc] *mard- > *bard "mud, swamp, pond" [rmcc]; note /m/ < > /b/ occurs in Celtic [rmcc] bardo Aragonese, Gasc?n bard, Spanish barro "mud"; pre-Latin substrate [bc 239, wje 179]; Basque loanwords having to do with "mud" [rf?] see Basque dialectal bartale "mudhole, mud puddle" [tv96: 134]; Basque loanword [rf] see Basque dialectal parta "pool, puddle, swamp" [tv96: 134]; Basque loanword [rf] see Basque barta, bartha "mud, muck" [tv96: 134], Basque loanword [rf] see Basque parta "thick mud, mud puddle, pool, swamp" [tv96: 134]; Basque loanword [rf] bartale "revolcarse" [Azkue ; cit. rf]; Basque loanword [rf] barta 'bone,fange'; non-native [Lande]; see rom. *bartia > *baltsa > balsa "soft, swamp" see Spanish balsa, Aragonese basa, Portuguese balsa "swamp, thicket" [rmcc]; link to balsa tree? [rmcc] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Feb 6 06:17:56 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2000 00:17:56 -0600 Subject: Lusitanian/Celtic/Italic [was Basque ] In-Reply-To: <20000204192947.9737.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: Yes, the /p/ problem does distinguish it from Celtic I've also seen the theory that it was cognate with Celtic and Italic as a member of a W IE branch Ed Selleslagh has floated the idea that it might be Q-Italic For me, this rasises the question of the validity of Italic as a group. If Lusitanian were Q-Celtic, that would imply either 1: the split between P- & Q-Italic occured before Italic entered Europe 2: P- & Q-Italic are actually different branches of Western IE and that the resemblances in phonology and lexicon are actually due to adstrate and common substrate Q-Celtic does seem to be in a peculiar little spot on the lower Tiber that would seem to be prime real estate for interlopers But, given that my knowledge of the linguistics issues are minimal, I'd like to hear from those who do know what they're talking about :> >The big problem with accepting Lusitanian as Celtic is that Lusitanian >preserves the PIE -P- (lost by Celtic) in the word Porcom (Celtic *Orco- >"pig" note British Orcades "Pig-land"). >It is possible that Lusitanian may be a late survival of a type of >Proto-Celtic, however. From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Mon Feb 7 14:44:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2000 14:44:00 GMT Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: RC>very closely related" is extremely misleading. They could be considered RC>closely related only by contrast to the highly diverse (lexically and RC>typologically) other families of the north and west of Australia. RC>Consider just the immediate neighbours of Dyirbal, as described by RC>Dixon: Yidin (27% shared vocabulary), Mbabaram (18%), Warungu (47%), RC>Wargamay (60%) .. misleading are such percentages, if taken as representing proportional genealogical relationship. Direct genealogical relationship means that two daughter-languages directly stem from the same mother language. Replacements, even severe and/or quite different ones, taking place after that split, have no influence on the notice. Thus, two languages with a smaller number of retained common lexemes may be related closer than others with higher percentages. I shall try to make this clearer in the near future. (BTW, you signed with my Footer.) Mit freundlichen Gr??en Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover Tel=FAX x49-511-9585714. From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 8 13:30:07 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 14:30:07 +0100 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>As far as I know, the Hittite word for "wheel" is . No relation to >>the *kwel->words. >> >-- 'hurkis' is derived from PIE *hwergh, and cognate to TocharianA 'warkant' >(wheel) and TocharianB 'yerkwanto'. >The agreement between Hittite and Tocharian -- very widely separated IE >languages -- would suggest PIE status for this word as well. Only for the root, strictly speaking. The words are formed quite differently (Hitt. *HwrK-is, Toch *HwerK-ontos). It does seem to indicate that this (*hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-?) was the preferred word for "to turn, to roll" at quite an early stage. >There's a broad overlap in the 4 PIE words for wheel: >1. *kwekwlom -- Germanic, Phrygian, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Tocharian, >Balto-slavic, and closely related terms in Celtic >This probably referred to the wheels in a two-wheeled cart, given the dual >form in Old Irish ('cul', from *kwolo via *kwolos). "The two roundy-roundy >things". >2. *Hwergh -- Tocharian, Hittite >3. *dhroghos -- Celtic, Greek, Armenian >4. *roto -- Celtic, Latin, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Indo-Iranian, >and possibly Tocharian. >So while none of the 4 occurs in all the groups -- one wouldn't expect that, >eh? -- Well no, but it does mean one has to be careful with phrases like "the IE word for wheel" or the sound changes affecting it. Which one? >every single one occurs in at least _two_ of the groups. Eg., >Tocharian and Hittite share cognates derived from *hwergh, Tocharian has >derivatives of *kwekwlom and possibly *roto, etc. >They're all fairly transparent, too: "the round thing", "the thing that goes >round and round", "the runner", and so forth. >This is what you'd expect if proto-Indo-European speakers invented the wheel, >by the way -- otherwise there should be at least one loan-word for "wheel", >one that isn't resolvable into a PIE root. Wait a minute. PIE-speakers invented the wheel? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From edsel at glo.be Tue Feb 8 15:44:21 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 16:44:21 +0100 Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Saturday, February 05, 2000 8:27 AM [snip] > There's a broad overlap in the 4 PIE words for wheel: > 1. *kwekwlom -- Germanic, Phrygian, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Tocharian, > Balto-slavic, and closely related terms in Celtic > This probably referred to the wheels in a two-wheeled cart, given the dual > form in Old Irish ('cul', from *kwolo via *kwolos). "The two roundy-roundy > things". > 2. *Hwergh -- Tocharian, Hittite > 3. *dhroghos -- Celtic, Greek, Armenian > 4. *roto -- Celtic, Latin, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Indo-Iranian, > and possibly Tocharian. > So while none of the 4 occurs in all the groups -- one wouldn't expect that, > eh? -- every single one occurs in at least _two_ of the groups. Eg., > Tocharian and Hittite share cognates derived from *hwergh, Tocharian has > derivatives of *kwekwlom and possibly *roto, etc. > They're all fairly transparent, too: "the round thing", "the thing that goes > round and round", "the runner", and so forth. > This is what you'd expect if proto-Indo-European speakers invented the wheel, > by the way -- otherwise there should be at least one loan-word for "wheel", > one that isn't resolvable into a PIE root. [Ed Selleslagh] Why? This is based on the hypothesis that some IE speakers would have preferred to use a foreign word over a descriptive IE word, if they hadn't invented the wheel. And that's just a hypothesis, although not an unlikely one. But that's not the problem here (BTW I tend to believe that IE speakers invented the wheel) in the ungoing discussion. The question is whether the IE words used indicate that the wheel was invented before PIE split up. I would say they don't: otherwise all or most groups would have used the same word (quod non), quite the contrary: they all use a limited number of existing simple descriptive words any moron in any language group might have thought of, and not even the same ones. (Looks a bit like the "original" names invented for the 'roundabouts' and 'flyovers' that are so popular among UK traffic planners). In other words, I find it unlikely that the spread of IE and the spread of the (probably IE) wheel technology need any synchronism to explain the observed facts. The languages (and the four most obvious descriptive words for wheel and chariot) could have spread long before the wheel. That would explain the groupwise use of different terms (plus carry-over through diffusion, Sprachbund,...from one group to the neighboring ones, leading to re-convergence in more limited IE areas). I'm afraid this isn't very different from the hotly contested link between the spread of agriculture and IE languages. Ed Selleslagh. From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Feb 11 06:37:25 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 01:37:25 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 2/8/00 4:20:02 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: <> This is interesting. 2000yrs from modern Romance language back to Latin? 2000 yrs from Myceanaean, Sanskrit and Latin back to what? PIE? Not likely. Because even if Mycenean, Sanskrit and Latin were as 'undifferentiated' as is claimed above, this group hardly represents the full range of differences that emerge out of the darkness of 4000 years, are they? Do the similarities between Latin and Hittite 'leap off the page" as you say? (Please recall how long it took for relationship to even be detected.) And what does Hittite (for starters) add to the total 'differentiation' between the first attested PIE languages? If 2000 years separates Latin and Sanskrit, Hittite should certainly add another 2000 years, wouldn't you say? That would put you at (1000BC minus 2000 minus 2000 more) 5000BC. And of course, the differentiation between the languages above and Tocharian, Luwian, the undecipherable Thracian, Albanian and Celtiberian should send your date of dispersal hurtling back to that magic 7000BC you've mentioned so frequently. Or do all these languages decline with only a change in the initial vowel and do they all have the same name for their principle god - thus justifying a 2000 year separation between all of them. JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> BTW, would you know if appears in Mycenaean? Or when the phrase first appears in Greek? Regards, Steve Long From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Wed Feb 9 16:57:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 16:57:00 GMT Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >Hittite and Tocharian -- very widely separated IE languages .. interesting! Ringe's and my own computations come out with the contrary. (cf. TWarnow PNAS 94:6585ff; Holm forthcoming JQL.) Mit freundlichen Gr??en Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover Tel=FAX x49-511-9585714. From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 8 04:18:36 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 05:18:36 +0100 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: <13.ff6942.25cd291e@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >So this appears to be a different word for horse - coming from a different >(?) root than *ekwos - with the sense "mover, self-mover, something that >propels?" (I think.) Yes. Or simply "the swift one", as may have been the semantics of *ek^wos itself (*ok^us "fast"). >I assume that *g^hei has not been suggested as >*ekwos or vice versa Indeed not. >(that >may be a mistake) so this suggests that the two words may reflect different >'traditions'. And the traditions possibly conflicted in Armenian or at least >the outcome was that both words appear and either the *ekwos word was applied >to donkey first or the *g^hei word was applied to horse first? And the other >was applied by default? >Does this make sense? And if it does, could it be possible that ji<*g^hei >reflects a more native PIE word for horse or equid than *ekwos - which does >not necessarily show known PIE roots (that's my understanding at least)? Not necessarily so (see above). Skt. haya-, Arm. jio- clearly represent a much more recent "tradition" than *ek^wos (Skt. as'va- "horse", Arm. e_s^ "donkey"). If we look in C.D. Buck's dictionary, we see that *ek^wos, though widespread, has been replaced with more recent terms in many IE languages (this is a perfectly normal process). ModGr. has "< irrational, non-human" (military term: the army's personnel consisted of humans and horses). Romance has generalized *caballu, which may be connected with Russ. "mare" and Slavic "horse" (if < *kobnj-). Semantics unknown (I suspect *kop(h)- "hoof" may have something to do with it). Not necessarily an old word, not necessarily recent. Germanic hross ~ horse from a word meaning "to run" or "to jump". German/Dutch paard ~ Pferd, from Celto-Latin para-vere:dus "post horse". Celtic-Germanic *marko- "horse". This might qualify as ancient, in the neighbourhood of *ek^wos. Lithuanian arklys < "plow horse", Baltic z^irgas, zirgs "wide-stepper" [similarly, from "ambler", maybe the Basque word for "horse" < IE *del-, German Zelter "ambler", thieldo- "Cantabrian ambling horse (Pliny)"], Russ. loshad' < Turkic, Skt./Arm. haya-/jio- "horse". All these words, with the [just] possible exceptions of *marko- and *kab-, are more recent terms than *ek^wos, which is undoubtedly the common PIE word for "horse". >Also mcv at wxs.nl wrote: ><> >Would this suggest that onus/asinus are not from PIE and that the occurence >of 'ass' in IE languages happens late? Yes. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From rao.3 at osu.edu Fri Feb 11 21:42:34 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 16:42:34 -0500 Subject: Horses Message-ID: wrote: To: Sent: Saturday, February 05, 2000 2:19 AM > I assume that *g^hei has not been suggested as >*ekwos or vice versa > (that may be a mistake) so this suggests that the two words may > reflect different 'traditions'. And the traditions possibly > conflicted in Armenian or at least the outcome was that both words > appear and either the *ekwos word was applied to donkey first or > the *g^hei word was applied to horse first? And the other was > applied by default? In Sanskrit, the difference seems to be everyday name versus poetic language. There is an example that I cant place at the moment, but goes something like `` ... bhu:tva: deva:n avahat, ..., as'vo bhu:tva: manus.ya:n''. `... becoming as'va he (carried) men.' Look up papers that refer to ``language of gods vs language of men''. If this was the original difference, Armenian shift may simply have been ``ek^wo -> low-prestige horse -> donkey''. [BTW, why do we cite most words in stem form but some, like ek^wos, in what seems to be the nominative?] From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Sat Feb 12 10:01:22 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2000 12:01:22 +0200 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: <008201bf6fed$c3687b80$c502703e@edsel> Message-ID: > [Ed] > Note that in Basque, 'zezen' means 'bull'. At least it has four legs ;-) > Coincidence? Another loan cum semantic shift? Or did these words originally > mean 'big four-legged domesticated animal' or 'head of cattle' or something > of that kind? > Ed. Selleslagh For parallels, there's Finnish lehm? 'cow' = Mordvin l'iSme 'horse'. - Ante Aikio From rao.3 at osu.edu Fri Feb 11 21:41:50 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 16:41:50 -0500 Subject: Horses in War Message-ID: > Homer tells us precisely what happens when chariots cross a ditch: > ".... the hosts of Troy, whom the digged trench held back against > their will. And in the trench many pairs of swift horses, drawers > of chariots, brake the pole at the end, and left the chariots of > their lords...." Iliad 16.369 (et seq) There is a modern eye-witness account of what might happen when a 2nd m. BCE chariot tries to jump a ditch. This is in footnote 10 on p. 40 in Spruytte, Ancient Harness Systems. During experiments with a reconstructed copy of the chariot found in Tut's tomb, the horses took fright for some unknown reason and took off at high speed. The alarmed driver jumped to safety. The horses came to a deep ditch about 1.30 m wide, jumped and landed on the other side. The pole broke, but [the point of the story] the yoke and the neck forks stayed put on the horses' necks, though the right fork turned to be cracked on inspection. [It doesn't say where the pole broke.] From colkitto at sprint.ca Tue Feb 8 05:57:07 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 00:57:07 -0500 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >JoatSimeon at aol.com >In a message dated 2/4/00 12:17:35 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >><<>I don't believe that any current theory is that Greek and Sanskrit >>managed to split-off from PIE in the Ukraine and went their separate ways >>sharing innovations that are not found in PIE. >-- that is precisely the current consensus theory. Both Greek and Sanskrit >(and Armenian and Phyrgian) belonged to an east-central group of dialects >within PIE. They lost contact sometime in the course of Indo-Iranian's >spread to the east and pre-Greek's movement south. This accounts >parsimoniously for all the observable linguistic data.>> My own impression that this theory, as far as Greek and Sanskrit go, goes back to Sir William Jones. From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 8 06:49:53 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 07:49:53 +0100 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000205222118.00996db0@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: Stanley Friesen wrote: >At 12:55 AM 2/5/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >>That's not at all what Renfrew says. He's saying that "a >>massive amount of archaeological evidence associated with >>fundamental technological-economic transformation requires a >>linguistic change", as it were. Which is true. The Neolithic >>Revolution was the second most important such event in European >>history (the most important was the introduction of language --as >>we know it-- itself in the Upper Paleolithic, 50-40,000 BP). >I think that date is rather too late. That is more likely the date at >which language was introduced into Europe. That's why I said "in European history". >How much earlier language was >invented is unclear, but it could be as long ago as 200,000 years ago, with >the first appearance of anatomically modern humans in Africa. >The Upper Paleolithic (or its equivalent) begins earlier,and more >gradually, outside of Europe. True. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu Tue Feb 8 17:54:11 2000 From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 11:54:11 -0600 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >As far as the consensus goes - where do you find evidence of this consensus? >(I mean apart from Mallory.) Is there a specific poll that was taken or is >it something that's reflected in a count of recent papers on the subject? > Steve Long On the Greek-Armenian-Indo-Iranian branch, the major evidence is at least as early as Antoine Meillet (The IE Dialects and an update to the Introduction) and as late as Gamkrelidze and Ivanov's IE and IEeans (trsl. 1995). I don't recall major arguments refuting Meillet and G & I, while they give major linguistic arguments in favor of this branch (but in the Ukraine?). The problem that I see is that, while people seem to accept this view, they somehow don't always internalize the implications. As a result, someone who purports to agree with Meillet will still reconstruct PIE on the basis of shared features between Greek, Sanskrit, and Avestan that Latin, Anatolian, and Germanic don't share. So the consensus may be more by default than by reasoned application. It would be nice if people would take a position on the basis of the particular arguments then work with the implications. Carol Justus >JoatSimeon at aol.com >In a message dated 2/4/00 12:17:35 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: ><<>I don't believe that any current theory is that Greek and Sanskrit managed >>to split-off from PIE in the Ukraine and went their separate ways sharing >>innovations that are not found in PIE. >-- that is precisely the current consensus theory. Both Greek and Sanskrit >(and Armenian and Phyrgian) belonged to an east-central group of dialects >within PIE. They lost contact sometime in the course of Indo-Iranian's >spread to the east and pre-Greek's movement south. This accounts >parsimoniously for all the observable linguistic data.>> >Now this is interesting. And it actually gets back to the subject of the >thread. >So you are saying a proto-language of Greek, Sanskrit, Armenian and Phrygian >was located in the Ukraine? And this language was not PIE or even narrow PIE. >What dates would you put on that language? Would you have any notion of how >that group of speakers would correlate with archaeologically? >What shared attributes would you suggest uniquely group those four languages >as opposed to other IE languages? >Regards, >Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 8 21:14:51 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 16:14:51 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Might this apparent conflict with your information suggest that you might >want to get more familiar with the subject matter? -- "The earliest Neolithic settlements in southeastern Europe have been dated to around 7000 BCE... by 6000 BCE, farming villages with pottery and other Neolithic features had become established throughout southeastern Europe as far north as the Danube valley and the Great Hungarian Plain." -- Oxford Companion to Archaeology, Brian W. Fagan, ed., p. 215. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 8 21:17:16 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 16:17:16 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: In a message dated 2/7/00 9:11:47 PM Mountain Standard Time, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >However, core analysis of pollen deposits indicating forest clearance and the >growth of domesticated plants have not yielded dates in France earlier than I >believe 4600BC. >> -- "By 5300 BCE Banderkeramik settlement had spread along the major river valleys of central Europe, and communities of Banderkeramik farmers were established in eastern France and the Low Countries." Oxford Companion to Archaeology, p. 215 From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 8 21:19:47 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 16:19:47 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: In a message dated 2/7/00 9:33:02 PM Mountain Standard Time, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: << Let me suggest a date of @4500BC for the functional final unity of non-Anatolian 'narrow PIE' and located it at that time stretching from Holland across north central in a 6 degree lat band to the upper Dniestr, Dnieper and Bug - the extent of the Bandkeramik culture. >> -- Renfrew specifically hypothesizes that IE entered Europe _from_ Anatolia at the time of the _first_ introduction of agriculture into SE Europe, which is dated to 7000 BCE. This means that, according to you, PIE must have retained _complete linguistic unity for 3500 years_ (minimum). From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 8 21:21:25 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 16:21:25 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: << And not a paragraph before that you say 'You do not GET uniform languages over large areas.' >> -- now you're descending to selective quotation. You do not GET uniform languages over large areas for a long period. If you find a large, linguistically uniform area, it's a certain indication of a _recent spread_ of the language in question. This is a truism found in any textbook. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 8 21:23:20 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 16:23:20 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Not 'the introduction of agriculture as such' -- yup. Renfrew says PIE spread through Europe with agriculture. This process begins in 7000 BCE, and reaches as far as the Low Countries well before 5000 BCE. Now, are you saying that this process spread Indo-European or not? Yes or no? From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 8 21:25:44 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 16:25:44 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >So you are saying a proto-language of Greek, Sanskrit, Armenian and Phrygian >was located in the Ukraine? And this language was not PIE or even narrow >PIE. -- in an area spanning the Ukraine, possibly into the northern Balkans at some point. >What dates would you put on that language? -- "dialect continuum". Dates? "After 3000 BCE, before 2000 BCE". >Would you have any notion of how that group of speakers would correlate with >archaeologically? -- languages are not pots. There's usually no way to make a one-to-one correlation between material culture and language. From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Mon Feb 7 16:22:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2000 16:22:00 GMT Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: MCV>was the introduction of language --as we know it-- itself in the MCV>Upper Paleolithic, 50-40,000 BP). .. that's the - in the moment - most likely assumption. 'Knowledge' - C'est une autre chose... Mit freundlichen Gr??en Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover Tel=FAX x49-511-9585714. From sarima at friesen.net Thu Feb 10 15:36:40 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 07:36:40 -0800 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) In-Reply-To: <9d.170d8ea.25cd1229@aol.com> Message-ID: At 12:42 AM 2/5/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Yes. SORRY. But yes. Not 'the introduction of agriculture as such' - The >term 'middle neolithic' as applied to Europe as a whole (not locally) >encompasses my 4500-4000BC date. For some reason you are calling the whole >process 'early neolithic'. Neolithic is basically a distinction from >mesolithic. Early neolithic in Europe as a whole generally denotes the >period before 5000BC. Locally the term is sometimes used when different >sub-periods can be identified. But in terms of Europe, farming 'as such' is >also being introduced in the late neolithic and in some areas even in the >'European iron age.' This is a different use of the terms than I am familiar with. I guess I have not often come across their use for "Europe as a whole". But this still doesn't change the basic facts: the agricultural revolution is too old, and took too long to spread over Europe, for it to be associated with PIE. Whether one uses local terminology or pan-European terminology does not change this fact. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Wed Feb 9 16:16:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 16:16:00 GMT Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >by 7000 BCE >about 5800BC ..before beating your heads, _please_ cite those dates _always_ with the degree of exactness = kind of calibration. Every specialist knows that; linguists normally do not. Unfortunately many works in the field do not mention these facts either. And this /may/ easily solve the difference. Mit freundlichen Gr??en Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover Tel=FAX x49-511-9585714. From rao.3 at osu.edu Fri Feb 11 21:42:09 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 16:42:09 -0500 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: wrote: > ... conversely, many changes of language have not > been accompanied by massive technological-economic change. > > Eg., for just one example, the spread of Slavic. Or of Indo-Iranian > into Iran and India, for another, which is definitely post-neolithic. We must be careful to distinguish between entry of a language into a new area and its spread. English entered India in 18th c, but its spread is connected to urbanization and industrialization of last 30-40 years (subsequent to the departure of the British). Now, there was significant change in social organization in North India during the ``Second Urbanization'' (urbanization of Ganga valley), from 700 BCE to 300BCE (I am not sure of technological change). Interestingly, either Burrow or Kuiper date the majority of the influx of non-IE words in Sanskrit to about this period. It is not so clear to me that languages change without significant change in social/economic organization. Even in the cases where gradual change in language is occuring due to elite dominance (an example in Afghanistan described by Barth is often cited) , it seems to be due to shift from one social group to another organized very differently. This can occur without technological change. But I will leave it archaeologists to fight out if this can occur without traceable records. From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Tue Feb 8 06:23:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 06:23:00 GMT Subject: Balkan Kurgans Message-ID: A question to the professional archeologists reading here: In JIES 21-3,4/Fall/Winter 1993:207214, I found an article 'Silver in the Yamna (Pit-grave) Culture in the Balkans'. Though silver cannot speak - is there any evidence pro or contra an (Pre-)Indo-European community there??? Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From spalviai at mappi.helsinki.fi Tue Feb 8 16:56:35 2000 From: spalviai at mappi.helsinki.fi (spalviai at mappi.helsinki.fi) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 18:56:35 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear IE-listers, here are few additions I would like to make to the bibliography Ante Aikio suggested a while ago: probably the most accessible article by Jorma Koivulehto on the representation of IE laryngeals in Uralic can be found in Bammesberger, Alfred (ed.) 1988. Laryngaltheorie und die Rekonstruktion des indogermanischen Laut- und Formensystems. Heidelberg : Carl Winter Universit?tsverlag. I also want to remind that the Festschrift for Jorma Koivulehto has appeared quite recently. It contains all his most important articles in German. Jorma Koivulehto 1999. Verba mutuata. Quae vestigia antiquissimi cum Germanis aliisque Indo-Europaeis contactus in linguis Fennicis reliquerint. M?moires de la Soci?t? Finno-Ougrienne 237. Helsinki : Finno-Ugrian Society. http://www.helsinki.fi/jarj/sus/sust.html#237 Best regards, Santeri Palviainen Univ. of Helsinki From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 8 20:46:12 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 21:46:12 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <015701bf6fd3$b758dca0$8c9201d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: "petegray" wrote: >(a) Unrelated languages do produce offspring - for example, creoles. But creolization has nothing to do per se with language mixing. >It has >even been suggested that the entire Germanic branch of IE is in fact a >creole. Give me one good reason. Sounds like linguistics by fashion. >Genetically (in your terms), English is equally >related to both French and Italian. I find it more helpful to accept a >wider use of "related" in such a way that it allows me to indicate that >plural forms and a range of other stuff in English actually are "related" to >French but not "related" to Italian, and that therefore English has a >different relationship to French and Italian, not an identical one There's a range of other stuff allright, but no plurals. >(b) The idea that there must be a single language progenitor of daughter >languages is widely disputed. Some people accept the idea that a >collection of interrelated languages might never have had a single ancestor, >but as far back as you care to go were simply a collection of inter-related >languages. The language/dialect issue comes up here. We talk of IE >"dialects" within PIE, but this is simply terminology. The point is that >there is no need whatever for there to have been a single unified PIE >language. Nevertheless, there certainly was a PIE. Now define "single" and "unified". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 8 22:54:46 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 17:54:46 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >petegray at btinternet.com writes: >Interestingly, these _failed_ to prove convincingly that Hittite was IE! >It was the rather obscure -r/-n heteroclite declension that was the final >clincher for some people. -- the first indication that Hittite was IE was a lexical term -- the word for "water", specifically. ("watar") If you look through a basic vocabulary list, say: PIE Hittite English *uet wett year *doru taru tree *iugom yukan yoke *neuo newas new *ueuok wewakk demand *uedor witar waters *esti es be *genu genu knee -- you get, to put it mildly, a very strong indication. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 9 00:45:34 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 19:45:34 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >sarima at friesen.net writes: >>joatsimeon at aol.com writes >>Not to mention that the Germanics had been expanding at the expense of >>Celtic-speakers for centuries before the Romans came along; as a matter of >>fact, it was Caesar who forced them out of Gaul and back across the Rhine. >>What's now Southern Germany and the German-speaking parts of Switzerland >>was once Celtic-speaking territory. >In fact I think this area includes the most likely Celtic homeland. -- I'd agree with you there; somewhere on the Upper Danube, probably. Or at least between Austria and Alsace. From colkitto at sprint.ca Wed Feb 9 02:02:31 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 21:02:31 -0500 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: Scottish Gaelic borrowed the numerals for year dates from English; it startles non-Gaelic speakers when they hear, e.g., "1967" (God, that was a long time ago!) in the mddle of a flood of Gaelic. >> I believe English numerals tend to be borrowed into Hind-Urdu... >> But please correct me if I'm wrong! >You're not wrong. The last time this came up on the list, I checked it with >Hindi speakers whom I teach. They knew the Hindi numerals, but agreed that >in practice they often used English. They also agreed that this was not a >statement, but a confession! The use of English is marked, and might be >restricted to more casual areas of discourse, and perhaps to younger >speakers. But I hardly had an adequate database to make any firm >statements! >Peter From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Wed Feb 9 08:58:09 2000 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 09:58:09 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >So the initial discovery of Indo-European was produced by straightforward >comparison of lexical items. That made it obvious, in a straightforward >common-sense way, that the languages were related. Grammatical analysis >followed. All this is true, and a few names could be added to this (Sassetti comparing Sanskrit and Italian words in a remarkably "correct" way back in (was it) the 16th century and some others). There is Strahlenberg comparing words and only words in several Eurasian languages back in 1720 arriving at some quite viable groupings of languages (IE not among them) aso. Back in Leibniz' times it was quite fashionable in the German writing world (I don't blame this on Leibniz' personally) to talk of a common origin of German and Persian due to some common words (some comparisons of which have stood the test of time) aso. It is legitimate and interesting to look for the "first" people to suspect that something is going on between the languages of the Old World, and it is quite natural that every name me may be able to pin down in the prehistory of IE (and general) complx. was mainly concerned with words. But any name on such a pre-1816 list of "pre-IEists" will be the name of an isolated genius, guessing the right thing, or having had the right idea of (parts of) the IE family avant la parole. However, all these bright people have not been able to demonstrate the genetic affinity of IE in a way which convinced their contemporaries to the effect that the need for a new academic discipline was felt. To show that not only "something fishy is going on with some languages of the Old World" (this need not have interested anybody in the first place in pre-enlightenment times, for the dogma of the dispersal of an original tongue due to the events which led to the Babylonians abandon their ambitious tower project was known to every single person in Europe, literate or illiterate), but that something which was going on there, something *specific*, and altogether *unexpected*, could be *explored* with scientific methods (methods yet to develop, of course) to the end of better understanding why the languages we find are the way they are marks the beginning of IE (and general) complx as a scientific discipline. And this beginning dates from Bopp's "Conjugationssystem", not from Jones' brilliantly formulated observation, and not from any one of his predecessors. Trying to think up an analogy I might mention electricity, which was basically known (very basically) to the Ancient Greeks, and every history of science will have to mention this fact, but it will also have to mention that systematic investigation of the phenomenon and everything which goes with it started considerably later (say, with Franklin, but please call me whatever name you think appropriate for someone who knows so little on the history of physics as I do ...). So, if you agree that there is a qualitative difference between "first guesses" and the foundation of a new science, which soon developed into an academic discipline, because the kind of evidence brought forward convinced enough people in the learned world that it can and should exist, and which existed and was practised for almost two centuries up to the present day, you should, imho, also accept that the observation of remarkably parallel morphological paradigms in geographically widely apart languages is the point in time we are looking for when we want to determine "when it all began" (i.e. IE lx. "as we know it"). So, Parson was certainly, in a way, on the right track (and so was Sassetti before him, and others have been, too), but neither he nor anyone else before Bopp was able to put IE complx on the agenda of urgent and solvable tasks. Word comparisons simply couldn't do the job, since they have been around for centuries (mainly as shots in the dark, which nevertheless sometimes may have hit the bull's eye) without impressing too many people, let alone set a whole new science into motion. The Conjugationssystem did, and from there on the new thing kept moving until today. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg home: Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-691332+ Georg at home.ivm.de work: http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/vtw/Georg/Georg.html From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Wed Feb 9 12:02:43 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 14:02:43 +0200 Subject: basic vocabulary borrowing (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: <8s7o9scv0nthjnjchipfgievibbrhmuugg@4ax.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 5 Feb 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > Ante Aikio wrote: >> What is likely to be borrowed and what is not in a given >> circumstance depends on many factors. In U languages, the numerals are >> largely cognate and there are no known borrowings except for 'seven', >> 'hundred' and 'thousand'. > It has been claimed, though, that the affix -deksan (etc.) found > in Finnic words for 8 and 9 is also of IE origin. (I doubt this > is true). Permic *das "ten" is obviously of Iranian origin. I > can't remeber what the story is on Hungarian . Well, I actually forgot about 'ten'. The Hungarian word is also an Iranian loan. Concerning the affix *-teks?(n), this explanation has been recently revived: it has been argued that it is a loan from Proto-Iranian *detsa. The phonetics are flawless; there are other examples of U *ks < Iranian *ts (The cluster *ts was illegal in U, hence the substitution). This explanation seems more plausible to me at least than the previous rather fabricated theory that Finnish kahdeksan and yhdeks?n developed from *kakta e-k-s?-n 'two do not exist' (i.e., "two are missing from ten") and *?kti e-k-s?-n. >> But even numerals can become cultural >> items; e.g. the loan origin of Ob-Ugric/Hungarian *s?pt? '7' (< Aryan / >> Iranian) and Samoyed *sejpti (< Tocharian?) > Tocharian A has and B has . We would expect > *septm. to give PToch *s^IptI (*s.a"pta"), which leads to the > Toch. A form without much problems (*s^IptI > *s^IpIt > s^pIt). > If the Toch. B form went through a stage *s^Iw(I)tI (*-p- > > *-w-?, with -kt later by analogy from "8"), that might > explain Nenets , Enets . But I can't see how > *sejpti (based, I guess, on Nganasan etc.) might derive > from Tocharian. The /b/ in the Samoyed forms rather reminds one > of Germanic *sibum. I have to correct myself a bit. The Proto-Samoyed reconstruction should be *sejTwE (where *T = *k or *t; *E = schwa) - this accounts for all the Samoyed forms. The idea of borrowing from Proto-Tocharian originally derives from Juha Janhunen, and it seems phonetically problematic, to say the least. In addition to the *j, which is hard to account for, one has to assume an irregular metathesis *pt > *tw in Proto-Samoyed. >> , replacing PU *s?exs?imi '7', > As in Permic , Mordvin . Is this also agreed to be > the prototype of Finnish ? My reconstruction *s?exs?imi is a bit problematic. It should rather be *s?Vs?imV (the first syllable vowel cannot be reliably reconstructed, but at any rate it was a front vowel). There is very little evidence for my *-ex- here, although it would account for the vowel relation between Saami and Mordvin rather nicely. The Finnish word is irregular. -?n is clearly due to analogy of kahdeksan and yhdeks?n, while -its- (pro -s-) is difficult to account for. If one assumes that the diphtong -ei- in Finnish is not secondary (although the other cognates show no evidence in support for this), it might even be possible to link Samoyed *seyTwE here. *w might be the irregulary weakened reflex of PU *m, thus something like PU *s?Vjsimi > *s?ejsEmE > *sejtEwE > *sejtwE (U *s?, *s > Samoyed *s, *t are regular developments). In this case one would have to assume sporadic assimilation *js > *(j)s? in the other branches of Uralic. This is of course quite irregular, but hardly more than the proposed IE loan etymology. Ante Aikio From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 10 04:20:11 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 23:20:11 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >mclasutt at brigham.net writes: >This would be due to avoidance. Reproductive body parts and elimination >functions are generally subject to very high degrees of euphemism, >> -- yup. The same with objects which are the subject of fear and avoidance -- "wolf" and "bear", for instance. ("The Outlaw" and "The Brown One", respectively). From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 10 04:23:49 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 23:23:49 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de writes: >let me take an Indo-European example, e.g. Italian and French. Superficially >seen they only have one ancestor: Latin. But this is only the dominant >ancestor. >If we look at e.g. French it has a lot of strata which can be called its >fathers: -- nope. It has some substrate influence from Celtic, and some loan-words; ditto from Frankish. But that does not alter its status as a Romance language one iota. If you took all the non-Romance elements out of French, it wouldn't make that much difference. If, on the other hand, you took out all the elements derived from Latin, it would cease to exist. Run it backwards, and it becomes Latin, not a Celtic or Germanic language. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 10 04:25:17 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 23:25:17 EST Subject: Numbers as "Core Vocabulary" (was IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic ... Message-ID: >mclasutt at brigham.net writes: >Numbers are one of the very WORST things to look at in order to make even a >preliminary decision about relationship. -- they work fine with the Indo-European languages; in fact, they were crucial to the discovery of the IE family itself. They work fairly well with Semitic, too. From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Thu Feb 10 10:51:25 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 12:51:25 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 5 Feb 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > This word is sometimes seen as supportive of a PIE ~ Uralic > genetic link, but it rather looks like a borrowing from IE into > Uralic. The IE prototype contains two laryngeals (*h1neh3- or > *h3neh3-) and the abstract suffix *-men [*], none of which finds > expression in the Uralic word. Actually, the lack of reflex of medial *h3 is a bit problematic. One would expect borrowing from IE *Hneh3men- to give PU *nexmi / *nixmi. But I've seen such reconstructs as IE *nmen-, based (at least) on Slavic, as far as I understand. Is this reconstruct valid? It would account nicely for PU *nimi. > Hittite has been dissimilated, as is not totally > unexpected in a word containg only nasal consonants. Uralic > *nimi has only two of them, but I believe (my Proto-Uralic is not > that good) that the genitive case would add another -n-. > Dissimilation would be a natural thing to happen. I don't think > Mordvin-Mari necessarily offers any evidence of Uralic-Anatolian > contacts. Yes, since this is an isolated case, sporadic dissimilation seems more probable than Anatolian influence. I didn't think of the genitive; it really is PU *nimi-n with three nasals. There are also lots of other suffixes with nasal consonants, at least accusative *nimi-m, lative *nimi-N, locative *nimi-n?, and sing. 1p px *nimi-mi 'my name'. Ante Aikio From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Thu Feb 10 21:02:29 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 23:02:29 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <200002051210.p728@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: On Sat, 5 Feb 2000, Hans Holm wrote: > RW>Either two (or more) languages are related or they are not. This is > RW>the basic hypothesis of historical linguistics. > .. is it? Nice to learn indeed. Well, better late than never ... > You will find defenders for or against relationships between any two > languages. You can argue about the degrees and ways, about significance or > chance resemblances. But you can't prove unrelatedness. We had that > discussion already. Perhaps You should read Anttila 89:320.. Indeed, one cannot prove unrelatedness, but without a historical record, one can not prove relatedness either. One can only amass enough evidence to show that it is inconceiveable that certain languages are not related. But if you have actually read Anttila 89:320, you will know that he says there "'Related' in linguistics means 'relatable'." So when I say that languages are either related or they are not, that means that languages can either be shown to be related ('are relatable') or they cannot. This simply means that if languages cannot be shown to be related, they must be considered unrelated. Now it is not impossible that all languages are ultimately related, which, if true, would mean that there is no such thing as unrelated languages and the "or not" becomes meaningless. But since there is no way, with present methodology, to prove this pro or con, one cannot deny the possibility of unrelated languages. So when a linguist says that certain languages are unrelated this means only that there is no (or insufficient) evidence to show relatedness. And if you want to use Anttila 89 as a source then you should read the heading of the chapter that you are quoting from, which says in part: "... typological classification is never perfect or absolute. This contrasts with the absolute nature of genealogical classification." (ibid. 310) So there may be distantly related language, but there are no slightly related languages. Languages are either related or they are not. Perhaps you should read Anttila 89:300. Start with the part where he says: "'Related' is a technical term, exactly like the equivalent 'cognate', meaning that the items were once identical." This is the criterion of genetic relatedness in historical linguistics. If you find this impenetrable, the same concept is explained is slightly different terms in Anttila 89:318: "Those languages that represent outcomes of one and the same proto-language are grouped into a family." This means that related languages (those that form a family) are variant outcomes of a single language. > RW>This is totally irrelevant > You mean /you/ do not see the point. Yes, that is what irrelevant means. Perhaps someone who does see the point can explain it to me. > You might have missed that my ancestor example referred not to languages > but to speakers. Which is precisely what makes it irrelevant. The genetic relatedness (or lack of it) of the speakers of a language has no bearing on the genetic relatedness of languages. The ability to learn and use language (the language acquisition device if you prefer) is genetic and inherited, but there is no genetic disposition to learn any particular language. Any normal human child, regardless of its genetic background, placed in any linguistic environment will learn the language(s) of that environment. > RW>Languages do not need a mommy language > .. really? > RW>But two genetically related languages have only one common ancestor, > .. let me take an Indo-European example, e.g. Italian and French. > Superficially seen they only have one ancestor: Latin. But this is only > the dominant ancestor. > If we look at e.g. French it has a lot of strata which can be called its > fathers: The languages spoken by the pre-celtic cultures, the Celts > themselves; later all the Germanic invaders not perfectly succeeding in > learning the current states of that language. Anttila (and others) cite > languages where you cannot even decide whether they should be named after > their mother or their father. Ah, well, it is a wise child that knows his own father. Substratum, adstratum, and superstratum languages can certainly influence the outcome of a language's development, but that does not necessarily make them genetically related. Latin had considerable influence on English, but that does not mean that English is descended from Latin; Latin had considerable influence on Basque, but that does not mean that Basque is related to Latin. Sumerian had considerable influence on Akkadian, but that does not mean that Akkadian is related to Sumerian. My professors in grad school had considerable influence on my later life, but that does not mean that they are related to me. Convergence (and even mixture) do not make for genetic relationships. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Fri Feb 11 07:42:12 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 09:42:12 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <015701bf6fd3$b758dca0$8c9201d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Sat, 5 Feb 2000, petegray wrote: > (a) Unrelated languages do produce offspring - for example, creoles. It has > even been suggested that the entire Germanic branch of IE is in fact a > creole. I think it is unhelpful to restrict our understanding of > relationship to a yes-no either/or. You might have trouble describing a > creole without distorting facts to fit your definition. Creoles are a well-known exception. Some maintain that creoles have multiple genetic ancestors, but it can be argued that creoles are not in fact "genetically" related to any language (this view is taken by e.g. Thomason & Kaufmann in their book Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics). And because of this the comparative method is not applicable to creoles. Since the comparative method is applicable to Germanic, Germanic is not a creole - and note that if it was, it wouldn't even be an IE language branch in the first place. > It is ultimately only a matter of which method of description we prefer, but > I do believe it is unhelpful to restrict the term "related" to mean > "genetically related". Genetically (in your terms), English is equally > related to both French and Italian. I find it more helpful to accept a > wider use of "related" in such a way that it allows me to indicate that > plural forms and a range of other stuff in English actually are "related" to > French but not "related" to Italian, and that therefore English has a > different relationship to French and Italian, not an identical one This is not really a matter of preferration. It is the basic assumption of historical linguistics that there is a qualitative difference between borrowing and inheritance. Even extensive borrowing has no implication on genetic connections (if it did, e.g. Saami and Finnish would rather be Indo-European than Uralic). This assumption is also the basis of the comparative method - if it is rejected, the method is inapplicable and there is no way to study historical linguistics. Ante Aikio From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 8 09:11:22 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 10:11:22 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <015a01bf6fd3$ba10a9a0$8c9201d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: "petegray" wrote: >Miguel wrote: >>For instance, I don't think >> Benveniste's root-theory allows *i and *u in the V position (or >> does it?). It would be nice to have statistics. >Forgive my ignorance - I'm puzzled here. *CiC and *CuC roots are >plentiful, e.g. *digh goat, *bhidh pot, *k'ik strap, *knid louse; *trus >reed, *k'up shoulder, *k'udh dung, *lus louse etc etc. >Could you help me understand what you meant here? Compare the number of Ce-/Co-roots (e.g. in Pokorny) with the number of Ci-/Cu-roots. I guesstimate the difference is a factor 10 or so. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 8 09:22:27 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 10:22:27 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <008101bf6fed$c3148f20$c502703e@edsel> Message-ID: "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >> << 1) what then is the standard reconstruction proposed for Skt. pu:r-, >> Greek and Baltic ? And the prototype meaning assigned to it? >[Ed] >And Slavic toponyms like Plzen' (Ger. Pilsen). What about -zen^? >Could Celtic 'briga' (> Gmc. burg) be a cognate? (and what about the Phryges, >Bruges?) [AFAIK, Gmc. is not a Celtic loanword.] No, *pelH- != *bhergh-. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 8 09:45:10 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 10:45:10 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.20000204221740.00712818@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu> Message-ID: roslyn frank wrote: >At 08:36 PM 2/3/00 EST, you wrote: >>>frank at uiowa.edu writes: >><< 1) what then is the standard reconstruction proposed for Skt. pu:r-, Greek >>> and Baltic ? And the prototype meaning assigned to it? >>-- *pelh(x), "fort, fortified place"..e. >Could you elaborate a bit more in order to explain why the phonologicial >shape of the Gk. and Baltic items take precedence over that of the Skt. >pu:r-? *pelH- is just the root. The actual word here is *pl.H-is (*pl.H-s for Sanskrit). It's not a question of precedence, merely soundlaws. The correspondences are exact. Skt. pu:r < pu:l < *pl.H(s) Skt. purih. < *pulis < *pl.=His Grk. polis < *pl.=His Lith. pilis < *pl.=His (syllabic *-l.- > -ur- in Skt., -ol- in Grk., -il- in Baltic) (long syllabic *-l.:- (<*-l.H-) > -u:r- in Skt.) >>There's also *uriien, 'fort', which gives Mycenaean 'rijo', promontory, and >>Tocharian 'ri', 'town'. >Do these examples imply that there was a loss of the initial plosive in the >last example and that one could posit an earlier * or perhaps * >for Tocharian? The initial was *w- (not a plosive). *wr- > Toch. r- (cf. English). I thought it was *wriya: (Thracian "city"). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 8 21:30:09 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 16:30:09 EST Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: In a message dated 2/8/00 12:05:29 AM Mountain Standard Time, roz-frank at uiowa.edu writes: << Could you elaborate a bit more in order to explain why the phonologicial shape of the Gk. and Baltic items take precedence over that of the Skt. pu:r-? >> -- it's a standard shift in Indo-Iranian, as far as I know. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 8 21:33:49 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 16:33:49 EST Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: >frank at uiowa.edu writes: >What are the data sources for the reconstruction *uriien? -- *uri, if you want the root. There are cognates in Thracian (from place-names, mostly), Mycenaean Greek, and Tocharian. >Do you mean to suggest by citing this example that there was a loss of the >initial plosive in the case of Tocharian. -- my ignorance of Tocharian is profound and deep. I have no idea. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 8 21:38:17 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 16:38:17 EST Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: >roz-frank at uiowa.edu writes: >Then with respect to the prototype meaning, is the choice of "fort, >fortified place" based on the fact that such a location/structure would >antedate an urban site such as "town" or "city"; or is there some other >basis for this choice? -- the Greek meaning is "city", but this retains traces of an earlier semantic association with "fortified place" or "enclosure"; eg., the continued use of "acropolis" for "citadel", as in the central, usually elevated, redoubt of a city. The Baltic and Indo-Iranian examples both refer specifically to a fortified enclosure (or sometimes to the wall of an enclosure); and since PIE speakers presumably didn't have cities, but probably did have fortified enclosures or settlements, the original meaning would have been "fort". Therefore it seems more sensible to posit a transferance from "fort" to "fortified city" to "city" in Greek and Armenian rather than vice versa. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 8 21:43:29 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 16:43:29 EST Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: >frank at uiowa.edu writes: >In the case of , et. al. I once read that they believed that the >referential object to which it once applied as an Iron Age "hill-fort", >although I don't recall the exact citation. -- *bergh. There are derivatives in the Germanic language (eg., OHG burg, 'fort', or Gothic baurgs, 'city, town'. Homeric Greek (I think -- possible spelling error) burghos, and definitely Armenian burgn. There's also a series of related terms with meanings like "hard" or "strong"; Old Latin fortus/Lating fortis, Sanskrit brmhati ("fortifies"), and Tocharian prakar 'hard, solid'. I think it's fairly obvious how meaning would shift back and forth here, since a defensive fortified wall was virtually a defining characteristic of a city in ancient times. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 8 21:44:28 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 16:44:28 EST Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >This is an Iranian loanword (also found in Georgian and Syriac) < MP /kl'k/ >(OI * kala:ka-). >> -- ah, I didn't know that. Thanks. From sarima at friesen.net Thu Feb 10 15:44:49 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 07:44:49 -0800 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.20000204221740.00712818@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu> Message-ID: At 11:15 PM 2/4/00 -0600, roslyn frank wrote: >Could you elaborate a bit more in order to explain why the phonologicial >shape of the Gk. and Baltic items take precedence over that of the Skt. >pu:r-? >Are there a general set of rules that show the regular correspondence of >Sk. words in to Greek and Baltic , i.e., that there >are other examples of the same transformations? Skt u:r regularly corresponds to a PIE vocalic resonant followed by a laryngeal. Skt mixes PIE 'l' and 'r', so one has to go elsewhere to find which is original. Baltic also regularly derives from a vocalic resonant. Between these two we reconstruct PIE *plh- (where the 'l' is the "vowel"). The Greek shows o-grade instead of zero-grade, leading to *p(o)lh. Based only on these examples, I see no trace of e-grade, but that may be due to the incompleteness of the list. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Thu Feb 10 15:46:17 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 07:46:17 -0800 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <015a01bf6fd3$ba10a9a0$8c9201d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: At 12:05 PM 2/5/00 +0000, petegray wrote: >Miguel wrote: >>For instance, I don't think >> Benveniste's root-theory allows *i and *u in the V position (or >> does it?). It would be nice to have statistics. >Forgive my ignorance - I'm puzzled here. *CiC and *CuC roots are >plentiful, e.g. *digh goat, *bhidh pot, *k'ik strap, *knid louse; *trus >reed, *k'up shoulder, *k'udh dung, *lus louse etc etc. >Could you help me understand what you meant here? Benveniste considers all of these to be zero-grades of "full" roots. I think this is over-reaching. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From lmfosse at online.no Tue Feb 8 13:54:32 2000 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 14:54:32 +0100 Subject: SV: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com [SMTP:JoatSimeon at aol.com] skrev 05. februar 2000 08:41: > And, for example, cattle dairying -- well-attested from the PIE vocabulary, > with words for 'to milk' (cows), curds, whey, 'cow rich in milk', butter, > etc., is generally dated to the mid-4th millenium BCE. (eg., McCormick, 1992, > "Early Faunal Evidence for Dairying", Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 11, > 201-209). > Note also that the genes for lactose tolerance (ability to digest cow's-milk > as an adult) show a distinct drop-off in Mediterranean Europe and the Near > East, but are high in northern and eastern Europeans. This seems to me to be an interesting observation. Have you got any bibliographic references on lactose tolerance? Also: are there any data on lactose tolerance in India? 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 lmfosse at online.no Tue Feb 8 14:53:41 2000 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 15:53:41 +0100 Subject: SV: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com [SMTP:JoatSimeon at aol.com] skrev 05. februar 2000 08:51: > But PIE does _not_ have a word for the warp-weighted loom, which was > developed in the Danube valley and spread eastwards in the Late Neolithic. > The Greek vocabulary for this type of loom is entirely borrowed, for example; > none in Indo-Iranian either, etc. > Hence PIE probably cannot have been spoken in an area and/or at a time when > this technology was known. Hence there can't have been PIE speakers in the > Middle Danube towards the end of the Neolithic. One more brick... There is a logical glitch here: The non-existence of a certain word in this context is non-conclusive. And the appearance of a certain kind of technology in a certain place does not prove that it was developed there. Hence, your statement is too strong. It should rather be something like: "Hence at the present state of the evidence, it seems unlikely that there were PIE speakers in the Middle Danube towards the end of the Neolithic." Sorry about the nitpicking. If not a brick, possibly a bricklet... :-) Best regards, Lars Martin Fosse Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114, 0674 Oslo Norway Phone/Fax: +47 22 32 12 19 Email: lmfosse at online.no From edsel at glo.be Tue Feb 8 16:48:22 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 17:48:22 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stanley Friesen" Sent: Saturday, February 05, 2000 8:55 AM > At 12:53 AM 2/4/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >> I simply MUST point out what is happening here. >> Much of your 'late Neolithic technology' - aside from the wheel - no longer >> supports the unity dates they once did and they do not necessarily refute >> the neolithic hypothesis regarding PIE. >> in the Ukraine, metal smelting appears about 4500BC - hammered metal appears >> well before that. The domesticated horse is now at about 4000BC and horse >> bones are in the food pits a thousand years before that. > Umm, circa 4000 BC is my current best guess for the time of unity. (I > currently suspect the Sredny Stog culture of being the basic PIE culture). > The horse as food doesn't fit with its place in PIE. [snip] [Ed] They were sacrificed though: see e.g. G. Dum?zil (La religion romaine archa?que) : Equus October in Rome, As'vamedha in India. (note also Brahman <> Flamen). Usually (I don't know in this case) at least parts of sacrificed animals were eaten. Ed. Selleslagh From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 8 17:09:06 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 18:09:06 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <37.ef27c0.25cd440f@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >4000 years is a VERY long time in linguistic terms. 4000 years ago was 2000 >BCE, when Greek hadn't emerged, and pre-proto-Germanic probably was still >mutually comprehensible with pre-proto-Celtic and pre-proto-Balto-Slavic. ? >>And yet you find it linguistically plausible that the language of this mass >>of technically advanced >-- Neolithic farmers in scattered hamlets. >>speakers >-- "speakers" =/= admissable term. You're assuming your conclusion again. >>across Europe was completely substituted >>without leaving any thing remotely resembling a substrate >-- plenty of evidence of substrate influence in many IE languages, >particularly in central and western Europe. Less so in Baltic/Slavic >territory. Important point, I think. Since Germanic and Balto-Slavic (as far as they're traceable to the "Corded Ware" cultural area) both developed on a TRB substrate (c.q. out of a TRB substrate), it is strange that none of the Germanic substrate words appear in Balto-Slavic. On the other hand, western TRB did have quite a different substrate (the sedentary Ertebolle-Ellerbek group) than eastern TRB (which extended into sparsely populated areas). >>that first dispersed from the Ukraine in 3500BC and that did not even bother >>to leave a relative behind >-- what on earth do you mean? >The Ukraine was Indo-European speaking at the earliest historic attestation. >Indo-Iranian, to be precise; The Scythians were intrusive. As far as we can tell, the leftover relative may have been Cimmerian (nothing is known about the language, although it is presumed IE). >-- incidentally, the spread of Indo-Iranian languages over a much _larger_ >area than Europe took place within historic times and is not seriously >disputed. If then, why not before? Probably because there'a a historic postcedent (the spread of Turkic) in the same area (the Central Asian-Ukrainian(-Hungarian) steppe zone). Nothing of the sort is known to have happened in the North European temperate forest area. >>Not to mention that a large part of the Ukraine had already been >>neoliticized when this happened - and most probably by these speakers of the >>lost neolithic language of Europe. >-- so? Well, that would make Mallory's "Proto-IE'ans" the descendants of Renfrew's "Proto-IE'ans". >>Linguistically, you are changing the languages of a massive group of speakers >>across the middle of a continent on the basis that a starting date (narrow >>PIE) from the Danube of 5500BC is too early. >-- no, 7000 BCE. >If PIE spread across Europe from the beginnng of the neolithic, it would have >to remain in a unified form _from_ the colonization of Greece (7000 BCE) >_through_ the settlement of Central Europe (around 6000 BCE) to the arrival >of farming cultures on the Atlantic shore (5300 BCE). >The, according to Renfrew, PIE would _already be in place across 2000 miles >and hundreds of thousands of square miles_. >You can't logically pick and chose a later time and a smaller portion. >Either it was the whole sweep of agriculture from Greece to Holland, or it >wasn't. Them's the choices. No they ain't. The problem with IE homeland problem is that there are so many choices to choose from (Starcevo? LBK? Sredny Stog? Tripolye? Catal Hu"yu"k? Halafian? Indus Valley?). You can't just limit the choices to "The Truth" and "Renfrew". Intuitions about how long the IE languages had been diverging when they are first attested c. 1500 BC, can't pin anything down to a higher degree of confidence than "give or take a millennium or two". The study of the proto-lexicon doesn't offer much more certainty either: absence says nothing (what the hell is a weighted-web loom anyway?), and presence of an item must remain subject to the effects of semantic drift and/or new archaeological findings/datings. Moreover, the boundaries of what we call "PIE" in space and time are almost by definition not very well defined. It is perfectly possible that Renfrew has correctly identified the "PIE" homeland (only it's really some Pre-PIE homeland) and so has Gimbutas (only it's some post-PIE homeland), but that as a matter fact Diakonov's homeland (the Balkans in the 5th mill. BCE) is the "real" PIE homeland. Or maybe they're all wrong. Take your pick. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From edsel at glo.be Tue Feb 8 17:24:54 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 18:24:54 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Sunday, February 06, 2000 4:07 PM > Ed Selleslagh writes: >> After reading Ante Aikio's contributions, I suspect Uralic might begin >> to shed 'some' light on this matter. On the Basque side we have the >> intriguing matter of a number of suffixes that also pop up in IE >> (e.g.-z-ko <> -(s)ko in Slavic, basically with the 'same' meaning and >> use). > A suffix *<-ko> is commonly posited for PIE, and this developed an > extended form *<-s-ko> in some branches, notably Germanic. Basque > has a very common suffix <-ko>, and a compound suffix <-z-ko> (phonetic > [-sko]). > Many years ago, the late Antonio Tovar published a series of articles > arguing that the PIE and Basque suffixes were so similar in their behavior > that they must derive from a common source, which he took to be some > (rather murky) kind of ancient contact. > I have criticized this idea rather severely in various places. The > problem is that the Basque suffix does not really behave very much like > the PIE one. > The PIE suffix was a word-forming suffix. It derived chiefly adjectives > but also nouns. I have never seen any suggestion that it ever had > a syntactic function. > The Basque suffix, in great contrast, is primarily a syntactic suffix: > it can be added to just about any adverbial constituent, regardless of > internal structure, to produce a preposed adjectival modifier. That > 'preposed' is significant, since lexical adjectives in Basque are > postposed. > Basque <-ko> also has two other functions, marginal by comparison. > It can derive a preposed adjectival from an N-bar satisfying certain > partly obscure conditions. And it can derive nouns from nouns. > Now, the Basque suffix does not derive adjectives -- the chief function > of the PIE *<-ko>. It does derive nouns, but only marginally. It is > overwhelmingly a syntactic morpheme, while the PIE suffix is not. > This doesn't look to me like a good case for proposing a common origin. > Finally, Basque <-z-ko> is transparently only the instrumental suffix > <-z> -- which is adverbial in function -- plus <-ko>. It cannot possibly > be identified with the *<-s-ko> found in IE. > Larry Trask [Ed] Apparently, you took my "basically with the 'same' meaning and use" a far too literally. IE languages are flecting, Basque is agglutinating and basically suffixing, so the use and grammatical or syntactic functions of suffixes can hardly be identical. However, the general meaning conveyed by suffixing a word with -ko is very, very similar. Even the often rather subtle difference between -ko and -zko, on the one hand, and -ko and -sko on the other is often similar. Of course, supposing there is some common origin, both very different language types would have incorporated these suffixes in different ways, compatible with their idiosyncratic typology. Ed. From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Wed Feb 9 00:57:43 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 18:57:43 -0600 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: At 02:50 AM 2/5/00 EST, Joat Simeon wrote: >Several distinct types of cloth production also dating to the 4th millenium >-- eg., felting -- (see E.J.W. Barber, 1991, Prehistoric Textiles, Princton >university press) also have PIE lexical references. Thus we have *pilso, >"felt". There are also a number of words relating to weaving in general. >But PIE does _not_ have a word for the warp-weighted loom, which was >developed in the Danube valley and spread eastwards in the Late Neolithic. >The Greek vocabulary for this type of loom is entirely borrowed, for example; >none in Indo-Iranian either, etc. Could you expand on this last point? >Hence PIE probably cannot have been spoken in an area and/or at a time when >this technology was known. Hence there can't have been PIE speakers in the >Middle Danube towards the end of the Neolithic. One more brick... Isn't there an assumption here that all such lexical items if they once existed in PIE would have been transmitted integrally into the daughter languages and down to us...? And or that whatever the word was for such a loom if it did exist, would have remained in its original semantic niche and still mean today something like "loom"? And before reaching the conclusion that there was no such item in the PIE lexicon, wouldn't one need to look at the words used to refer to such looms in other languages, i.e., in traditional cultures in other parts of the world where the similar warp-weighted looms might still be in use or have been until recently, in order to see the cognitive structures of the expressions used to refer to such devices? Also, just how old are warp-weighted looms? Are you referring to hand-held portable ones or upright stationary ones? Is there something unique about the one invented in the Danube that would mitigate against the independent development of similar devices in other parts of Europe, for example? Roz Frank From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Feb 9 07:34:28 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 07:34:28 -0000 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: Dear Joat and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Saturday, February 05, 2000 7:52 AM > >proto-language at email.msn.com writes: > basis, I believe that a comparison of Egyptian r', 'sun' (ideographically > written: a circle with >*central dot* [=axle?]) and IE *rot(h)o-, 'wheel', is > likely. >> [JS wrote] > -- this would be interesting, if it weren't for the fact that the Egyptians > didn't use wheeled vehicles (or the horse) until very late -- 2nd millenium > BCE. And, of course, there's no evidence at all of a genetic relationship > between Egyptian (or Afroasiatic) and PIE. Of course, the mere existence of our sister-list (Nostratic) suggests that some people at some time have thought that there was some evidence of such a relationship. The minimal components of Nostratic are PIE and AA. In addition to the many books which have been written to describe such a relationship, there may be some small interest in viewing the material at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/comparison.AFRASIAN.3.htm 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 X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Feb 10 01:35:46 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 20:35:46 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 2/8/00 7:45:50 AM, you wrote: <<<< The domesticated horse is now at about 4000BC and horse bones are in the food pits a thousand years before that. >> -- which indicates precisely... nothing at all.>> It indicates that the horse would be an rather unlikely candidate for a dating of PIE unity in the Ukraine later than 4000BC. It may indicate that the horse would a somewhat unlikely candidate for dating PIE unity - anywhere the wild horse is found - after 5000BC. <. Very well, then. This makes the horse an unlikely candidate for dating PIE unity after 400,000BC. <> And of course the evidence to date is that livestock domestication accompanied the rest of agriculture into the Ukraine at 4500BC or earlier. So the it is reasonable to attribute the spread of domestication technology into the Ukraine to the diffusion of agriculture at or before the time. Regards, Steve Long From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Wed Feb 9 17:00:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 17:00:00 GMT Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >There is precisely _one_ indication of horse domestication as early as >4000 BCE; a set of teeth with wear-marks characteristic of a bit. .. would you please give the exact source? I only know sredny rog. Mit freundlichen Gr??en Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover Tel=FAX x49-511-9585714. From sarima at friesen.net Fri Feb 11 15:29:28 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 07:29:28 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 02:50 AM 2/5/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Several distinct types of cloth production also dating to the 4th millenium >-- eg., felting -- (see E.J.W. Barber, 1991, Prehistoric Textiles, Princton >university press) also have PIE lexical references. Thus we have *pilso, >"felt". There are also a number of words relating to weaving in general. I am generally somewhat skeptical about archaeological evidence relating to cloth. It is so very perishable that it need not be attested any time near its origin. >But PIE does _not_ have a word for the warp-weighted loom, which was >developed in the Danube valley and spread eastwards in the Late Neolithic. This, however, is somewhat different matter, as such a loom is less perishable. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Wed Feb 9 11:11:55 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 13:11:55 +0200 Subject: basic vocabulary borrowing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > sisar 'sister' (I can't quite recall > >the precise IE source of this one at the moment) > without having checked, I'd opt for Baltic (cf. Lith. sesuo, G. sesers) Yes, that was it. Thanks. -Ante From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Thu Feb 10 15:45:40 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 17:45:40 +0200 Subject: basic vocabulary borrowing In-Reply-To: <008201bf7076$d1b33de0$f2896395@roborr.uottawa.ca> Message-ID: (I wrote:) > As for body parts, there is hardly a real "reason" for replacing native > words by foreign ones in any circumstance (other than the wish to be > considered fashionable, of course). (Robert Orr replied:) > YES, THERE IS (if we consider exactly what is meant by foreign) > A word is "borrowed" in a different meaning (cf. Latin cuppa > (Old High) > German kop(f)) > Later on, a (nativised) kopf is transferred (probably via slang) to become > the (unmarked) word for head. > The native speakers have not "borrowed" the word for head. there has been > an internal semantic shift. > But to sophisticated linguists it does look like a borrowing. Yes, but this is not the type of case I had in mind, since the loan original does not mean 'head'. > I know this makes things more complicated, but it's probably the path most > of these forms took. This is certainly true in some cases, as e.g. Kopf. But if the loan original has identical meaning (e.g. Proto-Finnic *onc?c?a 'forehead' < Germanic *anthja- id.) this type of explanation is hardly applicable. Rather, it seems that the speakers just chose to replace the native word with a loan word. Ante Aikio From emibianchi at infinito.it Wed Feb 9 16:40:29 2000 From: emibianchi at infinito.it (Emiliano Bianchi) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 17:40:29 +0100 Subject: Augment i and DhAtupAThas Message-ID: Dear Sirs, I'm working on a research about the union-vowel (or augment) "i" of the Sanskrit verb. For that reason I need to know which roots of the words are, according to the Indian grammarians, seT, aniT or veT. I don't want to refer to the lists reported on the most important Western grammars: I better wish to have first-hand datas from hindU grammarians, mainly from DhAtupAThas of the different grammar schools. As for PAN, I don't have any problem because the difference is clearly put in evidence by a particular anubandha. I wonder if also the other Dh.P's (the non-PANinlya-s ones, mainly), have this information. Pasule's synopsis (1955) lacks that data, reported in Hill & Harrison (1991) instead, in which I also read that Jainendra-Dh.P. contains this information (Devanandin himself created a perfect anubandha). What about the other Dh.P.'s? I would be grateful if you could also suggest me some Western works on that subject. Thank you in advance Emiliano Bianchi, Studente dell'Universita' degli Studi di Milano From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Feb 9 17:38:54 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 17:38:54 +0000 Subject: reality of PIE Message-ID: Pete Gray writes: [quoting] > > No. Relationship is an absolute. .... > >Genetically related languages were once the same language. > Sorry, Bob, I can't agree, and I suspect you're in a minority these days > (though I may be wrong!). You are, I'm afraid. The statement above is true not just because all linguists believe it: it is true by definition. Languages which do not descend from a common ancestor are not genetically related. > (a) Unrelated languages do produce offspring - for example, creoles. Yes, but this observation is not a counterexample to the statement above. > It has > even been suggested that the entire Germanic branch of IE is in fact a > creole. Perhaps it has, but Proto-Germanic, with its stunningly complex nominal and adjectival morphology, looks nothing like a creole. But it looks for all the world like a daughter of PIE. > I think it is unhelpful to restrict our understanding of > relationship to a yes-no either/or. You might have trouble describing a > creole without distorting facts to fit your definition. Not true, I'm afraid. > It is ultimately only a matter of which method of description we prefer, but > I do believe it is unhelpful to restrict the term "related" to mean > "genetically related". And I'd say that extending the label 'related' to any and all languages between which we can find any kind of connection whatsoever would be a very bad idea. To do so would be to replace clear and important distinctions with an absence of distinctions. > Genetically (in your terms), English is equally > related to both French and Italian. "Genetically", in *everybody's* terms. > I find it more helpful to accept a > wider use of "related" in such a way that it allows me to indicate that > plural forms and a range of other stuff in English actually are "related" to > French but not "related" to Italian, Sorry. I don't think the English plural is historically cognate with the French plural, but I don't have my IE notes handy. Can an IEist confirm or deny this? And what range of other stuff? Apart from borrowed vocabulary, I mean. > and that therefore English has a > different relationship to French and Italian, not an identical one We already have a perfectly adequate vocabulary to describe this state of affairs: English has borrowed a lot more words from French than from Italian. Or, to put it more formally, the influence of French upon the English lexicon has been vastly greater than that of Italian. This statement is both fully adequate and completely explicit. What is the point of inventing non-existent "relationships", and confusing these with genetic links? > (b) The idea that there must be a single language progenitor of daughter > languages is widely disputed. Really? By whom? > Some people accept the idea that a > collection of interrelated languages might never have had a single ancestor, > but as far back as you care to go were simply a collection of inter-related > languages. OK; let's have some specifics. Who has proposed this, and for what languages, and on the basis of what evidence? > The language/dialect issue comes up here. We talk of IE > "dialects" within PIE, but this is simply terminology. The point is that > there is no need whatever for there to have been a single unified PIE > language. Yes, there is. Without a tolerably unified PIE we cannot account for the observed data in the daughter languages. The IE languages do not merely exhibit miscellaneous and unsystematic collections of broadly shared features. They all derive from a largely reconstructible common ancestor in a highly orderly manner. And this is simply not consistent with the non-existence of PIE. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Feb 10 02:54:36 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 21:54:36 EST Subject: Archaeologists Message-ID: To the IE list: I must apologize for the accidental inclusion of the abstract by Maximilian O. Baldia in my prior post under this subject. Any relevance to the subject was unintended. I had copied and pasted a different quote from another file and then deleted it, but failed to see the abstract had been carried along. Steve Long From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Thu Feb 10 08:34:05 2000 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 09:34:05 +0100 Subject: Frisian In-Reply-To: <015401bf6fd3$b4bb0040$8c9201d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: >>, which extends the scope of the >> tribe, if not the language, into modern Germany. >Pardon me, but surely Frisian (the language) _does_ extend into modern >Germany - it lies mostly along the region from Denmark - Germany - >Netherlands. Specifically, on the mainland East Frisian is found in >Oldenburg (east of Kiel), North Frisian overlaps the Denmark-Germany border, >and West Frisian is found entirely within Germany, (although also on the >islands along that remarkable coast, some of which are claimed by the >Netherlands). >Peter Pardon *me*, but I feel some details need a little adjustment here: East Frisian is found in the region of Oldenburg (confined to a small bunch of villages in the subregion called Saterland, and severely endangered there; it has died out in most of the historical region of Ostfriesland including the islands). Anyone trying to find this on the map should *not* look east of Kiel, since s/he'll find little more than the Baltic Sea there. The Oldenburg region is in the far *west*, bordering on The Netherlands. For North Frisian you are right, though as far as I know the language is largely confined to the islands (Sylt, Amrum, Foehr) there, but on West Frisian I have to correct you again. It is *not at all* in Germany, but *found entirely* within The Netherlands, where it enjoys official status in the province of Friesland. Everything else you say is OK. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg home: Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-691332+ Georg at home.ivm.de work: http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/vtw/Georg/Georg.html From edsel at glo.be Thu Feb 10 10:20:50 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 11:20:50 +0100 Subject: Frisian Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Saturday, February 05, 2000 11:52 AM >>, which extends the scope of the >> tribe, if not the language, into modern Germany. > Pardon me, but surely Frisian (the language) _does_ extend into modern > Germany - it lies mostly along the region from Denmark - Germany - > Netherlands. Specifically, on the mainland East Frisian is found in > Oldenburg (east of Kiel), North Frisian overlaps the Denmark-Germany border, > and West Frisian is found entirely within Germany, (although also on the > islands along that remarkable coast, some of which are claimed by the > Netherlands). > Peter [Ed] Aren't you overlooking mainland Friesland in the Netherlands? Apart from that, you're absolutely right of course. What do you mean by 'claimed by the Netherlands'? As far as I know, there are no longer (since 1958) any territorial disputes among the countries of the European Union, especially among the 6 founding members (BeNeLux, Germany, France and Italy). Ed. Selleslagh From maxdashu at LanMinds.Com Sat Feb 12 04:39:03 2000 From: maxdashu at LanMinds.Com (Max Dashu) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 20:39:03 -0800 Subject: Frisian In-Reply-To: <015401bf6fd3$b4bb0040$8c9201d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: >surely Frisian (the language) _does_ extend into modern >Germany - it lies mostly along the region from Denmark - Germany - >Netherlands. Specifically, on the mainland East Frisian is found in >Oldenburg (east of Kiel) You mean still today it is spoken there? Just to be sure. This touches directly on my original reason for inquiring about how far Frisian extended in medieval times. I'm interested in the Stedinger rebels of the Oldenburg region, which seem to have been Frisian speakers according to my best information. Max Dashu Suppressed Histories Archives 30 Years of International Women's Studies 1970-2000 From edsel at glo.be Thu Feb 10 10:37:17 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 11:37:17 +0100 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Saturday, February 05, 2000 1:22 PM > It is clear that the augment was originally separate, an adverb, and not a > necessary and integral part of the verb, as it later became. Homer and the > RV both preserve forms without augment that would later require it, and > prosodic features are certainly a factor in the choice, but these are > syllabic, not accentual, in both Homer and RV. > I wish to ask: > (a) what has the fact that sigmatic aorists have an accent before the sigma > got to do with the presence or absence of augment? I see no connection. I > also seem to remember that the Greek pattern of accentuation in verbs is a > development within Greek - RV keeps the accent further back. > (b) where is the evidence on the correlation mentioned between asigmatic > aorists and absence of augment? > Peter [Ed] I guess this refers to an older mail of mine, which was already refuted (in part) by others. The main problem stemmed from the fact that I was thinking of modern Greek: ad a) in m.Grk. the accent is normally on the augment of sigmatic aorists, if present (depending on the person): gr?ph?, ?grapsa. The aorist with augment has a definite prosodic scheme TA-ta-ta (esdr?jula, for the Hispanists). ad b) this was largely erroneous: a number of asigmatic aorists don't have an augment. Those that have one, follow the scheme sub a). Sorry for the confusion I caused. Ed. Selleslagh From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Feb 10 13:47:21 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 14:47:21 +0100 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) In-Reply-To: <002601bf715b$43293580$7d72fe8c@lucent.com> Message-ID: "Vidhyanath Rao" wrote: >From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" >> Still, the unmarked form is a simple past, while the marked forms >> are the imperfective ("durative", "present-future") with >> geminated C2, and the perfect (CtCC [iptaras], with infix -t-). >> Such a system is potentially very close to one with unmarked past >> vs. marked present (all it takes is the loss of the perfect). >Is it s a simple past or narrative past? [zero forms do survive as >subsequent forms even when they have been ousted from isolated >sentences, conversation etc.] I don't know much about Akkadian syntax, but what I gather is: The preterite (iprus) is the unmarked narrative past. The perfect (iptaras) is less frequent. According to Lipin'ski it denotes "that a state is produced in someone or in something, whether it be caused by another or by himself/itself". The -t- infix in other Semitic languages (as well as in Akkadian modal forms) denotes a reflexive (Ugaritic yr-t-HS "he washed himself", preterite with t-infix). I don't know to what extent the imperfective (iparras, "present/future") was used in past tense contexts. Judging by its traditional name, not often. There is also the Akkadian stative (paris), which is is the normal perfective / past tense in other Semitic languages (having ousted the preterite), but which in Akkadian is a true stative, i.e. a verbal adjective (paris "he is separate"(?)). Campbell ("Compendium of the World's Languages") says: "Instead of the typical Semitic division into perfective and imperfective aspects, Akkadian has an idiosyncratic quadruple segmentation which corresponds broadly to a present/ preterite/perfect system, with the fourth memeber acting as a kind of stative". Diakonov (in EB), contrary to Lipin'ski, seems to say that the preterite was in origin a perfective (opposed to the iparras imperfective). "Later a new "perfect" with an infixed -ta- in the stem developed". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Feb 10 14:10:39 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 15:10:39 +0100 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) In-Reply-To: <002601bf715b$43293580$7d72fe8c@lucent.com> Message-ID: "Vidhyanath Rao" wrote: >>> There is an interesting typological problem here. According to Bybee et al >>> (The evolution of grammar), unmarked past vs marked present is unknown in >>> extant languages. This makes the usual classification of forms in Hittite >>> (and PIE) quite unusual. Come to think of it, Hittite (unlike Akkadian) is quite clear. The forms without -i are past tense, those with -i present. There is no way around that. Bybee et al. are wrong (or rather, their universal is merely a tendency). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From r.clark at auckland.ac.nz Fri Feb 11 02:33:35 2000 From: r.clark at auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 15:33:35 +1300 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: It is also a feature of Bickerton's prototypical Creole verb system: an unmarked non-stative verb is interpreted as past; to make a present you add the non-punctual aspect marker. Of course the extent to which this is realized in actual languages remains debatable. Ross Clark >>> "petegray" 02/06 12:04 AM >>> >. According to Bybee et > >al (The evolution of grammar), unmarked past vs marked present is > >unknown in extant languages. This must surely be wrong - or at least disputable! Classical Hebrew has an unmarked tense-form whose natural and commonest tense meaning is the past. I believe Arabic, both classical and modern, has a similar structure. Peter From rao.3 at osu.edu Fri Feb 11 21:42:59 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 16:42:59 -0500 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: "petegray" wrote > >. According to Bybee et > > >al (The evolution of grammar), unmarked past vs marked > > > present is unknown in extant languages. To be precise, I should have said zero past vs non-zero present. Cases where both past and present carry special markings (equipollent oppositions) are fairly common. > This must surely be wrong - or at least disputable! Classical > Hebrew has an unmarked tense-form whose natural and > commonest tense meaning is the past. I believe Arabic, both > classical and modern, has a similar structure. Arabic has a perfective vs imperfective opposition. That the perfective is most often translated by English past is irrelevant. The difference is that when a language has a perfective vs imperfective contrast (but without explicitely marked tense) , the latter is used amid a narratives in perfectives to denote incomplete or background events and to denote habituals including past habituals. A present (or non-past) is not used that way, but depends purely on the time of the event. Defining tense and aspect this way (which goes back to Comrie, though Bybee et al prefer the slightly modified version of Dahl), zero perfective is not uncommon, zero imperfective is seems to be less common (though, through the accidents history, are more familar), both poles non-zero is widespread, but zero past is unknown. From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Thu Feb 10 11:50:32 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 13:50:32 +0200 Subject: Uralic, PIE and motivatited borrowings. In-Reply-To: <43.99586e.25ce4d02@aol.com> Message-ID: (Steve Long wrote:) [snip] > Also, I'm reminded of Andrew Sheratt's newer theory that the large vats of > the Bandkeramik were perhaps meant to hold malted beverage - a possible > by-product of agriculturalism and a possible tool of assimilation. Do these > borrowed words - 'water' (drink?) and 'bring' (six-pack?) possibly look like > they may reflect this kind of regular contact and 'motivated' borrowing? Speaking of alcoholic beverages, it is interesting that also PU *juxi- 'drink' might be an IE loan (*g?uH- 'pour'; semantic parallels have been pointed out). I also seem to recall that some researchers have proposed that the early spread of agriculture had (at least in some areas) more to do with brewing than food production. But still, connecting 'water', 'drink' and 'bring' with prehistoric alcohol trade is of course quite hypothetical... :) But at any rate, some items in the borrowed vocabulary point quite clearly to trade (see e.g. *mexi- and *wosa- below). > Perhaps these PIE borrowings can be made to yield some coherent picture when > taken together rather than one at a time. I'll present a list of the most convincing PIE > PU loans below. Most are from Koivulehto, but there are a couple of unpublished ones that will appear in a forthcoming article of mine. A note on the reconstructions: PU *d is a voiced dental spirant; *x was probably a voiced velar fricative. PU: PIE: -- ---- *(x)aja- 'drive' *(H)ag?- *kaja- 'sun, dawn' *kay- 'heat' *kelki- 'must, have to' *skelH- / *sklH- id. *ker?- 'bunch; collect' *ger- 'collect etc.' *koki- 'see, find' *Hokw- 'see' *kosi- 'cough' *kwa:s- id. *kota- 'hut, house' *kot- 'Wohnraum' *kulki- 'wander, go, flow' *kwelH- 'wander etc.' *k?l(x)i-w- *brother/sister-in-law' *glHi- id. *k?wdi- 'rope' *Haw-dh- 'flechten, binden' (cf Armenian z-aud 'Band', Old Norse v?dhr 'Seil, Schnur') *meti- 'honey' *medhu- id. *mexi- 'sell, give' *mey-gw- 'exchange' *mos?ki- 'wash' *mozg- id. *nimi 'name' ?*nmen id. *n?xi- 'woman, wife' *gwnaH- 'woman' *orpa(s)- 'orphan' *orbho(s)- id. *pel(x)i- 'fear' *pelH- 'frightening etc.' *pexi- 'cook' *bheH- 'roast etc.' *pit?- 'attach, hold, bind' *ped- 'fassen' ?*pow(x)i- / *poxi- / *puxi- 'tree' (reconstruction problematic) *bhowH- 'grow' (with derivatives meaning 'tree') *pun(x)a- 'plait' *(s)pn(H)- id. *pur(x)a- 'drill' *bhr(H)- id. *p?rt?- 'board' *bhrdho- id. *s?ada- 'rain, fall' *k?ad- id. *s?alka- 'pole, rod' *g?halgho- id. *s?ola- 'gut' *k?olo- (> Greek k?lon; IE root *k?el- 'cover') *suxi- 'row' *suH- 'put in motion' *syxni- 'vein, sinew' *sHi-nu- id. *teki- 'put, do' *dheH- id. *toxi- 'bring, give, sell' *doH- 'give' *tuxli- 'feather, wing; wind; mood; to blow' *dhuH-li- (< *dhewH- 'stieben, wirbeln, wehen, blasen usw.') *weti- 'water' *wed- id. *wet?- 'pull, lead' *wedh- 'lead' *wixi- 'take (somewhere)' *weg?h- *wosa- 'merchandise' *wos- id. The list contains 35 words, which is at least 10% of the reconstructed PU vocabulary. The loans seems to have a slightly western distribution: e.g. 31 of them are present in Finnic, while only 19 appear in Samoyed. This suggests that the contacts were even at the Proto-Language stage more intensive in the western area than in the eastern (I recall Steve Long asking if / suggesting that the direction of loaning would not have been South > North but rather West > East). The western part of the early (P)U language area seems to have had more intensive contact with Indo-Europeans, but there are also some independent IE loans in Samoyed, too. This points towards multiple contact points between Uralians and Indo-Europeans at an early stage, both in the east (Southern Urals??) and the west (Volga?). I will get back on this (and the linked question of the location of U Urheimat) in more detail later. (A note: perhaps at least two of the loans might be pre-PIE, because they show PU front *? as a substituent of IE *a adjacent to *h2 (*gwneh2- / *gwnah2- > U *n?xi-, *h2ewdh- / *h2awdh- > U *k?wdi-). Could this reflect some intermediate stage (*???) of the change *h2eh2 > *h2ah2?) Ante Aikio From stevegus at aye.net Thu Feb 10 13:29:40 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 08:29:40 -0500 Subject: Old Irish Message-ID: Larry Trask writes: > Don't know. But a philologist colleague did suggest to me once, years > ago, that literary Old Irish might have been to a significant extent an > artificial creation of the scribes, who delighted in introducing and > maintaining every possible complication, producing as a result something > which did not represent ordinary speech at any time in history. I know that literary Irish (and continental missionary Irish) monks delighted in a strange Latin jargon they called 'Hisperica famina," which actually meant 'Irish speech.' (Famina for 'speech' is an interesting bit of etymologising in itself.) They mixed up archaic or newly coined Latin words with bits of Greek and Hebrew. This flourished in around the sixth century --- about the time of the earliest OIr. glosses, if I remember rightly. St. Columba's -Altus prosator- is one of the best known, if relatively less extreme, examples of the style. -- Sella fictili sedeo Versiculos dum facio. From jrader at m-w.com Thu Feb 10 14:59:24 2000 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 14:59:24 +0000 Subject: Old Irish Message-ID: Are you either of you even halfway serious? The transition between Old Irish and Middle Irish and between Middle Irish and Early Modern Irish is abundantly, if at times confusingly documented, because so many late 7th-9th-century texts were transmitted in much later copies, and various strata of the language are readily apparent. The stages in the breakdown of the Old Irish verbal system, which is the principal gulf dividing Old Irish from Modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic, are not hard to describe. The transition from Old to Modern Irish is far better documented than, say, the transition from Latin to Old French. Recall that the canonical Old Irish texts, i.e., those whose manuscripts date from before ca. 900, are principally glosses and commentaries in the margins of Latin manuscripts. Though the source of these commentaries is a complex issue about which I have no expertise, there is unquestionably an extemporaneous quality to them; they are not some kind of literary exercise and there is little doubt they reflect the speech of the scribes. Very likely this speech had undergone some dialect leveling, because members of monastic communities were drawn from different areas of Ireland, but the idea that this language is either completely artificial or the vestige of some foreign elite is not plausible. The complexity of Old Irish has been exaggerated because the great majority of people who study it have European languages as their sole point of comparison. True, there is a remarkable degree of opacity in certain morphological relationships, as between prototonic and deuterotonic verb forms, for example, but I'm sure parallels could be found in other languages with lots of morphology that have undergone significant phonological change. There is a remarkable degree of opacity in the verbal paradigms of Arikara (a Caddoan language of the U.S. Great Plains), not to mention the possessed forms of kinship terms and others areas of its morphology. But I don't think anyone has ever proposed that Arikara was altered by its speakers to make it as complex as possible. Jim Rader > Rick Mc Callister writes: >> I throw out some possibilities >> Is it possible that WRITTEN Old Irish was NOT the direct ancestor >> of Gaelic? i.e that it held the same relationship to Gaeilge and Gaidhlig >> that Classical Latin held to Romance? >> Is it possible that WRITTEN Old Irish was only a literary language? >> Is it possible that WRITTEN Old Irish was the language of an elite >> of Briton or Gaulish origin and did not represent the speech of the >> majority? > Don't know. But a philologist colleague did suggest to me once, years > ago, that literary Old Irish might have been to a significant extent an > artificial creation of the scribes, who delighted in introducing and > maintaining every possible complication, producing as a result something > which did not represent ordinary speech at any time in history. > Larry Trask From michalov at uiuc.edu Thu Feb 10 14:43:11 2000 From: michalov at uiuc.edu (Peter A. Michalove) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 08:43:11 -0600 Subject: Numbers as "Core Vocabulary" (was IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dr. McLaughlin is quite right that numerals are often unstable lexemes, despite popular belief. In addition to the issues he points out about counting systems, there's another factor that frequently leads to the replacement (by borrowing) of numerals. One of the activities that leads to language contact and bilingualism is trade. Of course, trade is an activity in which the numerals are essential, and one must know the numerals of one's trading partners. Therefore numerals are often subject to borrowing (others have cited several examples on this list), and the case of Indo-European, where the numeral system is well preserved throughout almost all of the family, has probably acted as a misleading example At 01:00 PM 2/6/00 -0700, you wrote: >Numbers are one of the very WORST things to look at in order to make even a >preliminary decision about relationship. The main problem with numbers >(other than two and three) are that in the majority of hunter-gatherer >societies, they are intimately tied to the way that fingers are used in >counting. Throughout Native North America there are variants of systems >like this: 'one' = 'finger'; 'two' = two; 'three' = 'one down' (i.e., one >finger besides the thumb is still not raised); 'four' = 'all up'; 'five' = >'open', 'palm' or 'hand'; 'six' = 'two threes'; 'seven' = 'five + two'; >'eight' = 'two palms'; 'nine' = 'one missing'; 'ten' = 'whole'. There are >variations on this including whether one raises fingers to count or lowers >them, whether and when the thumbs are included, whether the count starts on >the right hand or on the left, etc. As this number/finger systems starts to >break down, other words can be borrowed or developed internally to fill the >gaps, but the very unstable nature of counting means that number words >should NOT be included in any list of "core vocabulary". >John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. >Assistant Professor >mclasutt at brigham.net Peter A. Michalove michalov at uiuc.edu Phone: (217) 333-7633 Fax: (217) 244-4019 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Foreign Languages Building Business Office 3072D Foreign Languages Building (MC-178) 707 South Mathews Avenue Urbana, IL 61801-3675 USA From mclasutt at brigham.net Thu Feb 10 16:14:07 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 09:14:07 -0700 Subject: Re Personal pronouns--typo In-Reply-To: Message-ID: OOPs, typo: > He is > defining grammatical categories not by meaning, but by structure. > "Her" is > a demonstrative because it passes all the structural tests of a > determiner, > but not all the structural tests of a pronoun. Change 'demonstrative' to 'determiner'. 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 Thu Feb 10 16:42:21 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 09:42:21 -0700 Subject: About an IE database In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: Direct replies to Prof. Herzenberg may be sent to his e-mail address, herzenbg at lgg.usr.pu.ru . --rma ] I-E List, I received the request at the bottom of this post and Prof. Herzenberg asked me to forward it to the list. Immediately below is my response to him. John McLaughlin Prof. Herzenberg, I'm sorry to be responding so late. The first part of February has been very, very busy for me. I'll forward your message to the list as a whole. US funding is probably best sought through either the National Science Foundation (www.nsf.gov) or the National Endowment for the Humanities (www.neh.gov). You will need an academic tie in the United States, but with all the Indo-Europeanists on the list, perhaps someone who specializes in Indo-European would be interested in serving in that capacity. (My own interests are only peripherally Indo-European, but if all else fails, I'd be willing to entertain the possibility.) I would think that some U.S. Indo-Europeanist would be happy to help you since you have student assistants ready to hand (a situation we don't always enjoy in the United States). I may occasionally be a little late in responding, but I'd be happy to offer any experience and/or advice on developing the proposal. 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) > -----Original Message----- > From: Leonard G. Herzenberg [mailto:herzenbg at lgg.usr.pu.ru] > Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2000 1:39 PM > To: mclasutt at brigham.net > Subject: About an IE database > Dear colleague, > I am Leonhard Herzenberg (Guertsenberg in my Russian passport), > Professor at the Department for Linguistics, University of Saint- > Petersburg, Russia. My narrow field of research and teaching > is Iranian and Indoeuropean Comparative Linguistics; I am also > greatly interested in compiling an etymological database of Indo- > European, its supposed base being Pokorny and reviews of it; the > ideal issue would be an Internet database to which permanent con- > tributions would keep it up-to-date. > To arrange that funding is needed, as well as connection to > some foreign institution. There is a special point: I envisage > that my students would happily introduce data for a reward > which would be considerably lower than abroad. Strangely > enough I have about thirty students here, who are engaged > in IE studies, and at least half a dozen are very knowledgeable > and ripe for a work of this kind. Of course, I am ready to > supply everybody who is interested with details. > Could you also help me to post this message on the general > list? > Thank you so very much for attention, > ever truly yours > Leonhard Herzenberg > > phone +7 812 233 27 62 From Georg at home.ivm.de Thu Feb 10 17:37:05 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 18:37:05 +0100 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000205220057.009a2b50@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: >>Language is a social phenomenon, which humans have been able to develop and >>are able to use and process for purposes intimately connected with social >>interaction, because they are furnished with certain cognitive abilities; >>which they are, because their physis meets certain biological >>prerequisites. The biological substratum furnishes the ability to develop, >>use and change the tool, it doesn't determine its shape. >I think you misunderstand my point. Yes, maybe I did. > I am not saying language is >biologically *determined*, I'm glad you aren't ;-) > I am saying it operates under the rules of >biological systems. Sociality itself evolved to because it provides >certain biological advantages, and social interactions among humans are >very much motivated by basic biological drives. I can accept that. >In this context I was really only pointing out that language "suffers" from >one of the main issues I see in all biological studies: fuzzy, imprecise >boundaries. There is no precise way to distinguish one language from another. True, thanks for the clarification. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From Georg at home.ivm.de Thu Feb 10 18:38:22 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 19:38:22 +0100 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: <001901bf706b$01c0fe20$b99f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: I somehow knew, mi Patrici, that you'd not let this opportunity pass to let us know where you stand. However, you make any reasonable discussion on this - which may be a thread alien to the objects of this list anyway - at least, say, difficult, since you have peppered your remarks with a neat characteristic of anyone who might take a somewhat different position. So, if it so pleases you, I am, using your words "doctrinaire", a "socially hyper-aware apologist" and things like that. I don't take offence. I only feel a little bit offended by the insinuation that I (or other readers of this list) may not follow you because we are "recently trained under the social theories of more recent times", which I can only take as meaning that we simply do not use our own brains but prefer to have them washed by others, which I, care amice, would rather not like to see repeated here. What all this is, dear Pat, is commonly called "immunization", by which you'll always end up on the right side, knowing that my objections will be the ones of those whom I allowed to brainwash me (or, who knows, who may even be paying me). This is not how it works, though. I pass in (near - ;-) silence over your snide against Ashley Montagu (or the allegation - implicit, of course - that I may be one of his cronies). I'll just say so much that few if any Marxists of my acquaintance (the M.-word does not sound as dirty over here as you may hope) would readily admit that he's one of them, but this need not detain us further. >Since then, Western science has determined that many human behavioral >characteristics are biologically based, i.e. inherited through genetic >transfer: e.g. schizophrenia, homosexuality, manic-depression, sociopathy; >and, though disputed by socially hyper-aware apologists, intelligence --- to >name just a few of significance. I'm sorry, but I contest that "Western Science" has "determined" such things ("Wild Western science", maybe [I wonder whether this snide will make it to the list ;-]). If you are referring to literature of the kind of the "Bell Curve", well, mwe can stop here, since we would then have to discuss who is sponsoring this kind of "research" and to which ends it is *meant* to be used by its originarors. But we should not, since our moderater will quickly pull the plug on this, since we should not endulge too much, if at all, in statements of a political nature. The whole business of reducing, as you name it yourself below, "complex behavioral assemblages" to the biological substrate we inherit physically is, in my humble opinion, mostly disinformation. The very simple reason for this is that some of these "behavioral assemblages" are exactly what they are, and, by this virtue, *constructs*. If I find you to be a "sociopath", which I, heaven forbid, don't, I'm applying my *construct* of, say, sociopathy with my *construct* of Pat Ryan, both of which may or may not have some (or much) resemblance to *your* construct of these things. That, e.g., homosexuality - you mention this example yourself - is equally such a construct becomes fairly obvious from the cultural history of this kind of behaviour. It is mostly frowned upon in modern societies, but we know that this attitude comes and goes in the history of mankind. I won't go into the details of the role of conventionalized homosexual practices in (mostly) Greek and (partly) Roman antiquity, but the very fact that what most people today think they possess an insurmountable "instinct" against was once part of the culture (Greece) or a superchic de-rigeur-behaviour in the leisure class (Rome) bespeaks that this, like any other "complex behavioral assemblage", is an artefact of human culture. Many societies, e.g. in Papua-Newguinea, know forms of ritualized homosexuality appropriate for certain ages, or part of certain rites-de-passage, without this meaning that those people have a "genetic disposition" for the same sex. They haven't, and they frown upon h-ty much the same way a lot of people in the Northern hemisphere do, if they find certain cultural requirements violated in connection with it. What is OK in one culture may be anathema in the next one, and, lest you take this as speaking in favour of a "genetic predisposition" of different cultures for this or that kind of behaviour or evaluation of behaviour, these things are also subject to *change*. I know some communities where not beating one's wife is regarded as sociopathic behaviour, and others where the opposite holds. But I also know (both from history and from personal experience, of course)people and even communities where attitudes towards social behaviour have changed, to the better or worse, but changed they have, and change they will, which they could not do if they were so deeply intrenched in our physis as you or your unnamed "Western Scientists" seem to believe. Heaven, even *you* may become a linguist one day, I'm absolutely certain that nothing in your genes stands in the way of this, believe me, there *is* hope ! ;-) Tu sum up this passage: the very reason why I take the assumption that genes may "control" such "complex behavioral assemblages", or more precisely, that any "Western Scientist" is able to say anything meaningful on this interdependence is that first of all we would need an operational definition of any one of these complexes, which is, of course, impossible. Even if most members of a village community agree that one of its members is "socially difficult", this is nothing more than a cultural construct, certainly nothing which could be determined objectively. In the next community round the corner, this person could be a pillar of the community. >It is fatuous in the extreme to believe that genes, which control such >complex behavioral assemblages, are *strangely* without any affect >whatsoever on language --- especially, since even true believers must admit >the biological basis of language ability. We could give this discussion a healthy turn back into the direction of linguistics, if you could name a few properties of some given language(s), which you are unable to explain otherwise than as the result of some kind of genetic predisposition ("mutation") of its speakers. And, no, I don't deny that in order to have language we first have to have a brain, and that brains are biological things. Since > >Similarly, I find it incredible that otherwise highly analytical thinkers >can fail to acknowledge that genetics plays an important part in >phonological development and change. I fail to, and, I'm afraid, you'll have to continue to find this incredible (though I won'*t object if you'll continue to think that I'm a highly analytic thinker; never argue with hard facts ;-) >Any objective non-linguist would, on the basis of common sense alone, agree >that if the ratio of tongue mass to oral cavity or lingual mobility were >genetically altered, it would affect phoneme production --- but, you will >see, many linguists will dispute so simple and straightforward a >proposition --- vehemently. Well, OK, here we seem to be at least in the vicinity of a concrete example. Pat, which features of exactly which extant phonological systems betray a direct correlation to the ratio you mentioned ? I've never heard about this in my entire life, and I'm eager to see what you have in mind here. >And it is high time that some linguists modernize >their relationship with biology and genetics. Modernize ... hmmm, let's see, who's modern here, but, lt's see some linguistic data and your biological explanation for them. Stefan Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 10 21:54:11 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 16:54:11 EST Subject: "is the same as" Message-ID: >proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) >I am sure that many listmembers, recently trained under the social theories >of more recent times, will be unable and unwilling to accept the following >comments at face value however, there may be others who have yet to decide >these issues; and it is for them that I write. -- this is a gross insult, as well as rhetorically dishonest ("some people are close-minded and ideologically blinded to the truth, and so will disagree with me") and I protest to the list moderator. Is this a moderated list, or not? >Similarly, I find it incredible that otherwise highly analytical thinkers >can fail to acknowledge that genetics plays an important part in >phonological development and change. -- hardly, since it's illogical. Human beings are strikingly uniform genetically (compared to other widespread large mammals) and judging by what evidence we have have changed little since the emergence of behaviorally modern h. sapiens sapiens. Therefore while the capacity to develop language is (tautologically) biological in basis, all change and variation in language must be due to cultural/cognitive factors. Mr. Ryan is apparently also unaware of the latest research in neurology, which shows that cognition itself affects the physical structure of the brain, throughout life, by causing the development and linkage of new neurons and neuron networks. Which is to say, the "wiring" itself is constantly being affected by mental processes, as well as vice versa. Reductionism is both incorrect and passe. From colkitto at sprint.ca Fri Feb 11 05:16:09 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 00:16:09 -0500 Subject: "is the same as" Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: The following is quoted from a posting by Stanley Friesen, made on Sat, 05 Feb 2000 22:05:24 -0800. --rma ] >In this context I was really only pointing out that language "suffers" from >one of the main issues I see in all biological studies: fuzzy, imprecise >boundaries. There is no precise way to distinguish one language from another. What is the problem with so-called "fuzzy" thinking? Is this a manifestation of "physics envy"? Robert Orr >May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From mclasutt at brigham.net Fri Feb 11 05:58:29 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 22:58:29 -0700 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000205220538.00996160@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: It sounds like biologists are starting to discover that biology works, in some limited ways, like language. If that's the case, linguists have known how language change works for an awfully long time and biologists are just beginning to discover how species influence one another. I think that you should drop the "language change is like biological change" and instead say that "biological change is like language change". There's a fundamental difference in the statement. If influence from one species to another is not universal and is just being discovered, but influence from one language to another IS universal and has been known and described for over a century (at least), then the latter statement is far more accurate than the former. How arrogant to try and equate linguistics to biology when linguistics has the prior claim and the linguistic facts apply in ALL cases! 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 Fri Feb 11 06:01:00 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 23:01:00 -0700 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: <001901bf706b$01c0fe20$b99f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: I am in full agreement with Prof. McLaughlin's suggestion, and will post no further discussion of this sidebar topic. --rma ] Pat, You're coming very close to your past racist claims that got you exiled from other lists. The list is more active with you involved, even though your linguistic ideas are sometimes very controversial and we don't always agree. But the genetic/racial approach to language change that you espouse will probably not be tolerated by the moderator once the rest of us start the vehement attacks on what we know is rubbish. If you want to pursue this with other list members that you might think are interested, you should do it off-line. Please! 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 friesen.net Fri Feb 11 15:45:44 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 07:45:44 -0800 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 01:36 PM 2/6/00 -0700, Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote: >Actually, the analogy I used in my last post didn't exactly correlate with >the argument being made. A better analogy is that since a few Australians >know the Star Spangled Banner and all Americans know the Star Spangled >Banner, then all Americans are Australians! That's what relating linguistic >change (Americans) to biological change (Australians) is really like. Umm, this also misunderstands what I was trying to say! I *never* intended to imply in any way shape or form that language change is tied to genetic change!!! What I was suggesting is that language change *operates*in a manner that is *similar* to genetic change. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From Georg at home.ivm.de Thu Feb 10 19:00:46 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 20:00:46 +0100 Subject: Turkic In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Indeed. Uyghur is one of the most divergent Turkic languages, and a >glance through a comparative vocabulary of the Turkic languages reveals >a very modest proportion of shared vocabulary between Turkish and Uyghur. >It is inconceivable that speakers of the two could communicate at anything >beyond the most rudimentary level, if even that. I doubt that speakers >could get much beyond the stage of smiling, nodding, pointing, and trying >to guess what the other guy might be saying. Well, this isn't "Altainet", but, while Larry is right that the degree of "mutual intelligibility" of the Turkic languages is often overemphasized, the scene depicted is not as inconceivable as it may seem. Provided, both speakers are educated to some degree (which implies that they'll know more words than the average peasant, including some literary and specialized registers of their language, which usually are characterized by marginal vocabulary on the one hand, and by a larger amount of Arabo-Persian cultural "chic" words on the other), and given further that they'll have some time to acclimatize (i.e. one of them had some time to adjust to the language of the other by, say, travelling in the other's country) and further the goal-oriented awareness that speaking fast, over-idiomatic and using only the dialect of ones home-village will not help, they *will* pretty soon be able to communicate, if not perfectly, but considerably beyond the smiling-nodding-pointing stage. Enough to make an appointment at a certain place and time and say whether they do or don't like the food and a bit more as well. Whether they'll be able to discuss the question of mutual intelligibility of the Turkic languages and the reasons for its limits in a very sophisticated way is of course a different cup of tea. "Uyghur" is, for the record, not really one of the most divergent languages of the family, it is fairly mainstream, the really odd-one-out is Chuvash on the Volga (which is completely unintelligible to any speaker of the other languages) or Yakut. I once taught a Yakut class which was attended, curiously enough, by one speaker of Ottoman Turkish and another one of, well, Yakut. Needless to say, comparing the languages was fun and educational for all of us, and, though these two languages are *really* wide apart the Ottoman speaker started soon to make up Yakut words and forms of herself, applying some fairly straightforward (but sometimes drastically surface-changing) sound-laws (without me having even introduced the notion). Well, I pointed them to these sound-laws, but a speaker of Ottoman and one of Uyghur will find out themselves after some time. They won't start writing poems in the other language soon, though. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Fri Feb 11 18:10:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 18:10:00 GMT Subject: Turkic Message-ID: LT>I doubt that speakers could get much beyond the stage of smiling, LT>nodding, pointing, and trying to guess what the other guy might be LT>saying. .. I wouold agree, so the film really startled me. Mit freundlichen Gr??en Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover Tel=FAX x49-511-9585714. From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Feb 10 21:54:11 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 16:54:11 EST Subject: Bandkeramik and non-Anatolian PIE Message-ID: I wrote in part: <> I'm going to be a gentleman about this and presume you overlooked a very important point I've tried to make. And that you edited out. I've often used the term non-Anatolian and 'narrow' PIE to describe PIE after its separation from Hittite and the other Anatolian languages. This is rather orthodox linguistics. I do this because the archaeological evidence draws a very distinctive line between the "Anatolian-Balkan painted ware' culture of 7000-5000BC and the Bandkeramik culture of the Danube that appears clearly about 5500BC. Anatolian-Balkan painted ware cultures originate in Anatolia and do extend beyond the Balkans in their final forms. I am HERE identifying it with the first branch-off from "wide PIE" - Hittite, Luwian, etc. That is what I wrote and you seem to disregard for no apparent reason. Bandkeramik or Linear pottery culture represents very distinctive practices and material remains. The cookie cutter settlements often described in the literature do not show up until about 5500BC. Bandkeramik may have evolved out of the Anatolian culture, but the differences in time and material evidence are large and clear. So I'm connecting Bandkeramik with post-Anatolian PIE -'narrow PIE'. I'm sure as an expert linguist you are familiar with the concept. PLEASE DON"T insist Bandkeramik dates to 7000BC. You may be an expert linguist, but this dating is not subject to linguistic argument. IF you know of specific evidence that gives Bankeramik assemblages a 7000BC date, please post them. Otherwise, please consider that you may be giving very misleading information to the members of this list. On this basis, I wrote the following (unedited): <> Now, I'm going to ask a courtesy here. If you do not understand the connection I'm making between Bandkeramik and non-Anatolian PIE, please address that fact. If you disagree with that connection is consistent with Renfrew, give some specific and supportable reasons. Otherwise your one-line, unexplained contradictions seem to me to be more appropriate to a pro football message board than any list with scholarly objectives. I won't address here your apparent claim that Myceanaean and Latin are almost identical languages (2 on a scale of 1-10 - a 1 score being I presume identical). But I will mention that I did not ask you to score your perception of the difference between Hittite and Latin. And the reason for that was because - aside from my trying to be fair - I was being consistent with the subject - which was POST-ANATOLIAN PIE. Though I'm sure that you also probably find Hittite and Latin 'linguistically' just more slices from the same white bread loaf, at least pay some mind to the fact that I did not present you with that particular comparison for a reason. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Feb 11 05:44:05 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 00:44:05 EST Subject: The degree of differentiation Message-ID: In a message dated 2/4/00 8:15:15 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> I'm still waiting for you to tell us how you measure this critical and all important "degree of differentiation," that "we" are using with such thorough confidence. Ah, if only carbon 14 and nitrogen isotopes could yield such precision. Do you count the number of vowel changes in the word for fire and multiply them by 500 years or something like that? Or is a laser involved? In a message dated 2/8/00 4:20:02 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> Let's be clear about this. What you have consistently offered has had very little or nothing to do with the principles of science. I can't speak for Colin Renfrew, but let me say on my own that you've shown absolutely nothing about how you supposedly measure linguistic behavior in historic times BUT you have insisted to a fare-thee-well that you somehow magically know how much time it takes for languages to differentiate in prehistoric times. This is not science. This is hoodoo. No, I change my mind. I now feel that your evaluations of "degree of differentiation" in languages should be promptly gathered and sent to the Journal of Irreproducible Results, where I'm sure many others will learn to apply your precision methods to calculate such matters as the time of separation between Dutch and Flemish scientifically demanded by your precision "degree of differentiation" formula. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Feb 11 06:34:12 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 01:34:12 EST Subject: Celtic's rate of differentiation Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 2/2/00 12:43:52 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- developing FROM WHAT? From PIE? Is PIE supposed to have been around in 250 BCE for the Celtic languages to develop from?>>. You have no problem with proto-Latin arising among the other Italic languages before 500BC, wiping out those other languages and giving rise to modern Romance languages 2500 years later. But you do have a problem with proto-Celtic arising among related languages before 800BC, wiping out those related languages and giving rise to the Celtic languages 1000 years later. Does that make any sense? And now who's the one who isn't applying a 'scientific' uniformity to prehistoric languages. Obviously, a lot could have gone on between Renfrew's 'an early indo-european language' and the rise of an identifiable Celtic. There could have been plenty of languages and dialects that developed in between. I don't think I need to tell you that the chances are that any IE languages in 4000BC wouldn't have had writing - but as you say with migrations - it doesn't mean they weren't there. There may have been many ancestor languages that preceeded Celtic before Celtic arose. THERE IS NOTHING THAT SAYS THAT A STRING OF ANCESTRAL LANGUAGES CAN'T SEPARATE NON-ANATOLIAN PIE FROM CELTIC. The only thing that prevents it is your "degree of differentiation" calculator. Which we are still waiting to see. <> Nobody said anything about the languages staying uniform over any great period of time. You are simply not comprehending that there is no requirement that Celtic come directly out of PIE - any more than that modern Greek came directly out of PIE. <> NOT DIFFERENTIATED ENOUGH? HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT? Oh, I forget the amazing "degree of differentiation = separation in years" calculator. What a boon that will be to historical science. Are you going to have it co-calibrated with tree rings? Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Feb 11 07:02:18 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 02:02:18 EST Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: I wrote: <> I disagree. Actually, Renfrew's evidence is still rather compelling. Although I am willing to reserve judgment until you unveil the amazing "rate of differentiation" machine - which I understand will place PIE in a small village in the Ukraine about 3000BC, where four different words for the wheel would be divied up among the departing IEian children, just before they marched off to change the language of Europe and half of Asia. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Feb 11 09:33:06 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 04:33:06 EST Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: I wrote: >By 4000BC, there is enough differentiation between regional expressions of >Bandkeramik to suggest that the former cultural unities are giving way to >local identities in western Europe and north of the Alps In a message dated 2/10/00 1:27:28 AM, sarima at friesen.net wrote: <> I perhaps am not phrasing that correctly. Bandkeramik is going through changes throughout this period and there is also quite a bit of local variation arising. There's a neat website by the Institut f?r Ur- und Fr?hgeschichte Erlangen and Wolfgang Wei?m?ller called Middle Europe (north of the alps) from 5500 to 780 BC (http://www.uf.uni-erlangen.de/karten/karten. html). You'll see there maps showing the different 'technocomplexes" in an abstract kind of geographical positioning at different periods. You'll also see by looking at the maps how local variations started popping up and increasing, so that that the last complex called Bandkeramik (Stichbandkeramik) on the maps has kind of been eaten away by 4200BC and is gone in the next map. Nothing like this sort of uniformity again appears on those maps all the way to the last one at 780BC. What the maps don't show is the population changes. So that you don't see how the population and number of settlement tremendously increases and in themselves create a very distinct sudden increase in variation. You must remember that at the beginning and for a while we are dealing witha very small number of settlements with small numbers of settlers - so there just isn't much to vary. Somewhat parallel is the English colonization of the American Atlantic coast. In @1615, you have few settlements and less than perhaps 500 colonists that are uniformally English in their practices and physical remains. As time goes on, the English/european character of the colonies doesn't change much at all for a century and a half, but then when change comes it accelerates very rapidly. Farming techniques, trades and materials take on a distinctly American look and character, and then begin to get quite regional. Of course we have no parallel for the population growth and cultural changes of modern times - but if you look at those 400 years you can see an underlying consistency in culture throughout - including language. Linguistically, the American Atlantic coast is certainly not speaking the same English it did in 1615, but it is still clearly English. When Barlowe describes the Native Americans living on the Outer Banks in 1588, it's in an English that is plainly readable today. "This island had many goodly woods, full of Deere, Conies, Hares and Fowles, in incredible abundance... Such a flocke of Cranes arose under us, with such a cry redoubled by many Ecchoes, as if an armie of men had showted all together.... {and the locals were] Very handsome, and goodly people, and in their manner as mannerly, and civill, as any of Europe." There is no comprehensibility problem here even after 400 years and through a lot more changes than the Bandkeramik folk could ever have experienced. But of course whatever uniformity there may have been in the speech and culture of those 1615 colonists, regional differences arose that by 1840 were noted by many observers that reflect real material differences - we can read constant references to the "Yankee Nation" of the New Englander. If one can picture a slower rate of change than the 19th and 20th Centuries gave us, it is not hard to see a small number of "peripherally conservative" colonists slowly weening themselves from the traditions they carried from the Danube. And that slowness first of all was a matter of slow initial population expansion which only changes about 4600BC - despite what JoatSimeon at aol.com has been writing, I still only find for example a single Bandkeramik settlement in modern France before 5000BC. Agriculture at first thins population density. It's possible that early Bandkeramik in western Europe represented under a few thousand people before 5000BC, but much more in central Europe. The first real expansion in population and settlements appears to have been more by way of neighboring mesolithic neighbors than by any further colonization from the Danube. Another factor was the strikingly regimented practices of the early Bandkeramik settlers - which allowed them to move as quickly across the geography the way they did - it was like prefab housing construction. There were not a lot of these settlers, but they were almost religious in the way they ritualized their settlements. (Amish settlers in the US come to mind.) These settlements were very uniform until about 4600BC. Then the population starts to soar and it seems something like rock n roll has been introduced and the local "technocomplexes" start to come up all over. There are some new more general practices like megaliths that show up, but most innovation is local. The underlying culture - settlement practices, the long houses, etc. however seems to remain Bandkeramik in central Europe until about 3500BC. Then the local and regional variations completely take over and the influence of kurgan is felt in the east and south of this zone. You'll see it on the maps on the web site I mentioned. <> I can't of course be sure about this, but I think that the simplier explanation is that the uniformity was already disappearing at this point and the basic populations and possibly language were in place and divisions were starting to occur. None of these would have been Celtic or even necessarily pre-Celtic at this point, of course. I can't say you are wrong. But it feels like narrow PIE has already happened and now there are a whole bunch of IE's that have just formed. Perhaps Kurgan a bit later is like Latin or English, a singular IE influence coming in from the east. I think of how Hispanic culture has grown so strongly in the US. The subtle change in the language is obvious. It use to be the hot dog (frankfurter/weiner) that was the number one food of the American summer. Now Nachos, Tacos, Chilli and Burritoes are king. In fact, I look forward to the day 5000 years from now, when is used as evidence for dating the last days of Hispano-American unity. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Feb 11 15:47:56 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 10:47:56 EST Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: In a message dated 2/10/00 1:27:28 AM, you wrote: <<>@4600BC - A north western European version of [narrow PIE] arises >@4000BC - An "early IE language" develops in parts of western Europe and >north of the Alps. >@3500BC - Local differentiation in this 'early IE language' begins This is even worse. You now have local differentiation delaying for over well 1000 years!!!! That is absurd. Given normal rates of language change, this should have happened well before 4000 BC, probably by 4400 or 4500 BC (within your "Narrow PIE"). >> No, you've misread this. The path I ROUGHLY gave above suggests "a northwestern version" (versus e.g. eastern) (600 years) >"an early IE language west and north of the Alps" (500 years) > "local differentiation" (e.g. on the Brittany coast) (@3500) - nothing says that anything identifiably Celtic would have arisen yet. <> Yeah, well as you know, I'm looking forward to exactly how you calculate this differentiation - especially with Hittite and whatever you are differentiating it from. If your formula finds Hittite an awful lot like any language, it sure would have saved Kurylowicz et al a lot of time and trouble. (And I don't know why you think Farsi and Hindi are more differentiated than Hittite and Sanskrit - haven't a clue. Are you talking about a numerical degree of differentiation that can be demostrated? Or is this some kind of ironic reference to the influence of Dravidian?) If this 'degree of differentiation' is based on your personal beliefs, that's fine. I have no argument with that. But if this is supposed to be science, it really needs to be quantifiable and reproducible - so we can feel confident that we are not being influenced by your favorite personal theory. As I said I can't be positive about any of the things I've suggested. But to call them 'absurd' takes a lot of chutzpah, especially when you are doing it on the basis on what seems to be nothing more than an impression. (And references to what may be liturgical languages.) And of course to some mysterious measure of differentiation that can conveniently tell us how much a language can change in 6000 years DESPITE THE FACT we don't even have any direct evidence of languages older than 4000 years. After reading again Arthur Barlowe's Roanoke Island account in 1588 that I mentioned last post, I can mention one language at least that doesn't differentiate much at all in the time it might take narrow PIE to turn into a group of early IE languages. But not yet Celtic. Regards, Steve Long From mclasutt at brigham.net Wed Feb 16 15:06:00 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 08:06:00 -0700 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: <001401bf7853$f96619e0$639f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: A couple of days ago I made the comment that Pat Ryan had been kicked off of two lists. That statement was incorrect and I have apologized to Pat privately for it. I had mixed him up with another member of the Evolution of Language list who was kicked off. I had conflated my memories of a very vehement discussion concerning Pat's views on racist determinism in language, which was quashed by the moderator, with another incident which was not quite as vehement, but became even more obnoxiously insulting to linguists. Pat kindly reminded me of the events I was confusing. Pat has only been kicked off of one list. 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 proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Feb 16 20:12:39 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 20:12:39 -0000 Subject: "is the same as" Message-ID: Dear Rich and IEists: Without reopening the question of possible genetic influences on language structure or phonology, I would only like to note for the record that the definition of 'racism' in my dictionary (American Heritage) is "the nhotion that one's own ethnic stock is superior". I do not subscribe to this view; and hence, to characterize me as a 'racist' is inappropriate and evidence of careless attendance to accuracy. 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 anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Fri Feb 11 10:40:38 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 12:40:38 +0200 Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Tocharian_A_w=E4s=2C_B_yasa?= Message-ID: The Tocharian word for 'gold' (A w?s, B yasa) has traditionally been compared with a Uralic group of words with meanings 'metal', 'iron', 'copper'. It has often been suggested that the U words might be of IE origin, although this assumption is problematic. I am interested in inspecting the possibility that the Tocharian word is a Uralic / Proto-Samoyed loan. First, the data. The Uralic word has two forms, a front and a back vowel variant. The front variant can be reconstructed as *w?s?k? [> Saami veaiki 'copper', Finnish vaski id., Mordvin vis?ke 'metal wire', Proto-Samoyed *wes? (> Nyenets yesye 'iron', Nganasan basa 'metal; iron', Selqup k?s? 'iron' etc.)]. The back vowel (-a-) as well as the second syllable vowel (-i-) in Finnish are probably secondary; there are also other examples of sporadic *?-? > a-i in Finnish. Mordvin rather suggests 1st syllable *-e- (*wes?k?); there is also an irregular dialectal variant us?ke (with *vi- >> u-). The back vowel variant appears in Hungarian vas 'iron' and Mari vaZ 'ore, metal' (< *was?kV). The loss of *k in Mari is irregular. In addition to this, there are phonologically unclear cognates in Permic and Ob-Ugric. They seem to have undergone reductive phonological developments, since they only appear as the last member of compound words that are names for metals (thus, the meaning seems to have been just 'metal'). The many phonological irregularities suggest that the word is an early "Wanderwort", and this is also compatible with the fact that PU must have been a stone-age language. However, the word must be quite old, since it appears in every branch of Uralic, and at least the consonant correspondences are regular (except for Mari). The direction of loaning can hardly have been IE / Tocharian > Uralic, because: a) Tocharian -s- would not give U *-s?k-. One could of course assume Tocharian > Samoyed (this has been suggested), but this leaves the other U words without explanation. The correspondence Samoyed *wes? ~ U *w?s?k? / *was?kV is hardly a coincidence, since PU *? > Samoyed *e and PU *s?k > Samoyed *s are regular developments. b) It seems very unlikely that a Tocharian loan word could ever have reached the western periphery of Uralic (Saamic, Finnic). The Tocharian word does not seem to have certain correspondents elsewhere in IE (IEW mentions it under *auso- 'gold': "vielleicht Toch. A w?s"). Now I have two questions: 1) What was the Proto-Tocharian form? (If it was something like *wVsV with front vowels, it fits quite well with Proto-Samoyed *wes?. A loan Samoyed > Tocharian is also geographically the most sensible alternative, if Tocharian was connected with the Afansevo culture.) 2) Is there any other plausible etymology for the Tocharian word? From sarima at friesen.net Sat Feb 12 01:11:52 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 17:11:52 -0800 Subject: language and biology In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:29 PM 2/7/00 +0000, Larry Trask wrote: >Stanley Friesen writes: >> Cognition is a biological process. Ergo, so is language. >Sure. But the biological aspects of language, important though they >may be, are not the subject matter of historical linguistics. >Historical linguistics, by definition, deals with language change. >And language change does not result from biological change: it results >from social factors. The point is that social change is another form of biological process, it is just not *genetic* change. Social change operates under the general constraints and modes of biological processes, even though it does not directly involve genetic factors. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From stevegus at aye.net Thu Feb 10 14:27:30 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 09:27:30 -0500 Subject: Basque * 'round' Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: > Maybe the geographical position of the donor language can be narrowed > down, for a word of the same shape found its way into Northern Europe in > the specialized meaning of 'car' (cf. "wheels"). I'm thinking of course of > Dan.-Norw.-Swed. bil 'car', which must be very old given the assimilation > of the nominative marker in Icelandic bi:ll (from *bi:l-R pointing to > PGmc. *bi:l-az). My understanding has ever been, that -bil- was short for -automobil-, which may be an ancient Germanic root, but it would seem to present certain phonological problems. My guess would be that the Icelandic has been assimilated to fit into a pre-existing declension. -- Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law Fox & Cotner: PHONE (812) 945 9600 FAX (812) 945 9615 http://www.foxcotner.com Post hominem vermis, post vermem foetor et horror. Sic in non hominem vertitur omnis homo. Unde superbit homo, cujus conceptio culpa, Nasci poena, labor vita, necesse mori? --- St. Bernard, Meditationes Piisimae From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Feb 10 14:38:15 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 15:38:15 +0100 Subject: Basque * 'round' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >Any good Celtic etymon for German Auto? Well, it is well known that German au < *u:, and Celtic *p > 0, so that looks very much like a form derived from an unattested Celtic *pu:to- "stinking" (the contraption was apparently named by the La T`ene Celts after its typical exhaust products). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Thu Feb 10 21:24:48 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 15:24:48 -0600 Subject: Basque Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] At 12:30 AM 2/6/00 -0600, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [snip] > you may wish to consider the following notes (keeping in mind that > any errors in copying are my own) > see Basque ekarri "to bring" Basque ekarri; < Pre-Basque *e-kaR-i > [lt/B] > PN263 *kar- "to twist, to turn, to wind" [b/k], see IE *(s)ker- "to jump, > to move in circles"? [p/IE] > maybe "to turn > to return s.t. > to bring s.t." [mcv] > Celtic carru, carricare, see Basque ekarri "bring, carry"; [wje] > carry English and Basque ekarri [rmcc] > Eng. carry is of French-Romance origin: Latin carrus, carruca = cart, > carriage. My Latin dictionary says both are of Gallic origin. see Fr. > charrier. Original meaning: transport by cart. [es] > carpentum "two-wheeled wagon" Gaulish > Spanish carpintero > "carpenter" [abi 4], French charpentier "carpenter" [wde 188-89]; < ? carru > [rmcc] > carru Gaulish "cart" > Spanish carro "cart" [abi 4]; char artisan > term French; from Gaulish [cb62: 13] > carro "car, cart" Spanish/Portuguese; from Celtic [jng]; carrum > Celtic > French char "cart" [mh 241] > carruca Gaulish > French charrue [wje 188-89]; charrue agricultural > word French; from Gaulish [cb62: 13] > carrum Romance < Celtic [wje 183] > carrus "cart" Latin; from Celtic [nv 75-76] > carrus Italian < Celtic [bm66: 25] > carrus "4-wheeled covered wagon" Latin; from Celtic [lrp 53]; carro > Spanish; from Celtic [rks 12-13] Rick, I'm glad to see that you brought up the case of . It's certainly one that has puzzled investigators for some time. In arguing the case for , i.e., how it fits into all of this, one might want to point out what I mentioned earlier. If one looks in Buck (10.75), it turns out that this root is far more wide-spread than any other single root-stem/etynom for 'wheel' -at least that's my impression from reading what others have said on the list. In the case of Buck In the case of the Basque item, using prototype semantics one would say that its prototypic meaning is 'to bring by means of a wheeled vehicle' but rather merely 'to bring', i.e., 'traer' Sp. or 'tirer, apporter' Fr.(cf. Azkue I, 229). Hence, a compound such as (with the common suffixing element <-era> to added to the verbal stem) refers to '(the) bringing, transporting' without explicitly stating the mode of transport. If one were apply the work that has been done in diachronic prototype semantics to this case, one could argue that a meaning such as 'to bring or transport by means of a wheeled vehicle' could be derived from the broader meaning of 'to bring, to transport (by any means)'. Given that the invention of the wheel is a technological innovation (albeit not a terribly recent one) the second definition, i.e., one that restricts the mode of transport to that of wheeled vehicle, could only have come into existence after the wheel itself was invented. Hence in this case a (hypothetical) development from a generalized notion of 'to bring' or 'to transport' to a narrowly defined one would also imply the following: that at some point in that semasiological process the term came to be associated with a particular mode of transport and that subsequently that meaning became the dominant one, the prototypic one. Again I emphasize that there is no evidence that in Euskera the word was ever used to refer specifically to a mode of transport by a wheeled vehicle. This in turn suggests that if one is going to relate the Celtic and Basque items -if one is going to argue that they are cognates and they do give every appearance of being so- there is a caveat. While it seems to me that it would be relatively easy for the meaning to narrow itself and become associated with a common type of transport, it would be more difficult for a word that whose prototypic meaning was originally 'to bring' or 'to transport by a wheeled vehicle' to end up meaning 'to bring' with no connotation whatsoever of any wheeled vehicle which is the case in Basque. But then there is the additional problem that the English word 'to carry' which is traced back to French doesn't mean 'to bring by means of a wheeled vehicle' but merely 'to carry' although I believe that a case could be made that 'to carry' might refer to a particular 'way of bringing', but not necessarily by means of a 'cart'. Someone with a better etymological dictionary of French would have to judge whether originally terms like were restricted in this way semantically. Also, I'm fully aware that the standard interpretation would derive the Romance items from the Latin word for cart , not from a substrate. Now, it's clear that the Latin form was influential, i.e., in introducing a term for a new technological marvel, but there seems to be a case that could be made that we are looking at items that might be better categorized as Basque/Pre-Celtic/Celtic (without trying to figure out exactly who was first in line) data set that was picked up by Romance languages (including Latin where it came to be associated with a particular object). Stated differently, one explanation for its presence in these languages would be that the diffusion of data set in question could be traced back in two stages: 1) the first would situate the lexical feature as part of a preexisting Basque/Pre-Celtic/Celtic substrate and 2) the second would reflect the influence of the prototype meaning of the Latin lexical item and its diffusion throughout the Roman Empire as the name of a particular kind of cart (chariot??). Hence in this simulation of linguistic events, there would be at least two chronological layers, an earlier and later one, that could be uncovered and two relatively different mechanisms for the diffusion of members of the data set in question. I don't know if the time-depth for Celtic/Gaullic would allow for that type of pattern of areal diffusion for this root, but it might. Also, I've noticed on the list several people mentioning that there are substantial substrate lexical (?) items in Germanic languages. Wouldn't it be possible that Celtic and Basque could share elements from a substrate that was found in this zone earlier, a substrate about which we know little and whose of geographical extension is unclear at this point? Also, as I mentioned in an earlier email, since <-bil-> is packaged inside (a Class 1 verb), and the verbal prefix and suffixing elements date back in all likelihood to Pre-Basque (or maybe even before), it is more difficult to argue that Basque just lifted the Celtic word and turned it into . Or if one argues that it happened this way, then we are talking about a significant time depth for the contact period. I've lost track of who said what in the exchange below so please forgive me for not citing who is who: Rick Mc Callister >> What about being 'bil' a loan from Gaulish? >>> PIE *kwel- > Cel *kwi:l- > Gaul *pi:l > ! > bask. bil >>> cf PIE *penque > Cel *kwinkwe > Gaul *pimpetos (ordinal) >>1) Regarding the semantics: >> Remember that the Celts were famous for their cartwright-technique. [snip] >> Of course the i-prefixed verbform is an argument /against/ borrowing from >> Celtic. [rmcc] > Maybe, maybe not. The prefix could have been added after borrowing >--but ask a specialist in Basque, don't take my word on it So in response to your comment about the 'prefix'. This prefix shows no sign of life whatsoever in Basque, whereas there are other elements, i.e., the <-eta> suffix now used to mark the plural of oblique cases (and for other things) that is partly non-productive in one subroutine of the system, but alive and well in other subroutines. This is not the case, to my knowledge, of the verbal prefix . And I think that Larry will agree with me on this one. ...At 04:24 PM 2/2/00 +0000, Larry Trask wrote: >Roz Frank writes: [snip] [RF] >> And as an aside, are there explict criteria set forth that determine >> which items are most representative. I'm speaking of crtieria along the >> lines of those that have been suggested by Larry Trask (and debated by >> many) concerning the selection of items in Pre-Basque. [LT] >But the two cases are very different. We have lots of IE languages, and so >our main tool is the comparative method here. But Basque is isolated, and >so the comparative method is of minimal use, and only internal reconstruction >is available. Hence different criteria are appropriate in the two cases. [RF] >> I would be most >> interested in knowing if such criteria have been debated and/or laid out >> explicitly at some point in the past. For example, how many language groups >> must the item be attested in for it to quality? I assume, for example, that >> identifying cognates/reflexes of the same item in Sanskrit and Celtic would >> be sufficient for the item to qualify? Or is the bar set higher for these >> PIE items, e.g., that the item must be attested in Sanskrit, Germanic and >> Celtic or Hittite, Slavic and Romance, etc. [LT] >There is no unchallengeable answer to this question. By Meillet's Principle, >we require cognates in at least three branches of IE before we can reconstruct >an etymon for PIE. But this is only a rule of thumb, and skilful specialists >need not adhere to it slavishly. [RF] >> For example, just glancing over the entries in Buck, it would seem that >> there isn't as much uniformity for "wheel" across IE languages, as there is >> for, say, "cart" which shows up most IE languages (obviously with the help >> of Latin). [LF] >But loan words don't count for the purpose of reconstruction. If an >identifiable Celtic word is borrowed into Latin, from where it descends into >the Romance languages and is borrowed into Germanic and elsewhere, it is still >only the Celtic word which counts. But if it could be shown that the Celtic word is cognate with a Basque word and that it is unlikely that the Basque word could have been borrowed from Celtic, e.g., if the Basque root-stem were to be encountered only as a verbal root-stem in a Class I non-finite verb (e.g., such as ), wouldn't it follow that the Celtic word itself may represent not a borrowing from Basque but rather from an earlier substrate that also was the source of the Basque and Celtic data sets? And on that note. Earlier we were discussing the semantic structure of the non-finite verb . I said that I believed that because of its structure, it would qualify for admission to candidacy for Pre-Basque. Would you agree that it is extremely difficult to date a word like or given that its structure reveals the presence of morphosyntactic structures that are no longer productive in the language. Let me try to explain what I'm getting at. One of the topics that intrigues me is that of developing techniques for discovering and/or elaborating criteria for judging "morphosyntactic stratification" in the case of the Basque data. And I fully recognize that I'm the neophyte on this list and, therefore, what I'm going to say may be a bit like trying to reinvent the 'wheel' :). However, in the case of Basque it is extremely important for one to be sensitive to the way in which certain morphosyntactic data are situated within the overall system. For instance, we have been speaking of the problem of developing criteria that would allow us to determine the age of verbs such as or . Again keeping in mind that we are speaking of simulations, i.e., of the ways that we can go about modeling the data available, we could ask what aspects of the morphosyntactic structure of Basque can give us clues about the age of the linguistic artifact, the data set under study. The way I see it is a bit like what happens in archaeology where researchers are sensitive to 'context' in which an artifact is discovered, for example, to the 'layer' in which it is encountered. Another way of looking at the problem is to say that when one digs up an artifact and discovers it wrapped in a given type of material, it is assumed that the object inside is at least as old as the wrapping it is found in. In the case of and we are dealing with a particular type of artifact, one that belongs to a class of similar artifacts, i.e., non-finite Class I verbs equipped with a prefixing element in * (which has a phonological variant in ) as well as a final verbal suffix in <-i>. As has been pointed out (Trask 1995) neither of these morphemes is productive today in the language. Therefore, they appear to incorporate morphosyntactic structures that may hearken back to a much earlier stage of the linguistic system. This is because there is no evidence in the language of even the slightest sign of life with respect to the verbal suffix nor that of the verbal prefix in * . This situation might be contrasted with that of the suffxing element <-eta> where one finds it alive and kicking in certain subroutines of the system but relatively moribund in others, as I've mentioned above. Moreover in the case of , and other Class I non-finite verbs, there is another factor that needs to be taken into consideration, although what weight it should be given when modeling the time depth of the artifact is not clear. I refer to the fact that Basque is a suffixing language. There is no trace of prefixing in the language except in the case of Class I verbs (I'm excluding a few lexical calques that have entered the language relatively recently and which are obviously based on Romance formations). Hence, the root-stem <-bil-> in or that of <-karr-> in is encountered wrapped up in material that has every sign of belonging to the most archaic strata that can be detected in the morphosyntactic structure of the linguistic system of Euskera. We are talking about typological issues where the artifact's morphosyntactic packaging provides the researcher with a certain type of information that in turn permits a tentative assignment of the artifact to a given layer, to a given morphosyntactic strata: the artifact ends up being situated at a certain level because of the way that the morphosyntactic data. lends itself to typological stratification. Again I emphasize that all of the above should be considered a highly tentative attempt to develop criteria that could be utilized in examining and dating artifacts such as and . As I mentioned in an earlier email, if an attempt is made to relate the verbal stem of to artifacts found in IE languages, the time-depth that can be assigned to the Basque artifact by means of the above argumentation, should serve as a cautionary sign. This doesn't mean that I would reject such attempts to see in the Basque data reflexes of the IE data. Rather, for such a proposal to flourish, the investigator need to consider whether the purported similarities between the Basque and IE might be best explained by alleging that they result from an even earlier Sprachbund or other type of areal phenomena that allowed reflexes of the same element to show up in two different linguistic systems. Hopefully the above discussion will shed some light on a few of the difficulties involved in constructing an argument in which the verbal stems found in Basque items such as and would be viewed as recent loans from an IE language(s). As so often happens when I start a short response, it gets out of hand. Thanks for your patience, that is, it you've reached this part of my long-winded message :)). Ondo ibili, Roz Frank From edsel at glo.be Thu Feb 10 17:58:29 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 18:58:29 +0100 Subject: Hualde's view Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" Sent: Sunday, February 06, 2000 3:32 PM [snip] > I'm afraid that if Hualde is serious about the "merger", his > explanation is not only not simpler, but leaves more things > unexplained. In the first place, there are a good many > indications that Pre-Pre-Basque initial **p-, **t- and **k- had > simply been dropped (sometimes leaving an aspiration), as in the > well-known cases of *karr- > harri "stone", Aquitanian Talsc- ~ > Halsc-, morpheme variants such as -tegi ~ -egi "house, place" > (maybe connected to Bq. etxe "house" < teg(i) + -xe (dim.)), etc. > But one can dispute or dismiss this evidence. [Ed] A few remarks: -In Iberian toponyms e.g. there is a root kal- that might be related to *karr-, a root that seems to be widespread in the Mediterranean area (cf. e.g. Carrara). -Iberian too, has apparently this opposition t- <> zero-, like in Ibi-Tibi, eban-teban. -Etxe could be derived from **tetxe, itself maybe < **tekte < IE root, like in Lat. tectum (and Du. dak), or else be related to (not necessarily derived, e.g. in N. Catalonia, from) Grk. the:ke:. This is not to say I disagree with what you said. > More seriously, a merger of voiced/unvoiced segments in initial > position, while in itself acceptable for the cases of **k-/**g- > > *g-, **p-/**b- > *b-, and (not sure how Hualde wants to interpret > these) **ts-/*s- > *z-, *ts'-/*s'- > *s-, leads to more problems > than Mitxelena's account already has in the case of supposed > **t-/**d- > *d-. The problem is that there are no Pre-Basque > words beginning with *d-. Hualde's merger doubles the problem of > the missing initial dental, and fails to explain the > superabundance of vowel-initial words. > Another fact which contradicts the merger of voiced ~ voicedless > stops in morpheme initial position is the phonological make-up of > verbal roots, which can start with contrasting b-, d-, t-, g- and > k- (e-man (*e-ban), e-dan, e-torr-i, e-gin, e-karr-i) [only *p- > seems to missing, except as a variant of *b, as in ipini ~ ibeni > "to put"]. [Ed] Taken together with your p-t-k- loss theory (which looks plausible in view of the abnormal number of vowel-initial words) this would mean that verb-initial e- might go back to *ke-. Since the Basque 'infinitives' are actually participles (the reverse of mod. Grk.), we come close to Germanic ge- (and Lat. co-???) again. Maybe Gmc. ge- IS a non-IE substrate vestige. > Miguel Carrasquer Vidal Ed. Selleslagh From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Feb 15 11:22:02 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 11:22:02 +0000 Subject: Basque Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister writes: [on the possibility of a Celtic source for Basque 'be in motion'] [somebody else] >> Of course the i-prefixed verbform is an argument /against/ borrowing from >> Celtic. > Maybe, maybe not. The prefix could have been added after borrowing > --but ask a specialist in Basque, don't take my word on it The big problem here is the seemingly great difficulty of borrowing verbs. Edith Moravcsik, in her universals of borrowing, goes so far as to declare that verbs cannot be borrowed at all. This is probably going too far -- after all, English did borrow verbs from Norman French (didn't it?). But, as a rule, when verbs are borrowed at all, they are borrowed only as non-finite forms -- participles or verbal nouns -- which are then inflected periphrastically in the borrowing language, with finite auxiliaries carrying all tense, agreement, and other verbal categories. This is how Basque borrowed verbs from Latin, and how it borrows verbs from Romance. It is how Turkish borrowed verbs from Arabic and Persian, and how it borrows verbs from French and English today. It is how Old Japanese borrowed verbs from Chinese, and how modern Japanese borrows verbs from English. But Basque is inflected synthetically, not periphrastically. It has a full set of finite and non-finite forms. Consequently, it doesn't look a good bet to be a borrowed verb. The same goes for the other Basque verbs mentioned, like 'bring', also inflected synthetically. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From r.clark at auckland.ac.nz Sun Feb 13 04:37:31 2000 From: r.clark at auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark) Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 17:37:31 +1300 Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: I believe you may be replying to the incomplete version of my post, sent by accident. (This would account for my apparently signing with your Footer.) In the complete version, I mentioned that Dixon makes the very point you are making with respect to Wargamay -- he cannot decide whether its fairly high cognate percentage with Dyirbal is due to a close genetic relationship or to a long period of contact and convergence. It's no longer clear to me what you are claiming about Pama-Nyungan. I thought your point was that their genealogical relationship is very remote, yet they are very similar. My reply was that the former is not certain, and the latter (from the Dyirbal example) clearly untrue. However, since you used the phrase "very closely related", do you mean this in the genealogical sense -- that their proto-language is quite recent? In which case, what is the relevance of the 50,000 year figure? Ross Clark >>> Hans Holm 02/08 3:44 AM >>> RC>very closely related" is extremely misleading. They could be considered RC>closely related only by contrast to the highly diverse (lexically and RC>typologically) other families of the north and west of Australia. RC>Consider just the immediate neighbours of Dyirbal, as described by RC>Dixon: Yidin (27% shared vocabulary), Mbabaram (18%), Warungu (47%), RC>Wargamay (60%) .. misleading are such percentages, if taken as representing proportional genealogical relationship. Direct genealogical relationship means that two daughter-languages directly stem from the same mother language. Replacements, even severe and/or quite different ones, taking place after that split, have no influence on the notice. Thus, two languages with a smaller number of retained common lexemes may be related closer than others with higher percentages. I shall try to make this clearer in the near future. (BTW, you signed with my Footer.) Mit freundlichen Gr??en Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover Tel=FAX x49-511-9585714. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 09:15:10 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 04:15:10 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: In a message dated 2/12/00 8:12:09 PM Mountain Standard Time, mcv at wxs.nl writes: << Wait a minute. PIE-speakers invented the wheel?>> -- possibly; or possibly Mesopotamians did. When something diffuses that fast, it's hard to tell where the original was. Has something definite been found on this? From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 09:16:25 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 04:16:25 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >edsel at glo.be writes: >This is based on the hypothesis that some IE speakers would have preferred >to use a foreign word over a descriptive IE word, if they hadn't invented >the wheel. And that's just a hypothesis, although not an unlikely one. >> -- oh, granted. Not meant as anything more than a hypothesis. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 09:35:51 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 04:35:51 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >This is interesting. 2000yrs from modern Romance language back to Latin? -- I'm being conservative. That's the time from Classical Latin (0 CE, say) to the present. Or one could say that it's from the breakup of Late Latin/Common Romance (400 CE, roughly) to the emergence of more or less the modern standard forms of French, Spanish, and Italian -- around 1500-1600. That would be around 1200 years. 2000 is the upper limit, the maximum possible. >2000 yrs from Myceanaean, Sanskrit and Latin back to what? -- yup, PIE. >Do the similarities between Latin and Hittite 'leap off the page" as you say? -- I was referring to Latin, Sanskrit, and Greek. >And what does Hittite (for starters) add to the total 'differentiation' >between the first attested PIE languages? -- nothing, since Hittite is universally considered to be a special case; and you're changing the subject again. >And of course, the differentiation between the languages above and Tocharian, -- nope. Our corpus of Tocharian dates from the 1st millenium _CE_; 1500 years or more after the first attested Mycenaean and Sanskrit, and well after the breakup of Common Romance. Do try to keep these dates straight. In any case, Tocharian is transparently an IE language, with many archaic features closely similar to those of the earliest attested language. The degree of development vs. a vs. PIE is quite similar to that of other IE languages _of the same period_. (That is to say, the appropriate comparison would be Tocharian and Old English or early French.) >Luwian -- same-same as Hittite; both Anatolian. >the undecipherable Thracian, Albanian and Celtiberian should send >your date of dispersal hurtling back to that magic 7000BC you've mentioned so >frequently. -- another bizzare statement. Would you care to elucidate why the existance of Celtiberian should affect our datings? Particularly as we know virtually nothing about it, or Thracian. And Albanian? How, exactly, do you drag that into the issue in question? We don't have any Albanian prior to the medieval period! >Or do all these languages decline with only a change in the initial vowel -- do try to keep the dates straight. Comparing languages in 1000 BCE and 1000 CE isn't quite the same thing, for the specific purposes of this question. >BTW, would you know if appears in Mycenaean? Or when the >phrase first appears in Greek? -- actually it's, "Diwos", in Mycenaean; later Greek lost the 'w'. In Hittite, 'dsius' (with assibilation of the intial dental); same meaning, "Sky God". It's 'tatis tiwaz' and 'tiyaz papaz' in Anatolian (Luvian and Palaic, specifically); same meaning -- "Sky Father" or "Father Sky". Gemanic has, of course, a reflex of the same term: tiwaz. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 09:36:40 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 04:36:40 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de writes: >Hittite and Tocharian -- very widely separated IE languages>> -- sorry, should have been more clear; geographically separated. From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 15 06:17:39 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 22:17:39 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 02:30 PM 2/8/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >>This is what you'd expect if proto-Indo-European speakers invented the wheel, >>by the way -- otherwise there should be at least one loan-word for "wheel", >>one that isn't resolvable into a PIE root. >Wait a minute. PIE-speakers invented the wheel? Well, it is certainly a serious possibility. The earliest wheels (outside of toys) are found at times and places consistent with this conclusion. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 15 06:34:13 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 22:34:13 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <92.154dc59.25d50825@aol.com> Message-ID: At 01:37 AM 2/11/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 2/8/00 4:20:02 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: ><is to say, with separation somewhere in the 1000 to 2000 years range.>> >This is interesting. 2000yrs from modern Romance language back to Latin? >2000 yrs from Myceanaean, Sanskrit and Latin back to what? >PIE? Not likely. Actually, for those three, almost certainly. Almost all proposed family trees make the most recent common ancestor of those three languages either PIE itself, or something barely differentiated from it (even assuming the Indo-Hittite hypothesis, the language ancestral to all the non-Anatolian members of the family was little different from the older language). Indeed, in some ways PIE could is *defined* as the most recent common ancestor of those three languages (which is why the Indo-Hittite hypothesis often is considered to exclude Anatolian from the IE family proper). After all, it was comparing those three that lead to the *idea* of PIE. >And what does Hittite (for starters) add to the total 'differentiation' >between the first attested PIE languages? If 2000 years separates Latin and >Sanskrit, Hittite should certainly add another 2000 years, wouldn't you say? Nope, not even close! It is about 500 years more differentiated, plus or minus a few years. Phonologically, and (with some exceptions) grammatically, it is quite archaic. The only reason it *seems* so different is the relatively few inherited IE words it retains. >That would put you at (1000BC minus 2000 minus 2000 more) 5000BC. I get 3500 to 4000, 4300 at the outside. >And of course, the differentiation between the languages above and Tocharian, >Luwian, Umm, Luwian is an Anatolian language, for this purpose it is interchangeable with Hittite. And Tocharian is only attested from a *very* late date - an AD date in fact. It adds nothing to the estimated age of unity. > the undecipherable Thracian, Albanian and Celtiberian should send >your date of dispersal hurtling back to that magic 7000BC you've mentioned so >frequently. They are only indecipherable due to extreme rarity of written records. >From what little is know of them, there is no real reason to suppose they are much more differentiated than Latin and Sanskrit. Certainl the very fact they can be *recognized as IE languages at all, given how few words we actually have of them, shows how conservative they really are. If we had as few words of Modern English as we have of Thracian, I doubt we could tell it was an IE language at all! >Or do all these languages decline with only a change in the initial >vowel and do they all have the same name for their principle god - thus >justifying a 2000 year separation between all of them. The phonetic changes we can be sure of in Thracian are at about that level, or maybe even *less* than that. As to gods, in most cases we have no way of telling - but Sky Father is fairly widely attested in place names and such throughout the area, so it is likely he was known to the Thracians. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From alderson at netcom.com Wed Feb 16 23:47:16 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 15:47:16 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <92.154dc59.25d50825@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Fri, 11 Feb 2000, Steve Long wrote in response to S. M. Stirling: > Do the similarities between Latin and Hittite 'leap off the page" as you say? > (Please recall how long it took for relationship to even be detected.) Knudtson published the Tell-el-Amarna letters in 1902, as I remember, and put forth the claim that Hittite was Indo-European at that time. Hrozny' demon- strated the IE-ness of Hittite in his 1917 monograph to the satisfaction of the general IEist populace. How long did you think it took? > And what does Hittite (for starters) add to the total 'differentiation' > between the first attested PIE languages? If 2000 years separates Latin and > Sanskrit, Hittite should certainly add another 2000 years, wouldn't you say? Absolutely not. Hittite looks IE enough that I'd say less than 1000 years, maybe less than 500, separate it from the Neogrammarian core--which was always too close to the classical languages and did not pay enough attention to the outliers. >That would put you at (1000BC minus 2000 minus 2000 more) 5000BC. No, more like 1000 - 2000 - 500 => 3500BCE or so. > Or do all these languages decline with only a change in the initial > vowel and do they all have the same name for their principle god - thus > justifying a 2000 year separation between all of them. > JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > < Nom. sing. agnis ignis > acc. sing. agnim ignem > dative agnibhyas ignibus > Latin and Greek still used nearly the same term for their principle god: > Juppiter/Zeus Pater Not sure what you mean to say by "only a change in the initial vowel": In Indo-Iranian, PIE *e *o *a all > PII *a, while in Latin e > i/_[+nasal stop]. Knowing that, we can take one look at the words for "fire" in these two languages and *immediately*, without further ado, see them for the cognates they are. On the other hand, there were two words for "fire", the active *egni- and the inactive/neuter *pur-, and the different dialects reflect different choices. The cognate phrase _dyauh. pitar_ of course occurs in the Veda, and the Germanic god Tiw/Tyr/Zio is another reflex; in _How to Kill a Dragon_, Watkins mentions, as I recall, a Hittite reflex _s^ius^_ as well. So if that's what you are looking for, it's there. Rich Alderson From colkitto at sprint.ca Sun Feb 13 06:11:58 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 01:11:58 -0500 Subject: Horses Message-ID: For the possible semantc shifts in names of large quadrupeds, the example of elephant > camel (Latin elephantus > Gothic ulbandus > Common Slavc *veliblodu (Polish wielblad) Old English olfend Russian verbljud should not be forgotten Robert Orr From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 09:40:47 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 04:40:47 EST Subject: Horses Message-ID: Armenian also has a word for horse, 'es', that's derived from *ekwos; Luvian, an Anatolian language, uses azuwa; and so forth. In fact, the only groups without a reflex of *ekwos are Slavic and Albanian. From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Feb 13 12:00:50 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 12:00:50 -0000 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: Dear IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Tuesday, February 08, 2000 9:23 PM >> X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >> Not 'the introduction of agriculture as such' > -- yup. Renfrew says PIE spread through Europe with agriculture. This > process begins in 7000 BCE, and reaches as far as the Low Countries well > before 5000 BCE. > Now, are you saying that this process spread Indo-European or not? Yes or > no? How would some of you feel if Renfrew's premise were altered to: Nostratic spread through Europe with agriculture. ? 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 Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Sun Feb 13 08:08:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 08:08:00 GMT Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: SG>I have been "wrong" myself more often .. Who is wrong, who is wright? Linguistics is no mathematics; and out of /this/ reason the expression "wrong" perhaps should be handled with much more caution. Linguists often don't seem to be aware that nearly everything they "state" is to a large degree a question of probability. An easy accessible attempt on this topic is Mark Rosenfelder 'How likely are chance resemblances between languages? in www.zompist.com/chance.html. Though in the binomial formulas one faculty mark '!' is always set wrong*, the results are correct. (*what shows that in one year nobody with minimal mathematical competence really did read this article). HJH From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 09:51:18 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 04:51:18 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >rao.3 at osu.edu writes: >We must be careful to distinguish between entry of a language into a new >area and its spread. -- good point. Eg., the entry of the dialects ancestral to English into the British Isles took place in the 5th and 6th centuries AD, but their spread has been a long-drawn-out process. Even in England proper it took three or four centuries to push Brythonic-Celtic bakc into Wales, and as recently as the early 19th century, Gaelic was still a majority language in Ireland, for instance, whereas now it's virtually extinct. One has a tendency to assume that an area has been "Indo-Europeanized" when the ancestral tongue first enters it, but this may well have been a similarly long-drawn-out process in many areas. Cf. the persistence of Basque/Aquitanian. >Now, there was significant change in social organization in North India >during the ``Second Urbanization'' (urbanization of Ganga valley), from 700 >BCE to 300BCE (I am not sure of technological change). Interestingly, either >Burrow or Kuiper date the majority of the influx of non-IE words in Sanskrit >to about this period. -- true, but there are _some_ Dravidian loans in Sanskrit from the earliest times. >It is not so clear to me that languages change without significant change in >social/economic organization. -- I'd tend to agree with that, but there's a distinction between _social_ change and _technological_ change. The latter is often visible in the archaeological record where the former is not. Subsistence technologies in particular tend to be very tenacious, post-Neolithic. From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Feb 17 03:52:54 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 22:52:54 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: I wrote: <> JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: <<-- languages are not pots. There's usually no way to make a one-to-one correlation between material culture and language.>> Right. Languages are not pots or wheels or primitive horse bits or evidence of milking or evidence of the warp-weighted loom or any other form of "material culture." But some of us seem to have no qualms about using such evidence when it is to our convenience. E.G: < From: JoatSimeon at aol.com Subject: Re: Pre-Greek languages An Elamo-Dravidian speech community through Iran to the Indus and beyond in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age,... DOES FIT THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL DATA RATHER NICELY.>> I wonder what that nicely-fitting archaeological data might have been. Pots or ogham sticks? And of course it is interesting to note that you can find a nice archaeological "fit" for ancient Elamo-Dravidian but you cannot do that for your proto Greek-Phrygian-Armenian-Indo-Iranian language in the Ukraine and the Balkans between 3000 and 2000BC.... Would anyone have any interest in what the archaeological evidence is in the Ukraine between 3000BC and 2000BC? Regards, Steve Long From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Feb 14 00:17:45 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 01:17:45 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000210073704.009c18f0@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: Stanley Friesen wrote: >Skt u:r regularly corresponds to a PIE vocalic resonant followed by a >laryngeal. And preceded by a labial (I forgot to mention that in my reply). Otherwise we mostly have i:r. >Skt mixes PIE 'l' and 'r', so one has to go elsewhere to find >which is original. Baltic also regularly derives from a vocalic >resonant. Between these two we reconstruct PIE *plh- (where the 'l' is >the "vowel"). >The Greek shows o-grade instead of zero-grade, leading to *p(o)lh. Oops, you're right, I didn't check my Greek soundlaws. *plHis would have given +palis, I guess. >Based only on these examples, I see no trace of e-grade, but that may be >due to the incompleteness of the list. Pokorny does not give any more cognates. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Feb 14 00:48:02 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 01:48:02 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- *bergh. *bherg^h >There are derivatives in the Germanic language (eg., OHG burg, >'fort', or Gothic baurgs, 'city, town'. Homeric Greek (I think -- possible >spelling error) burghos That's probably "tower", a Greek substrate word (so-called "Pelasgian", with Germanic-like *r. > ur, and Germanic-like b > p, but only after Greek-like Grassmann's Law *bhrgh > *brgh). Pokorny says that Latin burgus "watchtower" is borrowed from Greek (but what about p-?). >, and definitely Armenian burgn. Wish it were so simple. The root *bherg^h- is regularly reflected in Armenian as barjr "high" etc., so "tower", a centum word if IE, does not appear to be native. Birgit (also from *bherg^h-) Olsen points out that the same irregularity in the exact same environment is also found in "potter's wheel" besides darj- "to turn" (*dhrg^h-). There is also Slavic bre^g- "shore", of course, but there without any satem variants. To add the finishing touch to the confusion, it's necessary to mention Urartian "palace, fort". Urartean (non-IE, related to Hurrian) used to be spoken where Armenian is spoken now. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From alderson at netcom.com Tue Feb 15 01:40:06 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 17:40:06 -0800 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <015a01bf6fd3$ba10a9a0$8c9201d5@xpoxkjlf> (petegray@btinternet.com) Message-ID: On 5 Feb 2000, Peter Gray wrote: >Miguel wrote: >> For instance, I don't think Benveniste's root-theory allows *i and *u in the >> V position (or does it?). It would be nice to have statistics. >Forgive my ignorance - I'm puzzled here. *CiC and *CuC roots are plentiful, >e.g. *digh goat, *bhidh pot, *k'ik strap, *knid louse; *trus reed, *k'up >shoulder, *k'udh dung, *lus louse etc etc. >Could you help me understand what you meant here? Miguel was correct in his recollection of Benveniste's root theory, which was based on the notion of _Wurzeldeterminativen_. All roots are CVC, where V is defined to be the ablauting *e/o; a further _'elargissement_ or determinative can yield two series of stems (*not* roots), CVCC (I) and CCVC (II). All roots are verbal, as are stems with a single determinative; stems with more than one determinative are inherently nominal. Everything you refer to as a root in your list would be called a stem by Benveniste. Rich Alderson From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 15 07:03:48 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 23:03:48 -0800 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 10:11 AM 2/8/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >Compare the number of Ce-/Co-roots (e.g. in Pokorny) with the >number of Ci-/Cu-roots. I guesstimate the difference is a factor >10 or so. Certainly. But in my book, even a handful of such roots is enough to establish i and u as PIE vowel phonemes. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Feb 15 20:18:11 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 20:18:11 -0000 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: > Compare the number of Ce-/Co-roots (e.g. in Pokorny) with the > number of Ci-/Cu-roots. I guesstimate the difference is a factor > 10 or so. (a) Bird offers a summary of Pokorny's roots, identifying the core elements, and ignoring the variety of extensions. He ends up with 2050 such roots. Of these exactly 775 have neither e nor e: anywhere. The number of CeC roots (i.e. with no resonant) is 548. (b) How are you treating roots which show CeRC / CRC ablaut? Peter From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Feb 14 04:51:56 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 23:51:56 EST Subject: *hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-? Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> In a message dated 2/12/00 10:12:09 PM, mcv at wxs.nl replied: <> ("mcv at wxs.nl earlier wrote: <<...the Hittite word for "wheel" is . No relation to the *kwel-words.>>) Let me ask, does evidence of (*hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-?) appear in any other IE languages? I guess it would have to. Otherwise you'd have at best a Tocharian/Hittite connection, but not necessarily PIE. Am I right? After all, you wouldn't want to be finding PIE roots every time just two ancient IE languages showed cognates - that would mean that PIE would need to have a a larger lexicon than any of its daughters, since it would always have an original word for as little as two cognates among the daughters. This seems to be too much to ask of a real or even a hypothetical proto-language. (This idea is interesting though. It makes PIE look like a language of nuggets of abstractions (e.g., to turn, to roll) unrelated to any concrete object, waiting for some practical application. Of course this might be conceived of both very foresightful and very thoughtful of those early PIEists, forseeing the needs of all those future daughter languages.) I wouldn't of course think - if these two languages were the only evidence of root mentioned above - that a PIE root or root-stem would need to be conjectured simply because of some assumption that Hittite and Tocharian had no contact or common ancestor after PIE split. I can't take seriously the idea that it is ENOUGH to say that Hittite and Tocharian are "very widely separated IE languages." For one thing, all IE languages are geographically widely separated from Tocharian, but that couldn't always have been true. And for another thing, some trees at least (e.g., the UPenn tree) have Hittite and Tocharian right next to each other in terms of relatedness. Now it may be that evidence of (*hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-?) might be found dispersed throughout the IE languages in which case all this may be moot. But if it isn't - my question is: Just because (*hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-?) is reconstructable, why reconstruct it and then call it "the preferred word for "to turn, to roll" at quite an early stage?" (Why could it not have been a later innovation, born out of one of Stefan Georg's "expressives" and then formalized as a non-expressive?) I mean, IF the word is only found in Hittite and Tocharian, why not swing the conclusion around to its simpliest form and simply take it as evidence of contact between Tocharian and Hittite? Do you lose valid historical evidence of contact when the presumption is that such words must have had PIE origins? Regards, Steve Long From maxdashu at LanMinds.Com Mon Feb 14 05:16:58 2000 From: maxdashu at LanMinds.Com (Max Dashu) Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 21:16:58 -0800 Subject: brahmin/flamen In-Reply-To: <009c01bf7256$7f3e3380$da04703e@edsel> Message-ID: > (note also Brahman > Flamen). I read recently that this correspondence has been challenged, although it looks reasonable. Anyone know about the current consensus on it? Max Dashu From Georg at home.ivm.de Sun Feb 13 19:10:54 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 20:10:54 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <40.10c4a1d.25d3967b@aol.com> Message-ID: >>mclasutt at brigham.net writes: >>This would be due to avoidance. Reproductive body parts and elimination >>functions are generally subject to very high degrees of euphemism, >> >-- yup. The same with objects which are the subject of fear and avoidance -- >"wolf" and "bear", for instance. ("The Outlaw" and "The Brown One", >respectively). "bear" = "brown one" OK "wolf" = "outlaw", I'd like an explanation St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Feb 14 02:30:26 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 03:30:26 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Ante Aikio wrote: >On Sat, 5 Feb 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> This word is sometimes seen as supportive of a PIE ~ Uralic >> genetic link, but it rather looks like a borrowing from IE into >> Uralic. The IE prototype contains two laryngeals (*h1neh3- or >> *h3neh3-) and the abstract suffix *-men [*], none of which finds >> expression in the Uralic word. >Actually, the lack of reflex of medial *h3 is a bit problematic. One would >expect borrowing from IE *Hneh3men- to give PU *nexmi / *nixmi. But I've >seen such reconstructs as IE *nmen-, based (at least) on Slavic, as far as >I understand. Is this reconstruct valid? It would account nicely for PU >*nimi. *nmen seems right for Slavic ime~ (< jIme~ < Ime~ < nmen). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Mon Feb 14 07:38:03 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 09:38:03 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <33.11e9e27.25d39755@aol.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 9 Feb 2000 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >> Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de writes: >> let me take an Indo-European example, e.g. Italian and French. Superficially >> seen they only have one ancestor: Latin. But this is only the dominant >> ancestor. >> If we look at e.g. French it has a lot of strata which can be called its >> fathers: > -- nope. It has some substrate influence from Celtic, and some loan-words; > ditto from Frankish. But that does not alter its status as a Romance > language one iota. > If you took all the non-Romance elements out of French, it wouldn't make that > much difference. If, on the other hand, you took out all the elements > derived from Latin, it would cease to exist. Indeed. But the crucial point is not whether it makes much difference - a language can borrow so much that taking all the borrowed elements out would certainly make a difference. > Run it backwards, and it > becomes Latin, not a Celtic or Germanic language. Yes, this is the important factor - French is a changed version of Latin and not a changed version of Celtic or something else. And this is of course what genetic relationship by definition is about. Ante Aikio From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 09:58:33 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 04:58:33 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) >So, Parson was certainly, in a way, on the right track (and so was Sassetti >before him, and others have been, too), but neither he nor anyone else >before Bopp was able to put IE complx on the agenda of urgent and solvable >tasks. >> -- it isn't a coincidence that morphological studies were commenced _after_ the lexical comparisons (and simple comparisons like the declension of the noun) became widely known. There had to be a problem, before there could be solutions. "These resemblances are too close for chance" was the fundamental breakthrough; then came detailed examination, and the emergence of comparative linguistics as we know it. Likewise, when doing a "rough cut" on a new language, lexical comparison is still used. Only purists get upset over this. From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Mon Feb 14 20:11:55 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 22:11:55 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <015501bf6fd3$b59cd4c0$8c9201d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Sat, 5 Feb 2000 petegray wrote: RW>No. Relationship is an absolute. .... RW>Genetically related languages were once the same language. >Sorry, Bob, I can't agree, and I suspect you're in a minority >these days (though I may be wrong!). No problem -- differences of opinion are what make for horse races and book reviews. But I'm not entirely sure what you are disagreeing with here: the restriction of related to "genetically related" or the definition of genetic relatedness. I find it difficult to believe (although that doesn't mean that it isn't true) that the definition of genetic relationship that was the cornerstone of historical linguistics for over 200 years -- from Jones' 1786 "sprung from some common source" to Anttila's 1989 "'Related' is a technical term ... meaning that the items were once identical" -- has been dropped in the last 10 years and replaced with something like 'related languages are those that have some features in common or are somehow connected', or 'there is no such thing as genetically related languages'. I note that David Crystal in his _Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language_ (1987) has the following entry in the glossary (p. 429: "related (hist) Said of languages or forms that share a common origin." It will be interesting to check the second edition to see if he has switched over to what you suggest is now the majority position: that related languages do not have to have a common origin. >(a) Unrelated languages do produce offspring - for example, >creoles. It has even been suggested that the entire Germanic >branch of IE is in fact a creole. Yes, I've even heard it suggested that IE was a creole, but I don't think that such theories have many adherents (doesn't mean that they are wrong, just unlikely). But creoles are a different animal and one that is not yet well understood despite intensive study. I think that the mainstream view is something like the following: Creoles develop from pidgins; pidgins are not natural languages (have no native speakers), but auxillary languages used for communication between speakers of different (usually typologically widely divergent) languages, intended for limited purposes such as trade; pidgins have limited lexicons and minimal morphology and syntax (essentially they are mini isolating, bare-bones, no-frills languages); pidgins are often (but not necessarily) based on one language (usually the socially dominant one) but with some elements taken from other language(s); pidgins often die out when the need for communication between the groups ceases or with the development of bilingualism or the assimilation of one of the language groups into the other. Creoles arise when a pidgin becomes the mother tongue of a group of speakers (presumably the children of a group that communicates primarily in pidgin hear only the pidgin and begin expanding it to provide some of the syntactic features that have been stripped from the original language(s) to create the pidgin); this expanded pidgin becomes the native language of the next generation and continues to expand to provide all the syntactic features that are necessary to normal communication; the creole is once again a natural language. Pidgins and creoles are thus two stages of a single process. Many pidgins never become creoles, either dying out when no longer needed or simply continuing in use as pidgins. But I don't know that creoles arise other than out of pidgins (it wouldn't bother me to learn otherwise, however). So the steps involved in the creation of creoles actually form a cycle of contraction and expansion (natural language --> pidgin --> creole [natural language]). The thing is that the creole can arise very quickly from the pidgin (within a generation or two) and the creole is usually not easily intelligble to the native speakers of the language(s) on which the pidgin is based. This is in contrast to the normal development of natural languages where mutual comprehensibility is usually preserved over at least 3 generations (children may think that gramps uses a lot of 'quaint' expression and gramps may think that the youngsters aren't being taught the language properly, but they can still communicate easily). This, I think, is one of the fascinations that creoles hold for current research. The accelerated pace of change in creoles is is distincltly different from non-creolized natural languages and thus forms sort of a laboratory for studying language change. >I think it is unhelpful to restrict our understanding of >relationship to a yes-no either/or. You might have trouble >describing a creole without distorting facts to fit your >definition. I don't think so. I have just described what I think is considered the mainstream view of creoles without having to use the term 'related'. One doesn't have to distort facts to fit a definition. If the definition doesn't apply to the facts, then one just doesn't use it. It is of course, easier to distort the definition to fit the facts. Facts exists in nature; definitions are arbitrary conventions agreeded upon by a speech community. And definitions are subject to change either by the discovery of new facts or by an agreement to amend the convention. But if you change definitions unilaterally, you run the risk of not being able to communicate with your audience. You can redefine "roast beef" to mean "spinach quiche" and "file cabinet" to mean "kitchen sink", if you want to. But if you invite people over for roast beef they may be surprised (and perhaps even dismayed if they are real carnivores) when they are served spinach quiche. And the evening may take a disastrous turn if you tell them to just put the dirty dishes in the file cabinet. But I don't think that the linguistic awareness of creoles alters the facts of genetic relationship. The various parts that form a pidgin are no more related than the bits and pieces of Dr. Frankenstein's monster. The pidgin is not the same as the language on which it is primarily based; it is a severely truncated form -- a mere stump. Since this does not fit the definition of 'related' as used as a technical term in historical linguistics, I see no point in using the term. For example, I would describe Tok Pisin as an English-based pidgin influenced by native Papuan languages that has been creolized in some areas. There is no need to use the term 'related' and I don't think the facts have been distorted. The creole then develops out of the pidgin, but it is not, as a creole, identical to the pidgin nor is it ever identical to the language(s) on which the pidgin is based. So if one continues to use 'related', 'pidgin', and 'creole' as techinical terms, then they each have their specific meanings and it is not necessary to explain the "relationship" between natural languages, pidgins, and creoles. One only needs to start talking about 'related' with references to possible daughters of the creole. There are, of course, some gray and muddled areas (as there always are). For instance, if a pidgin is in use over a wide area, what happens if it is creolized more than once? Are the different creoles genetically related, having once been the same language? Depending on the circumstatnces, it is quite possible that the two (or more) creoles from a given pidgin are not mutually comprehensible. Thus one would have cognate languages that are not mutually intelligible within a generation, not a usual occurrence. >It is ultimately only a matter of which method of description we >prefer, but I do believe it is unhelpful to restrict the term >"related" to mean "genetically related". I can't see why. If you use 'related' in its dictionary sense of "connected, linked, affiliated" rather than its historical linguistics technical sense of "genetically related", then its meaning becomes so diffuse that you always have to explain how you mean 'related' so you might as well cut out the middleman and go straight to a description of the 'relationship' and there is really no point in using the term at all. Then it is quite true as Hans J. Holm says: "'Relationship' is _always and only_ a question of degrees and ways." The term has no specific meaning beyond implying some kind of connection, however vague, so each time you use 'related' or 'relationship' you have to define what you mean. I don't see what makes this so much more helpful. If you allow 'related' to mean "has some connection", then English is 'related' to Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Etruscan, Finnish, Hungarian, Malay, Mayan, Nahuatl, Sumerian, Swahili, Kaffir, Algonkian, Hawaiian, and hundreds if not thousands of other languages from which English with its capacity for swallowing foreign words whole has appropriated words for its own use. Similarly, it could be said that most of the world's 6000 (give or take a few thousand) or so languages are 'related' to English if they have at least one English loanword. 'Related' has become more or less meaningless in any linguistically interesting way. Using 'related' in its non-technical sense would allow you to say that English and Chinese are related (because there are a number of Chinese loanwords in English; ketchup, gung ho, yen ['desire'], and chow come to mind off the top of my head). But almost any historical linguist would take exception to a statement that English is related to Chinese. A historical linguist would say that English and Chinese are not related. And another historical linguist would know, through the technical vocabulary of historical linguistics, that this statement means that English and Chinese were never the same language at any level that has so far been uncovered by the methodology currently available. >Genetically (in your terms), English is equally related to both >French and Italian. They're not my terms; I didn't invent them -- they are standard in historical linguistics textbooks. But I agree with the premise -- except that I wouldn't say "equally related"; I would say "related at the same level." >I find it more helpful to accept a wider use of "related" in such >a way that it allows me to indicate that plural forms and a range >of other stuff in English actually are "related" to French but >not "related" to Italian, and that therefore English has a >different relationship to French and Italian, not an identical >one I can see what you are talking about (although I must confess that I don't know what you mean by "related" plural forms). But it seems to me that this is more a problem of lack of terminology to explain the situation rather than a limitation in the meaning of 'related'. I would simply say that English is related to both French and Italian at the same level but that English and French have (re)converged extensively due to lengthy periods of contact with French as both a superstrate and an adstrate language resulting in more similarites between English and French than between English and Italian. So I don't see the problem as one of limitation imposed by the technical meaning of 'related' in historical linguistics, but rather as a reluctance to use the vocabularly of historical linguistics to describe the situation. English and French have converged as a result of extensive borrowing of Frech lexicon by English due to contact; English and Italian have not. This does not mean that English is more closely "related" to French than to Italian. Languages that are in contact will tend to converge. But convergence does not make the languages related. Languages do not become related (cognate). Languages either start out related (cognate) or they will never be. Languages are either related (cognate) or they are not. The fact that we may not be able to demonstrate relatedness does not change this. Our perceptions of reality do not change reality. If everyone believes that the world is flat that still doesn't make it possible to walk to the edge and jump off. Of course one can say that we should just dump the technical meaning of 'related' and let 'cognate' carry the load. 'Cognate' is perhaps better suited to this because it is etymologically more transparent. But the problem is that this needs to be done across the board. Mixing terminology just cofuses those who are not trained in historical linguistics. When different people use the same word in different ways it leads to confusion if not chaos. Thus we have these interminable discussions about terminology ("ungoing discussion" as posted [unintentionally I presume] by Eduard Selleslagh on Feb 8 gets my vote as typo of the century [so far] :>) that simply lead us around in circles while the non-linguists who monitor the list conclude that historical linguists don't know what they're talking about. >(b) The idea that there must be a single language progenitor of >daughter languages is widely disputed. Some people accept the >idea that a collection of interrelated languages might never have >had a single ancestor, but as far back as you care to go were >simply a collection of inter-related languages. The >language/dialect issue comes up here. We talk of IE "dialects" >within PIE, but this is simply terminology. The point is that >there is no need whatever for there to have been a single unified >PIE language. There is quite a bit of material for thought in this paragraph. Enough for several dissertations at least. But fortunately, most of these dissertations have already been written. Yes, there are many people who dispute the existence of protolanguages. I have seen some of their web sites. The problem is that no one has yet come up with an explanation that fits the data better. Besides, if there are no protolanguages, then the comparative method, the basic tool of historical linguistics, is useless. Since you seem to be trying to tell me that the basic hypothesis underlying historical linguistics (languages that have more similarities than can be accounted for by chance or borrowing were once the same language) is not true, and that the basic tool used in historical linguistics (by comparing similar forms in related languages one can reconstruct the probable form of the common ancestor -- aka the comparative method) does not work because there is no common ancestor, I get the impression that you are trying to tell me that historical linguistics is a hoax perpetrated on the academic community by a bunch of Germans in the early 19th century (just joking, of course, but it does start to sound that way). The idea of infinitely converging languages instead of a proto-langauge sounds like Trubetskoy to me. This simply does not take into account the overwhelming amount of detail with which PIE can be reconstructed. Much too detailed to be accounted for with a loose federation of languages. Now individual IEists may not agree on the details, but that is due to the wealth of data that is available for interpretation, not on its scarcity. The IE hypothesis (an explanation of observed data) is inductive and thus cannot be proved directly. Rather proof of an inductive hypothesis comes from falsifying the alternative hypotheses. The detail with which the nominal, pronominal, and verbal systems, as well of the syntax, of PIE can be reconstructed do not prove that there was a PIE language. Rather, they make it inconceivable that there was not a PIE language. On the other hand, a group of languages with similar features does not have to be a language family. Discussion continues over whether Altaic is actually a family or a group of languages connected by areal features and convergence through longstandin contact. The eventual outcome of this discussion, however, does not affect the case for PIE. Yes we talk of dialects within PIE. But this is not simply a matter of terminology. PIE was a modern language much like any modern language known today. Any language that exists over a sufficient period of time will develop dialects. Since modern languages have dialects we assume that PIE had dialects. All modern languages display variants in some forms. We assume that PIE had variant forms. All languages that exist over a sufficient period of time will change both from internal causes and from contact with other languages. We assume that PIE changed with time. PIE is a reconstruction of the state of this language just before its first split, based the forms found in its daughter languages. The stage of the language before this we call pre-PIE (since we don't know enough to be able to divide pre-PIE into old, middle, and new phases, we call everything back to the point where pre-PIE split off from whatever its ancestor may have been pre-PIE). Pre-PIE forms must be found by internal reconstruction since the comparative method only works back to PIE. Despite the different names, the comparative method and internal reconstruction are essentially the same thing. They have different inputs and give different results, but the underlying principle is the same: similar forms that are in complementary distribution are likely to be different aspects or outcomes of the same thing. Perhaps the most spectacular use of internal reconstruction was de Saussure's reconstruction, in 1879, of what are now called laryngeals for pre-PIE based on the reconstructed forms of PIE. This reconstruction was not widely accepted, among other reasons because it reconstructed a feature of the pre-protolanguage that was not preserved in any of the known daughter languages. With the discovery that Hittite was IE and that at least one of the recontstructed "laryngeals" were actually present in the language in the words and places where predicted, the reconstruction was considered vindicated and with it the methodology that produced it. This then is what any theory that would replace the concept of PIE has to overcome. It not only has to explain away the wealth of detail with which PIE can be reconstructed, but it also has to explain away the fact that it is possible to make accurate reconstructions of pre-PIE on the basis of the reconstructed PIE forms. Oh, and it is very difficult to wish away the concept of protolanguages while there is a clear example of the breakup of a protolanguage into daughters that is entirely recorded in historic times. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From adahyl at cphling.dk Mon Feb 14 23:04:10 2000 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 00:04:10 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 10 Feb 2000, Ante Aikio wrote: > On Sat, 5 Feb 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> This word is sometimes seen as supportive of a PIE ~ Uralic >> genetic link, but it rather looks like a borrowing from IE into >> Uralic. The IE prototype contains two laryngeals (*h1neh3- or >> *h3neh3-) and the abstract suffix *-men [*], none of which finds >> expression in the Uralic word. > Actually, the lack of reflex of medial *h3 is a bit problematic. One would > expect borrowing from IE *Hneh3men- to give PU *nexmi / *nixmi. But I've > seen such reconstructs as IE *nmen-, based (at least) on Slavic, as far as > I understand. Is this reconstruct valid? It would account nicely for PU > *nimi. The reconstruction for (Pre-)Proto-Slavic *inmen is rather zero grade of *H1neH3mn, i.e. *H1nH3men-. Actually, the laryngeals should be no problem for U *nime-/*nima:- as an IE loanword (why I believe it to be an Indo-Uralic cognate anyway, see below): In protetic position before consonant, laryngeals are usually reconstructed as their consonantal variants. But the material from Uralic (and other language families) generally tend to speak against this, no matter whether you believe the look-alikes to be loans or cognates. So we should perhaps rather reconstruct a *@1neH3mn, phonetically realized as *nnoYwmn (read Y as gamma here; the consonantal variant of *H3 was probably phonetically realized as a voiced, labio-velar fricative *Yw). The development *-eH3- > *-oH3- took place already in PIE, and I find it very unlikely that a PIE *-oYw- should show up as *-i- in Uralic. Of course the borrowing could have taken place at the time of Pre-Proto-Indo-European, i.e. before the "colouring" of *eH3 to *oH3. But the word is also found outside Uralic; it appears in Yukaghir as and in Chuvan as . An Indo-Uralo-Yukaghir reconstruction *(n)newme- seems much more probable. Critics would point out that the PIE word is formed by adding a derivational suffix *-men. First of all, I don't see why a stem ending in *-me shouldn't analogically add an *-n, if nouns are productively formed with a suffix *-men. Secondly, the Uralic reconstruction *-a: corresponds perfectly to the IE vocalic *-n (*-e doesn't). So if the IE suffix isn't analogical, the Indo-Uralic form must be reconstructed as *(n)newmn-. Best Regards, Adam Hyllested -------------- Student of Indo-European, Uralic and Balkan Linguistics Institute for General and Applied Linguistics University of Copenhagen adahyl at cphling.dk --------------- Editor of etymologies and language surveys Danish National Encyclopedia dnhy at gyldendal.dk From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Tue Feb 15 15:17:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 15:17:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >It has some substrate influence from Celtic, and some loan-words; ditto >from Frankish. .. the history of French is by far not such simple. Our time and the space in the list would not be sufficient to list all the phonoogical and morphological influences I only could indicate. Or, regarding lexemes, e.g. a Swadesh-list produced by Rea (1973) of 215 lexemes there are 129 non-cognate between Moli?re-French and Latin (cited from Embleton 1986). There exist several more works on this topic. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Tue Feb 15 15:16:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 15:16:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: RW>And if you want to use Anttila 89 as a source .. 'use' is the correct expression. It is not the Bible. You cite Anttila with RW>"'Related' is a technical term, exactly like the equivalent 'cognate', RW>meaning that the items were once identical." And then go on: RW>This is the criterion of genetic relatedness in historical linguistics. 1) Anttila speaks of lexemes/items. 2) This was not the point I objected. It is no use to state things as true, which nobody can prove or disprove. So, changing your 'related' to 'relatable', in the sense of Anttila, will be okey. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Feb 15 20:08:30 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 20:08:30 -0000 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: On Hittite and other IE langs: > If you look through a basic vocabulary list, say: ... > -- you get, to put it mildly, a very strong indication. Of course, we do now. My point was that the relationship was not recognised for some time, and even resisted for a time, despite exactly what you say. Like it or not, it is a historical fact that such lists failed to convince - even if they should have. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Feb 15 19:57:12 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 19:57:12 -0000 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: Miguel said: >Now define "single" and "unified". If anything, this reinforces my point. The assumption that genetically related languages must by definition go back to a single ancestor over-simplifies the realities of language. Is there ever a "single, unified" language? Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Feb 15 20:13:19 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 20:13:19 -0000 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: > there is a qualitative difference between > borrowing and inheritance. Yes, I accept this - of course. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Feb 15 20:05:55 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 20:05:55 -0000 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >> (a) Unrelated languages do produce offspring - for example, creoles. > But creolization has nothing to do per se with language mixing. >> It has even been suggested that the entire Germanic branch of IE is in fact >> a creole. Please keep the example in the context of the discussion. The suggestion has certainly been made, and I agree with you that it now seems unlikely, but nonetheless the suggestion is out there in the literature! So don't blame me for the fact that the suggestion exists. Blame me for the way I have used it as an example. (And I admit it is a sidetrack, more misleading than helpful!) I mean that creolisation / language mixing or whatever you call it provides us with an example of a language which goes back to two ancestors, not one. Germanic is clearly and certainly related to other IE languages. If the theory about it being a creole were true (note the subjunctive, indicating unreality), then it would be: (a) related to other IE langs, and at the same time, (b) also related to some other original language, which had no genetic relationship to the other IE langs. Does it make sense in a situation like that - whether it is Germanic or any other language which is involved - to insist that "all related languages descend from a single common ancestor"? Peter From alderson at netcom.com Thu Feb 17 00:05:52 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 16:05:52 -0800 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: (JoatSimeon@aol.com) Message-ID: On Tue, 8 Feb 2000, JoatSimeon at aol.com (S. M. Stirling) wrote: >> petegray at btinternet.com writes: >> Interestingly, these _failed_ to prove convincingly that Hittite was IE! >> It was the rather obscure -r/-n heteroclite declension that was the final >> clincher for some people. > -- the first indication that Hittite was IE was a lexical term -- the word > for "water", specifically. ("watar") This, or course, could have been a coincidence. However, it was the form taken by the genitive that was the clencher: _wetnes^_, thus proving that the word was an r/n heteroclit and related to Gk. _hudo:r, hudatos < *hudn.tos_ and the various Germanic forms (Goth. _wato, watins_, Norw. _vatn_, Eng. _water_). The lexicon was suggestive, the grammar was conclusive. Rich Alderson From mclasutt at brigham.net Sun Feb 13 22:20:19 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 15:20:19 -0700 Subject: Numbers as "Core Vocabulary" (was IE "Urheimat" and evidencefrom Uralic ... In-Reply-To: <99.110bec5.25d397ad@aol.com> Message-ID: >> mclasutt at brigham.net writes: >> Numbers are one of the very WORST things to look at in order to make even a >> preliminary decision about relationship. > -- they work fine with the Indo-European languages; in fact, they were > crucial to the discovery of the IE family itself. They work fairly well > with Semitic, too. I guess that my point is that they are NOT "core vocabulary" for the purposes of comparative linguistics. "Core vocabulary" must be relatively universal in scope and numbers are definitely not. They may work for isolated language families (imagine saying that anything Indo-European is atypical of language change! :-)), but overall they are to be avoided. For every Indo-European and Semitic in the world, there are ten Uto-Aztecans and Siouans. 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 adahyl at cphling.dk Mon Feb 14 21:08:40 2000 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 22:08:40 +0100 Subject: basic vocabulary borrowing (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 9 Feb 2000, Ante Aikio wrote: > Well, I actually forgot about 'ten'. The Hungarian word is also an Iranian > loan. Concerning the affix *-teks?(n), this explanation has been > recently revived: it has been argued that it is a loan from Proto-Iranian > *detsa. The phonetics are flawless; there are other examples of U *ks < > Iranian *ts (The cluster *ts was illegal in U, hence the substitution). > This explanation seems more plausible to me at least than the previous > rather fabricated theory that Finnish kahdeksan and yhdeks?n developed > from *kakta e-k-s?-n 'two do not exist' (i.e., "two are missing from > ten") and *?kti e-k-s?-n. Well, what speaks in favour of the latter theory is of course the fact that '10' in Finnish is not **teksa:n, but , a word that also exists in Mordvin, Yukaghir, and Omok. Furthermore, it resembles full grade of a root cognate to the IE *kmt- 'hand' (with the derivations *dekmt '10' and *(d)kmtom '100'); the zero grade shows up in U *ka:te 'hand', Finnish . Whether a loanword, a cognate, or a word of totally different origin, kymmenta: '10' must be older than '8' and '9', if these are borrowed from Iranian. By the way, on the basis of what material you are reconstructing a Proto-Iranian *detsa ?. PIE *dekmt became *das'a already in Indo-Iranian; compare Sanskrit '10' and Avestan '10'. Best Regards, Adam Hyllested -------------- Student of Indo-European, Uralic and Balkan linguistics Institute for General and Applied Linguistics University of Copenhagen adahyl at cphling.dk -------------- Editor of etymologies and language surveys Danish National Encyclopedia dnhy at gyldendal.dk From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Feb 14 05:32:12 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 00:32:12 EST Subject: Hittite /wheel Message-ID: mcv at wxs.nl earlier wrote: <<...the Hittite word for "wheel" is . No relation to the *kwel-words.>> This is STRONG STUFF. It certainly seems to NEGATE the idea - often repeated earlier on this list - that all IE languages shared a common word for wheel. You can look back at the archives and see how often "the wheel word" was used as PROOF of the date of PIE dispersal. The often repeated position was that "the wheel word" had to have entered PIE before it split up, because the word was univeral among IE languages. And because the sound changes "the wheel word" underwent in those languages show the word entered before those sound changes occurred. Pointing out that those SPECIFIC sound changes do not date PIE dispersal and that those sound changes could have occurred long after dispersal should not have been a surprise. I'm told that Trubetsky brought it up before and others have made a point of it, including Lehmann have reiterated it. Mallory seems unaware of this objection, but Mallory seems to me to be unaware of more and more things. (When I asked Sean Crist to identify the "telltale signs of borrowing" that he offered that would tell him if "the wheel word" was borrowed in at least some IE languages, he never replied.) So, the two cases for dating final PIE unity with "the wheel word" - universality and the presence of sound changes - seem to have DISAPPEARED completely. As a matter of fact, IT SEEMS THEY WERE NEVER THERE - despite the often repeated claim that the PIE's final unity could be dated by the wheel. Now, this does not deter JoatSimeon at aol.com from NOW offering us FOUR PIE wheel words - some IE languages have one, some have another. It may strike some readers as obvious that FOUR wheel words WILL NOT support "the wheel word" as the way to date PIE. FOUR wheel words scattered among the IE languages DO NOT SUPPORT UNIVERSIALITY. (The fact that some of those words might have reconstructable roots does not matter - especially if those roots could or did have some meaning other than 'wheel.') Actually FOUR wheel words say the exact opposite. Common sense says that there are four wheel words BECAUSE the wheel was introduced AFTER PIE SPLIT UP. Of course, JoatSimeon at aol.com seems not to be bothered by this. And if others can go on seeing "the wheel word" as PROVING that PIE must have still been unified at 3000BC or 3500BC or 4000BC or whenever it was that the wheel would have been introduced in PIEland, then God bless them. They can clearly see things with a certainty that is not revealed to us ordinary mortals. Whether or not the actual facts are true (i.e., wheel introduced before PIE splits), the evidence hardly makes it necessary and may even argue against it, to the non-ideological observer. For us ordinary mortals on this list, there's a different question: how could this assertion that the wheel can postively and absolutely date PIE go unanswered so often? (Check the archive list - I found it asserted at least13 times!!! without contradiction.) With the intellectual firepower that plainly shows up on this list all the time, how could it be repeated so often without someone at least questioning it or noting the difficulties? Kind of in the way that I might be ripped to shreads for proposing an inappropriate sound change in Greek? It does raise the question as to how many of these kinds of absolute assertions about paleolinguistics deserve to be revisited. I certainly don't have the qualifications to do that linguistically, and I could only start seeing the holes in this argument thanks to "the kindness of strangers." But I wonder whether someone more formidably equipped might not find some other pieces of dogma also just as vulnerable. Regards, Steve Long From ECOLING at aol.com Mon Feb 14 08:38:18 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 03:38:18 EST Subject: Tree or wave? Message-ID: In a message dated 1/26/2000 10:55:35 PM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu writes: >...Ringe, Warnow, and >Taylor made use of this algorithm to compute the family tree for >Indo-European. There is certainly some noise in the data, and there are a >few problematic areas (notably, the placement of Germanic and of >Albanian), but on the whole, the same tree structure come up run after >run. >If it were the case that the proper model of the relations between the >IE >languages were really a fully general wave model, then this isn't the >expected result; what you'd get in that case would be wildly different >trees with every run of the algorithm, with very poor scores each time >for >how closely the tree comes to a perfect phylogeny. This is in fact what >happened when the team tried to compute a phylogeny of the West Germanic >languages: the languages developed in close contact and shared innovations >in ways which can't be captured in a tree. But it's not what you get with >the IE family in general, and this is very unlikely to be an accident. Isn't the direction of this difference (IE representable using tree model, \vs. Germanic using wave model) a predictable consequence merely of the difference in time depths, that intermediates tend to have vanished more with greater time depths? If so, does it not have little or no empirical content of interest to linguists? *** >As a matter of scientific economy, we should always choose the most >restrictive theory that the data will allow. Tree representations are >much more restrictive than wave representations; so if the data will allow >us to claim that all language relations are properly represented in this >more restrictive model, that's the claim we should make. The _empirical_ >question is whether the IE languages will allow a tree representation. As a *tentative hypothesis*, yes, because that may yield further progress. But as a result or conclusion to be reported to non-specialists, I believe the policy proposed above is a quite pernicious policy. We should rather be conservative and report what we actually have evidence for, that is the weakest hypothesis that is sufficient to account for the data, not anything unnecessarily stronger than that. Occam's razor cannot decide empirical fact. It can only point to a dangerous hyperelaboration of complex hypotheses to account for some phenomena for which the true explanation may be much simpler and quite different. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From ECOLING at aol.com Mon Feb 14 20:20:15 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 15:20:15 EST Subject: Hindsight vs. First Steps Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: There was no quoted material included in the received posting. --rma ] The message by Stefan George (quoted below) is highly reasonable, and I agree with most of it. The IE family was in an important sense discovered not from vocabulary comparisons but from verbal morphology. However, relationships in many other language families have in fact been discovered (in the sense of proposed, and still considered valid) from comparison of basic vocabulary. Judgements in hindsight are often easy, forgetting in some cases that our current judgements are merely past errors, viewed from some probable future. I do not think I would characterize as a rush to publication the first investigators who thought that Quechua and Aymara were related, biased as we *now* understand by using those Quechua languages which were most strongly influenced by Aymara. The general opinion has since reversed on that claim, once the borrowings and areal influences were factored out. And then it may have opened up yet again, granting that Quechua and Aymara *may* be related at a very deep level, but that the evidence on which the earlier conclusion of their relationship was first based is not of deep genetics but of later influence. All of which shows that "final" conclusions are difficult to draw within the lifetime of individual investigators, and that we must therefore rely on publication of non-final conclusions, and on exchange of views from different perspectives. Of course we would like everything that is published to be careful, to take into account all of the known ways in which conclusions drawn are subject to error, and to use as many techniques as are reasonably available to the investigators. Lloyd Anderson From ECOLING at aol.com Mon Feb 14 22:33:09 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 17:33:09 EST Subject: No single ancestor - breath of fresh air Message-ID: The message today by Peter Gray is really a breath of fresh air. I quote only the final paragraph below. Once we recognize that the facts of reality are more complex than any of our simple models, we can more easily investigate the facts, and spend less time in terminological disputes. That said, it is still the case that various of our techniques, *even* ones whose assumptions require a much simpler world, such as single-rooted family trees instead of dialect networks, can still be useful in challenging us to see just how far they can be pushed, because such results themselves tell us something about the facts we are trying to analyze. The conclusions should whenever possible include a measure of "strain" on the model, so that the position of Germanic within IE clearly indicates that one can impose the simple model of the single-rooted family tree with no converging branches and no overlapping dialect networks only at the cost of considerable strain (strain means mismatch with the facts). Is there a better model, which captures all of the virtues of the family-tree model without limiting us to that model when it is clearly not applicable? Perhaps dialect-network and family-tree superimposed in some way (perhaps what was referred to in another recent communication)? Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson In a message dated 2/8/2000 2:54:37 PM, petegray at btinternet.com writes: >(b) The idea that there must be a single language progenitor of daughter >languages is widely disputed. Some people accept the idea that a >collection of interrelated languages might never have had a single ancestor, >but as far back as you care to go were simply a collection of inter-related >languages. The language/dialect issue comes up here. We talk of IE >"dialects" within PIE, but this is simply terminology. The point is that >there is no need whatever for there to have been a single unified PIE >language. >Peter From ECOLING at aol.com Mon Feb 14 22:33:05 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 17:33:05 EST Subject: k' > ts > c-hachek order of changes? Message-ID: The following mention got my attention: > k' > c > ts > g' > j > dz I have come to suspect / believe / almost to argue evidence that the normal development is rather the reverse, phonetically, that we more commonly have (universally?) k' > ts > c-hachek g' > dz > j-hachek because the /ts,dz/ require more effort, reflect better their origin as a *fronted* tongue-body production, with the flat front of the tongue rather than the back contacting the roof of the mouth, whereas the grooved are more relaxed, with less fronting or raising of the heavy body of the tongue, but still an affricated acoustic effect, so presumably a later substitute for /ts,dz/. The theta is also I believe often a reflex of earlier /ts/ rather than only via /ts/ > /s/ > "th". Does this make sense to anyone? Is there evidence from Slavic, which shows both reflexes for velars? Is there evidence in the Indo-Iranian group for this other order of changes? The only thing I can think to add at the moment is a vague memory that in the NW part of India there are reflexes /ts,dz/ where we otherwise expect (from Sanskrit) the grooved . The basic letters of Tibetan also have these values /ts,dz/, and a diacritic is used to represent the Sanskritic . From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Feb 14 05:20:56 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 00:20:56 EST Subject: SV: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 2/13/00 10:13:18 PM, Lars Martin Fosse wrote: < And, for example, cattle dairying -- well-attested from the PIE vocabulary, > with words for 'to milk' (cows), curds, whey, 'cow rich in milk', butter, > etc., is generally dated to the mid-4th millenium BCE. (eg., McCormick, 1992, > "Early Faunal Evidence for Dairying", Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 11, > 201-209). > Note also that the genes for lactose tolerance (ability to digest cow's-milk > as an adult) show a distinct drop-off in Mediterranean Europe and the Near > East, but are high in northern and eastern Europeans. This seems to me to be an interesting observation. Have you got any bibliographic references on lactose tolerance? Also: are there any data on lactose tolerance in India?>> I hope to get to this later, but just a wee bit of a caution here and some additional questions that may be helpful. Number one, linguistically, do we find the IE languages discriminating cow's milk from mother's milk or goat's milk - both yielding substantially earlier dates? Number one point five, does goat's milk or mare's milk produce curds, whey, butter? Number two, do all the milk of all cattle or even of wild cattle produce the intolerance syndrome? Number three, does lactose intolerance apply to cheeses, butters and other by-products of cattle dairy farming? Number four, without refrigeration, particularly in warm climates, what would be the most common form in which the milk from cows would be consumed? Number five, would one forestall naming cow milk until one is able to drink it? Number six, when did lactose intolerance or tolerance to cow's milk apeans. Number seven, the production of cheese (from curds and whey) is an attribute of Sherratt's Secondary Products Revolution, which premises a long production curve before a sufficient surplus is reached. So that the premise is that the growth in cattle dairy farming is attributed to the ability to store and travel the products that start appearing just about 4000BC. And finally - given all the above - what precisely is "the PIE vocabulary for 'to milk' (cows), curds, whey, 'cow rich in milk', butter" and how in the world can it be "attested" much less "well-attested?" Just off the cuff. More to come. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Feb 14 05:31:39 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 00:31:39 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: <> In a message dated 2/13/00 11:24:00 PM, edsel at glo.be replied: < Flamen). Usually (I don't know in this case) at least parts of sacrificed animals were eaten.>> Going a little bit further, the primary remains of horses at Sredny Stog I believe are those used as food. This is true I'm pretty sure throughout "the Steppes cultures" that originated in the Ukraine about 4000BC and went east. I will try to look this up when I get back to my books. Regards, Steve Long From mclasutt at brigham.net Mon Feb 14 13:59:57 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 06:59:57 -0700 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <000a01bf72d0$1a6a4780$20d31b3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: > The minimal components of Nostratic are PIE and AA. Of course there is the competing claim of Greenberg, Ruhlen, and Bengtsen that AA does not belong in any group with PIE, but combines with Uralic and Altaic with IE in "Eurasiatic". 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 JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 19:04:38 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 14:04:38 EST Subject: SV: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >lmfosse at online.no writes: >This seems to me to be an interesting observation. Have you got any >bibliographic references on lactose tolerance? >> -- Cavalli-Sforza, "The History and Geography of Human Genes". From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 19:05:52 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 14:05:52 EST Subject: SV: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >lmfosse at online.no writes: >"Hence at the present state of the evidence, it seems unlikely that there >were PIE speakers in the Middle Danube towards the end of the Neolithic." >> -- you're quite right; absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, after all. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 19:11:59 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 14:11:59 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >edsel at glo.be writes: >Equus October in Rome, As'vamedha in India. (note also Brahman <> Flamen). >Usually (I don't know in this case) at least parts of sacrificed animals were >eaten. >> -- many other examples of horse sacrifice, too -- Celtic, as in the *ekwo-medu, "horse-mead", derived from the Gallic personal name Epomeduos. And the Sintasha graves show evidence of ritual sacrifice of horses (in a rather Vedic manner... 8-). The "horse-drunk" would appear to be a good candidate for a PIE religious ceremony, involving sacrificing a horse and getting totally blitzed on mead. The pagan Germanics, btw, certainly did both sacrifice horses and eat the flesh of the sacrifice. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 19:29:10 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 14:29:10 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >Important point, I think. Since Germanic and Balto-Slavic (as far as >they're traceable to the "Corded Ware" cultural area) both developed on a >TRB substrate (c.q. out of a TRB substrate) -- in some areas; not so much in the Baltic zone, for instance, or the huge extension into the mixed-forest and forest-steppe areas of Russia. The Corded Ware phenomenon extended well into zones that were preagricultural before the characteristic ceramics and battle-axes showed up. In fact, it stretches from the Rhine Delta into the area east of the Volga, and directly borders the Sredny Stog/Yamna cultures of the Ukraine and points east. The extreme speed of its spread is also an interesting point. >Probably because there'a a historic postcedent (the spread of >Turkic) in the same area (the Central Asian-Ukrainian(-Hungarian) >steppe zone). Nothing of the sort is known to have happened in >the North European temperate forest area. -- but Indo-Iranian spread widely not only in the steppe zone, but into areas that had long been agricultural; Iran, and India, which in area and population are quite comparable to temperate Europe. Note also that Turkic spread into Anatolia and far into Balkan Europe -- as recently as the 1870's, half the population of Bulgaria was Turkish-speaking, for example; and much of what's now Greece had large Turkish-speaking groups. It's only the massacres and explusions attendant on the fall of the Ottoman empire which halted a centuries-old process of language replacement that had gone quite far towards replacing the Greek and Slavic languages of the Balkans with Turkish. >Well, that would make Mallory's "Proto-IE'ans" the descendants of >Renfrew's "Proto-IE'ans". -- no, just the people they picked up agriculture and animal husbandry from. The 'wave of advance' peters out in the western Ukraine. The cultures to the east were Mesolithic and adopted the Neolithic package from their neighbors; at least, that's what it looks like. >No they ain't. -- they are the choices in Renfrew's scenario. >Intuitions about how long the IE languages had been diverging when they are >first attested c. 1500 BC, can't pin anything down to a higher degree of >confidence than "give or take a millennium or two". -- true, but a millenium or two does definitely rule out 7000 BCE. >The study of the proto-lexicon doesn't offer much more certainty either: >absence says nothing (what the hell is a weighted-web loom anyway?) -- one where the warp threads are held steady by weights on the bottom of each thread. It's highly visible in the archaeological record because the weights last well. It's the characteristic form of European loom, although not the only one. One absence says nothing; a number are indicative. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 19:31:06 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 14:31:06 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >frank at uiowa.edu writes: >Isn't there an assumption here that all such lexical items if they once >existed in PIE would have been transmitted integrally into the daughter >languages and down to us...? -- into some of them, at least. >and still mean today something like "loom"? -- or at least in Latin, or Greek. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 19:34:17 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 14:34:17 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >Steve Long >It indicates that the horse would be an rather unlikely candidate for a >dating of PIE unity in the Ukraine later than 4000BC. -- domestic horse =/= wild horse. >And of course the evidence to date is that livestock domestication >accompanied the rest of agriculture into the Ukraine at 4500BC or earlier. -- but not the domestic horse. That was not part of the original Near Eastern 'package' and the domestic horse is intrusive in the original areas of Eurasian agriculture. PS: there is no such thing as "domestication technology". There are only animals which have been domesticated. Do you mean the _idea_ of domestication? From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Feb 14 19:40:34 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 14:40:34 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de writes: >... would you please give the exact source? I only know sredny rog. -- I had the Dereivka stallion in mind. The evidence of bit-wear on the teeth is unequivocal, but the dating of the skeleton is not. The Dereivka site was occupied c. 4200-3700 BCE (calibrated radiocarbon dates) but the sample from the stallion's skull dates to 2900 BCE. From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 15 07:06:59 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 23:06:59 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <009c01bf7256$7f3e3380$da04703e@edsel> Message-ID: At 05:48 PM 2/8/00 +0100, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: >They were sacrificed though: see e.g. G. Dum?zil (La religion romaine >archa?que) : Equus October in Rome, As'vamedha in India. (note also Brahman ><> Flamen). Usually (I don't know in this case) at least parts of sacrificed >animals were eaten. Quite possibly. But animals that are *primarily* food animals are rarely sanctified. A subtle, but important distinction. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 15 07:10:55 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 23:10:55 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <7fg0as4mcdiopgeim5dsfgg5bdc8p979np@4ax.com> Message-ID: At 06:09 PM 2/8/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >Important point, I think. Since Germanic and Balto-Slavic (as >far as they're traceable to the "Corded Ware" cultural area) both >developed on a TRB substrate (c.q. out of a TRB substrate), it is >strange that none of the Germanic substrate words appear in >Balto-Slavic. I am not sure about this - I seem to recall a moderate number of entries in Pokorny that are only attested in Germanic and Balto-Slavic. Those sound like good candidates for substrate words to me. [Though I actually question tracing B-S back to Corded Ware]. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 15 07:12:29 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 23:12:29 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <000a01bf72d0$1a6a4780$20d31b3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: At 07:34 AM 2/9/00 +0000, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >The minimal components of Nostratic are PIE and AA. I have heard, somewhere, that AA is now often considered one of the most peripheral, and most doubtful, components of Nostratic. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 15 01:25:28 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 17:25:28 -0800 Subject: Balkan Kurgans In-Reply-To: <200002080823.p891@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: At 06:23 AM 2/8/00 +0000, Hans Holm wrote: >A question to the professional archeologists reading here: >In JIES 21-3,4/Fall/Winter 1993:207214, I found an article >'Silver in the Yamna (Pit-grave) Culture in the Balkans'. >Though silver cannot speak - is there any evidence pro or contra an >(Pre-)Indo-European community there??? Well, weakly pro. PIE has a reconstructible word that *probably* meant silver, and it is derivable from a root meaning "white", which makes it unlikely to be borrowed. But that is not very constraining. Silver is relatively easy to smelt, and was widespread very early. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Feb 15 01:45:20 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 20:45:20 EST Subject: reality of PIE as dialect network Message-ID: The following comments by Larry Trask on comments by Peter Gray reveal yet again that the use of absolutely discrete categories yes-or-no may be a model not fitting the facts, and attempts to force such a terminological usage on us may be counterproductive, by rendering such a model incapable of application to messy reality. [PG commenting on someone else] >>> No. Relationship is an absolute. .... >>> Genetically related languages were once the same language. >> Sorry, Bob, I can't agree, and I suspect you're in a minority these >> days (though I may be wrong!). [LT, with clarifying inserts [ ] in the first sentence] >You [PG] are [wrong], I'm afraid. The statement above is true not just >because all linguists believe it: it is true by definition. Languages which >do not descend from a common ancestor are not genetically related. Not so, the matter is not so simple. Sufficiently massive borrowing *does* constitute a kind of genetic relation, and the more sophisticated researchers today do recognize that all of these kinds of genetic relation do occur simultaneously, in various different combinations and mixtures. That does not mean we cannot distinguish the kinds. And with careful work and also some luck, we can also use the manifest results of language cross-breedings to conclude something about the circumstances of the language contacts and social contacts which led to them. If two language clusters are in intimate contact (whether ultimately descending from some proto-world or not) long enough that their interaction creates a complex dialect network, then that dialect network *is real* (referring here to Trask's phrase that PIE is real, which Peter Gray did not in any way deny), yet it may be impossible in the time frame of that dialect net or in any time frame somewhat preceding it to say that there is a single point uniform ancestor, from which all descendants evolved. The same may be true of a single language having spread across an area with a number of other languages which become substrates of different parts of the proto-language cluster. It simply may be a more useful model to think in terms of an ancestor with some regional variations which do *not* go back to a common origin, in either of the real sorts of situations just mentioned (and others). This in no way denies that there should *also* be single origins for some common elements in such situations, nor does it deny that much significant IE morphology *does* go back to a common singular origin in PIE. Nor, more importantly than either of the above, which are conclusions, does it deny that it is useful to try to lead various attested forms back to common origins in PIE, to discover more cognate forms and structures than are known at any given time. All of these models and techniques can operate simultaneously, with more benefit that if we limit ourselves to only one, as long as we keep in mind the limited capabilities of each technique we use, that *every* technique is biased towards certain sorts of answers rather than others, biases which may be more harmful or helpful depending on the particular nature of the context being investigated. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics PO Box 15156 Washington, DC 20003 From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Feb 15 01:45:10 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 20:45:10 EST Subject: "pronoun" is semantic or distributional? Message-ID: Another way of seeing why our long discussions have been at cross purposes is the following. Pat Ryan, in attempting to conform to the terminology being used by Larry Trask, wrote the following: >[PR] >Perhaps the discussion could be foreshortened. 'My' could perhaps be termed >a "pronominal determiner". This is a perfectly reasonable position, *GIVEN* that Pat is using the word "pronoun", here in the form "pronominal", as a semantic-functional term (referring to persons etc.). I believe that is an accurate statement, even if Pat's explanations have not said so explicitly. Trask is however using "pronoun" as a distributional class. For Trask, "pronominal" and "determiner" are a contradiction because both refer to distributional classes, distinct classes, one standing for a full noun phrase, the other as a modifying element part of a noun phrase (loosely put). Back to Pat Ryan's terminology: "possessive pronoun" is perfectly reasonable when both terms are taken in their semantic-functional senses. But Trask does not use "pronoun" that way. (Nor do I, when I am dealing with distributional classes.) Pat Ryan seems not to understand that "she" does not substitute for "woman" with "the" mysteriously not manifest. Rather, "she" stands for the entire noun phrase "the woman", normally with all modifying semantics also included, so that "she who came yesterday" is at the margins in modern English, a rather unusual construction, even if perfectly grammatical. As Trask points out, "the she who came yesterday" is not grammatical. On the other hand, Pat Ryan could also point out that in "her book", the "her" stands also (in Trask's analysis I think also) for the entire noun phrase modifying book in (the woman who came yesterday's book), and thus may be regarded as the genitive or possessive form of the pronoun "she", in the contrast "she" vs. "her book", just as "the woman who came yesterday's" is the genitive form of the noun phrase "the woman who came yesterday". That is all consistent in the standard analysis, I believe? My point, as it has been for some time, is that despite whatever Pat Ryan may or may not understand of the type of distributional analysis represented by many of us, his terminology was quite consistent and sensible, and used an older tradition in the meaning of "pronoun", a semantic-functional one. He should not be beaten upon for that. Even Trask's distributional usage might be criticized by a purist, in that for him a "pronoun" does not stand for a "noun" but rather for a noun phrase. So we should all give up the term "pronoun"? I certainly don't advocate that, despite how misleading it may be to some. Larry Trask was kind enough to take the time to distinguish semantic-functional senses from distributional senses, but I think had not acknowledged that much of the discussion was motivated not by a lack of knowledge on Pat Ryan's part, but rather by Pat Ryan using "pronoun" in a semantic-functional sense. With different definitions, the discussion was bound to be unfruitful. So can we please stop trying to prove each other wrong, and get back to discovering interesting things about the real world? Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics *** The following is a refinement, dealing with a more difficult "edge" case. Paul Postal (I think it was) many years ago argued that in expressions like "we linguists" the "we" was the head of the construction and the "linguists" was something like an appositive (I don't remember the details just now). I don't think this kind of construction is usefully laid up against "those linguists", arguing the reverse of Postal's position that "we" can be a determiner, because it is understood as "we, who are linguists" (non-restrictive), more than as a restrictive "those linguists who are we" in the manner of "the house which is here" ~=~ "this house". *** From sarima at friesen.net Wed Feb 16 02:49:30 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 18:49:30 -0800 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: <00c901bf744f$1c992460$6da294d1@roborr.uottawa.ca> Message-ID: At 12:16 AM 2/11/00 -0500, colkitto at sprint.ca wrote: >[ Moderator's note: > The following is quoted from a posting by Stanley Friesen, made on Sat, > 05 Feb 2000 22:05:24 -0800. > --rma ] >>In this context I was really only pointing out that language "suffers" from >>one of the main issues I see in all biological studies: fuzzy, imprecise >>boundaries. There is no precise way to distinguish one language from >>another. >What is the problem with so-called "fuzzy" thinking? Is this a >manifestation of "physics envy"? *I* have no problem with it, that is why I put "suffers" in quotes. Indeed it is my default mode in matter like this (though I do have an almost irrepressible drive to classify everything). But there are many who do have trouble with it, perhaps even some here. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Feb 14 21:07:55 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 21:07:55 -0000 Subject: reality of PIE Message-ID: Continuing the discussion on relationship: (No doubt I will have to admit stupidity soon, but do bear with me as I try to explain what I meant.) As often it may be that terms are being used in different ways - probably my fault! Larry said: > Without a tolerably unified PIE ..... Quite! My point is that we cannot go beyond the "tolerably unified" and speak of a single, undifferentiated language. I thought this was standard stuff. To reconstruct PIE without allowing for some internal variety would seem to me - in my innocence, and in light of the IE evidence - somewhat doubtful. Indeed, this very variety is what some of the glottalicists rely on - for example, in order to link Skt /bh/ with Germanic */b/, both derived from dialectic allophones (or "dialectophones") of b/bh. That's just one example - you know the kind of stuff I mean. A single unified PIE is certainly not what we can reconstruct, except as an artificial abstraction. A more interesting and slightly philosophical question is whether we believe a perfectly unified pre-PIE is a necessity. I am arguing that it is not - that dialect variation within a language is perfectly normal, and the daughter languages may indeed reflect that variation, and even show mixing of the dialects (as modern English does). Of course there are examples of a single dialect spawning variant daughters, but I am challenging the assumption that all daughter languages must - by definition - come from a single undifferentiated original. >>> Genetically related languages were once the same language. On this, Larry said: >The statement above is true ... by definition. This begs the question I asked above, and also relies on questions of definition - are we talking of a single unifed undifferentiated language? That's the concept I am attacking. It is not true *by definition* that genetically related langauges derive from a single undifferentiated ancestor. It may be true by definition that they derive from closely related forms of that language, but where is your evidence that all must come from a single form of that language? I think it is an assumption open to challenge and debate. >Languages which do not > descend from a common ancestor are not genetically related. Even if they descend from sister languages, which are themselves descended from different dialects, which are themselves reflexes - maybe quite complex ones - of an earlier dialect continuum - which is itself the result of earlier close dialects - etc etc .... So that there is no single unified undifferentiated ancestor? Or do you believe that there always must be a single ancestor without variation? Perhaps we are again using different meanings of "common ancestor" - yours more loose, including variation, and mine excluding it in order to make the point that a single dialect-free ancestor may not be necessary. >Proto-Germanic, ..., looks nothing like a creole. It was intended as an example, and I accept that it was a misleading one. Creoles - how can you describe a Creole as descended from a single ancestor? Doesn't his mean prioritising one of its "parents" over the other? >the English plural This was answered in another post - I accept that it is an expansion of an English original. But it was just an example. Your restriction of "related" to mean only "genetically related" means we cannot say, "English shows a closer relationship to French than to Italian." Instead we have to spell out the nature of that relationship, and say, "English is equally related to both French and Italian, but has been more deeply influenced by... and so on." I want to say both sentences have their place, and given the right understanding of "relationship", both are true. You appear to be saying that the first is always wrong. I would say it is only wrong if "relationship" is understood purely in a genetic sense. So I ask, is the only relationship two languages can have, a genetic one? (Indeed you talk of "inventing non-existent "relationships", and confusing these with > genetic links?") What about Sprachbuende, etc? There are other relationships - so why deny them? Why not keep the word "relationship" open, and specify "genetic" when necessary? Peter From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 15 13:39:44 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 08:39:44 EST Subject: reality of PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 2/14/00 4:08:53 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk wrote: <> But notice what you are saying here. By calling this definitional, you are saying really it doesn't matter whether even one linguist BELIEVES it or not - if it is true by definition. Just like assumptions in a geometry proof, you don't need to BELIEVE the side of triangle A = the side of triangle B. All you need to do is PROCEED AS IF.... "Let x = y" is the way we've phrased it since Pythagoras. The Greek geometrists would politely ask the observer to "allow" x = y, for the sake of proceeding with the proof. A wonderfully civil approach perhaps worth emulating. This is all aside from a definition's relevance to the real world. To the extent you never find equal sides in the real world, your definition and also your "proof" may have no real world application. larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk also quoted: > and that therefore English has a > different relationship to French and Italian, not an identical one ...and then larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk replied: <> Well, that's also a matter of definition. What you described - the influence of French on English - was a relationship in a certain, normal sense. Some folks are related by marriage. You are just saying here that 'relatedness' must be 'genetic.' However, the 'relationship' you are describing between French and English is HARDLY 'non-existent.' No reason to usurp every word that derives from 'relate," is there? Even biological geneticists use the word 'relationship' in its normal sense. Why not let 'relatedness' be a restricted technical term. But let 'relationship' retain its good, sensible, normal, understandable and very useful wider meaning. "Allow" that, if you would. But all this also brings up the issue of 'reification.' As we have been reminded on this list in the past, we can get carried away and start believing our working concepts are real flesh and blood things. We already know that a language itself may be a "non-existent" entity. I don't need to cite Gaston Paris on the undefinablity of the real world line between French and Italian. Just do a word search of the IE list archive entering the phrase "reification" and you'll see plenty of evidence from Prof. Trask on just how theoretically intracable the idea of a "language" really is. So, it seems rather odd to be fretting here about inventing 'non-existent relationships.' Especially since the relationships we are talking about are between what appear to be 'non-existent' entities. After reading those old 'reification' posts, you might begin to feel as if we are arguing here about whether Snoopy is or isn't - technically - Charlie Brown's dog. Regards, Steve Long From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Feb 15 16:46:06 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 11:46:06 EST Subject: Assumptions in Computing phylogenies Message-ID: Thanks to Sean Crist for once again clarifying what the UPenn group is doing. I believe some further clarifications are in order about possible questions which may be raised, without claiming to be an expert on this. I may have gotten something quite wrong. I am copying this message to Sean Crist because a later message from him says that he will not be receiving IndoEuropean list messages automatically from now on for a while. I am agreeing with Sean on terminology, on the automaticity of the algorithm and the fact that if it contains a random element, then getting the same unrooted tree result again and again indicates some stability of the tree, etc. Not in discussion here. I am more concerned with problems raised by specialists in biological classification about the technique itself, without implying we need to take everything from biologists. (See other discussions recently.) I am also glad the UPenn team is doing this (computers can help us), at the same time that I am always skeptical about assumptions getting hidden when computers are used. There are simply so many examples of this happening. How to fool oneself unintentionally with statistics, etc. Anyhow, onwards: [SC] >For a given set of coded characteristics for the 10 >taxa ("is a vertebrate", "has a beak"), some of these trees will score >better than others. The problem is to find the one which scores the best, >and the only way to compute the problem deterministically is to compute >the score for _every one_ of these trees. Even computing it deterministically might not give the best answer. An important question is the degree to which using the measure "scores the best" will in fact yield the closest to the TRUE tree of the historical splits which occurred in the history of PIE and its descendants. That is to say, the method and the "scores" used must be *evaluated* against their success judged by other means. They are not themselves the judge of other considerations. They may help us to gain more insight, and a computer can handle much more computation than we can do by hand, so even given that the full computation Sean Crist refers to would take too long to actually carry out, >This would just take too long >over any data sets of larger than trivial size. the technique can still be useful. But the question remains, how closely does the "scoring" system favor a TRUE tree. I am *not here* questioning whether dialect-networks is a better model than a tree, that is a separate question. I am here only concerned with whether the tree produced by *this* technique is the best *tree* possible. The "least strain" on the model may properly correspond to the best score if the scoring system is designed ideally. The result of this technique is by definition not a dialect net. I would be happier if we had a technique that could give results as a combination of dialect net and tree, and assume if we had such a technique, it could handle Germanic better, both as to its place within IE and as to the dialect divisions within it. But such a new technique might, in some versions, make fewer suggestions about tree splits, simply avoiding them in difficult cases. That might be good sometimes (i.e. when the result was true), but bad other times (i.e. when not true). [SC notes the impossibility of doing complete deterministic computations, and that] >In the 1990's, M. Farach, S. Kannan, and T. Warnow worked out >a way of partly getting around the problem. >The mathematics of their algorithm are beyond me, >but as is often the case, you don't have to understand the >internals of an algorithm to be able to understand >what it's computing and to be able to use it. >The practical characteristics of their algorithm are as follows: >1) If the characters allow a perfect phylogeny, the algorithm >will return it. 2) If there is no perfect phylogeny, the algorithm will >return a pretty-good tree, but not one which is guaranteed to be the >best-scoring one out of all the possible trees. However, since the >algorithm involves a random element, >you can repeatedly run the algorithm, and if the same tree >keeps coming up, that's a good indication of the tree's reliability. Then >Don Ringe and Ann Taylor (both Indo-Europeanists) >got together with Tandy Warnow, and applied this method to the family tree of the IE languages. *** Now on to my primary questions: According to one of our correspondents (Stanley Friesen?), the biologists have found that this (?) technique is not highly robust, is subject to artifact effects in several ways, and that the UPenn team have not taken account of these. I have no knowledge to express an opinion on whether they have or have not, but believe these questions should be addressed publicly and clearly. Perhaps they have been, in which case I will appreciate being referred to sources. Perhaps these are among the issues to be more fully explained in a publication in preparation, in which case I will just have to wait, though some sketchy explanations in advance of publication would be helpful. Here are two such claims I think I have seen about artifact effects: (a) results are highly sensitive to the choice of initial characteristics (b) results may be systematically biased by the technique (what someone referred to as the "long branch" attraction effect, if I remember correctly) And here is a third one I raised recently as a question, and do not think the one response I received got me further in my understanding: (c) are results sensitive to whether a dialect in a dialect net is near the center, surrounded by closely related languages, with many nearby characteristics to compare, or near the periphery, surrounded by unrelated languages or isolated, with fewer nearby characteristics to compare? Will these different positions influence results expressed as trees in ways they should not? (That is to say, peripheral dialects may split off or innovate earlier; or they may fail to follow innovations spreading from another part of the dialect network; two quite opposite possibilities. Is the technique biased in these respects?) *** Here is Sean's response to a different question, but relevant to (a): >...the team's work is "mainly based on prior scholarship". >It's quite true that the team >drew on the collective knowledge of the IE scholarly community in >coming up with the character list, much as a biologist might refer to >already-published descriptions of various species in coming up with a >character list for the purpose of computing the evolutionary family tree >of those species. It's obvious that they should do so; they are not >working in a vacuum, and it would be perverse to ignore what we already >know. My own observation (at a lecture by Ringe at the Smithsonian Institution some years ago) was that Ringe expressed "surprise" that the results of using the technique were highly consistent with traditional scholarship. I found that expression of surprise itself surprising, since one would certainly expect that if traditional comparativists had done their job decently and if the UPenn team had done their job decently. But it also made me wonder why Ringe was so strongly emphasizing the superiority of the UPenn technique as compared with previous work. Perhaps simply everyone tends to view their own work as important. I am glad the UPenn team is doing this, and am certain it will at least raise questions which may have been overlooked, and by virtue of using a computer may be able to check some hypotheses which were not previously checked. See the next section below. But results *do* quite properly depend crucially both on the choice of characteristics included in the data and on the interpretation of those characteristics, both in prior scholarship. So there is a sense in which results are partly built in by the selection of characteristics and the interpretation as innovations vs. retentions. This will seem quite proper if one agrees with the conclusions built in, and not if one does not agree with some of them. Presumably traditional scholarship has done its work well, but in that case the results of the UPenn technique really do depend in essential ways on traditional scholarship, the technique cannot question those earlier results which it treats simply as facts, as data. *** Where does the UPenn work fit in a longer view of development of our field? Here is how I see it, as one step in a long chain of steps (as so far presented). Personally, I do think that in order to evaluate whether we think the results of this technique are TRUE (valid, not merely repeatable), we will need a more advanced method which can yield results as a mixture of dialect network and tree structure, at least that, and we will need a much larger amount of data, enough data so that a traditional comparative linguist would be able to identify fairly easily by scanning the data tables of actual forms cases in which there is borrowing or areal influences rather than family-tree phenomena, and the reverse. At that point I would begin to have some confidence that the technique can be applied to more difficult cases with less than optimal quantities of data, and we could begin to measure how reliable are the results of using kinds of subsets of data rather than complete data, then even deriving probability estimates for cases in which we CANNOT have ideal complete data because the time depth is too great. The other area where I think computerization can be most helpful is in developing automatic techniques for detecting assumptions which we need to question, but such usually appear obvious after the fact so we forget them. A good historian of IE studies would know of many trails of analysis which turned out wrong, which could be added here. Consider these two, each embodying the kind of assumption that is often built in unconsciously, perhaps the kind of assumption to which some of our correspondents might be referring. I mention these two simply because they have been of interest to me. If our grouping (say in a dialect net) of gradient centum-satem characteristics relied on an assumption that *k' > c^ > ts > "th", the computer might suggest trying an alternative assumption *k' > ts > {c^ or "th"}. I asked about this in a separate message yesterday, giving phonetic analysis to suggest the second is more realistic, more common, a simpler explanation, whatever. Or, for the Chinese languages, I once read Karlgren's detailed work very carefully, and noticed a great rotation of the vowel space was used as the sound correspondence between two sets of languages in the Chinese family. Karlgren took one form of the vowel space as more original, a second form as derived by rotation of the vowel space. What if we reversed that, took the second form as more original, the first form as derived by a rotation of the vowel space in the opposite direction? How would that affect the family tree or the dialect network for Chinese languages? (There may be good reasons to reject such an alternative assumption, but the question can at least be asked explicitly, and a computer might help to force such assumptions to our conscious level.) *** One of our correspondents has mentioned that the traditional neogrammarians in fact checked their new hypotheses against diagrams in which the sound changes and the vocabulary items affected (?) were displayed on the branches (?) of trees. I would like some detailed references (title, author, *page* in volumes, etc.) to see examples of these. Perhaps, despite our much greater knowledge today, this would still be useful, so that we recognize that our knowledge is always in progress, that we keep its logic always available to us on the surface as much as our display techniques allow us to do so, rather than visually displaying only results without the ability to delve into the reasoning and question them freshly, when either new data *or* new perspectives come along. *** Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics PO Box 15156 Washington, DC 20003 From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Feb 15 16:46:09 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 11:46:09 EST Subject: Celtic closer to Anatolian? Message-ID: For Celtic, is there any argument that on balance the geographic position of Celtic in the earliest stages of PIE dialect network would put it closer to Anatolian, or Tocharian, or Armenian, or etc., because of a few shared isoglosses with those which might be common innovations? Or are any sharings retentions? I am trying to dredge up some old memories. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Feb 15 16:46:10 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 11:46:10 EST Subject: Italic close to Slavic? Message-ID: For Italic, is there any argument that on balance the geographic position of Italic in the earliest stages of PIE dialect network would put it closer to Slavic, or Armenian, or etc., because of a few shared isoglosses with those which might be common innovations? Or are any sharings retentions? In either case, Perhaps shared verbal conjugations? If so, shared with which other IE groupings? I am trying to dredge up some old memories. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Tue Feb 15 12:02:33 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 14:02:33 +0200 Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario In-Reply-To: <73.f3d36e.25cbb926@aol.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 4 Feb 2000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > Perhaps more importantly, inscriptions appearing in Latin, on the US > Dollar, on religious objects and at the end of e-mail messages (but > not on ogham sticks) show NO CHANGE IN THE LANGUAGE at all - 1800 > years later! Yes, and that's how you can tell that it's a dead language. Living languages change; dead ones don't (at least not to the same extext or in the same way). I know that you don't believe that Latin was a dead language in the Middle Ages because so many people spoke it and used it for communication. But it had no native speakers and therefore it was a dead language. Here is a little assignment for you. Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, it to find some text written in English in 1000 AD and then find the same text written in English in 2000 AD. See if you notice any difference. Next find some text written in French in 1000 AD (or any other living language of your choice that was recorded both then and now) and then find the same text written in the same language in 2000 AD. Then find some text written in Latin in 1000 AD and the same text written in Latin in 2000 AD. I suggest the Lord's Prayer for the text sample since it was extensively recorded in various languages over a long period and later examples are not required to be archaizing copies since the text is a translation of a fixed text and the translator is trying to render the original in his own language. I will even give you a leg up and tell you that you can find a ca. 1000 AD English version of the text in H.H. Hock, _Principles of Historical Linguistics_ (1986), p. 3. See if you can see any difference between the treatment of the text in the English and French (or whatever) versions and the Latin version. Then try to generalize your observations and suggest some explanations for the differences. Come back and report when you have finished. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From sarima at friesen.net Wed Feb 16 03:50:53 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 19:50:53 -0800 Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario In-Reply-To: <72.17e0d5a.25d50dfa@aol.com> Message-ID: At 02:02 AM 2/11/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >I disagree. Actually, Renfrew's evidence is still rather compelling. >Although I am willing to reserve judgment until you unveil the amazing "rate >of differentiation" machine - which I understand will place PIE in a small >village in the Ukraine about 3000BC, Look, NOBODY here is making any such claim, or even anything remotely like it. Nobody claims to be able to narrow the homeland down that far, and I can remember nobody here suggesting a divergence as late as 3000 BC. The point is that *overall* levels of differentiation among the earliest dialects are much less than among living dialects. Comparing averages, and calibrating by observed rates of change in the last 3000 years, we can place a fairly secure *upper* *limit* on how old the divergence of PIE is. That upper limit is about 4500 BC. > where four different words for the wheel >would be divied up among the departing IEian children, just before they >marched off to change the language of Europe and half of Asia. Sigh, the upper limit is not based on any *single* vocabulary item. It is based on the fact that studying Greek, plus learning a few rules of thumb, actually makes it possible to understand Sanskrit in a limited way. Much as knowing English and a few phonetic rules often allows one to piece together the general meaning of basic German. (Indeed, perhaps *better* than that). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Wed Feb 16 04:05:43 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 20:05:43 -0800 Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 04:33 AM 2/11/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Linguistically, the American Atlantic coast is certainly not speaking the >same English it did in 1615, but it is still clearly English. Yes. And now add another 500 years of change. I predict that in rather *less* than another 500 years, most people will find the writings from 1615 to be incomprehensible. >When Barlowe describes the Native Americans living on the Outer Banks in >1588, it's in an English that is plainly readable today. Today, yes. 500 years from today, I seriously doubt. And this with modern roads. >If one can picture a slower rate of change than the 19th and 20th Centuries >gave us, it is not hard to see a small number of "peripherally conservative" >colonists slowly weening themselves from the traditions they carried from the >Danube. Unfortunately, nobody has ever observed language change *much* slower than this. (Perhaps Greek, but I am not certain even that was all that much slower). > And that slowness first of all was a matter of slow initial >population expansion which only changes about 4600BC Actually, that would *accelerate* local language change! These widely separated small settlements would have almost no contacts beyond the local area. Each grouping would tend to develop more or less separately in the absence of regular contact. People in a handful of small settlements in the middle of an area otherwise populated by speakers of other languages would tend to pick up many language features from their immediate neighbors. It was really only the increase in English settlement in NA that stabilized the language enough so that it is still recognizable. > - despite what >JoatSimeon at aol.com has been writing, I still only find for example a single >Bandkeramik settlement in modern France before 5000BC. Which, if true, almost *ensures* that the language of its people would diverge rapidly! >and the local "technocomplexes" start to come up all over. There are some >new more general practices like megaliths that show up, but most innovation >is local. The problem with associating the megaliths with IE peoples is that no IE myths or legends show *any* comprehension of the purpose or origin of them! All known IE myths about them are of the "fantastic" nature, none show any trace of any older tradition continuous from their origin. This suggests that even the immediate predecessors of the IE peoples had forgotten what they were for, and who built them. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Wed Feb 16 04:16:19 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 20:16:19 -0800 Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 10:47 AM 2/11/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Yeah, well as you know, I'm looking forward to exactly how you calculate this >differentiation - especially with Hittite and whatever you are >differentiating it from. One measure is basically how hard one must work to explain the differences in cognate words. > If your formula finds Hittite an awful lot like any >language, it sure would have saved Kurylowicz et al a lot of time and >trouble. The problem with Hittite is not the level of differentiation in phonetics, it is the *dearth* of cognates. The ones that *are* there are all very obvious, and easily correlated with their Sanskrit and Greek counterparts. [I still would like to know: do the other early Anatolian languages have so many non-IE words, or is this trait specific to Hittite itself]. >(And I don't know why you think Farsi and Hindi are more differentiated than >Hittite and Sanskrit - haven't a clue. Are you talking about a numerical >degree of differentiation that can be demostrated? ... I know how similar cognate words are in Hittite and Sanskrit. After one abstracts out the differences in writing systems, they are very little different at all. Indeed, if the phonetic differences were all there were, they would be more like dialect variants of one language. Farsi and Hindi, on the other hand, do not have many such transparently similar cognates (and most of those are accidental - much like the fact that in my dialect of English, "worm" is pronounced almost identically to the reconstructed PIE root it derives from [*wrm] - sans endings). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 16 07:11:50 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 02:11:50 EST Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: <In a message dated 2/10/00 12:17:58 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com replied with only >this comment: ><<-- yes, and without any evidence for doing so.>> >I disagree. -- that's obvious, but you still haven't presented any reason for anyone else to agree with _you_, yet. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 16 07:28:22 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 02:28:22 EST Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Yeah, well as you know, I'm looking forward to exactly how you calculate this >differentiation - especially with Hittite and whatever you are >differentiating it from. -- that would require whole textbooks. In fact, it _does_ require whole textbooks. Has it occurred to you that linguists know something about languages? Things whose demonstration can't be summed up in a paragraph? >And I don't know why you think Farsi and Hindi are more differentiated than >Hittite and Sanskrit - haven't a clue. -- Just a little hint: Hittite Sanskrit English genu janu knee kuis ka who kuen ghnanti kill/strike yukan yugam yoke daru taru wood/tree anzas nas us >If this 'degree of differentiation' is based on your personal beliefs, that's >fine. -- well, 200 years of linguistic scholarship, for starters. From alderson at netcom.com Thu Feb 17 01:56:43 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 17:56:43 -0800 Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario In-Reply-To: (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Fri, 11 Feb 2000, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: > When Barlowe describes the Native Americans living on the Outer Banks in > 1588, it's in an English that is plainly readable today. "This island had ^^^^^^^^ > many goodly woods, full of Deere, Conies, Hares and Fowles, in incredible > abundance... Such a flocke of Cranes arose under us, with such a cry > redoubled by many Ecchoes, as if an armie of men had showted all together.... > {and the locals were] Very handsome, and goodly people, and in their manner > as mannerly, and civill, as any of Europe." There is no comprehensibility > problem here even after 400 years and through a lot more changes than the > Bandkeramik folk could ever have experienced. Yes, *readable*. There is no living American, though, who could understand this text spoken at native speed in late 16th Century English on a single hearing. The two forms of the language are simply too different. We are often cozened by writing, and by the habits of the modern stage, to think of Elizabethan English as being similar or identical to our own, and then to extend that thought to the language of non-literate societies over longer periods of time. The content of stories may have stayed the same, as in Homer, but the language did not. (Against Vedic, I call to witness Avestan--whose texts were meaningless to the Parsi priests until western linguists began to decipher them.) Rich Alderson From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Tue Feb 15 17:20:32 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 19:20:32 +0200 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) In-Reply-To: <0uc5askf7l79k2nj7net21la6jh7h53l6i@4ax.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 10 Feb 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > "Vidhyanath Rao" wrote: >> From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" >>> Still, the unmarked form is a simple past, while the marked forms >>> are the imperfective ("durative", "present-future") with >>> geminated C2, and the perfect (CtCC [iptaras], with infix -t-). >>> Such a system is potentially very close to one with unmarked past >>> vs. marked present (all it takes is the loss of the perfect). >> Is it s a simple past or narrative past? [zero forms do survive as >> subsequent forms even when they have been ousted from isolated >> sentences, conversation etc.] > I don't know much about Akkadian syntax, but what I gather is: > The preterite (iprus) is the unmarked narrative past. This is generally true. > The perfect (iptaras) is less frequent. According to Lipin'ski > it denotes "that a state is produced in someone or in something, > whether it be caused by another or by himself/itself". The -t- > infix in other Semitic languages (as well as in Akkadian modal > forms) denotes a reflexive (Ugaritic yr-t-HS "he washed himself", > preterite with t-infix). Avoid Lipin'ski. At least as far as Akkadian is concerned (I don't have the competence to judge his treatment of the other languages). Lipin'ski gives no footnotes so you do not know whose opinion he is basing his description on and in most cases, what the evidence is for the position he takes. But even worse, he glides over controversial points without even indicating that there is a controversy. Only one point of view is ever expressed and there is no way for the uninformed reader to know this or to know what the relative merits of the unmentioned positions are. For Akkadian use the most recent edition of von Soden's grammar. In classical Old Babylonian the perfect expresses an action that is subsequent to some previous action. In narrating the past, an action that took place in the past is normally expressed with the preterite; subsequent actions (usually ones that are dependent on the first action or result from it) are expressed by the perfect (coordinate actions will still be expressed by the preterite). Since the perfect is used to express subsequent action, it can also be used after a present/ future as a future perfect. In later periods (Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian) the distinction disappears. In main clauses only the perfect is used to express the past. The preterite is now restricted to subordinate clauses. The use of iptaras quoted from Lipin'ski is not really the perfect (it doesn't have to do with time), but a t-stem form used as a middle verb. There is both a stem-forming -ta- infix and a tense-forming -ta- infix. The former results in reflexives and reciprocals to the basic stem (G stem) and in passives to the derived stems (D and $ stems). Sometimes it is used to deny the participation of an agent in the action (i.e., it happened all by itself; cf. R. Reagan: "Mistakes were made"). > I don't know to what extent the imperfective (iparras, > "present/future") was used in past tense contexts. Judging by > its traditional name, not often. The present/future is often used to express a durative in the past. > There is also the Akkadian stative (paris), which is is the > normal perfective / past tense in other Semitic languages (having > ousted the preterite), but which in Akkadian is a true stative, > i.e. a verbal adjective (paris "he is separate"(?)). The Akkadian stative is indeed a verbal adjective and in the basic stem is the least marked form (in derived stems the stative/verbal adjective has the same form as the infinitive) in the tense system. But the form is not unmarked as the vocalization (CaCiC) is a marking (the unmarked form of the verb is the basic stem imperative). I always explain the stative as the absolute form of the verbal adjective to which the bound forms of the nominative personal pronouns are added (the bound form of the third person masculine singular being 0). The stative makes no reference to time and is often used as a permansive (particularly in geographical descriptions: $umma a:lu ina me:le $akin 'if a city is situated on a hill'). In stative verbs the stative simply expresses the existence of the state (damiq 'it is good'); coming into the state at some point in time (inchoative/ingressive) is expressed by the present/future or preterite. In intransitive action verbs, the function of the stative gets blurred; it often expresses an action that was going on or a state that existed when some other action took place or an action that took place over a certain period of time (often translated by a past or present progressive tense). In transitive verbs, the stative is often translated as a passive (the verbal adjective functions as a passive participle); thus paris 'it is decided', Sabit 'he is captured'. > Campbell ("Compendium of the World's Languages") says: > "Instead of the typical Semitic division into perfective and > imperfective aspects, Akkadian has an idiosyncratic quadruple > segmentation which corresponds broadly to a present/ > preterite/perfect system, with the fourth memeber acting as a > kind of stative". Formally, the Akkadian stative corresponds to the West Semitic perfective (and the Egyptian so-called "old perfective") and the Akkadian preterite corresponds to the West Semitic imperfective. The Akkadian present/ future is not represented in West Semitic (although Ethiopic has a similar form) and West Semitic has stem-forming -ta- forms but of course no tense- forming ones. > Diakonov (in EB), contrary to Lipin'ski, seems to say that the > preterite was in origin a perfective (opposed to the iparras > imperfective). "Later a new "perfect" with an infixed -ta- in > the stem developed". It is hard to say whether iparras is an innovation of East Semitic or was original and lost in West Semitic (the Ethiopic form makes a decision difficult). A plausible case could be made for iprus and iparras once having been the same form with the outcomes being the result of differences in stress. If so, then the 'old perfective' became the stative and simply dropped out of the tense system (it is not specific with regard to time). But the sequence presented by Diakonov is correct. Old Akkadian has iparras as does Eblaite, but there are no clear examples of tense-forming -ta- (although stem-forming -ta- is present). Unquestionable examples of tense-forming -ta- do not appear until archaic Old Babylonian (around 2000 BC). Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From rao.3 at osu.edu Fri Feb 18 21:03:31 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2000 16:03:31 -0500 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" wrote: > I don't know to what extent the imperfective (iparras, > "present/future") was used in past tense contexts. > Judging by its traditional name, not often. When it comes to aspectual questions, IMHO, depending on names is a poor guide to syntax. >Come to think of it, Hittite (unlike Akkadian) is quite clear. >The forms without -i are past tense, those with -i present. Actually it is not that clear: There have been suggestions (Josephson, ``The role of sentence particles in Old and Middle Hittite'') that sentence particles had an aspectual role as well. More recent work (Boley ``Sentence particles and place words in Old and Middle Hittite'') suggests local meaning overall but `kan' is given a terminative function for the most part. These need not be mutually exclusive (eg Russian). The more important question in our context is if there is any difference between the tenses in sentences/clauses with and without these particles. I don't know this has been studied (I don't know enough about Hittite to do it without large doses of guidance.) BTW, I remember reading that the Hittite `preterit`, in some cases, to have a performative meaning. I can't find the reference now. Is this true? [Some examples of RV injunctive may be classified as performative, eg RV 1.32: indrasya nu vi:rya:n.i pra vocam.] From rao.3 at osu.edu Fri Feb 18 21:13:32 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2000 16:13:32 -0500 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: "petegray" wrote: > I also seem to remember that the Greek pattern of accentuation in > verbs is a development within Greek - RV keeps the accent further > back. I don't unerstand this. Augmented forms are accented on the augment in RV. In case of unaugmented forms, the accent is generally on the root in the s/is aorist, and shifts between the root and ending in the root aorist. > (b) where is the evidence on the correlation mentioned between > asigmatic aorists and absence of augment? Blumenthal, Some Homeric evidence for the history of the augment , IF 79(1974) 67--77: The data given here is from Iliad 11, but only forms which are metrically secure are counted. Imperfect has 28 augmented and 73 unaugmented, strong aorist has 27 and 76 respectively and weak aorist 37 and 50. I calculated chi-square p-value to be 0.027 from this data for lack of difference between the two aorists. Blumenthal also adds that the ratio of augmented to unaugmented forms is 1:2 in speeches and 1:3 in narrative, and also that in dual (all forms), pluperfect and aorist passives, the figures are 1&6, 8&4 and 5&1. His conclusion is that the augment is young is so is more frequent in newer formations than older ones. From rao.3 at osu.edu Fri Feb 18 21:50:28 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2000 16:50:28 -0500 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: "Ross Clark" wrote: > It is also a feature of Bickerton's prototypical Creole verb > system: an unmarked non-stative verb is interpreted as past; > to make a present you add the non-punctual aspect marker. Bybee et al do talk about creoles, with the conclusion that it supports them: Zero forms are perfective limited to the past on dynamic verbs, but present on statives, a feature also found in some non-creole languages. The problem here may be the definitions of the terms `perfective' and `simple past'. Bybee et al follow the definition of Comrie, with a nod to the modifications proposed by Dahl: A form that is limited to past events considered as a whole is classified as a perfective and not a past. It does not matter if such forms have no non-past versions. In English, for example, we use the same form in both She sang the whole song She sang to him every day. We can also say I knew it even before you told me. without any implication that my knowing whatever it is is over. In Tamil, to say ``I gave it to him'', one says avanukk- atai koDutten. where `koDutten' stands for `gave'. But avanukk- atai koDutten, a:na:l avan atai vangikk- koLLavillai means ``I offered it to him, but he did not accept it.'' The form used for neutral statements and narration can still have habitual, past state or connative meanings. If a form is used for past and narration is excluded from these three, it should be classified as a perfective, not as a simple past. From a.rosta at uclan.ac.uk Tue Feb 15 18:34:00 2000 From: a.rosta at uclan.ac.uk (A Rosta) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 18:34:00 -0000 Subject: Celtic's rate of differentiation Message-ID: Steve Long to "JoatSimeon": > You have no problem with proto-Latin arising among the other Italic > languages before 500BC, wiping out those other languages and giving rise > to modern Romance languages 2500 years later. > But you do have a problem with proto-Celtic arising among related languages > before 800BC, wiping out those related languages and giving rise to the > Celtic languages 1000 years later. By what process would proto-Celtic have wiped out those related languages? By late migrations triggered by something other than the spread of agriculture? If Celtic could spread without agriculture as its vehicle, would that make Renfrew's model less compelling (--because it might imply that PIE too could spread without agriculture as its vehicle)? [Excuse my butting in, but you two seem to be exasperatedly talking across each other.] --And Rosta. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 16 07:10:20 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 02:10:20 EST Subject: Celtic's rate of differentiation Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >You have no problem with proto-Latin arising among the other Italic languages >before 500BC, wiping out those other languages and giving rise to modern >Romance languages 2500 years later. -- obviously not, since it's historically observable that this is what happened. Although Late Latin starts to give rise to the modern Romance languages about 1000 years later, not 2500 -- roughly around the time of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the centuries after 400 CE. Nor does the structure of early Latin contradict a reasonable divergence date for the IE languages. On the contrary, early Latin shows very strong similiarties to all the other early IE languages; which is, of course, just what you'd expect if they hadn't been separated all that long. >But you do have a problem with proto-Celtic arising among related languages >before 800BC -- on the contrary. We were discussing _Renfrew's_ hypothesis, which is that the Celtic languages developed _in situ_ among established IE-speakers all across their historic range from the British Isles to the Danube. That is, that there were no migrations of Celtic speakers in the recent past to account for the uniformity of the Celtic languages as observed by Classical authors and surviving textual evidence. You now disagree with this? >wiping out those related languages and giving rise to the >Celtic languages 1000 years later. -- now you're postulating a Celtic Empire analagous to the Roman Empire? Interesting... To recapitulate: when first observed, the Celtic languages show very close similarities, and a rather conservative overall structure -- particularly when compared with the extensive restructuring they undergo in the early medieval period. In other words, early Celtic is much more similar to, say, Latin, than Gaelic is a few centuries later. This indicates that the Celtic languages had spread from a fairly small core sometime not long before they were first observed; something like a millenia, or less, before the 200's BCE. (Early Urnfield at the earliest, if you want an archaeological reference.) (Incidentally, the linguistic comparisons also indicate that Italic and Celtic had diverged sometime quite recently -- second millenium BCE, I'd say.) >Obviously, a lot could have gone on between Renfrew's 'an early indo-european >language' and the rise of an identifiable Celtic. -- whatever it was, it couldn't have involved much linguistic change, since the early Celtic languages lack most of the distinguishing features which they later developed. Eg., Hispano-Celtic retains the PIE labio-velars; and one could go on. >There could have been plenty of languages and dialects that developed in >between. -- not an leave the early Celtic languages so similar, and with so little change between them and PIE. >THERE IS NOTHING THAT SAYS THAT A STRING OF ANCESTRAL >LANGUAGES CAN'T SEPARATE NON-ANATOLIAN PIE FROM CELTIC. -- well, yes, there is. The similarity of early Celtic to PIE. There is, so to speak, not enough linguistic "room" between proto-Celtic and PIE. No 'space' for many intermediary languages. >Nobody said anything about the languages staying uniform over any great >period of time. -- Renfrew did. >You are simply not comprehending that there is no requirement that Celtic >come directly out of PIE - any more than that modern Greek came directly out >of PIE. -- compare modern and Mycenaean Greek, and then the latter with PIE, and you may begin to grasp this point. Modern Greek is much more different from PIE than Mycenaean Greek is. Eg., in Mycenaean Greek, the word for "cow" is still 'gous', which is very similar to the PIE *gwous. Early Celtic (still less proto-Celtic) is just _not different enough_ from PIE to be the result of a long process of intermediary change. There aren't enough changes. >NOT DIFFERENTIATED ENOUGH? HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT? -- by use of the comparative method; which is how we know that there's such a thing as "PIE" in the first place. From alderson at netcom.com Thu Feb 17 01:40:07 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 17:40:07 -0800 Subject: Celtic's rate of differentiation In-Reply-To: <33.12aa02a.25d50764@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Fri, 11 Feb 2000, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote, in response to S. M. Stirling: > In a message dated 2/2/00 12:43:52 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > < have been separated by that depth of time!>> > NOT DIFFERENTIATED ENOUGH? HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT? Because we have the texts: Vedic Sanskrit, Avestan and Old Persian, Homeric (and the later-discovered Mycenaean) Greek, early Latin, Hittite and the other Anatolian languages, ad nauseam. The languages we see are not much further apart, to casual inspection, than the Romance or Germanic families. You would have done better, rather than resorting to sarcasm, to point out Lithuanian verb and noun morphology in your argument, since they have retained to this day a number of similarities to Vedic Sanskrit, across a gulf of 3500 years--though several have been lost in the last 500. Rich Alderson From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 16 06:42:07 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 01:42:07 EST Subject: The degree of differentiation Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >I'm still waiting for you to tell us how you measure this critical and all >important "degree of differentiation," that "we" are using with such thorough >confidence. -- that would require that you study the languages and linguistics. I can't do that for you; but if you begin now, you should be able to address the question in no more than four or five years. >BUT you have insisted to a fare-thee-well that you somehow >magically know how much time it takes for languages to differentiate in >prehistoric times. -- merely that we must proceed on the assumption that languages in prehistoric times changed and differentiated, other things being equal, about as they do in historic times. From sarima at friesen.net Wed Feb 16 02:45:15 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 18:45:15 -0800 Subject: Numbers as "Core Vocabulary" (was IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000210083449.0094d2e0@staff.uiuc.edu> Message-ID: At 08:43 AM 2/10/00 -0600, Peter A. Michalove wrote: >replacement (by borrowing) of numerals. One of the activities that leads >to language contact and bilingualism is trade. Of course, trade is an >activity in which the numerals are essential, and one must know the >numerals of one's trading partners. >Therefore numerals are often subject to borrowing (others have cited >several examples on this list), and the case of Indo-European, where the >numeral system is well preserved throughout almost all of the family, has >probably acted as a misleading example Hmm, I wonder. Could the stability of numerals in early PIE be due to it being a language of trade? If so, this tends to support my current model of how it spread originally (at least in Europe). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 16 06:38:23 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 01:38:23 EST Subject: Bandkeramik and non-Anatolian PIE Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >So I'm connecting Bandkeramik with post-Anatolian PIE -'narrow PIE'. I'm >sure as an expert linguist you are familiar with the concept. -- Quite. Although you're now left with the little matter of explaining how the entire area from Hungary to Greece ended up speaking languages which evolved from PIE well after the branchoff of Anatolian. Of course, that's a bagatelle. >If you do not understand the connection I'm making between Bandkeramik and >non-Anatolian PIE, please address that fact. -- and here I thought you were agreeing with Renfrew... >I won't address here your apparent claim that Myceanaean and Latin are almost >identical languages (2 on a scale of 1-10 - a 1 score being I presume >identical). -- "quite similar" rather than "identical". >I was being consistent with the subject - which was POST-ANATOLIAN PIE. -- actually, we were discussing Renfrew's views on the spread of the IE languages _as a whole_. From alderson at netcom.com Wed Feb 16 21:28:08 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 13:28:08 -0800 Subject: Lusitanian/Celtic/Italic [was Basque ] In-Reply-To: (message from Rick Mc Callister on Sun, 6 Feb 2000 00:17:56 -0600) Message-ID: I notice that no one else has responded. I have a couple of comments: On Sun, 6 Feb 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Yes, the /p/ problem does distinguish it from Celtic > I've also seen the theory that it was cognate with Celtic and Italic as a > member of a W IE branch > Ed Selleslagh has floated the idea that it might be Q-Italic Q-Celtic, I think you mean. > For me, this rasises the question of the validity of Italic as a group. If > Lusitanian were Q-Celtic, that would imply either > 1: the split between P- & Q-Italic occured before Italic entered Europe > 2: P- & Q-Italic are actually different branches of Western IE and that the > resemblances in phonology and lexicon are actually due to adstrate and common > substrate > Q-Celtic does seem to be in a peculiar little spot on the lower Tiber that > would seem to be prime real estate for interlopers Here, I think you mean Q-Italic. If Lusitanian were Q-Celtic, that would not save the

objection, since *all* Celtic languages lose PIE *p-. Cf. OIr. _athair_ "father" as an example. It has been argued before that P- and Q-Italic do not form a single branch, on morphological as well as lexical and phonological grounds, but there are also arguments on the basis of shared innovations in the morphology that they *do* form a single branch. I have always considered the Italo-Celtic hypothesis weak at best, with any other evidence being adduced to shore up the connection best characterized as "Well, they both have P- and Q- branches, don't they, so they must be closely related, mustn't they?" But I think Italic and Celtic, with similar parallel changes, are safely established. Rich Alderson From alderson at netcom.com Thu Feb 17 01:25:16 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 17:25:16 -0800 Subject: Bandkeramik and non-Anatolian PIE In-Reply-To: (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Thu, 10 Feb 2000, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: > I've often used the term non-Anatolian and 'narrow' PIE to describe PIE after > its separation from Hittite and the other Anatolian languages. This is > rather orthodox linguistics. Only of one school. There are many Indo-Europeanists who do *not* accept that Anatolian is to be viewed as a sister of the entire rest of the IE family. In fact, I would say that the "Indo-Hittite" hypothesis is accepted by very few, almost all students of one person (and certainly of one department) in the US. Rich Alderson From stevegus at aye.net Fri Feb 18 00:00:37 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2000 19:00:37 -0500 Subject: Old Irish Message-ID: As to the possible artificiality and semi-cryptographic quality of at least some Old Irish texts; and the more certain hermeticism of some Hiberno-Latin texts, I did find online a copy of "Adelphus adelpha mater," author unknown, which can be read (or at least looked at) at the following URL: http://www.ucc.ie/celt/online/L400003/ Much of the jargon in the poem is recognisably Greek. But there are enough obscurities in it to keep several Champollions awake for several nights. -- Sella fictili sedeo Versiculos dum facio. From jrader at m-w.com Fri Feb 18 14:45:35 2000 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2000 14:45:35 +0000 Subject: Old Irish Message-ID: [Steve Gustafson]: > I know that literary Irish (and continental missionary Irish) monks > delighted in a strange Latin jargon they called 'Hisperica famina," which > actually meant 'Irish speech.' (Famina for 'speech' is an interesting bit > of etymologising in itself.) They mixed up archaic or newly coined Latin > words with bits of Greek and Hebrew. This flourished in around the sixth > century --- about the time of the earliest OIr. glosses, if I remember > rightly. St. Columba's -Altus prosator- is one of the best known, if > relatively less extreme, examples of the style. According to Michael Herren in the notes to his edition of the _Hisperica famina_, is a variant of post-classical Latin , "western," "Italian" (because Italy was west of Troy), and hence "elegant" in Late Latin terms, referring to Roman as opposed to provincial Latinity. is used in the same sense in the _Hisperica_. is not to be confused with , "Hisperica famina" does not mean "Irish speech," and any resemblance between the Latin of the _Hisperica_ and Old Irish grammar is fortuitous. Jim Rader From fabcav at adr.dk Sat Feb 19 07:40:16 2000 From: fabcav at adr.dk (Fabrice Cavoto) Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2000 08:40:16 +0100 Subject: Indic rag(h)- Message-ID: Dear IEnists, Does anybody have some information about the Indic verbal root ragh-/rag-/rak-, which has a variety of meanings incl. 'to obtain, to get'. According to Monier-Williams, this root is only found in the root list appended to Panini's grammar of Sanskrit. I was wondering if anybody knows of this root in any other context, especially in in later Indic (Indo-Aryan) or even in the rest of Indo-Iranian? Also, if anybody knows the current state of the debate concerning the reality of Sanskrit roots that are only attested in the native grammatical or lexical works. Best regards Fabrice Cavoto. Fabrice Cavoto Badstuestrede 4, 2. sal DK-1209 Kobenhavn K. Danmark Tel.: (45) 33 14 17 54 E-mail: fabcav at adr.dk From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 22 06:29:33 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 01:29:33 EST Subject: language and biology Message-ID: At 12:29 PM 2/7/00 +0000, Larry Trask wrote: >Historical linguistics, by definition, deals with language change. >And language change does not result from biological change: it results >from social factors. In a message dated 2/21/00 9:12:55 PM, Stanley Friesen replied: <> But is this question relevant to the issue of whether recent biological models may help in linguistic analysis? Does really doesn't matter if you classify languages as biological phenomena or not? It would seem that if you are after 'genetic' relatedness, biology provides pretty good models for such concepts associated with the transfer of attributes by 'descent' as wll as by other mechanisms. The analogy may not be perfect, but the prototypical idea of attributes passing from parental to filial generations must come from biology. In fact, I suspect the whole idea of relatedness among languages is by analogy from the biological notion of inheritance. (Although I'm conscious that Grimm predates Mendel.) And clearly the notion of strata in languages must have been a concept borrowed from geology. Systems may have similar organizations not because their constituents are relateable. The similarity in organization may come from the fact that the tasks are similar though the pieces are different. The history of human technology is often, e.g., analogized with natural selection, and the two processes often parallel one another. It should not be that hard to see how biology and linguistics might follow the same paths and processes in terms of 'genetics', though their subject matters are materially different. Regards, Steve Long From mclasutt at brigham.net Tue Feb 22 15:35:55 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 08:35:55 -0700 Subject: language and biology In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000211171019.00996820@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: > [Stanley Friesen wrote:] The point is that social change is another form > of biological process, it > is just not *genetic* change. Social change operates under the general > constraints and modes of biological processes, even though it does not > directly involve genetic factors. No it doesn't. One society can change it's entire structure virtually overnight to match another society. An organism may borrow (if your data are correct) a few genetic features from another organism in rare circumstances, but a blue-green algae cannot change to a bacteria overnight. Society can, however. The Pueblo culture of New Mexico is virtually identical from Pueblo to Pueblo, yet this culture is practiced by representatives of four totally unrelated language families. On the social level, there are radically different social and political systems between the Hopi and the Shoshoni even though they are related. Social change and biological change are NOT similar. Once again, social change, like linguistic change, can borrow from another society wholesale and biological change cannot. IF biologists are discovering a few instances where genes can be "borrowed", they are the exception rather than the rule. IF biologists discover that borrowing of genes is more common than presently accepted, then the correct statement is that biological change is similar to social or linguistic change, NOT the other way around. We staked out the scientific ground first. Biology, IF you are correct (which I don't accept yet), is only catching up. 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 JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 22 07:41:23 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 02:41:23 EST Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Re:=20Tocharian=20A=20w=E4s,=20B=20yasa?= Message-ID: >anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi writes: >1) What was the Proto-Tocharian form? (If it was something like *wVsV with >front vowels, it fits quite well with Proto-Samoyed *wes?. A loan Samoyed > >Tocharian is also geographically the most sensible alternative, if Tocharian >was connected with the Afansevo culture.) -- Tocharian A/B 'was' and 'yasa' from proto-Tocharian *wesa. >2) Is there any other plausible etymology for the Tocharian word? -- Proto-Tocharian *wesa from *haues (with metathesis) from PIE *haeus PIE *haeusom, 'gold' also producing Old Latin 'auron', Old Prussian 'ausis', Lithuanian 'auksas'. There's a possible Mycenaean Greek cognate, 'awos'. (The Classical Greek word for 'gold' is a loan from Akkadian, 'hurasu', 'gold', also found in Hittite. Attested in Mycenaean times as well -- 'kurusos') From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 22 07:50:09 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 02:50:09 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 2/22/00 1:30:33 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: <<-- yup, PIE.>> I wrote: <> JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: <> Well, I wasn't. I intentionally asked you that question and for a very good reason. Here's the part I wrote that you left out - <<2000 yrs from Myceanaean, Sanskrit and Latin back to what? PIE? Not likely. Because even if Mycenean, Sanskrit and Latin were as 'undifferentiated' as is claimed above, this group HARDLY REPRESENTS THE FULL RANGE OF DIFFERENCES that emerge out of the darkness of 4000 years, do they?>> (Caps mine.) This part you left out is crucial. Because it means that your 'leap off the page' test does not work on Hittite (@1500BC) or Thracian (@500BC). And although it may be convenient to brush them off, they will not go away. (We have full texts by the way in Thracian, but nothing "leaps off the page" to say the least.) The fact is all you accounted for with the "leaps off the page" criterion is some kind of proto-Mycenaean-Sanskrit-Latin. But you CAN'T logically use those three ONLY to get back to PIE. Otherwise your PIE is only the ancestor of some IE languages - which would be truly, as you say <> Here's the other section that was partly edited out: <> JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: <> No, you are changing the subject. The subject is PIE. And if Hittite is IE and happens to be attested before Sanskrit or Latin, then THAT IS THE SUBJECT. (And let's not make everything a special case that contradicts your claim that the first IE languages were undifferentiated.) Remember what YOU wrote when you started this? In a message dated 2/2/00 12:43:52 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> Well, the first encountered IE languages include Hittite, Luwian, Thracian - all before Latin. Here's your chance to account for why Mycenaean, Latin and Sanskrit can give you a date for PIE, but why somehow it is necessary to exclude the other first encountered IE languages - in fact the first two encountered IE languages. I mean you wouldn't be excluding them because they are DIFFERENTIATED ENOUGH to move your date way back - by whatever measure you are using - would you? JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> I replied: <<...do all these languages decline with only a change in the initial vowel... thus justifying a 2000 year separation between all of them.>> Let's get back to this proof you offered. Does Mycenaean decline 'fire' the same similar way as Latin and Sanskrit? Does Hittite? And how many extra years do you put on the fact that they don't? Or do you only count evidence of little differences and disregard evidence of big differences? JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> Well, it seems that Anatolian is in the picture when the evidence helps, but not when it doesn't. JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> Of course. And where exactly does it have it, by the way? Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 22 08:50:38 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 03:50:38 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: I wrote: <<2000yrs from modern Romance language back to Latin? Then 2000 yrs from Myceanaean, Sanskrit and Latin back to what? PIE? Not likely.>> In a message dated 2/22/00 2:44:46 AM, sarima at friesen.net wrote: <> I'd still like to see your catalogue of the specific differences between Mycenaean, Sanskrit and Latin. Then I'd like to see how you assign a date to those differences. Until then using "almost certainly" for 2000 years seems to be uncalled for. Quite uncalled for. No rational basis has been presented for any such claims of certainty about that date. sarima at friesen.net wrote: <> I think that is the other way around. The I-H hypothesis I believe has Hittite < PIE. In fact I believe there's still an open question whether Anatolian was the innovator or 'narrow PIE' was. Which means yes you would still have to account for the Anatolian differences in dating PIE, accepting the I-H hypothesis. I wrote: <<...Hittite should certainly add another 2000 years, wouldn't you say?>> sarima at friesen.net replied: <> Really, 500 years. Kind of Italian (1500AD) to Italian (2000AD) - except of course for the lack of gender in Hittite - and some other small matters like that. Nothing important. And I see that the rate of loss of "inherited IE words" also does not enter into the time equation. I've looked for objective measures of linguistic change in the books and I do believe that there have been serious efforts in this direction that may yield results in the future. And I do respect the considered judgment of historical linguists in these matters. I just don't believe we've had the benefit of such knowledge in this thread - not from the start of it. This "2000 years" separating Sanskrit, Latin and Mycenaean that's been repeated in these posts looks more and more like it has very little to do with linguistics and a lot to do with unsupported assertions about rate of differentiation. That time period may be true, but I've seen here nothing to support it. sarima at friesen.net wrote: <From what little is know of them, there is no real reason to suppose they are much more differentiated than Latin and Sanskrit.... If we had as few words of Modern English as we have of Thracian, I doubt we could tell it was an IE language at all!>> This is simply incorrect. We have texts in Thracian and the reason we cannot read them is because they are VERY highly differentiated from Latin and Sanskrit and every other known IE language. And it should also be pointed out that the notion that it took many years and much work to establish Hittite's relation to IE, despite the fact that many, many texts were found. There is no necessary correlation here. On the other hand, if early IE were as undifferented as being claimed here, many of these problems in discipherment logically should not have occurred. Regards, Steve Long From sonno3 at hotmail.com Tue Feb 22 17:28:56 2000 From: sonno3 at hotmail.com (Christopher Gwinn) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 12:28:56 -0500 Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >> the undecipherable Thracian, Albanian and Celtiberian should send >> your date of dispersal hurtling back to that magic 7000BC you've >> mentioned so frequently. > -- another bizzare statement. Would you care to elucidate why the existance > of Celtiberian should affect our datings? Particularly as we know virtually > nothing about it, or Thracian. I think you are overstating a bit on Celtiberian - we may not know as much about it as Gaulish, but we are far from knowing "virtually nothing about it" (and it is certainly not undecipherable!) In any case, we know Celtiberian was already being spoken in Spain in the 6th century BC, and that it shares many similarities with the Goidelic branch (PIE -Kw-=Qu/Ku/Cu, for example). Its vocabulary preserves some archaisms not found in Goidelic or Brythonic (Silbur "silver" next to regular Common Celtic word Arganto-) and its sentance structure was SOV From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Tue Feb 22 10:08:39 2000 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 11:08:39 +0100 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) In-Reply-To: <011b01bf761a$89716300$27d31b3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: >How would some of you feel if Renfrew's premise were altered to: >Nostratic spread through Europe with agriculture. >? Renfrew seems to be about to alter this premise himself, maybe (judging from his active role in organizing Nostratic conferences and the like), but it of course begs the question of the existence of Nostratic. It doesn't exist, so it didn't spread anywhere, less so through Europe, and least so with agriculture. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg home: Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-691332+ Georg at home.ivm.de work: http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/vtw/Georg/Georg.html From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Tue Feb 22 11:09:51 2000 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 12:09:51 +0100 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) In-Reply-To: <200002131008.p1267@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: > An easy accessible attempt on this topic is Mark Rosenfelder 'How likely > are chance resemblances between languages? in www.zompist.com/chance.html. > Though in the binomial formulas one faculty mark '!' is always set wrong*, > the results are correct. (*what shows that in one year nobody with minimal > mathematical competence really did read this article). > HJH There is a sizable body of literature on this topic, some with foul, some with fair mathematics, no doubt about this. What most of the books and article I've seen *don't* address, however, is the question how "resemblances" are to be defined in the first place. Your resemblance may not at all be mine, and the literature on macro-comparative efforts illustrates this amply. It is, however, the crucial question. What is more, mathematical approaches like these tend to treat language (always and only lexicon, to be sure, as if lexicon had *anything* to do with lg. classification, which it of course hasn't) as a static entity, ignoring what may be known about the history of individual items. They also ignore the range of psychological factors which increase iconicity in language, something which will always contribute to more "resemblances" being found than the calculation of probabilities seemed to allow, invariably followed by a loud "he:ureka" and startled incomprehension on discovering the linguistic community yawning. This is not against Rosenfelder, whose attempt I've not found easily accessible, mainly because the link above is dead. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg home: Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-691332+ Georg at home.ivm.de work: http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/vtw/Georg/Georg.html From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Feb 22 11:08:17 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 11:08:17 +0000 Subject: Rosenfelder Message-ID: Hans Holm writes: > An easy accessible attempt on this topic is Mark Rosenfelder 'How likely > are chance resemblances between languages? in www.zompist.com/chance.html. A small correction: the final element here should be ".htm", and not ".html". Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 22 20:20:20 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 15:20:20 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >proto-language at email.msn.com writes: >How would some of you feel if Renfrew's premise were altered to: Nostratic >spread through Europe with agriculture. >> -- I'd wonder about lexical influences from Sindarin Elvish. From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Tue Feb 22 11:37:49 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 11:37:49 GMT Subject: The law Message-ID: Did the speakers of common IE have any notion of "the law" as an institution? What was the IE word for "law", either as "the rules to be obeyed" (Latin {lex}), or as "the process of justice" (Latin {jus})? Each IE language that I know of seems to have a different word. My knowledge here is limited and I accept any correction. Doubled vowel = long. Greek w = digamma. - Anglo-Saxon {ae(w)}, compare Greek {ewaoo} = "I allow". - Old Norse {log} < {lagu}, c.f. {l-g-} = "lay, lie": < "that which is laid down"? - Latin {leg-}; the root also occurs as "choose" and "read". - Latin {jus} < *{jous-} : what cognates are there for that word? - Greek {dikee}: same root in Greek {deiknuumi} = "I indicate", Latin {dico} = "I say". - Greek {nomos}: same root in Greek = "I apportion". - Russian {zakon}. From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Feb 22 07:32:31 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 07:32:31 -0000 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: Dear Miguel and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" Sent: Monday, February 14, 2000 12:48 AM > JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >> -- *bergh. > *bherg^h >> There are derivatives in the Germanic language (eg., OHG burg, >> 'fort', or Gothic baurgs, 'city, town'. Homeric Greek (I think -- >> possible spelling error) burghos > That's probably "tower", a Greek substrate word > (so-called "Pelasgian", with Germanic-like *r. > ur, and > Germanic-like b > p, but only after Greek-like Grassmann's Law > *bhrgh > *brgh). Pokorny says that Latin burgus "watchtower" is > borrowed from Greek (but what about p-?). >> , and definitely Armenian burgn. > Wish it were so simple. The root *bherg^h- is regularly > reflected in Armenian as barjr "high" etc., so "tower", a > centum word if IE, does not appear to be native. Birgit (also > from *bherg^h-) Olsen points out that the same irregularity in > the exact same environment is also found in "potter's > wheel" besides darj- "to turn" (*dhrg^h-). There is also Slavic > bre^g- "shore", of course, but there without any satem variants. > To add the finishing touch to the confusion, it's necessary to > mention Urartian "palace, fort". Urartean (non-IE, > related to Hurrian) used to be spoken where Armenian is spoken > now. Into this mix, we might also consider Pokorny's 2. *bhreg^-, 'stand up stiffly', which I believe can be related to Egyptian b3H, 'phallus'. In the correspondences which I believe I have identified, Egyptian H (dotted h) corresponds to IE final -g(h) or g^h. 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 proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Feb 22 07:55:56 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 07:55:56 -0000 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: Dear Stanley and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stanley Friesen" Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2000 7:03 AM > At 10:11 AM 2/8/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> Compare the number of Ce-/Co-roots (e.g. in Pokorny) with the >> number of Ci-/Cu-roots. I guesstimate the difference is a factor >> 10 or so. > Certainly. But in my book, even a handful of such roots is enough to > establish i and u as PIE vowel phonemes. What I believe I have found is that IE /i/ and /u/ correspond to Semitic /y/ and /w/ whenever a cognate can be established (seems likely). >From this, I provisionally conclude that IE went through a stage in which it had one vowel (= Lehmann's SYLLABICITY), which we designate now as /e/, which later developed a conditioned variant /o/. Of course, this means that /a(:)/ was also not an independent part of the vowel system but only could occur in conjunction with a 'laryngeal'; e.g. IE *(H[2])abh-ro-, 'strong, powerful', should, I believe, be compared to Arabic Habba, 'love'. I believe the process through which this happened is roughly that Nostratic, which had phonemic /e,a,o/ came into areal contact which Caucasian languages that favored extreme vowel reduction, and transference of vocalic differences to glides: CE -> Cya; CO -> Cwa, which were subsequently lost when IE began utilizing root extensions for semantic differentiation. 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 rao.3 at osu.edu Tue Feb 22 15:06:32 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 10:06:32 -0500 Subject: *hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-? Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > Let me ask, does evidence of (*hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-?) > appear in any other IE languages? Yes. Lexicon der Indogermanischen Verbum lists h_2werg, `sich umdrehen, sich wenden' (quoting Latin uergere as the evidence for intransitive meaning, and Hittite for h_2 so that Greek e as due to assimilation), with finite verb forms in Sans (though the meaning changes to `turn away from' => avoid for the most part in Classical Sans), Greek and Latin, and a participle in Toch A. From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Feb 22 17:01:36 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 12:01:36 EST Subject: Buck on the WWWeb? Message-ID: As I read messages on the IE list, and piecemeal discussion of particular word families, it seems to me that one of the most useful things we could possibly have is a fully-updated version of something like Buck, but organized by etymon not by semantic meaning. This could be something like a dissertation project and more, not simply a scanning of already existent data. Pokorny is not easily usable in the fashion I have in mind, though I know its computerization has been mentioned. It uses a visual format in which one must read through a paragraph to find info, not as visually accessible as it could be, perhaps, it does not even make use of the vertical vs. horizontal dimensions of the page. That to me is now too old-fashioned, a waste through non-use of potential information-carrying display devices. Buck is much more accessible. Can the two be merged in some way? A recent dictionary of verb stems (citation not handy) is another source, and its publication is recent enough that a CD could perhaps be made available? Just consider the amount of evidence available to correspondents on this list. What if we had a simple listing of cognate roots in each of the languages, with some cross-reference notes such as that both /durgn/ and /borgn/ in Armenian share the non-satemization of the final /g/? (pardon if my memory for the spellings is not right; I'm referring to a message received today). Or what the meaning contrast might be in particular languages where two roots apear with related meanings, such as between reflexes of the /hurkis/ Hittite for 'wheel' and the *kwel- root? When such info is available (more of that kind is in Buck, sometimes). Attestations in the left column, for fast searching, comments to the right. It takes more paper, in printing, but is infinitely more usable, and does not take more storage on CD or on the web. Etc. We need some new tools, and creating them requires work. ***It also requires a very balanced individual to supervise, one who will neither try to prove how rigorous they are by excluding almost everything interesting or on the edges of knowledge, nor one who will include every possibility without distinguishing the kinds of support available, or not, for particular analyses.*** If there are two word-families which within themselves cohere quite clearly, but which pose some problems for linking the two together, then that should be overt and public, not hidden by either lumping them or splitting them. There *are* ways of noting possible links without having to take a final position on their validity or not, while still giving reasoning both for and against hypotheses. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Feb 22 18:20:36 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 13:20:36 EST Subject: "Related" debate unproductive? Message-ID: I want to be perfectly clear at the outset that "the point" of a discussion may be different for different participants, what I am trying to focus on here is what points have in fact been brought up, as distinct from the straw-man element of many messages, and which points, if we discuss them, are likely or not likely to be productive. The debate, now ongoing for months, about the term "related", seems to me to have been singularly unproductive. I agree with most of the posting by Bob Whiting today, but feel that it is not to the point, at least not to the important points where we might make progress (and I am not particularly singling out this posting). To too great an extent, it is a battle about words, not about content at all. And it is getting *v e r y* boring. There are probably a number of quite sane people among us who believe that the traditional meaning of (genetically) related is useful, (so all discussion of abolishing the use of the term "related" in that sense is not to *our* point at least, it seems only a red herring), and who are *not* discussing creoles or any other special cases of similar kinds (so discussion of creoles is not to *our* point at least, and contributes nothing new to the discussion we thought was ongoing), and who do not need a long textbook stating the obvious. Many of us I think are concerned with much more subtle and sophisticated problems. By considering primarily extreme cases where we probably all agree, we make no progress towards handing the difficult ones. ** I would note first that it is probably impossible in practice to avoid a mixture of ordinary language with technical usage. When Whiting says today in response to someone's >>Genetically (in your terms), English is equally related to both >>French and Italian. as follows: >They're not my terms; I didn't invent them -- they are standard >in historical linguistics textbooks. But I agree with the >premise -- except that I wouldn't say "equally related"; I would >say "related at the same level." I of course agree. Perhaps our common reluctance to use the phrase "equally related" here is that it has a portion of its ordinary-language meaning, and we know clearly English *is* especially closely related to French, as *all* linguists recognize. (English loans from Hindi or Chinese or Afrikaans or whatever, are also not really to the point, I think, because such extreme cases were not mentioned by those wishing to question an overly narrow sense of "relationship". So bringing *them* up is at least not to the point of what I believe many of us are concerned with, such would also be red herrings.) ** It is perhaps my personal interest and bias, but the problem that remains as a subtle and sophisticated one, and which has clearly *not* been resolved by previous scholarship, is the handling of trees vs. dialect areas, and the implications of the following paragraph, which I did not write, and which was referred to by Whiting today: >(b) The idea that there must be a single language progenitor of >daughter languages is widely disputed. Some people accept the >idea that a collection of interrelated languages might never have >had a single ancestor, but as far back as you care to go were >simply a collection of inter-related languages. The >language/dialect issue comes up here. We talk of IE "dialects" >within PIE, but this is simply terminology. The point is that >there is no need whatever for there to have been a single unified >PIE language. The example Whiting mentions of the Altaic "family" (or perhaps not a family, if long contact and mutual influences and massive borrowings were involved) is closer to a propos to the view expressed by the author of the above paragraph, it seems to me. The possibility that PIE was some close complex of languages which exchanged even morphology, but which retained traces of various distinct substrates or whatever one wishes to discuss, is a real possibility. Not necessarily to a great degree, not necessarily as much as Altaic, but to some degree, it is quite possible and an entirely reasonable hypothesis consistent with *traditional* views of historical linguistics. Merely one that is mostly not discussed, rightly or wrongly. This possibility, which may exist for many proto-languages, *does* have practical, as opposed to purely terminological, implications. To recognize that this is a possible situation for a proto-language, we must handle vocabulary and morphological distributions across *portions* of the dialect network of any proto-language in *at least* the frameworks of the following 1) simple family tree, innovations on one branch, replacement on one branch, etc. branch then dividing. 2) wave spread of items across a part of a dialect network, which may have no relation to the family-tree structure 3) persistence as areal dialect-net isoglosses of what were substrate inheritances in only part of the territory of an eventual proto-language, the substrate inheritances in another part of that territory being from a different language or languages. When substrates are strong, and morphology can spread, the difference between the various kinds of "inheritance" can become quite blurred. 4) proto-languages need not (not even by the narrow definition of "genetically related") be completely uniform, they need not be indivisible points with no internal dimensions Living languages do not fit such a simple model, so what business do we have insisting that dead languages did? That would make them theoretical constructs, useful primarily for making it easier for us to think about them, so artificially simplified. In limiting special cases, sure, when a single family or village migrated, and became the nucleus of a new language family. But those are limiting special cases, they do not define a narrow total range of possibilities which historical and comparative linguistics should restrict itself intellectually to being able to deal with. 5) Any proto-language need not be pure, it may share substrate inheritances from quite a number of substrates, substrates which either are known as separate language families, or which have become extinct as independent languages, or in an intermediate situation, which may appear as substrates also for some other language or language family. It may be possible to reconstruct part of the vocabulary even of a language or family which survives *only* as substrates to two or more other languages or language families, if we can determine that the substrates within each of those latter are indeed substrates, rather than being later innovations in some area which crosses language boundaries, or later loans from part of the area of one language or family to part of the area of another language or family. So let us sharpen our existing tools, develop new tools, avoid oversimplifications, *and* recognize the inherited wisdom of comparative and historical-reconstructive linguistics. There is absolutely no reason we should need to choose between these as if they were mutually exclusive alternatives. And let us treat the contributions of others by always trying to find the *most* reasonable view of them, or the part of them which we believe we can make the most productive contributions to, rather than spending most of our words trying to defeat them. There is absolutely no reason to throw out *any* of the tools of comparative-historical linguistics. There *is* reason to sharpen those tools and to add more tools and to add less simplistic formats for recording results of using those tools. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Feb 15 19:35:07 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 14:35:07 EST Subject: Long monomorphemic Basque words Message-ID: Trask writes: > I am only interested in monomorphemic words, and >monomorphemic words tend to be short, while long words tend to be >polymorphemic, in Basque as in all the languages I know anything about. >Consequently, Lloyd's objection could only constitute a problem for me >in the following scenario: > Pre-Basque had lots of long monomorphemic words as well as short > ones, but, for some reason, the long monomorphemic words have been > generally lost from the language, while the short ones have > preferentially survived. >And I don't see this as a plausible scenario. When reworded slightly, I find it highly plausible indeed. It is not that the long monomorphemic words have been generally lost, it is that Trask's criteria exclude them from his considering them as early Basque (this has been discussed in many other messages, one a cumulation of 9 ways in which his criteria might usefully be modified). It is one respect in which the totality of Trask's criteria embody a bias against certain vocabulary not justified by careful linguistic methodology. Under Larry Trask's criteria for inclusion in his data set, some polysyllabic monomorphemic words, a set which would generally include all but the most common expressives, are disproportionately disfavored for written records because of their meanings. Although "txitxi" 'chick' is perhaps recorded early (Trask did not say otherwise in his message dealing with it), Trask says it sticks out a mile. I assume he means the two voiceless stops, and the voiceless stop initial. Words for 'butterfly' probably were also not recorded early, among many others. Some of those for 'butterfly' are monomorphemic, at least under the sensible understanding that the so-called reduplication is not a separate morpheme unless some word exists with it removed, rather the reduplication is a part of the shape of the root of a number of expressive words. Half of a reduplicated form is not a functioning morpheme in such cases. Trask has argued that the endings of some of these words, such as /-leta/ etc. are not suffixes, not analyzable as productive Basque morphemes. If so, the forms are monomorphemic. I do not in this message deal with the question whether the forms in question are reconstructible back to early Basque, that is a different question from whether they are monomorphemic. Lloyd From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Tue Feb 22 07:06:16 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 09:06:16 +0200 Subject: Basque In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Larry Trask wrote: > The big problem here is the seemingly great difficulty of borrowing verbs. > Edith Moravcsik, in her universals of borrowing, goes so far as to declare > that verbs cannot be borrowed at all. This is probably going too far -- > after all, English did borrow verbs from Norman French (didn't it?). > But, as a rule, when verbs are borrowed at all, they are borrowed only as > non-finite forms -- participles or verbal nouns -- which are then inflected > periphrastically in the borrowing language, with finite auxiliaries carrying > all tense, agreement, and other verbal categories. > This is how Basque borrowed verbs from Latin, and how it borrows verbs from > Romance. It is how Turkish borrowed verbs from Arabic and Persian, and how > it borrows verbs from French and English today. It is how Old Japanese > borrowed verbs from Chinese, and how modern Japanese borrows verbs from > English. This may be true in the cases you mention above, but the generalization is incorrect. To name just one counterexample: Saami has a huge amount of verbs borrowed from both Finnish and Scandinavian, and most of these are quite recent borrowings. They are without exception inflected according to the normal Saami inflectional paradigm. This even holds for new borrowings: a borrowed verb root that has not even been phonologically nativized gets Saami mood, tense, number and person suffixes attached to it quite regularly. Ante Aikio From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Feb 22 10:12:32 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 10:12:32 +0000 Subject: Basque Message-ID: Roz Frank writes: > Moreover in the case of , and other Class I non-finite > verbs, there is another factor that needs to be taken into consideration, > although what weight it should be given when modeling the time depth of the > artifact is not clear. I refer to the fact that Basque is a suffixing > language. There is no trace of prefixing in the language except in the case > of Class I verbs (I'm excluding a few lexical calques that have entered the > language relatively recently and which are obviously based on Romance > formations). OK. The Basque of the historical period does indeed exhibit a few word- forming prefixes which are borrowed from, or calqued on, Romance. To these no antiquity can be imputed. Otherwise, the language has the following prefixes. Personal-agreement prefixes in finite verb-forms. These are all related in form to the corresponding free pronouns, and they must surely result from the incorporation of pronouns into the verb at some ancient date. Such prefixes exist only for the first two persons, since Basque has no third-person pronouns. Tense-mood prefixes in finite verb-forms. Though the original functions of these things are still moderately clear, their origin is completely unknown. Curiously, they are overtly present only when no personal- agreement prefix is present. The prefix * in all non-finite forms of ancient verbs based on verbal roots (but not in ancient verbs derived from nominal roots). The original function of this is unknown, though in my 1990 TPhS paper I presented a case that it was a nominalizing prefix. I think my evidence is moderately persuasive, but probably not strong enough to be unanswerable. The ancient causative prefix <-ra->, which precedes the verbal root it is added to but follows * in non-finite forms and all other prefixes in finite forms. Example: 'do'; 'make (somebody) do'. The prefix *, which derives negative-polarity indefinites from interrogatives. Example: 'what?'; 'anything'. A curious apparent prefix <-i->, which sometimes surfaces to the left of the verbal root in finite verb-forms marked for indirect-object agreement. Example: for usual 'I bring it to him'. Several other prefixes attached to finite verb-forms: 'if', affirmative (whose prefixal status is debatable), (hard to translate), optative (archaic). And that, I think, is it. The personal prefixes are easy to explain, and one or two of the others are perhaps not really prefixes at all. But the rest are rather mysterious. It is far from clear what these prefixes are doing at all in a language which is otherwise strictly (and luxuriantly) suffixing. It may be that we are looking at here at the fossilized relics of a very ancient period when Basque was typologically different. But who knows? > Hence, the root-stem <-bil-> in or that of <-karr-> in > is encountered wrapped up in material that has every sign of > belonging to the most archaic strata that can be detected in the > morphosyntactic structure of the linguistic system of Euskera. We are > talking about typological issues where the artifact's morphosyntactic > packaging provides the researcher with a certain type of information that > in turn permits a tentative assignment of the artifact to a given layer, to > a given morphosyntactic strata: the artifact ends up being situated at a > certain level because of the way that the morphosyntactic data. lends > itself to typological stratification. Indeed. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From Helmut.Birkhan at mailbox.univie.ac.at Tue Feb 22 08:09:32 2000 From: Helmut.Birkhan at mailbox.univie.ac.at (o. Prof. Dr. Helmut Birkhan) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 09:09:32 +0100 Subject: Basque * 'round' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] > From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal > Date sent: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 15:38:15 +0100 > Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >> Any good Celtic etymon for German Auto? > Well, it is well known that German au < *u:, and Celtic *p > 0, > so that looks very much like a form derived from an unattested > Celtic *pu:to- "stinking" (the contraption was apparently named > by the La T`ene Celts after its typical exhaust products). Lieber Richy, diese Etymologie ist durch die seit unserer Kindheit/Jugend ?blichen FUT/AUTO-Inschriften eigentlich schon vorweggenommen worden. Helmy _______________________________ Prof. Helmut Birkhan Institut f?r Germanistik der Universit?t Wien Dr. Karl Lueger Ring 1 A-1010 Wien ?STERREICH iemehl: Helmut.Birkhan at univie.ac.at Tel.: + 43 - 1 - 4277 / 421 41 From jer at cphling.dk Wed Feb 23 16:33:50 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 17:33:50 +0100 Subject: "Upper limit" of PIE In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000215194427.009d2550@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Stanley Friesen wrote: > [...] [W]e can > place a fairly secure *upper* *limit* on how old the divergence of PIE is. > That upper limit is about 4500 BC. > [...] Help me, I'm dumb and ignorant, what is up and down in archaeological dating? Does the quoted statement mean that PIE split up "no later than" 4500 BC, or does it mean "no earlier than" 4500 BC? Is the present moment the low or the high end of the scale? This is quite honestly meant as no criticism, but perhaps there are other language-oriented IE-ists who have difficulties following an argument that points up and down when it means before and after (in this order or the reverse). Will anyone stoop to informing me (us) on this important point? Jens From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 22 20:28:55 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 21:28:55 +0100 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000214221552.009dce60@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: Stanley Friesen wrote: >At 02:30 PM 2/8/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >>>This is what you'd expect if proto-Indo-European speakers invented the >>>wheel, by the way -- otherwise there should be at least one loan-word for >>>"wheel", one that isn't resolvable into a PIE root. >>Wait a minute. PIE-speakers invented the wheel? >Well, it is certainly a serious possibility. The earliest wheels (outside >of toys) are found at times and places consistent with this conclusion. Still, the origin of the wheel is usually thought to be in Mesopotamia (e.g. Sharrett). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 22 20:56:33 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 15:56:33 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: I wrote: >> Do the similarities between Latin and Hittite 'leap off the page" as you >> say? (Please recall how long it took for relationship to even be detected.) In a message dated 2/22/00 3:08:16 AM, Rich Alderson replied: >Knudtson published the Tell-el-Amarna letters in 1902, as I remember, and put >forth the claim that Hittite was Indo-European at that time. Hrozny' demon- >strated the IE-ness of Hittite in his 1917 monograph to the satisfaction of >the general IEist populace. How long did you think it took? Did it take 15 years for the similarities to "leap off the page?" That is still rather slow leaping. (And it appears that laryngeals are still more hesitant about any such acrobatics.) But more importantly I must point out that mere identification of IE-ness is NOT what S. M. Stirling was talking about or what I was responding to. The "leap off the page" quote was made to tell us just how "undifferentiated" Sanskrit, Latin and Mycenaean are supposed to be. 98 years after Knudtson I do not believe that the similarities between Latin and Hittite do much leaping at all, even to expert Hittite scholars. I'm on the road now, but I hope to grab a random Hittite text and post it and ask specifically how often these striking similarities with Latin show up. I wrote: >> And what does Hittite (for starters) add to the total 'differentiation' >> between the first attested PIE languages? If 2000 years separates Latin >> and Sanskrit, Hittite should certainly add another 2000 years, wouldn't you >> say? Rich Alderson replied: >Absolutely not. Hittite looks IE enough that I'd say less than 1000 years, >maybe less than 500, separate it from the Neogrammarian core--which was >always too close to the classical languages and did not pay enough attention >to the outliers. I respect your judgment on this. But the issue here is really the certainty that can be attached to any such dating. What are the chances that the gap between Hittite and Classic IE languages is actually much older? There is the tail-end of a thread called "How weird is Hittite? Not weird enough :)" on this list's archive and I believe I have some of the pre-archive posts stashed somewhere back on my system. One can read those messages and easily conclude that, while Hittite is not weird enough to be excluded from IE, it certainly is 'weird' enough to at least reasonably support much more than 500 years of separation time. The morphological and syntactical differences mentioned alone seem to suggest not certainty, but problems that still need to be worked out before any hard conclusions about dating can be drawn. As far as the lexical?/phonological? differentiation between Hittite and the "Neogrammarian core" (pre-laryngeal?), this turns into an honest question about how one measures such things. Perhaps a way of making this understandable is to ask the following: If Hittite were separated from Sanskrit-Latin-Mycenaean by an additional 2000 years, how would the comparison be different than it is now? What would one expect in the comparison to change if in fact Hittite separated 1500 or 1000 years earlier? If you wanted to see what Hittite would have been like if its ancestor were a distinct language in 6000-5500BC, how would it reconstruct differently? Does the degree of variance in the reconstructed forms become greater in some way? Do the numbers of retentions or innovations increase? What changes would one expect to reflect the greater effects of a longer time period? If I have been successful in posing this question understandably, then one should see the value in considering what the reconstructed proto-Hittite of 6000-5500BC would look like. What would it be missing? What would it have lost? What additional signs of age should we expect? This would give us a way of saying 'Hittite texts would need to look like this if proto-Hittite indeed separated from PIE about 7500 years ago.' And that would seem to me to be of great value. >> JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >> <> Nom. sing. agnis ignis >> acc. sing. agnim ignem >> dative agnibhyas ignibus I wrote: >> Or do all these languages decline with only a change in the initial >> vowel and do they all have the same name for their principle god - thus >> justifying a 2000 year separation between all of them. Rich Alderson replied: >Not sure what you mean to say by "only a change in the initial vowel": In >Indo-Iranian, PIE *e *o *a all > PII *a, while in Latin e > i/_[+nasal stop]. >Knowing that, we can take one look at the words for "fire" in these two >languages and *immediately*, without further ado, see them for the cognates >they are. >On the other hand, there were two words for "fire", the active *egni- and the >inactive/neuter *pur-, and the different dialects reflect different choices. Precisely. Go back to the original post and you'll see that agnis/ignis was being used to selectively support the 2000 year separation between those early IE languages. My point that this was very convenient for Latin and Sanskrit to be compared this way. And equally inconvenient not to find anything like the same similarity in either Greek or Hittite. If agnis/ignis prove something about the degree of differentiation over time, then what does the absence of agnis/ignis in other early IE languages prove about time and differentiation? "Different dialects reflecting different choices" would suggest that some time was involved in those processes too. I did not use this singular example. I simply point out that it does not support the premise it was meant to support - which was the closeness of not just two languages - but of all early IE languages. (As a matter of fact, I'm surprised that the closeness between agnis/ignis in Sanskrit and Latin does not suggest a much more recent date of commonality for those words by themselves, without regard to the rest of those two languages. If all the words in Latin and Sanskrit matched like this, you could argue 50 years separated the two languages. Lehmann tells me that Sjoberg and Sjoberg showed why words in south Asia like 'sun' should be eliminated from the "glottochronological core" precisely because they reflected very early and widely borrowed religious vocabulary. Forgive me for asking whether agnis/ignis might not fall into the same category.) Regards, Steve Long From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 22 20:27:19 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 21:27:19 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <004101bf78b2$818126e0$a2a701d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: "petegray" wrote: >> Compare the number of Ce-/Co-roots (e.g. in Pokorny) with the >> number of Ci-/Cu-roots. I guesstimate the difference is a factor >> 10 or so. >(a) Bird offers a summary of Pokorny's roots, identifying the core elements, >and ignoring the variety of extensions. He ends up with 2050 such roots. >Of these exactly 775 have neither e nor e: anywhere. 38%. Is that including a(:) and o(:)? >The number of CeC >roots (i.e. with no resonant) is 548. >(b) How are you treating roots which show CeRC / CRC ablaut? Benveniste treats them as CeRC roots. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From alderson at netcom.com Tue Feb 22 23:35:54 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 15:35:54 -0800 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000214230249.009d1ca0@mf.mailbank.com> (message from Stanley Friesen on Mon, 14 Feb 2000 23:03:48 -0800) Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Feb 2000, Stanley Friesen (sarima at friesen.net) wrote: > At 10:11 AM 2/8/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> Compare the number of Ce-/Co-roots (e.g. in Pokorny) with the number of >> Ci-/Cu-roots. I guesstimate the difference is a factor 10 or so. > Certainly. But in my book, even a handful of such roots is enough to > establish i and u as PIE vowel phonemes. Of course, there is no question of the phonemicity of *i and *u, which has nothing to do with their occurrence in roots. Benveniste's root theory is very specific: *All* roots are of the form C1VC2, where the V is the apophonic *e/o vowel, and C1 and C2 have some co-occurrence restrictions: 1. C1 may not be identical to C2. 2. C1 and C2 may not both be "voiced plain" (*b *d *g *g{^w}). 3. If either C1 or C2 is "voiceless" (*p *t *k *k{^w}), the other may not be "voiced aspirated" (*bh *dh *gh *g{^w}h). Benveniste's theory treats *i and *u as conditioned variants of *y and *w, only occurring on the surface when *e/o is not present for accentual reasons. The real problem is that there are occurrences of *i and *u which do not ever vary with *y and *w, so they must be phonemic, and the interchange is no longer phonetically or phonemically automatic. Rich Alderson From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 22 20:31:59 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 15:31:59 EST Subject: Horses Message-ID: In a message dated 2/22/2000 4:00:34 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Armenian also has a word for horse, 'es' Did something change while I wasn't looking? I thought > was ass. S. Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Feb 23 08:22:04 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 03:22:04 EST Subject: Domesticating the Horse Message-ID: I wrote: >>It indicates that the horse would be an rather unlikely candidate for a >>dating of PIE unity in the Ukraine later than 4000BC. In a message dated 2/22/2000 10:20:29 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- domestic horse =/= wild horse. The linguistics seems quite against you here, I think. No word for 'the wild horse' in early IE or *PIE as far as I can tell. To PIEians wild and tame seemed to be one and the same. Colin P. Groves suggests that there's very good evidence that the possibly ancestral wild 'tarpan' of eastern Europe and possibly even an ancestral wild Equus ferus were still frequently encountered in Roman times, but those wild horses apparently were given no distinctive name - except to be called 'wild' horses. (OED says 'tarpan' is a Khirgiz Tartar name.) And of course at the time of first domestication there would hardly be a reason to distinguish between the two, especially since they were both used for food. And if as has been suggested *ekwos is from *ok os, speedy, no distinction there. Wild horses are speedy too. (Cf. early L. , tamed) I wrote: >>And of course the evidence to date is that livestock domestication >>accompanied the rest of agriculture into the Ukraine at 4500BC or earlier. JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: >-- but not the domestic horse. That was not part of the original Near >Eastern 'package' and the domestic horse is intrusive in the original areas >of Eurasian agriculture. But dirt farming and animal domestication enter the Ukraine, care of the Tripolye (read Renfrew's narrow PIEians), just around 4750BC calibrated (Dolukanov 1996). Dereivka, the best-known Sredni Stog settlement (first dating at 4570BC calibrated) will have evidence of domesticated animals possibly predating evidence of early true horses fairly early on (by 4400BC?) This is no surprise since the most western Sredni Stog settlements are about a hundred miles from the most eastern remains of Tripolye. It is not hard to see how Sredni Stog culture might have learned domestication and livestock breeding from Tripolye and applied it to the animal it had a wealth of - the horse. Needless to say, we have evidence of people eating horses in the middle Ukraine for 7000 years BEFORE Tripolye enters the scene, but we only have evidence of horse domestication AFTER - rather soon after - Tripolye enters the scene, clearly carrying the domestication process and breeding know-how with it. JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: >there is no such thing as "domestication technology". There are only >animals which have been domesticated. Ooh, don't tell the biotechnologists that. As a matter of fact, I believe Karl Ereky when he coined the word back in 1919 cites animal domestication as one of the original biotechnologies. Gordon Childe would also disagree with you (Man Makes Himself 1936) where he specifically uses 'technology' to apply to domestication. Not to quibble about the word 'technology'. But the statement 'there are only animals that have been domesticated' couldn't be farther off the mark. F ew if any species of thoroughly domesticated animal we know (not even the cat) have not undergone extensive changes through breeding and in morphology. And that is precisely how we can identify domesticated animals in ancient remains. If there were domesticated aurochs or domesticated equus ferus, we have no way of telling them from wild ones in the bone middens. And our very best guess is that neither aurochs or tarpans were domesticatible in a single generation. Or maybe at all. So if you object to the term 'technology', that's fine. But 'domestication' as a term of art involves more than taming a squirrel or a circus bear. It involves well-managed techniques in handling, breeding and husbandry that had to be developed and learned and transfered across generations. JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Do you mean the _idea_ of domestication? No, that is apparent in the dog. But cattle and horse breeding are a different matter. Nowadays, biotechnologists are talking about expanding the "biodiversity" of our livestock by gene manipulation, specifically because ordinary attempts at 'domesticating' certain kinds of wild fowl, e.g., have been totally unsuccessful. Domestication is not just an idea, or taming a single individual animal. Domestication is a managed change in genotype that must have taken a lot of work and a lot of nerve (aurochs were much bigger and meaner than cows). IN CONCLUSION: No distinction I know of between wild and domesticated horses in early IE. (Ready to be corrected.) Domestication of the horse was quite possibly the result of domestication and breeding know-how coming from the Danube area about 4500BC. I stand by my statement: >>It indicates that the horse would be an rather unlikely candidate for a >>dating of PIE unity in the Ukraine later than 4000BC. I may be wrong of course, but that's how the evidence just seems to lean. Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 22 20:32:12 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 15:32:12 EST Subject: brahmin/flamen Message-ID: >maxdashu at LanMinds.Com writes: >I read recently that this correspondence has been challenged, although it >looks reasonable. Anyone know about the current consensus on it? -- as far as I know it's regarded as doubtful. brahmin/flamen (and Old Persian 'brazman' etc.) would require a PIE form something like *bhlaghmen, and there's no evident reflex of PIE *gh in the Latin form From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 22 20:37:06 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 15:37:06 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >"wolf" = "outlaw", I'd like an explanation>> -- well, PIE for 'wolf' is *wlkwos. It's been suggested that this is a normalization of an adjective, *ulkwos 'dangerous'; ie., Hittite walkuwa 'dangerous', and Sanskrit 'avrka', 'not wild'. In Anatolian, *wlkwos gives 'lion', which also suggests that the meaning of 'wolf' is a semantic narrowing of an original 'the dangerous one'. I should have been more precise; perils of working from memory. From inakistand at yucom.be Wed Feb 23 17:08:59 2000 From: inakistand at yucom.be (jose.perez3) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 18:08:59 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >>>This would be due to avoidance. Reproductive body parts and elimination >>>functions are generally subject to very high degrees of euphemism, >> >>-- yup. The same with objects which are the subject of fear and avoidance -- >>"wolf" and "bear", for instance. ("The Outlaw" and "The Brown One", >>respectively). >"wolf" = "outlaw", I'd like an explanation I reckon he wasn't thinking of E. "wolf" or Sw. "ulv" but of its synonym "varg" (the same in Norw) < ON "vargr" which is related to OHG "warg" (villain, criminal). From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 22 20:36:16 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 21:36:16 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Adam Hyllested wrote: >The development *-eH3- > *-oH3- took place already in PIE, and I find it >very unlikely that a PIE *-oYw- should show up as *-i- in Uralic. Of >course the borrowing could have taken place at the time of >Pre-Proto-Indo-European, i.e. before the "colouring" of *eH3 to *oH3. But >the word is also found outside Uralic; it appears in Yukaghir as neve, nim> and in Chuvan as . An Indo-Uralo-Yukaghir >reconstruction *(n)newme- seems much more probable. >Critics would point out that the PIE word is formed by adding a >derivational suffix *-men. First of all, I don't see why a stem ending in >*-me shouldn't analogically add an *-n, if nouns are productively formed >with a suffix *-men. Secondly, the Uralic reconstruction *-a: corresponds >perfectly to the IE vocalic *-n (*-e doesn't). So if the IE suffix isn't >analogical, the Indo-Uralic form must be reconstructed as *(n)newmn-. But what about the laryngeals? They can't have sprung out of thin air in the Indo-European part of Indo-Uralic. If this word is a cognate, we should at least reconstruct something like *(H)neGumn-, for some value of H and G. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From alderson at netcom.com Wed Feb 23 00:27:27 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 16:27:27 -0800 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: (message from Adam Hyllested on Tue, 15 Feb 2000 00:04:10 +0100 (MET)) Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Adam Hyllested (adahyl at cphling.dk) wrote: > The reconstruction for (Pre-)Proto-Slavic *inmen is rather zero grade of > *H1neH3mn, i.e. *H1nH3men-. The initial laryngeal *must* be *H3, given the evidence of the Greek prothetic vowel in _onoma_. There is no way for *H1 (the "e-colouring laryngeal") to yield an initial /o/ in Greek. Rich Alderson From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Wed Feb 23 11:59:42 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 13:59:42 +0200 Subject: PU *nimi / PIE *HneH3men- (was: Re: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Adam Hyllested wrote: [I wrote:] >> Actually, the lack of reflex of medial *h3 [in Proto-Uralic *nimi 'name'] is >> a bit problematic. One would expect borrowing from IE *Hneh3men- to give PU >> *nexmi / *nixmi. (snip) [Adam Hyllested relpied:] > Actually, the laryngeals should be no problem for U *nime-/*nima:- as an > IE loanword. (snip) > In protetic position before consonant, laryngeals are usually > reconstructed as their consonantal variants. But the material from Uralic > (and other language families) generally tend to speak against > this, no matter whether you believe the look-alikes to be loans or > cognates. So we should perhaps rather reconstruct a *@1neH3mn, > phonetically realized as *nnoYwmn (read Y as gamma here; the consonantal > variant of *H3 was probably phonetically realized as a voiced, labio-velar > fricative *Yw). But if you reconstruct *H3 phonetically as *[Yw], this should give PU *x (which was phonetically most probably *[Y]). One can speculate that PU *xm was perhaps phonotactically excluded, since there is no evidence of clusters consisting of *x and a nasal. But still, one would expect that *H3 was substituted with something (e.g. *w?) > The development *-eH3- > *-oH3- took place already in PIE, and I find it > very unlikely that a PIE *-oYw- should show up as *-i- in Uralic. Of > course the borrowing could have taken place at the time of > Pre-Proto-Indo-European, i.e. before the "colouring" of *eH3 to *oH3. IE *o > PU *i would indeed be impossible. If PU *nimi is a loan, it is either Pre-IE, or else it must derive from the zero grade - *(H)n(H3)men- > PU *nimi- is phonetically sensible, given Uralic phonotaxis, which requires roots to be of shape *(C)V(C)CV-. > But > the word is also found outside Uralic; it appears in Yukaghir as neve, nim> and in Chuvan as . An Indo-Uralo-Yukaghir > reconstruction *(n)newme- seems much more probable. It seems ad hoc to me, since no conclusive evidence of a genetic relationship between these language families has been presented. But it seems likely that at least the Yukaghir item is not a chance correspondence. (Perhaps a loan U > Yukaghir? Other such borrowings have been pointed out.) > Critics would point out that the PIE word is formed by adding a > derivational suffix *-men. First of all, I don't see why a stem ending in > *-me shouldn't analogically add an *-n, if nouns are productively formed > with a suffix *-men. Secondly, the Uralic reconstruction *-a: corresponds > perfectly to the IE vocalic *-n (*-e doesn't). But you can't reconstruct PU *-? for this item: the reconstruction must be *nimi (= traditional *nime). Second syllable *i gives regularly Finnish -i : -e-, Saami -a and Mordvin and Proto-Samoyed zero. Thus, PU *nimi > Finnish nimi : (oblique stem) nime-, Saami namma, Mordvin (dissim.) l?em, Proto-Samoyed *nim. There is no evidence for 2nd syllable *? here: it would have been retained in Finnish and Samoyed, and changed to -i in Saami and -e in (Erzya) Mordvin. Regards, Ante Aikio From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 22 20:40:42 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 15:40:42 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: In a message dated 2/22/00 12:21:34 PM Mountain Standard Time, petegray at btinternet.com writes: << Is there ever a "single, unified" language? >> -- for all practical purposes, yes. Eg., English. Certainly there are dialects within English, but so what? As long as intercommunication remains intense, the dialect divergences don't become separate languages. From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 22 20:41:05 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 21:41:05 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <003d01bf78b2$7def2680$a2a701d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: "petegray" wrote: >Miguel said: >>Now define "single" and "unified". >If anything, this reinforces my point. The assumption that genetically >related languages must by definition go back to a single ancestor >over-simplifies the realities of language. Is there ever a "single, >unified" language? No. The "genetic" model is a simplification, of course. Thankfully, it works well enough in most cases (just like the (over)simplification "species" [only real twins/x-plets have exactly the same DNA] works well enough in biology, in most cases). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Wed Feb 23 07:53:39 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 09:53:39 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <003e01bf78b2$7eda22c0$a2a701d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, petegray wrote: (snip) > I mean that creolisation / language mixing or whatever you call it provides > us with an example of a language which goes back to two ancestors, not one. A creole does not "go back" to any ancestor at all in the same sense that a non-creole does, because there is no structural continuity between a creole and its lexical source languages (= "ancestors"). The relationship between a creole and its "ancestors" is different from the realtionship between a non-creole and its single genetic ancestor ("relationship" being used here in its normal sense and not as a technical term of historical linguistics; in linguistic terms, a creole has no relationships). - Ante Aikio From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Wed Feb 23 08:23:54 2000 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 09:23:54 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >-- it isn't a coincidence that morphological studies were commenced _after_ >the lexical comparisons (and simple comparisons like the declension of the >noun) became widely known. >There had to be a problem, before there could be solutions. "These >resemblances are too close for chance" was the fundamental breakthrough; then >came detailed examination, and the emergence of comparative linguistics as we >know it. >Likewise, when doing a "rough cut" on a new language, lexical comparison is >still used. Only purists get upset over this. Though I don't think it to be really objectionable to be a purist of sorts, I wouldn't really describe myself as one. I don't get upset when a "rough cut" on unknown languages is started by looking at the lexicon. I've done this myself. But what does get me down a bit, however, when this "rough cut" is presented as the whole story, for which I have a bulky (and pricey) collection of witnesses on my bookshelf. "These resemblances are too close for chance" is never a breakthrough to the establishment of relatedness. It may be the breakthrough to knowing that something happened here, and this something may also be areal convergence. The failure to see this is haunting, e.g., comparative Altaic studies ever since the days of Schott (who pinned down "resemblances to close for chance", for that matter). If such an observation, which may well serve as a first indicator that a problem is there, which awaits some kind of solution, I'm with you here, is taken for a "breakthrough", then we all should re-read Ritter v. Xylander's 1837 "Sprachgeschlecht der Titanen", which argues for Manchu being Greek on the basis of hundreds of vocabulary resemblances. Yes, of course they lack systematicity of any kind, and semantics is getting wild at the knight's hands, but such things do get published even today, which is the result of allowing lexical "resemblances" as "fundamental breakthroughs". So, as we shouldn't take first suspicions with fundamental breakthroughs when we try our luck on language classification ourselves, we shouldn't do it when writing it's history. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg home: Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-691332+ Georg at home.ivm.de work: http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/vtw/Georg/Georg.html From edsel at glo.be Wed Feb 23 12:07:53 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 13:07:53 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Whiting" Sent: Monday, February 14, 2000 9:11 PM [snip] > Yes, I've even heard it suggested that IE was a creole, but I > don't think that such theories have many adherents (doesn't mean > that they are wrong, just unlikely). But creoles are a different > animal and one that is not yet well understood despite intensive > study. I think that the mainstream view is something like the > following: > Creoles develop from pidgins; pidgins are not natural > languages (have no native speakers), but auxillary languages > used for communication between speakers of different > (usually typologically widely divergent) languages, intended > for limited purposes such as trade; pidgins have limited > lexicons and minimal morphology and syntax (essentially they > are mini isolating, bare-bones, no-frills languages); > pidgins are often (but not necessarily) based on one > language (usually the socially dominant one) but with some > elements taken from other language(s); pidgins often die out > when the need for communication between the groups ceases or > with the development of bilingualism or the assimilation of > one of the language groups into the other. > Creoles arise when a pidgin becomes the mother tongue of a > group of speakers (presumably the children of a group that > communicates primarily in pidgin hear only the pidgin and > begin expanding it to provide some of the syntactic features > that have been stripped from the original language(s) to > create the pidgin); this expanded pidgin becomes the native > language of the next generation and continues to expand to > provide all the syntactic features that are necessary to > normal communication; the creole is once again a natural > language. > Pidgins and creoles are thus two stages of a single process. > Many pidgins never become creoles, either dying out when no > longer needed or simply continuing in use as pidgins. But I > don't know that creoles arise other than out of pidgins (it > wouldn't bother me to learn otherwise, however). [Ed Selleslagh] I think your idea about 'contraction and expansion' (of syntactic and other features) is indeed the core of what pidgins and creoles are all about. But in contrast to what you seem to suggest (correct me if I am wrong), this can happen without the intermediate stage of a pidgin: Afrikaans is a typical example of that. The original 17th century Dutch suffered a very major reduction of syntactic (and other) features under the influence of indigenous (and to a much lesser degree: other European) peoples who had to collaborate with the Dutch colonizers (in earlier times mostly as farm hands etc.). Even today, there is a major group of indigenous, Asian and mixed-race people among the Afrikaans speaking population. But it seems unlikely that there ever was a pidgin; if it existed among the non-Europeans, it must have died out without leaving much of a trace. Anyway, the Boers never spoke a pidgin. Nonetheless, modern Afrikaans has many of the characteristics of a creole, like a seriously altered syntax and (much less altered) lexicon. Maybe Papiamento (Cura?ao etc.) could be a similar case, based upon Spanish and some Portuguese. And Ha?tian French Creole, maybe (i.e. if there was uninterrupted presence of a French speaking fraction of the population, which I don't know). English can be considered a mild case of creolization without an intermediate pidgin (even though the former existence of a pidgin cannot be ruled out entirely, but it would not have been the origin of modern English): not only the vocabulary was altered very seriously (which doesn't mean it's a creole), but syntax was moderately altered as well, e.g. lack word order inversion after an adverbial phrase (a typical error of French speakers who learn Dutch or German) and in some other cases, and the simplifications of the verbal system, including the disappearance of the participial prefix ge- that existed in Old English. All this is of course a very personal view of mine. Ed. Selleslagh From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Wed Feb 23 16:07:58 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 18:07:58 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <200002151716.p1428@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Hans Holm wrote: > You cite Anttila with > RW>"'Related' is a technical term, exactly like the equivalent 'cognate', > RW>meaning that the items were once identical." > And then go on: > RW>This is the criterion of genetic relatedness in historical linguistics. > 1) Anttila speaks of lexemes/items. No, Anttila is speaking of "Language Families and Family Trees." Read the heading of the section. "Lexemes" are nowhere mentioned in the section. The "items" Anttila is talking about are languages and dialects. Read the paragraph in which the statement occurs. > 2) This was not the point I objected. Good. Then I presume that you agree that related languages are descended from some common source and that therefore languages either start out related or they will never be. > It is no use to state things as true, which nobody can prove or disprove. > So, changing your 'related' to 'relatable', in the sense of Anttila, will > be okey. It is equally useless to state that because there is no way to demonstrate that any two languages are not related there is no such thing as unrelated languages. Since the non-relatedness of languages cannot be established empirically, unrelated languages are simply those that cannot be shown to be related. And it not "my" 'related'; it is historical linguistics' 'related.' If you don't want to take Anttila 89 as the Bible (and there is no reason why you should) then check out some other introductory textbooks on historical linguistics (e.g., Hock 86, 8: "... these languages are descended from a common source. In such cases we speak of Related Languages."). But historical linguists know that when one says that two languages are not related it means "not demonstrably related." Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Feb 23 17:24:01 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 17:24:01 +0000 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: Pete Gray writes: > I mean that creolisation / language mixing or whatever you call it provides > us with an example of a language which goes back to two ancestors, not one. Creolization is not at all the same thing as language mixing. > Germanic is clearly and certainly related to other IE languages. If the > theory about it being a creole were true (note the subjunctive, indicating > unreality), then it would be: > (a) related to other IE langs, and at the same time, > (b) also related to some other original language, which had no genetic > relationship to the other IE langs. > Does it make sense in a situation like that - whether it is Germanic or any > other language which is involved - to insist that "all related languages > descend from a single common ancestor"? OK; folks. My two cents. First, as others have pointed out, there are big problems with asserting that a creole derives from two (or more) ancestors. This is far from being obviously true, and many of us would prefer to say that a creole has *no* ancestors at all. That is, a creole is *not* genetically related to any of the languages which may have provided input to it. It is connected to them in some way, but it is not genetically related to them. Second, Germanic is a simply terrible example. Germanic looks not at all like a creole, but it looks very much like a daughter of PIE. If the Germanic languages descend from a creole constructed in part from PIE, then why the hell do they preserve PIE ablaut, PIE inflectional endings, PIE word-forming morphemes, and other PIE complexities that should have vanished in any creole? And why does Germanic phonology correspond so systematically to PIE phonology? The idea of Germanic as a creole is a non-starter, so let's forget about it. Now let's turn to a real and much better example: the North American language Michif. Michif is probably the finest example of a mixed language on the planet. To oversimplify a bit, Michif consists of a French nominal system (with French lexicon and phonology) bolted onto a Cree (Algonquian) verbal system (with Cree lexicon and phonology). OK. What should we say about Michif? Is it well described as a language descended from two ancestors? Or is it better described as a language descended from no ancestor at all? The floor is open. I know what I think, but I'll leave that for later. ;-) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 22 23:03:27 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 18:03:27 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: In a message dated 2/22/00 2:05:10 PM Mountain Standard Time, alderson at netcom.com writes: >The lexicon was suggestive, the grammar was conclusive.>> -- well, that's what I said; you use the lexical items for the rough cut, to indicate a probability, and then investigate in more detail. Mind you, if there are _enough_ lexical items... 8-). From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 22 21:00:30 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 22:00:30 +0100 Subject: Tocharian A wds, B yasa In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Ante Aikio wrote: >Now I have two questions: >1) What was the Proto-Tocharian form? I suppose *wya"sV < *wesV- (or *wisV-). >(If it was something like *wVsV with >front vowels, it fits quite well with Proto-Samoyed *wesd. A loan Samoyed > >Tocharian is also geographically the most sensible alternative, if Tocharian >was connected with the Afansevo culture.) >2) Is there any other plausible etymology for the Tocharian word? The most likely etymology still seems to be *h2wes- (*h2aus-). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 22 23:13:31 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 18:13:31 EST Subject: Hittite /wheel Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >This is STRONG STUFF. It certainly seems to NEGATE the idea - often repeated >earlier on this list - that all IE languages shared a common word for wheel. -- well, no, it doesn't. As mentioned, Hittite 'hukri' derives from PIE *hwergh, as does Tocharian A/B 'warkant' and 'yerkwanto'. Tocharian A/B also have a reflex of PIE *kwekwlom, 'kukal' and 'kokale', and possibly of *rotho, 'ratak'/'retke'. What this suggests is that PIE had several words for wheel; as does English. Some dropped out of one language or another, or were subject to semantic shift. (Eg., in Sanskrit the reflex of *rotho becomes "chariot", rather than "wheel".) >The often repeated position was that "the wheel word" had to have entered PIE >before it split up, because the word was univeral among IE languages. -- "widespread", actually. >And because the sound changes "the wheel word" underwent in those languages >show the word entered before those sound changes occurred. -- yup. >seem to have DISAPPEARED completely. -- nope. >It may strike some readers as obvious that FOUR wheel words WILL NOT support -- better than one, actually. Also words for "wheeled vehicle" and "to travel by vehicle". >They can clearly see things with a certainty that is not revealed to us >ordinary mortals. -- only to linguists, apparently. From alderson at netcom.com Wed Feb 23 00:56:36 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 16:56:36 -0800 Subject: Hittite /wheel In-Reply-To: <8e.13e55bb.25d8ed5c@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Feb 2000, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: > The often repeated position was that "the wheel word" had to have entered PIE > before it split up, because the word was univeral among IE languages. There is a misunderstanding here. It was never claimed that the "wheel word" was the one and only word for "wheel" in the protolanguage; rather, the claim is that the word that comes down to us in English as _wheel_ was present in the protolanguage, because where it *does* occur in various daughter languages, the form in which it occurs is always developmentally regular. The same thing is true for all four words so far adduced with respect to the concept "wheel". > Pointing out that those SPECIFIC sound changes do not date PIE dispersal and > that those sound changes could have occurred long after dispersal should not > have been a surprise. I'm afraid you have it backwards: Those specific sound changes *do* date PIE dispersal, and could not have occurred late, so the wheel must have been known prior to dispersal. Period. > It may strike some readers as obvious that FOUR wheel words WILL NOT support > "the wheel word" as the way to date PIE. Not the way you have mistakenly understood the phrase "the wheel word", no, but as I noted above, no one meant what you thought they meant with that phrase. [ moderator snip ] > how could this assertion that the wheel can postively and absolutely date PIE > go unanswered so often? (Check the archive list - I found it asserted at > least13 times!!! without contradiction.) With the intellectual firepower > that plainly shows up on this list all the time, how could it be repeated so > often without someone at least questioning it or noting the difficulties? There is only a contradiction when one misunderstands the phrase "the wheel word" as meaning "the one and only word for _wheel_ in PIE", rather than as "the word for _wheel_ that comes down to us, _mutatis mutandis_, in English with that meaning". I hope I have cleared this up enough that we can move on. Rich Alderson From jer at cphling.dk Wed Feb 23 17:08:08 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 18:08:08 +0100 Subject: Hittite /wheel In-Reply-To: <8e.13e55bb.25d8ed5c@aol.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Feb 2000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > mcv at wxs.nl earlier wrote: > <<...the Hittite word for "wheel" is . No relation to the > *kwel-words.>> > This is STRONG STUFF. It certainly seems to NEGATE the idea - often repeated > earlier on this list - that all IE languages shared a common word for wheel. > You can look back at the archives and see how often "the wheel word" was used > as PROOF of the date of PIE dispersal. > [...] Hey, hey, hey - a word can be replaced, or synonyms can coexist. The word _wheel_ most certainly is of PIE date by virtue of its forms and distribution. It got replaced in Anatolian by the hurki- stem (Tocharian has wa"rka"nt/yerkwant- from the same root) and in Latin and Celtic by rota etc. That says nothing more about the knowledge of the wheel in PIE times than the rich diversity in names for the horse does about the existence of PIE *ek'wos which can hardly be doubted. Jens From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 22 20:29:03 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 15:29:03 EST Subject: *hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-? Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >I mean, IF the word is only found in Hittite and Tocharian, why not swing the >conclusion around to its simpliest form and simply take it as evidence of >contact between Tocharian and Hittite? -- because at their earliest historic attestation, Tocharian and Hittite are 4000 miles apart; because there's no evidence of close contact between the two (as opposed to common survivals from PIE). Because the words mentioned are common derivatives from an ancestral _root_, and hence it's a cognate, not a loanword. And so on and so forth. From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Feb 22 17:35:51 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 17:35:51 -0000 Subject: *hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-? Message-ID: Dear Steve and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Monday, February 14, 2000 4:51 AM [ moderator snip ] > Let me ask, does evidence of (*hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-?) appear in any > other IE languages? [ moderator snip ] Surely you are familiar with IE *wer-g-, 'turn', a stem based on Pokorny's 3. *wer-, 'turn, bend'. It is surely highly unlikely that *hwerg- is not related to it in some way. I would segment it *H-wer-g-. What might the source of this prefix be? I have made an attempt to address that question in http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/ProtoLanguage-IE-PrefixPlurals.htm I would be glad for any critique of the ideas expressed in 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/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 mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 22 21:06:52 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 22:06:52 +0100 Subject: *hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-? In-Reply-To: <31.13b8430.25d8e3ec@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 2/12/00 10:12:09 PM, mcv at wxs.nl replied: ><differently (Hitt. *HwrK-is, Toch *HwerK-ontos). It does seem to >indicate that this (*hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-?) was the >preferred word for "to turn, to roll" at quite an early stage.>> >("mcv at wxs.nl earlier wrote: <<...the Hittite word for "wheel" is . >No relation to the *kwel-words.>>) >Let me ask, does evidence of (*hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-?) appear in any >other IE languages? I'm not sure. There's a whole family of roots with the general meaning "to turn, to twist" strating with *wer- (*wert-, *werg-, etc.). As far as I can see in Pokorny, this family consistently fails to show prosthetic a- in Greek (PIE *h2wer- > Grk aer-), which makes me doubt the Hittite word is related. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 23 03:37:09 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 22:37:09 EST Subject: SV: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >This seems to me to be an interesting observation. Have you got any >bibliographic references on lactose tolerance? -- Cavalli-Sforza, "The History and Geography of Human Genes" and "The Great Human Diasporas". >Number one, linguistically, do we find the IE languages discriminating cow's >milk from mother's milk -- unlikely to be the latter, since the terms actually usually derive from a verbal form, "to milk"; eg., *melk Also *dhedhnos, 'sour milk, cheese'; *pipiusi, giving Lithuanian papijusi, 'cow rich in milk'; *tenki, 'buttermilk'; *nguen, 'butter'; *turo, 'curds, curdled milk', etc. >Number two, do all the milk of all cattle or even of wild cattle produce the >intolerance syndrome? -- if drunk unprocessed. >what precisely is "the PIE vocabulary for 'to milk' (cows), curds, whey, >'cow rich in milk', butter" and how in the world can it be "attested" much >less "well-attested?" -- see above. By the usual methods. From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Feb 22 22:54:14 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 22:54:14 -0000 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: Dear Stanley and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stanley Friesen" Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2000 7:06 AM > At 05:48 PM 2/8/00 +0100, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: >> They were sacrificed though: see e.g. G. Dumizil (La religion romaine >> archaoque) : Equus October in Rome, As'vamedha in India. (note also Brahman >> <> Flamen). Usually (I don't know in this case) at least parts of sacrificed >> animals were eaten. > Quite possibly. But animals that are *primarily* food animals are rarely > sanctified. > A subtle, but important distinction. Just where did you get this, out of curiosity? 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 mcv at wxs.nl Wed Feb 23 06:55:24 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 07:55:24 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000214230742.009d0360@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: Stanley Friesen wrote: >At 06:09 PM 2/8/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >>Important point, I think. Since Germanic and Balto-Slavic (as >>far as they're traceable to the "Corded Ware" cultural area) both >>developed on a TRB substrate (c.q. out of a TRB substrate), it is >>strange that none of the Germanic substrate words appear in >>Balto-Slavic. >I am not sure about this - I seem to recall a moderate number of entries in >Pokorny that are only attested in Germanic and Balto-Slavic. Those sound >like good candidates for substrate words to me. >[Though I actually question tracing B-S back to Corded Ware]. G-B-S. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Feb 23 14:10:06 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 15:10:06 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- but Indo-Iranian spread widely not only in the steppe zone, but into areas >that had long been agricultural; Iran, and India, which in area and >population are quite comparable to temperate Europe. But not linguistically. There are 250 million people speaking Dravidian languages in the Indian subcontinent. Basque is spoken by some 660,000 people. "Steppe invasions" have affected Northern India, Iran, Anatolia, the Balkans, the Hungarian plains. Never Southern India, Northern or Western Europe. >>Well, that would make Mallory's "Proto-IE'ans" the descendants of >>Renfrew's "Proto-IE'ans". >-- no, just the people they picked up agriculture and animal husbandry from. >The 'wave of advance' peters out in the western Ukraine. The cultures to the >east were Mesolithic and adopted the Neolithic package from their neighbors; >at least, that's what it looks like. Not really. The Bug-Dniestr culture is Balkanic, Mallory quotes Telegin on the North-Western origin of the Dniepr-Donets culture, and even the Sredny Stog culture can be considered a cultural satellite of the Western/Balkanic Tripolye culture. After all, the steppe cultures have been mainly dated on the basis of imported Tripolye pottery. Between 6500 and 4000 BC, the handful of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in the Western steppe area could have been easily Indo-Europeanized linguistically from the west at any time, several times over. It would have been a minor event. Only after 4000 (after the domestication of the horse in the steppe) do we see a partial reversal in the direction of technological and cultural flow, and we find steppe influences going westwards into the Hungarian steppe and the Balkans, although not into Northern/Central Europe (roughly Netherlands to Poland). Mallory's scenario requires "steppe pastoralists" to have become linguistically dominant after 3500 over an area that was densely populated by contemporary standards, but highly decentralized. In the Balkans (even more densely populated, but more centralized), seizing the "tells" and taking over the native political structures may have worked. In Northern Europe, there were no cities and no sizeable political structures to take over. Only massive infiltration might conceivably have done the trick, and we know there was none of that (the population still has largely "Anatolian" genes). The most parsimonious solution is therefore to assume that Northern/Central Europe was Indoeuropeanized rapidly from 5500 with the advance of the Linear Pottery culture, followed in the ensuing millennia by acculturation of the peripheral sub-Neolithic areas (N.Germany-Denmark-S.Sweden; Baltic-Bielorussia; Pontic-Caspian). After 4000, the Pontic area became a secondary center of (re-)Indo-Europeanization, affecting mainly the Balkans and Central Asia (-> Iran, India), while local developments in the Western/Central European area ca. 3500 (Corded Ware-Bell Beaker) carried Indo-European languages further into Eastern Europe (Russia) and Atlantic/West-Mediterranean Europe (France, Italy, Spain, British Isles). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Feb 22 19:33:38 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 19:33:38 -0000 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: Dear John and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dr. John E. McLaughlin" Sent: Monday, February 14, 2000 1:59 PM >> The minimal components of Nostratic are PIE and AA. > Of course there is the competing claim of Greenberg, Ruhlen, and Bengtsen > that AA does not belong in any group with PIE, but combines with Uralic and > Altaic with IE in "Eurasiatic". It is certainly good practice to be aware of this modification of the original theory. My major reason for proposing and maintaining the earliest version of the theory is the remarkable coincidences of phonological developments between Semitic and Germanic, which I attempt to illustrate at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/comparison.AFRASIAN.3_germanic.htm 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 JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 23 05:48:20 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 00:48:20 EST Subject: reality of PIE as dialect network Message-ID: That all languages are dialect clusters is true, but not particularly meaningful or important for our purposes. >ECOLING at aol.com writes: >Sufficiently massive borrowing *does* constitute a kind of genetic relation -- only if we redefine "genetic relation", which would serve only to make our vocabulary less succinct and less useful; and which we should therefore refuse to do. What we're discussing here is the relations of languages _over time_, from their _origins_. Borrowing is definitely a type of relation between languages -- there is more Romance vocabulary than Germanic in this sentence -- but that doesn't show a _genetic_ relationship between English and, say, French (or Romance). It shows a relationship of large-scale borrowing, which is a different type of relationship from that for which the term "genetic" was coined in this field. Likewise, substrate or superstrate influence on a language is also a relationship between the languages in question... but not a _genetic_ relationship. We have perfectly good terms for describing these relationships; "borrowing" and "super/substrate". Blurring these with "genetic" decreases the precision of the vocabulary available to discuss historical linguistic development. Where once we had three terms, each referring to something specific, now we would have only one -- which would therefore require elaborate amplification to make clear what we were talking about. If we "run the film backwards", the Romance accretions drop out of English, and we eventually arrive at a Northwest-Germanic language with very little Romance influence, and then at Proto-Germanic. And "running the film backwards" is _in essentio_ what comparative linguistics is about, after all. That's why this is the "Indo-European" list. Does anyone suggest that Persian should now be reclassified as a "IE/Semitc language" because half its vocabulary is Arabic? What earthly purpose would be served by such a redefinition? From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 23 07:33:23 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 02:33:23 EST Subject: reality of PIE Message-ID: >petegray at btinternet.com writes: >Quite! My point is that we cannot go beyond the "tolerably unified" and >speak of a single, undifferentiated language. I thought this was standard >stuff. To reconstruct PIE without allowing for some internal variety would >seem to me - in my innocence, and in light of the IE evidence - somewhat >doubtful. >> -- I don't think anyone has ever argued that PIE was completely internally undifferentiated. Particularly not in the "late PIE" period, when the spread/dissolution was under way. There are plenty of late isoglosses which are shared by several of the IE daughter languages/language families but not by others -- satemization, for instance. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 23 07:35:50 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 02:35:50 EST Subject: reality of PIE Message-ID: >petegray at btinternet.com writes: >but I am challenging the assumption that all daughter languages must - by >definition - come from a single undifferentiated original. >> -- that's only if you insist there's a meaningful difference between "tolerably undifferentiated" and "absolutely undifferentiated". There isn't really. What we can say with some confidence is that, at the time our reconstructions cease, PIE exists as a set of highly mutually intelligible dialects -- no more distinct than the contemporary dialects of English or German, say. That's close enough to a single, undifferentiated language for government work. This isn't organic chemistry, after all. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 23 07:38:10 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 02:38:10 EST Subject: reality of PIE Message-ID: >petegray at btinternet.com writes: >Creoles - how can you describe a Creole as descended from a single ancestor? >Doesn't his mean prioritising one of its "parents" over the other? -- in point of fact, the Creoles I'm familiar with all do owe more to one. Krio, for example, or Gullah, or Haitian creole. Creoles also tend to have highly distinctive grammatical features which are common to all creoles as such. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 23 07:39:30 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 02:39:30 EST Subject: reality of PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 2/22/00 11:27:53 PM Mountain Standard Time, petegray at btinternet.com writes: << "English shows a closer relationship to French than to Italian." >> -- that would be misleading. It's more concise to say something along the lines of: "Middle and Modern English show strong Romance influence, most particularly from French." From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Wed Feb 23 15:00:07 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 17:00:07 +0200 Subject: reality of PIE In-Reply-To: <000c01bf7798$894380a0$3b8901d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Feb 2000, petegray wrote: [someone wrote:] >>>> Genetically related languages were once the same language. > On this, Larry said: >>The statement above is true ... by definition. > This begs the question I asked above, and also relies on questions of > definition - are we talking of a single unifed undifferentiated language? > That's the concept I am attacking. The application of the comparative method always gives a single, homogenous parent language for a group of genetically related languages. This results from the nature of the method, since it always derives present heterogenity from earlier homogenity. But the result of the method must never be accepted as such - it must be interpreted. The reconstructed proto-language is an idealization, and idealizations should not be mistaken as reality. I believe no serious linguist would maintain that the proto-language was in reality completely homogenous (= without dialect variation). > It is not true *by definition* that > genetically related langauges derive from a single undifferentiated > ancestor. Not "undifferentiated", since no natural language is completely homogenous. Rather, the currently heterogenous state derives from an earlier, less heterogenous state. And when we go backwards in time, there will be a point which is homogenous enough to justify the concept of a single parent language. - Ante Aikio From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 23 07:47:48 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 02:47:48 EST Subject: Celtic closer to Anatolian? Message-ID: >ECOLING at aol.com writes: >For Celtic, is there any argument that on balance the geographic position of >Celtic in the earliest stages of PIE dialect network would put it closer to >Anatolian, or Tocharian, or Armenian, or etc., >> -- whether or not one goes so far as to posit a post-PIE "Italo-Celtic" unity (along the lines of Balto-Slavic) there are undoubtedly some shared features. Eg., both Celtic and Italic assimilate *p...kw to kw...kw -- PIE *penkwe, 'five' > Latin 'quinque', Old Irish 'coic'. Then there's the optative in -a-, and some uniquely shared vocabulary (Old Irish 'tir', 'land', and Latin 'terra'), and so forth and so on. On the whole, Celtic seems to have separated from the main bulk of PIE rather early, but later than Anatolian, and to have been "near" proto-Italic in the dialect continuum. That would mean, geographically, it was 'always' the southwesternmost fringe of PIE. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Feb 23 15:44:22 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 15:44:22 +0000 Subject: No single ancestor - breath of fresh air Message-ID: Lloyd Anderson writes: [on the family-tree model] > Is there a better model, which captures all of the virtues of the family-tree > model without limiting us to that model when it is clearly not applicable? > Perhaps dialect-network and family-tree superimposed in some way > (perhaps what was referred to in another recent communication)? There are many models on offer. In my forthcoming dictionary of historical and comparative linguistics (out in March over here and in March or April in the US), I group the various proposals under seven headings: 1. family-tree 2. wave 3. rake 4. rhizotic 5. crystallization 6. social-network 7. punctuated-equilibrium The first three emphasize divergence, while the last four focus more on convergence, or at least regard convergence and divergence as equally important. Only the last four have anything to say about non-genetic languages, such as creoles and mixed languages. I don't think any of these can be regarded as the ultimate model. Each is good at handling some things, bad at handling others. They are, I think, best regarded as complementary, rather than as competing. As always, linguistic reality is too complex to be captured adequately within a single model. However, I want to stress that the family-tree model remains our standard model. This is just too successful in too many cases to be brushed aside. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From jer at cphling.dk Wed Feb 23 18:03:02 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 19:03:02 +0100 Subject: Basque * 'round' In-Reply-To: <38A2CAD2.10A03647@aye.net> Message-ID: On Thu, 10 Feb 2000, Steven A. Gustafson wrote: [On my connection of the Basque/Celtic word with >> Dan.-Norw.-Swed. bil 'car', which must be very old given the assimilation >> of the nominative marker in Icelandic bi:ll (from *bi:l-R pointing to >> PGmc. *bi:l-az). > My understanding has ever been, that -bil- was short for -automobil-, > which may be an ancient Germanic root, but it would seem to present > certain phonological problems. My guess would be that the Icelandic has > been assimilated to fit into a pre-existing declension. Spoilsport, phonological problems are there to be overcome. And just because a Copenhagen newspaper gave first prize to the suggestion _bil_ in 1902 doesn't mean that the word is necessarily artificial; the prizewinner may well have been the last surviving speaker of the kind of Celtic that influenced Basque (which is apparently the most interesting IE language of them all, and one that has been sadly lacking in the training I have received). And on Thu, 10 Feb 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: [in reply to my plea:] >> Any good Celtic etymon for German Auto? > Well, it is well known that German au < *u:, and Celtic *p > 0, > so that looks very much like a form derived from an unattested > Celtic *pu:to- "stinking" (the contraption was apparently named > by the La T`ene Celts after its typical exhaust products). Now, that's more like it! And it makes excellent semantic sense. Perhaps someone knows how it ties in with current knowledge on the state of environment pollution in La Tene times? In that case perhaps he'd better keep it to himself, so that we do not strain the moderator's patience any further. Sorry, Rich, I couldn't help myself. Jens From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Feb 23 00:16:02 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 01:16:02 +0100 Subject: k' > ts > c-hachek order of changes? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ECOLING at aol.com wrote: >I have come to suspect / believe / almost to argue evidence >that the normal development is rather the reverse, phonetically, >that we more commonly have (universally?) >k' > ts > c-hachek >g' > dz > j-hachek >because the /ts,dz/ require more effort, >reflect better their origin as a *fronted* tongue-body production, >with the flat front of the tongue rather than the back contacting >the roof of the mouth, >whereas the grooved are more relaxed, >with less fronting or raising of the heavy body of the tongue, >but still an affricated acoustic effect, >so presumably a later substitute for /ts,dz/. >The theta is also I believe often a reflex of earlier /ts/ >rather than only via /ts/ > /s/ > "th". >Does this make sense to anyone? I can't think of any examples of c > c^ [using Slavic notation]. The most common paths seem to be: k to k^ t to t^ k^ to t^ or c^ t^ to c c^ to s^ c to T or s s^ to s T to s or t ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Wed Feb 23 08:33:51 2000 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 09:33:51 +0100 Subject: k' > ts > c-hachek order of changes? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Is there evidence in the Indo-Iranian group for >this other order of changes? >The only thing I can think to add at the moment is a vague memory >that in the NW part of India there are reflexes /ts,dz/ >where we otherwise expect (from Sanskrit) the >grooved . You are doubtlessly having the Nuristani languages of SE Afghanistan in mind, which are sometimes viewed as the third Aryan group besides Indic and Iranian. >The basic letters of Tibetan also have these values /ts,dz/, >and a diacritic is used to represent the Sanskritic . No, it's the other way round in Tibetan. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg home: Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-691332+ Georg at home.ivm.de work: http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/vtw/Georg/Georg.html From strand at sedona.net Fri Feb 25 03:12:21 2000 From: strand at sedona.net (Richard F.Strand) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 22:12:21 -0500 Subject: k' > ts > c-hachek order of changes? Message-ID: As the author of the "mention" in ECOLING's query, >The following mention got my attention: >> k' > c > ts >> g' > j > dz >I have come to suspect / believe / almost to argue evidence >that the normal development is rather the reverse, phonetically, >that we more commonly have (universally?) >k' > ts > c-hachek >g' > dz > j-hachek I can only refer him to the reference (http://users.sedona.net/~strand/Nuristani/nuristanis.html) on my original posting on this list on 2/3/2000. The "mentioned" sequence is found in the Iranian and Nuristani languages, as well as in several Indo-Aryan languages. The processual sequence is Fronting (k > k' > c [c = lamino-alveolar affricate]) followed by "Prognathizing" (jutting out the jaw while keeping the tongue's apex pressed behind the lower teeth, which moves the tongue's blade against the upper teeth). This sequence is inferred in proto-Iranian and is clearly attested in the Nuristani languages (e.g., Kamviri *dekm > *daca > *datsa > *dats > *dots > duts 'ten') and twice in Pashto (e.g., *deKm > *daca > *datsa > *dasa > las, 'ten', and *kwetu(e)r- > *catuar > tsalor > [Northeastern dialects] salor 'four'). The sequence may proceed to Obstruent Laxing (ts > s, dz > z), as in Eastern Iranian, contemporary Pashto dialects, and the Nuristani language ASkuNu, or to Strengthened Prognathizing (ts > th, dz > d), as in Old Persian. To my knowledge nowhere in the region is the reverse sequence "k' > ts > c-hachek" attested. As for the assertion >because the /ts,dz/ require more effort, >reflect better their origin as a *fronted* tongue-body production, >with the flat front of the tongue rather than the back contacting >the roof of the mouth, >whereas the grooved are more relaxed, >with less fronting or raising of the heavy body of the tongue, >but still an affricated acoustic effect, >so presumably a later substitute for /ts,dz/ there is no a priori reason why this should be so, and in fact in the Indo-Iranian frontier region it is just the opposite. Once you are speaking with a prognathized jaw, who is to say that /ts, dz/ require "more effort" than /c, j/? And there is nothing about this process that implies that the latter sounds must be a "later substitute" for the former. Any "effort" that occurs goes into the prognathizing that produces /ts, dz/; it has its origins in the belligerent facial posture as seen today in the generally hostile tribal environment of the Afghan-Nuristani ethnic divide. Regarding >The theta is also I believe often a reflex of earlier /ts/ >rather than only via /ts/ > /s/ > "th". this is exactly what my original post said in reference to the /th/ (read "theta") of Old Persian. Richard Strand Richard Strand's Nuristan Site http://users.sedona.net/~strand From edsel at glo.be Wed Feb 23 12:59:17 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 13:59:17 +0100 Subject: k' > ts > c-hachek order of changes? Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Monday, February 14, 2000 11:33 PM [snip] > The theta is also I believe often a reflex of earlier /ts/ > rather than only via /ts/ > /s/ > "th". [Ed Selleslagh] In European Spanish c (before i, e) (=theta) < /ts/ < Latin c (before i,e) or -t(i)-. Ed. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Feb 23 14:59:35 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 14:59:35 +0000 Subject: "pronoun" is semantic or distributional? Message-ID: Lloyd Anderson writes: > Another way of seeing why our long discussions > have been at cross purposes is the following. > Pat Ryan, in attempting to conform to the terminology > being used by Larry Trask, wrote the following: >> [PR] >> Perhaps the discussion could be foreshortened. 'My' could perhaps be termed >> a "pronominal determiner". > This is a perfectly reasonable position, *GIVEN* that Pat is using > the word "pronoun", here in the form "pronominal", > as a semantic-functional term (referring to persons etc.). > I believe that is an accurate statement, even if Pat's explanations > have not said so explicitly. > Trask is however using "pronoun" as a distributional class. > For Trask, "pronominal" and "determiner" are a contradiction > because both refer to distributional classes, distinct classes, > one standing for a full noun phrase, the other as a modifying > element part of a noun phrase (loosely put). Yes, except that I prefer 'specifying' to 'modifying'. But I don't agree that 'pronoun' can or should be used as a label for a semantico-functional class, since the term is already in use for a syntactic class. To apply the same label to two entirely different things is merely to invite unnecessary confusion. > Back to Pat Ryan's terminology: > "possessive pronoun" is perfectly reasonable when both terms > are taken in their semantic-functional senses. > But Trask does not use "pronoun" that way. > (Nor do I, when I am dealing with distributional classes.) [snip] > On the other hand, Pat Ryan could also point out that in > "her book", the "her" stands also (in Trask's analysis I think also) > for the entire noun phrase modifying book in > (the woman who came yesterday's book), > and thus may be regarded as the genitive or possessive form > of the pronoun "she", in the contrast "she" vs. "her book", > just as "the woman who came yesterday's" is the genitive > form of the noun phrase "the woman who came yesterday". > That is all consistent in the standard analysis, I believe? Not necessarily. Syntactic analysis does not, in general, work in terms of which things can "stand for" other things, whatever that might mean. Anyway, the determiner 'her' does not intrinsically mean 'the woman who came yesterday'. It might be so interpreted in a given case, but so what? This is still no argument that possessive 'her' is a pronoun -- now is it? Consider a parallel case: John: "I'm looking for a book with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley." Mary: "I have such a book." Now, in this context, 'such' is clearly to be interpreted as meaning 'with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley'. But does this observation make 'such' a prepositional phrase? No? Then how can possessive 'her' be regarded as a pronoun, on the basis of a parallel argument? > My point, as it has been for some time, is that > despite whatever Pat Ryan may or may not understand > of the type of distributional analysis represented by many of us, > his terminology was quite consistent and sensible, > and used an older tradition in the meaning of "pronoun", > a semantic-functional one. > He should not be beaten upon for that. Well, this is debatable -- the "consistent and sensible", I mean, not the beating-up part. > Even Trask's distributional usage might be criticized by a purist, > in that for him a "pronoun" does not stand for a "noun" > but rather for a noun phrase. So we should all give up the term > "pronoun"? I certainly don't advocate that, despite how > misleading it may be to some. We all realize that the label 'pronoun' is a little unfortunate, and that 'pro-NP' would be preferable in principle. But the term is traditional and established, and all linguists know what it means, so there is no good reason to change it. We are not so foolish as to commit the etymological fallacy. Mathematicians apply the label 'imaginary numbers' to a certain class of numbers. This name too is a little unfortunate, since it misleads outsiders into believing that the "imaginary" numbers are somehow less real than the "real" numbers -- which they are not. But again the term is traditional and established, and all mathematicians know what it means, and so they have seen no reason to change it. If outsiders misunderstand it, that's just their tough luck -- and it's the same with us. > Larry Trask was kind enough to take the time to distinguish > semantic-functional senses from distributional senses, > but I think had not acknowledged that much of the discussion > was motivated not by a lack of knowledge on Pat Ryan's part, > but rather by Pat Ryan using "pronoun" in a semantic-functional > sense. With different definitions, the discussion was bound > to be unfruitful. No doubt. But I notice that no semantico-functional definition of 'pronoun' has been advanced, either by Pat Ryan or by anyone else. Anybody like to try? > So can we please stop trying to prove each other wrong, > and get back to discovering interesting things about the real world? I'd love to. But I honestly do not believe that 'pronoun' should, or even can, be usefully applied to a semantico-functional category -- especially to a hypothetical such category which nobody has tried to characterize. > The following is a refinement, dealing with a more difficult > "edge" case. > Paul Postal (I think it was) many years ago argued that in > expressions like "we linguists" the "we" was the head of > the construction and the "linguists" was something like > an appositive (I don't remember the details just now). This analysis makes some sense, though it's not so easy to defend in English, with its lack of agreement. In languages with more agreement, the comparable construction usually shows first-person agreement, not third-person, confirming that the pronoun is best taken as the head. > I don't think this kind of construction is usefully laid > up against "those linguists", arguing the reverse of Postal's > position that "we" can be a determiner, because it is > understood as "we, who are linguists" (non-restrictive), > more than as a restrictive "those linguists who are we" > in the manner of "the house which is here" ~=~ "this house". I query this analysis. When I say 'we linguists', I normally mean '*all* linguists (including me)', and *not* 'a few people (including me) who happen to be linguists'. In context, I might mean something different. For example, within my university, I might conceivably say 'we linguists' to mean 'all the members of the Linguistics Department', but then I still couldn't use it to mean only 'some of the people in the LD, including me'. Anyway, note that, in English, this odd construction is confined to 'we' and to plural 'you': nobody permits *'I linguist' or *'she linguist' or *'they linguists'. The construction is therefore somewhat marginal, and it should not be invoked too freely in drawing conclusions about English syntax. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Feb 23 18:01:04 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 18:01:04 -0000 Subject: "pronoun" is semantic or distributional? Message-ID: Dear Lloyd and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2000 1:45 AM As usual, you have very concisely and accurately summed up the situation --- with an eye to creating the conditions for fruitful discussion. >> [PRp] >> Perhaps the discussion could be foreshortened. 'My' could perhaps be termed >> a "pronominal determiner". > This is a perfectly reasonable position, *GIVEN* that Pat is using > the word "pronoun", here in the form "pronominal", > as a semantic-functional term (referring to persons etc.). > I believe that is an accurate statement, even if Pat's explanations > have not said so explicitly. You have made explicit what the underlying assumptions were. But, I would ask Larry if, given the analysis above, 'pronominal' is inappropriate to distinguish 'my' from 'this' etal., what would be the appropriate term? Certainly, I do not believe anyone will easily agree that there is no discernible difference between 'my' and 'this' etal. Certainly, 'possessive', the term Larry employs in his published definition is unproblematical so far as I can see but is it entirely without merit to identify the substitutional difference between words like 'my' and 'this'? A more troublesome omission(?) in Larry's definifitions concerns words like 'mine', which he has assured us in a recent posting are 'pronouns'. But under his published definition of 'pronoun', we find only personal, reflexive, demonstrative, indefinite, interrogative, and relative --- listed as categories. Larry, under which of these categories does 'mine' belong? > Pat Ryan seems not to understand that > "she" does not substitute for "woman" with "the" mysteriously > not manifest. > Rather, "she" stands for the entire noun phrase > "the woman", normally with all modifying semantics also > included, so that "she who came yesterday" is at the margins > in modern English, a rather unusual construction, > even if perfectly grammatical. As Trask points out, > "the she who came yesterday" is not grammatical. I am not sure why you have interpreted what I have written to mean this --- perhaps I expressed myself awkwardly. I am aware that 'she' stands not just for the head noun but for the entire NP. 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 X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Feb 23 16:11:58 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 11:11:58 EST Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: In a message dated 2/23/2000 5:03:03 AM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote: >I suggest the Lord's Prayer for the text sample >since it was extensively recorded in various languages over a long period >and later examples are not required to be archaizing copies since the text >is a translation of a fixed text and the translator is trying to render >the original in his own language. Actually, I did sort of go through a similar exercise - perhaps before the archive - on this very list. If it's in the archive, you'll see I even compared the Lord's Prayer in Italian and OFr to 'Silver Age' Latin (Saxo Grammaticus 1200AD) and OCSl to Pol and Polabian. I was trying to make a point about the degree of divergence in Slavic and was beat up quite nicely by Miguel Carrasquer Vidal. The fact that you are sending me back to that lesson may just indicate that I am one of those slow learners. :) Let me make the point I was making in my original post more explicit: I wrote: > Perhaps more importantly, inscriptions appearing in Latin, on the US > Dollar, on religious objects and at the end of e-mail messages (but > not on ogham sticks) show NO CHANGE IN THE LANGUAGE at all - 1800 > years later! whiting at cc.helsinki.fi replied: >Yes, and that's how you can tell that it's a dead language. Living >languages change; dead ones don't (at least not to the same extext or in >the same way). Well, my point - perhaps too subtle - was that the Celtic inscriptions on ogham sticks might be like the Latin inscriptions on coins and such. If you recall, a number of folks on this list asserted that the Celtic on ogham sticks had a great deal of similarity to the Celtic found (also mainly in inscriptions I believe) on the continent maMy point was that the inscriptions on ogham sticks may have had an artificial uniformity as one finds in inscriptional Latin. To the extent that these ogham sticks had some religious or ritual significance and were not meant to be 'littera' - communications for more everyday purposes, that seems possible. Tacitus describes Germanic priests carving sacred words on wood sticks and sacred words might tend to preserve anachronisms. Hope this clarifies things. Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 23 19:35:59 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 14:35:59 EST Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: >sarima at friesen.net writes: >Much as knowing English and a few phonetic rules often allows one to piece >together the general meaning of basic German. (Indeed, perhaps *better* >than that). -- good point. There's actually less structural difference between Greek (particularly Mycenaean) and Sanskrit than there is between modern English and standard German. Eg., the verbal morphology of Mycenaean and Sanskrit are much closer than English and German. In fact, you could make a good case that _Latin_ and Sanskrit are more similar than contemporary English and German. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Feb 23 19:41:45 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 14:41:45 EST Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: >alderson at netcom.com writes: >We are often cozened by writing, and by the habits of the modern stage, to >think of Elizabethan English as being similar or identical to our own, and >then to extend that thought to the language of non-literate societies over >longer periods of time. -- good point. The pronunciation has changed a lot more than the orthography. When English spelling was regularized, it was fairly phonetic. From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Feb 23 19:17:12 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 19:17:12 -0000 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: Dear Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stefan Georg" Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2000 10:08 AM >> How would some of you feel if Renfrew's premise were altered to: >> Nostratic spread through Europe with agriculture. >> ? > Renfrew seems to be about to alter this premise himself, maybe (judging > from his active role in organizing Nostratic conferences and the like), but > it of course begs the question of the existence of Nostratic. > It doesn't exist, so it didn't spread anywhere, less so through Europe, and > least so with agriculture. Stefan is undoubtedly right in his major premise. But (is there no always a 'but') I sincerely believe that, however the details may eventually sort themselves out, the correspondences between Semitic and IE are so demonstrable that no objective observer can doubt them --- even if we consider oursleves still in the MLC of inspection. The question of AA and IE is obviously much more complicated. The non-Semitic languages of AA are not easy to get at because of neglected study and relative dearth of references. Those efforts that have been made (e.g. Ehret) have not satisfied AAists let alone Nostraticists (presuming they exist). I sympathize with those who have looked at Nostratic and found it wanting. Only for linguists who cut their teeth on Hegel is Mo/ller stimulating reading; and others like Linus Brunner seem to have missed the Brunne altogether. However, Bomhard has assembled a lot of data which, I believe, has substantial merit and exploratory power. Although I differ with him principally phonologically, I certainly do believe that many of his comparisons have ultimate validity. Bomhard had to, I believe, rely on data that was faulty because, in some cases, better data was not available. Critics have seized on these discrepancies, and viciously attacked Bomhard's work. This, in my opinion, is equivalent to refusing a date with a beautiful woman because she has a mole, which can always be surgically removed. Almost no one has looked at his work with an eye to refining it --- only rejecting it. And I believe this is a serious and intellectually unforgivable mistake. 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 JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 03:26:27 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 22:26:27 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl writes: >Renfrew seems to be about to alter this premise himself, maybe (judging >from his active role in organizing Nostratic conferences and the like) >> -- I'm not surprised. He probably would have retracted long ago, if he hadn't invested so much personal prestige in the hypothesis. Nostratic is safely in the realm of the unfalsifiable hypothesis and provides a graceful avenue of retreat... 8-). From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Thu Feb 24 13:21:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 13:21:00 GMT Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: SG>not against Rosenfelder, whose attempt I've not found easily SG>accessible, mainly because the link above is dead. .. < The link via the homepage seems to be disconnected, indeed; but, the URLdoes work now leaving out the 'l': "www.zompist.com/chance.htm";-)) SG>What most of the books and article I've seen *don't* address, however, is SG>the question how "resemblances" are to be defined in the first place .. < Rosenfelder tries to define them, I think. Another source is e.g. Ringe in Diachronica 1992, passim, in his nearly famous Greenberg-controversy; in abridged form to be found in Larry's textbook. ---------- SG>Your resemblance may not at all be mine, .. < I never maintained any resemblance (as common heritage, you mean). ---------- SG>as if lexicon had *anything* to do with lg. classification, .. < correct, regarding the percentage calculations ? la Dyen. Only by understanding and applying the properties of the 'hypergeometric' and, using a complete etymological dictionary, it is possible to compute split-off bases between any two languages. Not more, and nothing less. And the brain of homo sapiens has not been constructed to grasp the hypergeometric ad hoc. --------- SG>the calculation of probabilities .. I wrote: >>Yes. SORRY. But yes. Not 'the introduction of agriculture as such' - The >>term 'middle neolithic' as applied to Europe as a whole (not locally) >>encompasses my 4500-4000BC date. For some reason you are calling the whole >>process 'early neolithic'. Neolithic is basically a distinction from >>mesolithic. Early neolithic in Europe as a whole generally denotes the >>period before 5000BC. Locally the term is sometimes used when different >>sub-periods can be identified. But in terms of Europe, farming 'as such' is >>also being introduced in the late neolithic and in some areas even in the >>'European iron age.' In a message dated 2/13/2000 5:02:19 AM, sarima at friesen.net wrote: >This is a different use of the terms than I am familiar with. I guess I >have not often come across their use for "Europe as a whole". I did not get a chance to respond to this post earlier. A good sense of how period classifications are applied can be gotten from John Collis' The European Iron Age (1984), a still impressive overview of the archaeology of the late bronze, iron and early Roman periods. Although it does not deal with the neolithic, it does make clear how the categorization of "Europe as a whole" during a period correlates with local classifications. sarima at friesen.net also wrote: >But this still doesn't change the basic facts: the agricultural revolution >is too old, and took too long to spread over Europe, for it to be >associated with PIE. Whether one uses local terminology or pan-European >terminology does not change this fact. Knowing the terminology helps to avoid misstatements about the facts. And I'm becoming more convinced that in fact a certain neolithic culture spread farming too fast, populated Europe too thoroughly and was too technologically advanced not to be associated with PIE. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Feb 24 02:08:18 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 21:08:18 EST Subject: Bandkeramik and non-Anatolian PIE Message-ID: I wrote: >> I've often used the term non-Anatolian and 'narrow' PIE to describe PIE >> after its separation from Hittite and the other Anatolian languages. This >> is rather orthodox linguistics. In a message dated 2/23/2000 2:15:46 PM, Rich Alderson wrote: >Only of one school. There are many Indo-Europeanists who do *not* accept that >Anatolian is to be viewed as a sister of the entire rest of the IE family. In >fact, I would say that the "Indo-Hittite" hypothesis is accepted by very few, >almost all students of one person (and certainly of one department) in the US. After reading that the UPenn tree had confirmed "the Indo-Hittite hypothesis," I seem to have confused myself and everyone else here. This Danubian scenario for "narrow PIE" does not require 'the Indo-Hittite hypothesis' in any way. All that is required is that one accept the rather "orthodox linguistic" notion that "the archaic features of Hittite can be explained by assuming that Hittite speakers made up the first group to leave the Indo-European community. Assumption of a considerable period of separation would account for the innovations in Hittite." (W. Lehmann, Historical Linguistics 1992, p.82) The one glitch is that it is not the proto-Hittites/Anatolians who left, but the 'Indo-European' community - the first splitting or branching occuring in either case. The 'Indo-Hittite hypothesis' is a more elaborate idea and is taxonomic: "Some Indo-Europeanists, notably E. H. Sturtevant, proposed reclassification of the [IE] family because of the h: sounds, others archaisms and the early time of the records. They suggested that Hittite was a sister language, rather than a daughter language, of Proto-Indo-European, and proposed a new label Indo-Hittite for the family." (Lehmann, ibid) I'm using "narrow PIE" as a shorthand (I learned from Prof Trask's posts on this subject) for the proto-language that is left AFTER the split-off of Anatolian. (This has nothing necessarily to do with the true "Indo-Hittite hypothesis.") "Narrow PIE" is shorthand for "PIE minus Anatolian/Hittite" or "proto-Celtic-Italic-Germanic-Slavic-IIr-etc." This appears to be quite orthodox, unless one concludes that the IE families split-off all at once. My read on this is that "PIE minus Anatolian" forms on the Danube and becomes Bandkeramik. The predecessor "Anatolian-Balkan painted pottery" culture found in the Balkans and Anatolia represents the residue of 'wide PIE' AFTER the split and would include proto-Hittite-Luwian (and possibly proto-Phrygian-Thracian, though don't hold me to that.) Renfrew does not concern himself much with intra-IE movements and anyone who actually reads A&L will see why. (Mallory is not the best place to get an accurate capsulization of Renfrew.) Renfrew is mainly dealing with the spread of IE (not PIE) in non-IE areas. He does however seem to see no need for pre-Greek to move into Greece, except as part of the first migration out of Anatolia. This may be at odds with the scenario I described above, though Renfrew hardly seems adament about it. Miguel Carrasquer Vidal has mentioned the view that in effect the Danuabian PIEians or post-PIEians moved south (the A>B>A migration.) At the time Renfrew wrote A&L, 1987, there was little evidence of Bandkeramik's progeny moving into the Balkans. There is some now. I don't know if this has affected his evaluation, which as I said was not strongly stated at all. (see A&L, 176-7, where he quotes John Chadwick - of Linear B fame - saying that the question "Where did the Greeks come from? is meaningless" based on the idea that Greek was not yet Greek when it entered Greece.) What does strike me again going through all this is the powerful evidence of a migration and a deep cultural change that comes from Anatolia into Greece about 2200BC. This is the time when we see the introduction of the domesticated horse into Greece, along with the fast wheel, new burial and building practices that merge with the existing culture to create what would become Mycenaean culture. This evidence was just beginning to be gathered when Renfrew wrote A&L and I wonder if it has affected his evaluation. In any case, if Renfrew ("not the Bible") is even 75% correct, his explanation seems to me to have the advantage of plausibility - for what that is worth in this crazy world. It is somewhat easier to believe that IE languages developed out of settlers/speakers populating the land, then to believe a rather small horde of Ukrainian horsemen/sheepherders entirely coverted the language of the first large, widespread technically advanced population in Europe - adept at trade, agriculture, building and metallurgy - whom must have by the way had an extremely adequate language of their own, but who nevertheless left no substrate. But stranger things have happened in history, I guess. Regards, Steve Long From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Thu Feb 24 08:46:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 08:46:00 GMT Subject: Bandkeramik and non-Anatolian PIE Message-ID: RMA>the "Indo-Hittite" hypothesis is accepted by very few, almost all RMA>students of one person (and certainly of one department) in the US. .. correct. I hope that is now clear to everyone in this list at least. Unfortunately, Ringe did feed this opinion /into/ the UPenn tree. (It was /not an outcome/ of the Warnow tree, because the algorithm produces so-called 'unrooted' trees). Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 02:27:15 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 21:27:15 EST Subject: The law Message-ID: >mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk writes: >Did the speakers of common IE have any notion of "the law" as an institution? >What was the IE word for "law", either as "the rules to be obeyed" (Latin >{lex}), or as "the process of justice" (Latin {jus})? >> -- two words; *dhe-ti, 'that which is established, law'; reflexes in Latin, Germanic, Greek, Sanskrit; derivation from *dheh, 'set, place'. And *ieuos, 'law, ritual', reflexes in Celtic, Latin ('ius'), Slavic and Indo-Iranian. From edsel at glo.be Thu Feb 24 12:05:48 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 13:05:48 +0100 Subject: The law Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Anthony Appleyard" Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2000 12:37 PM > Did the speakers of common IE have any notion of "the law" as an institution? > What was the IE word for "law", either as "the rules to be obeyed" (Latin > {lex}), or as "the process of justice" (Latin {jus})? Each IE language that I > know of seems to have a different word. [ moderator snip ] [Ed] You could add: Dutch {wet} : could that be related to 'veda'? (The Dutch verb 'weten' means 'to know') German {Gesetz} : 'what has been set' Ed. Selleslagh From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 03:02:42 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 22:02:42 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: <> -- sure. Hittite shows greater differentiation than other IE languages of the same date, but not _that_ much more. Eg, some vocabulary: PIE Latin Hittite English iugom iugum yukan yoke neuos novus newas new kwis quis kuis who kuuon canis kuwan dog es es es 'be' (as in 'to be') nsos nos anzas us And so forth and so on. >Because it means that your 'leap off the page' test does not work on Hittite >(@1500BC) -- I'm afraid it does. See above. >or Thracian (@500BC). -- What on earth do you mean? We don't _have_ enough Thracian to say more than it's transparently Indo-European; eg., Thracian 'Dia' from PIE *diuo -- and derivatives from the PIE words for 'horse', 'white', etc., mostly from place-names and personal names. Another perfectly standard IE language of the period. >The fact is all you accounted for with the "leaps off the page" criterion is >some kind of proto-Mycenaean-Sanskrit-Latin. -- plus Balto-slavic, Celtic, Germanic and Tocharian, to name a few. You should note that Latin and Sanskrit aren't considered particularly closely related. >But you CAN'T logically use those three ONLY to get back to PIE. -- see above. between the first attested PIE languages? If 2000 years separates Latin and >Sanskrit, Hittite should certainly add another 2000 years, wouldn't you say?>> -- more like 500 to 1000, actually. Anatolian is first attested in written sources around 2000 BCE or a little later -- personal names in documents from the Assyrian merchant colonies in what's now eastern Turkey. >Well, the first encountered IE languages include Hittite, Luwian, Thracian - >all before Latin. -- I've dealt with the Anatolian languages above. The -- very fragmentary -- sources for Thracian are contemporary with out first Old Latin texts and show about the same degree of development from PIE, as far as they go, which isn't very far. >I mean you wouldn't be excluding them because they are DIFFERENTIATED >ENOUGH to move your date way back - by whatever measure you >are using - would you? -- no. As I've shown above, and as any textbook would tell you, they're not differentiated enough either. Do you insist that every example come from every IE language? That's going to make things very tedious. >Let's get back to this proof you offered. Does Mycenaean decline 'fire' the >same similar way as Latin and Sanskrit? -- quite similar inflectional forms in the noun. The similarities of Greek and Sanskrit grammar were, you will remember, among the first clues to the existance of an Indo-European family of languages. Mycenaean and Sanskrit are so similar that knowing one, and a few rules for sound-changes, will enable you to read the other and get the general gist of the meaning. <> >Of course. And where exactly does it have it, by the way?>> -- it's the proto-Germanic word for "god/Sky God", of course, with the usual Germanic sound-change of PIE initial *d to 't'. As in 'diwaz' ==> Germanic 'tiwaz'. This is one of the best-established words in the lexicon, with derivatives in Germanic, Hittite/Anatolian, Italic, Greek, Celtic, Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic. You didn't know? From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 03:04:34 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 22:04:34 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >I'd still like to see your catalogue of the specific differences between >Mycenaean, Sanskrit and Latin. Then I'd like to see how you assign a date to >those differences. >> -- might I suggest you get a couple of textbooks and _read_ them? Then we wouldn't have to keep repeating commonplaces for you. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 03:23:48 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 22:23:48 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Really, 500 years. Kind of Italian (1500AD) to Italian (2000AD) - except of >course for the lack of gender in Hittite - and some other small matters like >that. -- Kind of like Anglo-Saxon (1000 AD) and Early Modern English (1500 AD), actually. Massive freight of Romance loan-words, drastic grammatical simplification, and -- right around 1500 -- an equally drastic set of sound-shifts. >And I see that the rate of loss of "inherited IE words" -- mmmm, in case you hadn't noticed, Hittite (as is well-known) has a massive freight of borrowed vocabulary from the non-Indo-European language Hattic, particularly in terms having to do with religious ritual, government and urban life. This is, of course, exactly what happens when one language moves into the territory of another whose speakers are at a higher level of technology and social organization. (The Greek word for "bath" is a non-IE loan, as is the Greek terminology for specifically Mediterranean plants -- hyacinth, for instance.) The Hittites (just to add some confusion, they actually called their language "Neshite") preserved the older Hattic language as a liturgical tongue and borrowed very extensively from it. >And I do respect the considered judgment of historical linguists in these >matters. I just don't believe we've had the benefit of such knowledge in >this thread - not from the start of it. -- that's odd, since the actual historical linguists in this thread have simply been repeating the consensus of the field. >We have texts in Thracian and the reason we cannot read them is because they >are VERY highly differentiated from Latin and Sanskrit and every other known >IE language. -- no, I'm afraid you're simply incorrect. The sum total of extant Thracian consists of a small series of short inscriptions in Greek script, which are difficult to translate because of problems in word division. (This is characteristic of _short_ inscriptions.) There are some glosses found in Hesychius and Photius which give us about 30 certain Thracian terms. The rest of our information comes from personal and place-names. In sum, we have less than a hundred Thracian words -- most of them names. Those we do have, are transparently IE, and present no particular difficulty: -para, 'settlement', -bria, 'town', for instance. >On the other hand, if early IE were as undifferented as being claimed here, >many of these problems in discipherment [of Hittite] logically should not >have occurred. -- no, you're simply wrong, again. The difficulties with Hittite were due to the form of _writing_, not to the language. Once the writing forms were thoroughly understood, the language presented no particular difficulties and indeed bore out some predictions -- the famous laryngeals, for instance. The writing system was a nightmare, though. Eg., the extensive use of Sumerograms in the Hittite version of cuneiform makes a large number of Hittite vocabulary items unrecoverable; and cuneiform is badly suited to writing Indo-European languages in the first place. Not to mention the extensive use of learned terms borrowed from Akkadian for the written form of Hittite. It's rather as if our only source for Latin were 7th-century Irish monastic graffitti. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 03:24:50 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 22:24:50 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: In a message dated 2/23/00 4:51:30 PM Mountain Standard Time, sonno3 at hotmail.com writes: >I think you are overstating a bit on Celtiberian >> -- sorry; sloppy writing. My mind was on "Thracian" while my fingers were still on Celtiberian... 8-). From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Wed Feb 23 07:38:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 07:38:00 GMT Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: SF>>Sanskrit, Hittite should certainly add another 2000 years, wouldn't SF>>you say? SF>Nope, not even close! It is about 500 years more differentiated, plus SF>or minus a few years. .. how will you know? I sometimes feel to be at an auction here.. SF>Phonologically, and (with some exceptions) grammatically, it is quite SF>archaic. .. again: how will you know? In the contrary, (not only to me) it seems rather contaminated. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Wed Feb 23 07:25:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 07:25:00 GMT Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: We should no longer discuss the aboriginal langs on this IE list. I only mentioned Pama-Nyungan as an example that languages under small outside pressure remain relatively conservative over long times. Don't mix that up with the percentages of co-occurrences, please. "Closely related" in a genealogical sense means only that they stem from the same ancestor language. That must not necessarily have been "recently". (I am not going into any glottochronology discussion). And the 50,000-year figure is the one presented by archeologists, as far as I know, these people were HSS and not Neanderthal. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 07:04:02 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 02:04:02 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >Still, the origin of the wheel is usually thought to be in Mesopotamia (e.g. >Sharrett). -- this is, I think, an unresolvable question. The use of the wheel appears at such very "compressed" dates over so much of Eurasia that it's hard to say whether it spread from Point A to Point X or vice-versa. The most one can say is that it's unlikely to have been invented independently at so many contiguous points so close in time. On a related subject, it _is_ fairly safe to say that the chariot (limiting the word to light vehicles with two spoked wheels) didn't appear first in Mesopotamia -- or in the near east. At present, the evidence would seem to indicate a northern Indo-Iranian origin for it, although a rather early one -- late third millenium, which would be prior to the I-I entry into the Middle East, Iran, or India. A pity the Sinashta charioteers didn't write their word for "one hundred" on the bronzework of the horse-harness, so we could date satemization... 8-). And even if it wasn't a PIE-period development, it certainly spread very far, very fast. Eg., the Tocharian word for "army" seems to derive from a term for "wheels", and there were chariots in Scandinavia, of all places, by the 14th century BCE -- no more than 8 centuries after the burials east of the Urals. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 08:02:18 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 03:02:18 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Did it take 15 years for the similarities to "leap off the page?" That is >still rather slow leaping. (And it appears that laryngeals are still more >hesitant about any such acrobatics.) -- it took a fair proportion of those 15 years (including the opening years of WWI, which sort of disrupted scholarly work) to reliably decypher the highly idiosyncratic Hittite writing system, which is an eccentric form of a script originally designed for another language; in fact, it's a local variant of Akkadian cuneiform adapted to write "Hittite", and that had in turn been designed for Sumerian and adapted to write Akkadian. Eg., the apparent distinction between b/p, d/t, and g/k in written Hittite is not real because it represents a phonological difference between Akkadian and Sumerian -- it has no relevance to spoken Hittite. Things like this had to be worked out before we could get at the actual shape of the language. Add to this the fact that the overwhelming bulk of the Hittite documents were religous and/or governmental, and it's precisely in those semantic fields that the non-IE element in the Hittite lexicon is greatest -- from Hattic, Akkadian, and Sumerian. To use an analogy, studying Hittite from the texts we have is rather as if we had to study English exclusively through works dealing with Greek architecture and Christian theology, written by a set of medieval copyists given to dropping into Latin every now and then and sprinkling the page with Greek words meant to be pronounced as their English equivalents. The _core_ vocabulary of Hittite is unambiguously Indo-European, and of a rather archaic form, at that, indicating a short separation. We were lucky that cuneiform was already known; it took 40 years before someone could show that Linear B was archaic Greek, a feat requiring skull-cracking ingenuity. >The "leap off the page" quote was made to tell us just how "undifferentiated" >Sanskrit, Latin and Mycenaean are supposed to be. -- that's "are". Has anyone here disputed their close similarity? Eg., Homeric Greek "Hieron menos" and Sanskrit "ishiram manas" (both meaning "mighty and powerful"). NB: no, the relationship does not depend on that one pairing. That's just a typical example. >What are the chances that the gap between Hittite and Classic IE languages >is actually much older? -- very little, in the judgement of most in the field. It's comparable to the difference between Old English and Early Modern English; a brusque restructuring of the morphology, and a massive freight of loan-words in certain semantic fields. >If I have been successful in posing this question understandably, then one >should see the value in considering what the reconstructed proto-Hittite of >6000-5500BC would look like. -- it shouldn't look so close to the PIE you get by comparing the other IE languages, for starters. Given a gap of 4000 years, one would expect an extreme degree of differentiation, similar to that between, say, English and Proto-Germanic. >My point that this was very convenient for Latin and Sanskrit to be compared >this way. And equally inconvenient not to find anything like the same >similarity in either Greek or Hittite. -- oh, there are plenty of similarities. The word for fire was just one. eg., that for "field" is, in four fairly early IE languages: Sanskrit: ajras Greek: agros Latin: ager Gothic: akrs Or to use the famous phrase: Sanskrit: Devas adadat datas Latin Deus dedit dentes Greek*: Theos doken ondontas (*my feeble stab at a Homeric version; Hellenists feel free to correct. Anyone care to venture a Mycenaean rendering?). >then what does the absence of agnis/ignis in other early IE languages prove >about time and differentiation? -- very little. You have to consider the whole language, of which that noun was simply one example. See above. You also have to consider the broad series of examples of the speed of linguistic change which we have records of. >"Different dialects reflecting different choices" would suggest that some >time was involved in those processes too. -- it's concurrent, not sequential. When one language was "deciding" to use *egnis or *pur-' as its word for "fire", it did not have to wait until another had gone the other way. All the languages in question were changing _simultaneously_, tho' of course not at exactly the same speed. >I simply point out that it does not support the premise it was >meant to support - which was the closeness of not just two languages - but of >all early IE languages. -- nobody in the field disputes the closeness of the early IE languages, that I'm aware of. There's disagreement about the _relative_ closeness, but not that the languages at first observation are still quite close. >As a matter of fact, I'm surprised that the closeness between agnis/ignis in >Sanskrit and Latin does not suggest a much more recent date of commonality >for those words by themselves, without regard to the rest of those two >languages. -- that's because they're cognates. They both undergo -- here's that phrase again -- the characteristic Indo-Iranian and Latin sound-shifts from a PIE form. Latin ignis Lithuanian ugnis OC Slavonic ognis Sanskrit agnis from PIE *egnis. The _alternative_ term, also of PIE date, is of course PIE *pur; which gives Germanic furr (standard *p ==> f) Umbrian pir Czech pyr (ashes, a semantic shift) Hittite pahur Tocharian puwar, etc., etc. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 03:29:46 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 22:29:46 EST Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: >proto-language at email.msn.com writes: >I believe the process through which this happened is roughly that Nostratic, >which had phonemic /e,a,o/ came into areal contact which Caucasian languages >that favored extreme vowel reduction, and transference of vocalic >differences to glides: CE -> Cya; CO -> Cwa, >> -- I thought this was the _Indo-European_ list? Since most people here probably classify "Nostratic" with the tooth fairy, must we waste our time? [ Moderator's comment: Would your reaction be as strong if Mr. Ryan had said "pre-IE" instead of "Nostratic"? --rma ] From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Feb 24 11:22:56 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 11:22:56 -0000 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: >> Bird's summary of Pokorny's roots, ....2050 core roots. >> Of these exactly 775 have neither e nor e: anywhere. > 38%. Is that including a(:) and o(:)? I simply got the computer to check - so it includes absolutely everything listed in Bird without e or e:. > Benveniste treats roots with CeRC / CRC ablaut as CeRC roots. Then it is no wonder that so few (comparatively) roots appear with CRC - whether the R is /i/ or /u/ or anything else. Is it possible that the apparent imbalance in numbers of CeC roots and CiC/CuC is a chimaeara - merely the result of the way we record the root in question? And further, since CeC includes CeR, a comparison would not be about -e- and -i-/-u- at all, but about the number of roots without a third consonant compared with the number of roots with third consonant, with medial R, but without full grade. Is anything meaningful being compared there? It does not seem to be a comparison of like with like. Peter From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Wed Feb 23 08:52:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 08:52:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: AH>The reconstruction for (Pre-)Proto-Slavic *inmen is rather zero grade AH>of *H1neH3mn, i.e. *H1nH3men-. Some more "loans" (???) to the north: - yukagir nim/niu - tshuk ninn - jap namu - ainu namup to the south (with s-mobile) - bask izen - semitc *s-m-n - nub esmi/esum far east: - indones. namma I do not know or claim these to be cognates. But it might be. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Wed Feb 23 08:30:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 08:30:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: RW>has been dropped in the last 10 years and replaced with something RW>like 'related languages are those that have some features in common or RW>are somehow connected', or 'there is no such thing as genetically RW>related languages'. French and Rumanian have Latin as one common ancestor language. Only in this sense they are said to be genealogically related and named Romance languages. Anttila shows that not in all cases it is clear which language should be called the "mother language" insofar as we prefer lexical versus grammatical & morphological features as criterion. Take Albanian with a rest of 10% (!) of original lexemes (cf. Anttila 89:172), but nobody hesitates to name it an /IE language/. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Feb 24 07:54:29 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 07:54:29 -0000 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: Dear Joat and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2000 8:37 PM >> Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >> "wolf" = "outlaw", I'd like an explanation>> > -- well, PIE for 'wolf' is *wlkwos. It's been suggested that this is a > normalization of an adjective, *ulkwos 'dangerous'; ie., Hittite walkuwa > 'dangerous', and Sanskrit 'avrka', 'not wild'. > In Anatolian, *wlkwos gives 'lion', which also suggests that the meaning of > 'wolf' is a semantic narrowing of an original 'the dangerous one'. > I should have been more precise; perils of working from memory. The Egyptian has wnS, 'jackal', which, I believe, is likely to be a cognate. Rather than 'dangerous', I have speculated that the the term can be analyzed as a combination of 4. *wel-, 'wool' ('sheep'), and 1. *kwei-, 'watch'. 'Dangerous', an adjective, is more likely to be derived from 'wolf' ('wolflike') than deriving a noun ('dangerous one') from an early adjective. 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 JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 21:03:31 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 16:03:31 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >edsel at glo.be writes: >this can happen without the intermediate stage of a pidgin: Afrikaans is a >typical example of that. -- Afrikaans is not a creole; it's transparently a Germanic language and transparently descended from 17th-century Netherlandish. Certainly there's been a morphological simplification, but only slightly more so than in English. In fact, Afrikaans is to Dutch very much as English is to Old English -- many of the same developments. >including the disappearance of the participial prefix ge- that existed in Old >English. -- however, Frisian shares many features with English, and never had the sort of Romance superstrate experience that English did. From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Wed Feb 23 08:04:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 08:04:00 GMT Subject: Horses Message-ID: >Armenian also has a word for horse, 'es', that's derived from *ekwos; .. that is not generally accepted. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 08:11:13 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 03:11:13 EST Subject: Horses Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Did something change while I wasn't looking? I thought > was ass. -- my reference lists it as "Arm: es, 'horse'. I don't have an Armenian dictionary on hand -- does anyone? From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 20:53:13 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 15:53:13 EST Subject: Domesticating the Horse Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >To PIEians wild and tame seemed to be one and the same. -- PIE has another word for horse -- *markos -- which has a derived feminine in Germanic, *markiha. In animal names a derived feminine in *-eha seems to denote a domestic animal (eg., PIE *h(1)ekueha, 'mare') and in *-iha denotes a wild animal. (eg., *ulkwiha, 'she-wolf). Therefore the original meaning of *markhos was probably specifically a wild horse. There's also an eastern-IE word, *gheios (from "impells, drives") which gives reflexes in Armenian -- 'ji', 'horse' -- and Sanskrit 'haya', 'horse'. Although in point of fact, English has no separate word for "wild horse", and we distinguish the wild from the domestic variety without any particular problem. >It is not hard to see how Sredni Stog culture might have learned >domestication and livestock breeding from Tripolye and applied it to the >animal it had a wealth of - the horse. -- no objection there; that's probably exactly what happened. PIE-speaking Sredni Stog picked up Neolithic traits from the non-PIE-speaking Tripolye culture and then did them the dirty. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 06:08:26 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 01:08:26 EST Subject: "Upper limit" of PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 2/23/00 10:47:45 PM Mountain Standard Time, jer at cphling.dk writes: >Does the quoted statement mean that PIE split up "no later than" 4500 BC, or >does it mean "no earlier than" 4500 BC? >> -- "no earlier than" 4500 BCE is what was meant, I think. Probably rather later. My own take would be "sometime after 4000 BCE" for the split with Anatolian; "Sometime after 3500" for the beginning of the breakup of the rest of PIE. I'd say around 3500 BCE or a little earlier for the split with Anatolian and around 3000 BCE for the rest, myself. Of course, there are no absolute dates here. In 3000 BCE, PIE was undoubtedly already a collection of dialects. Some of them went on sharing innovations much longer than others -- the percusors of Balto-Slavic-Greek-Phyrgian-Armenian-Indo-Iranian (and probably the lost IE languages of the Balkans) for example. Germanic seems to have made many of its most characteristic changes very late -- in the Iron Age. It's like very slowly pulling a mass of warm taffy in various directions, rather than chopping it up with a cleaver. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Feb 24 10:00:50 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 10:00:50 +0000 Subject: "Upper limit" of PIE Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard writes: > On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Stanley Friesen wrote: >> [...] [W]e can >> place a fairly secure *upper* *limit* on how old the divergence of PIE is. >> That upper limit is about 4500 BC. >> [...] > Help me, I'm dumb and ignorant, what is up and down in archaeological > dating? Does the quoted statement mean that PIE split up "no later than" > 4500 BC, or does it mean "no earlier than" 4500 BC? Is the present moment > the low or the high end of the scale? This is quite honestly meant as no > criticism, but perhaps there are other language-oriented IE-ists who have > difficulties following an argument that points up and down when it means > before and after (in this order or the reverse). Will anyone stoop to > informing me (us) on this important point? It means 'no earlier than'. When we say that 4500 BC is an upper limit for an event, we mean that the event cannot have happened any *earlier* than 4500 BC, though it may have occurred later. The archaeologists' calendar runs backward in time from the bottom of the page to the top. So, a "high" date is earlier than a "low" date, and an "upper" limit is a *terminus non ante quem*, while a "lower" limit is a *terminus non post quem". Don't blame us linguists for this. ;-) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Feb 24 08:10:11 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 08:10:11 -0000 Subject: Celtic closer to Anatolian? Message-ID: This all depends on the isoglosses you choose - obviously. I would be interested to see the ones that link Tocharian with Celtic. There are some isoglosses which are claimed to separate the two. I'm rather cautious about putting too much weight on "isoglosses" that I cannot always justify from my own knowledge, but for what it's worth: Germanic, Celtic and Italic are one side of collection of isoglosses which has Tocharian, Hittite etc on the other, and includes: (a) nouns in -tu:t formed from adjectives (b) -ss- consistently rather than -st- or -tt. (c) I also have a note about "-a- derivative nouns" which I no longer understand. Maybe it will remind you of something. Celtic Italic & Greek are one side of another collection which has Tocharian and Hittite on the other, and includes: (a) feminine form comparatives (b) Interconsonantal H falls (c) absence of -i on secondary endings Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Feb 24 08:29:02 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 08:29:02 -0000 Subject: Tocharian and Macedonian Message-ID: Inspired by Lloyd to ask odd questions, I dare to wonder if there is any connection between Tocharian and Macedonian -or is our evidence for Macedonian too weak? Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Feb 24 08:27:19 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 08:27:19 -0000 Subject: Italic close to Slavic? Message-ID: LLoyd seesm intersted in the place of Hittite, Tocharian & Albanian. For what it's worth, which is very little, I have spent some time working out a "pseudo-map" of the dialects based on as many usable isoglosses as I could find. The well-known 8 dialects have to go in their usual positions in a kind of circle. That's uninteresting. The interesting bit is fitting in Tocharian, Hittite, Albanian and Armenian. To get the simplest map, these all ended up in the middle of the circle, in a kind of square - in clockwise order, Hittite, Albanian, Armenian, Tocharian, Hittite. Armenian has to lie close to I-I and Greek. It shares one isogloss with Greek against I-I, and one with I-I against Greek, and three with Slavic or Baltic & Slavic against both Greek and I-I. There are five that separate Armenian, Greek and I-I from everything else, and another 6 that separate it off from most others. Albanian on the other hand appears closer to Baltic and Slavic (at least on the isoglosses I used, and on my interpretation of them). I find 7 isoglosses between Albanian and Hittite, 8 between Alb and Toch. Hittite and Tocharian seem much closer to each other - the only major PIE isogloss I have found to separate them is the distinction of short o and a (merged in Hittite, Germanic, I-I etc). And both, of course, are centum, appear to have a new tense system derived from the perfect, and so on. Hittite appears on my pseudo-map closer to Germanic than anything else. I found this a helpful exercise to do, and perhaps in gross terms there is some value in it as a kind of broad overview. Peter From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Feb 24 09:28:45 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 09:28:45 +0000 Subject: reality of PIE Message-ID: Pete Gray writes: > Larry said: >> Without a tolerably unified PIE ..... > Quite! My point is that we cannot go beyond the "tolerably unified" and > speak of a single, undifferentiated language. I thought this was standard > stuff. To reconstruct PIE without allowing for some internal variety would > seem to me - in my innocence, and in light of the IE evidence - somewhat > doubtful. But nobody is proposing that PIE was a language devoid of variation. Every living language exhibits variation: regional, social, contextual, individual. And PIE cannot have been different. It is merely that variation is generally very hard to reconstruct. Only occasionally do we find evidence pointing to the existence of variation in our reconstructed language, and even then such evidence is often hard to interpret unambiguously. I can give you a nice example from Basque. We can reconstruct for Pre-Basque a certain noun meaning 'interval', but the modern reflexes are inconsistent: some point clearly to earlier *, others equally clearly to earlier *. There is no way of resolving this with the data available, and it may be simply that the form of the word was variable in Pre-Basque. Or there may be some other explanation which we can't detect for lack of evidence. > Indeed, this very variety is what some of the glottalicists rely on - for > example, in order to link Skt /bh/ with Germanic */b/, both derived from > dialectic allophones (or "dialectophones") of b/bh. Sorry; I don't follow. As far as I know, *everybody* links Sanskrit /bh/ to Proto-Germanic */b/, both being derived from PIE */bh/. > That's just one > example - you know the kind of stuff I mean. A single unified PIE is > certainly not what we can reconstruct, except as an artificial abstraction. But nobody is claiming that our reconstruction contains every detail of the speech of the PIE-speakers. That's out of the question. What we *do* claim is that we can reconstruct a great deal of PIE. > A more interesting and slightly philosophical question is whether we > believe a perfectly unified pre-PIE is a necessity. I am arguing that it > is not - that dialect variation within a language is perfectly normal, and > the daughter languages may indeed reflect that variation, and even show > mixing of the dialects (as modern English does). Of course there are > examples of a single dialect spawning variant daughters, but I am > challenging the assumption that all daughter languages must - by > definition - come from a single undifferentiated original. Then you are arguing with no one, because no one either denies the reality of variation or insists that PIE was a language without variation. >>>> Genetically related languages were once the same language. > On this, Larry said: >> The statement above is true ... by definition. > This begs the question I asked above, and also relies on questions of > definition - are we talking of a single unifed undifferentiated language? > That's the concept I am attacking. It is not true *by definition* that > genetically related langauges derive from a single undifferentiated > ancestor. Assuming that 'undifferentiated' means only 'exhibiting sufficiently little variation that we may regard the whole as a single language', then I'm afraid that this *is* true by definition. That's what we *mean* by 'genetically related languages'. > It may be true by definition that they derive from closely > related forms of that language, but where is your evidence that all must > come from a single form of that language? I think it is an assumption open > to challenge and debate. Put it this way: the Romance languages derive from a single ancestor, spoken Latin, in the same way that the IE languages descend from a single ancestor, PIE. Nobody claims that spoken Latin was devoid of variation, but only that spoken Latin was, by any reasonable standard, a single language. >> Languages which do not >> descend from a common ancestor are not genetically related. > Even if they descend from sister languages, which are themselves descended > from different dialects, which are themselves reflexes - maybe quite complex > ones - of an earlier dialect continuum - which is itself the result of > earlier close dialects - etc etc .... So that there is no single unified > undifferentiated ancestor? Or do you believe that there always must be a > single ancestor without variation? Again, *nobody* is claiming an absence of variation for any language. But are you suggesing that a dialect continuum can derive only from an earlier dialect continuum, and so on, back in time without limit? I remain to be persuaded that such a thing is possible. Anyway, 'dialect' is a two-place predicate: a dialect must be a dialect *of* something: it can't just be a dialect, *tout court*. > Perhaps we are again using different meanings of "common ancestor" - yours > more loose, including variation, and mine excluding it in order to make the > point that a single dialect-free ancestor may not be necessary. Actually, I am very close to taking the presence of variation as part of the definition of 'natural language'. Not quite sure if I want to do that, but we never find natural languages without variation. I also suspect you may be taking regional variation as the only significant kind of variation. If you're not, I apologize, but in fact regional variation is just one of several kinds of variation that languages exhibit. It is also the one that is generally easiest to trace back to an earlier absence of variation. > Creoles - how can you describe a Creole as descended from a single ancestor? I haven't done so. > Doesn't his mean prioritising one of its "parents" over the other? There is nothing wrong with this conclusion in principle. We routinely describe an individual creole as 'English-based' or 'Portuguese-based', or whatever -- and with good reason. > Your restriction of > "related" to mean only "genetically related" means we cannot say, "English > shows a closer relationship to French than to Italian." Correct. We can't, because it's not true. > Instead we have to > spell out the nature of that relationship, and say, "English is equally > related to both French and Italian, but has been more deeply influenced > by... and so on." Are you seriously objecting to stating the facts accurately? Do you really think it would be a step forward to abandon all distinctions and shove every kind of connection between languages into a black bag marked 'related'? Count me out. > I want to say both sentences have their place, and given the right > understanding of "relationship", both are true. You appear to be saying > that the first is always wrong. I would say it is only wrong if > "relationship" is understood purely in a genetic sense. But that is how we *do* understand the term in historical linguistics. Basque has borrowed thousands of words from Latin and Romance. But this does not make Basque any more closely related to Romance than it ever was. 2000 years ago, Basque was a genetically isolated language (as far as we know). Today, Basque is a genetically isolated language whose lexicon has been heavily influenced by Latin and Romance. That's all. > So I ask, is the only relationship two languages can have, a genetic one? > (Indeed you talk of "inventing non-existent "relationships", and confusing > these with > > genetic links?") > What about Sprachbuende, etc? There are other relationships - so why deny > them? Why not keep the word "relationship" open, and specify "genetic" > when necessary? First, because our terminology is established, and changing established terminology without a profound reason is a bad idea. Second, because we already have terminology for labeling these other states of affairs -- 'Sprachbund' being a good example. I've written several dictionaries of linguistics, and nobody knows better than I do just what a mess much of our linguistic terminology is in. It's a relief to find an area of linguistics in which our terminology is in good order and generally accepted. And messing about with this established terminology is absolutely the last thing I want to contemplate. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Feb 24 11:38:30 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 11:38:30 -0000 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: I (Peter) said: >> the Greek pattern of accentuation in >> verbs is a development within Greek - RV keeps the accent further >> back. Vidyanath said: > I don't unerstand this. Augmented forms are accented on the augment in > RV. In case of unaugmented forms, the accent is generally on the root in > the s/is aorist, and shifts between the root and ending in the root > aorist. A new pattern developed in Greek which limits how far back the accent can fall. The accent must fall in one of the last three syllables, and may have to be on the second to last, (or even the last after contraction), depending on word shape. The means the augment cannot always be accented. eg 'ephe:na (1 sg aor act = I appeared) but ef'e:namen (1 pl = we appeared), 'elusa, but el'usamen etc. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Feb 24 11:57:52 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 11:57:52 -0000 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: >> where is the evidence on the correlation mentioned between >> asigmatic aorists and absence of augment? > Blumenthal, [comparing] strong aorist ..and weak aorist Thanks! But can I check two things: (a) Has he used "strong" to mean "asigmatic" rather than "second"? (There are number of asigmatic first aorists, e.g. e:ggeila, hgeira, e:ra e:muna apekriname:n ege:ma edw:ka etc) (b) What about verbs that appear to be asigmatic/"strong" merely because they lost their -s- in the development of the language? Would these affect the results? Peter From rao.3 at osu.edu Thu Feb 24 16:05:52 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 11:05:52 -0500 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: "Robert Whiting" wrote: I am confused by some of these. I will appreciate some expansion. > Formally, the Akkadian stative corresponds to the West Semitic > perfective (and the Egyptian so-called "old perfective") and the > Akkadian preterite corresponds to the West Semitic imperfective. > ... A plausible case could be made for iprus and iparras once > having been the same form with the outcomes being the result of > differences in stress. If so, then the 'old perfective' became the > stative and simply dropped out of the tense system If I understand this correctly, the evolution seems decidely odd: Perfective becomes a stative (existence of a state of indeterminate duration would seem to be in the domain of imperfective) while the imperfective became the narrative past but some other form was often used for `durative' past. [OTOH, stative -> perfect -> perfective is a more familiar chain.]. What are the reasons for this reversal of functions? BTW, isn't the `imperfective' used with wa- in Biblical Hebrew for narration? I know that people have been arguing for over 100 years about the explanation, but I thought that nowadays this was taken to be a survival of an old preterite and comparable to the Akkadian use. What is the preferred explanation these days? From rao.3 at osu.edu Thu Feb 24 15:23:25 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 10:23:25 -0500 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: wrote: > Number one point five, does goat's milk or mare's milk > produce curds, whey, butter? They make cheese from goat's milk, so there must something like curds or whey. > Number three, does lactose intolerance apply to cheeses, > butters and other by-products of cattle dairy farming? It is said to apply to cheese. It does not apply to yoghurt. I doubt it applies to butter, as butter is mostly fat. Anyway, people don't enough butter in one sitting to make much difference. BTW, ``butter'' and ghee used in (South) India is generally made from >fermented< milk (ie, it is fat separated from yoghurt, not fresh milk). This may make a difference. Also, there was some research I read about several years ago about practical implications of lactose intolerance. Apparently, people who consume milk from infancy on without break can tolerate milk even if they are, strictly speaking, lactose intolerant (defined as capable of consuming x gm of lactose on an empty stomach in one go. This amount, as I remember, comes to one pint of milk on an empty stomach which I don't think I can stand, but I drink two cups of milk a day (with oatmeal, cold cereal or in South Indian style coffee) plus yoghurt). Even if there is a break, if one persists for several months, one can get used to it. Secondly, lactose intolerance need not stop anyone from consuming 1-2 cups of milk a day, especially if accompanied by solid food. [In Tamil Nadu (South India), milk is generally consumed either as yoghurt/buttermile or in coffee (60-75% milk)or ``khiir/paayasam'' and often with some other food.] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Feb 24 21:33:14 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 16:33:14 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >But not linguistically. There are 250 million people speaking >Dravidian languages in the Indian subcontinent. -- and currently around 800 million speaking Indo-European languages there, which if you add in Iran, eastern Anatolia and central Asia, comes to over 1 billion. >"Steppe invasions" have affected Northern India, Iran, Anatolia, >the Balkans, the Hungarian plains. -- the Huns got as far as France, the Avars raided all over western and southern Europe, and the Mongols devastated Poland. They weren't stopped by the Europeans, either; Ogedai Khan died and they all went back to Mongolia. In any case, with the IE expansion in the Neolithic, we're talking about a social-political-ecological setting which has no historic parallel. Eg., the sparsity of population in Europe, the small size of the political units, the focus of settlement on what are now heath and upland areas, and the existance of broad and largely uninhabited areas of scrub and second growth. >Mallory's scenario requires "steppe pastoralists" -- well, no. Mobile mixed agriculturalists with a pastoral emphasis. It's clear from the archaeological record that true steppe nomadism was a _much_ later development. Even the Andronovo culture east of the Volga isn't pastoralist in the way that, say, the Kirgihz or Mongols were. >to have become linguistically dominant after 3500 over an area that was >densely populated by contemporary standards -- no problem. Roman Britain was densely populated too, and also politically decentralized. In fact, there were more people in Britain c. 400 CE than in 1400 CE. And it was Anglo-Saxonized to a startling degree; just from the linguistic evidence, you wouldn't know that the Romano-British had ever existed at all. The Germanic incomers were highly decentralized too. What seems to have happened there is small war-bands accompanied by their families bullying or bashing their way in among a less militant native population, making deals with the small local polities (often to help them against their domestic British rivals) and then turning on them later as they expanded by assimilating individual locals and/or bringing in more people from their homeland. Eventually the British settlements get overrun, or encapsulated and assimilated. And then the Germanicized areas of initial settlement in turn served as bases for the same process further west. Sort of like a series of ink-blots slowly growing and merging on a map, for a visual metaphor. >In Northern Europe, there were no cities and no sizeable political >structures to take over. -- well, that makes things easier for incomers, not harder; see the example of England, above. All that's required is one-way assimilation, which could be accounted for by the intruders having a hierarchical social structure suited to assimilating individual outsiders, and the natives not having such a mechanism. When the paradigm is: "What's mine is mine, what's yours is negotiable", the process has only one end -- regardless of the relative numbers. >Only massive infiltration might conceivably have done the trick, and we know >there was none of that (the population still has largely "Anatolian" genes). -- not according to Cavalli-Sforza, who shows a wave of migration starting north of the sea of Azov and spreading throughout Europe. >The most parsimonious solution is therefore to assume that Northern/Central >Europe was Indoeuropeanized rapidly from 5500 with the advance of the Linear >Pottery culture, followed in the ensuing millennia by acculturation of the >peripheral sub-Neolithic areas (N.Germany-Denmark-S.Sweden; >Baltic-Bielorussia; Pontic-Caspian). -- that's ruled out by the linguistic evidence. Archaeological stuff can only be a supplement, useful to confirm linguistic information, but unable to disprove it. >After 4000, the Pontic area became a secondary center of >(re-)Indo-Europeanization, affecting mainly the Balkans and Central Asia (-> >Iran, India) -- that presupposes a complex set of overlapping re-migrations which (very conveniently!) wipe out the supposed "IE" languages of the original European agricultural hearth. >ca. 3500 (Corded Ware-Bell Beaker) carried Indo-European languages further >into Eastern Europe (Russia) and Atlantic/West-Mediterranean Europe (France, >Italy, Spain, British Isles). -- it's more parsimonious to assume that the Corded Ware culture and its Bell-Beaker offshoot were in fact the agents of Indo-Europeanization of northern and western Europe; and even more important, there's a much better temporal fit with the linguistics. From rao.3 at osu.edu Thu Feb 24 15:32:39 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 10:32:39 -0500 Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: "Stanley Friesen" > I know how similar cognate words are in Hittite and Sanskrit. > After one abstracts out the differences in writing systems, they > are very little different at all. Indeed, if the phonetic differences > were all there were, they would be more like dialect variants of > one language. Farsi and Hindi, on the other hand, do not have > many such transparently similar cognates (and most of those are > accidental - much like the fact that in my dialect of English, "worm" > is pronounced almost identically to the reconstructed > PIE root it derives from [*wrm] - sans endings). I am curious about this. Has anybody actually sat down with dictionaries and tried it out? One problem is that, depending on the speaker, Hindi can contain varying amounts of loans from Iranian languages [For example, the Hindi word for 1000, `hazaar' is transperantly Persian, and transparently cognate to the Sanskrit sahasra.]. On the other hand, ``Shudh Hindi'' deliberately replaces these with Sanskrit words whose selection criteria may introduce its own bias into the comparison. I would like to know how these were handled? From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Thu Feb 24 13:09:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 13:09:00 GMT Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: SF>Comparing averages, and calibrating by observed rates of change in the SF>last 3000 years, we can place a fairly secure *upper* *limit* on how SF>old the divergence of PIE is. That upper limit is about 4500 BC. .. < you aren't really a linguist, are you? Who told you this outdated glottochronological fuss? just see my parallel mails for counter examples. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Thu Feb 24 10:01:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 10:01:00 GMT Subject: Rosenfelder Message-ID: LT>A small correction: the final element here should be ".htm", and LT>not ".html". .. correct, thank you (on my Atari I only have 3 gaps for the file ending, anyway); at least now that is the correct URL. Just in the moment I got it this way; What seems broken, is indeed the link via the homepage, as SGeorg stated in a parallel mail. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Thu Feb 24 13:04:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 13:04:00 GMT Subject: Balkan Kurgans Message-ID: Dear Stanley, SF>PIE has a reconstructible word that *probably* meant silver, and it is SF>derivable from a root meaning "white", which makes it unlikely to be SF>borrowed. .. That is well-known. The question aimed at *professional archaeologists* for archaeological evidence whether that silver showed any traits that could be termed or compared with clearly IE art. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Thu Feb 24 13:23:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 13:23:00 GMT Subject: Buck on the WWWeb? Message-ID: >it seems to me that one of the most useful things we could possibly have >is a fully-updated version of something like Buck, but organized by >etymon not by semantic meaning. .. The VTW at Leiden University, NL, is working on a new Indo-European etymological dictionary 'IED'. But it will still take some more years as I was informed some days ago by personal e-mail. Meanwhile we urgently are looking for an digitized version of the Pokorny!! Who knows one ???? Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Thu Feb 24 13:08:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 13:08:00 GMT Subject: Assumptions in Computing phylogenies Message-ID: "UPenn tree" LA>I am always skeptical about assumptions getting hidden when computers LA>are used. .. < they must not nessessarily get hidden: in a standard scholarly work you do have to make things clear. The UPenn tree is not clear. - the one side is the so called "perfect phylogeny" of prof. Warnow. The truth is that biological taxonomists come out with new, increasing complicated "perfect phylogenies" every 14 days. A professional overview is "Swafford/Olsen/Waddell/Hillis: 'Phylogenetic inference'. Molecular Systematics, 2nd ed. 1996." - have fun;-)) - the other side is Prof. Ringe's list; but: first, this is not published, and - still worse - the decisions fed into the tree are not published either. Or did I miss one of the many articles ? So - /what/ can we really argue about? Every question LLoyd stated furtheron shows that the UPenn tree is not fully documented. ---------- LA>I would be happier if we had a technique that could give results as a LA>combination of dialect net and tree, ... .. < There is. See e.g. Forster/Toth/Bandelt 'Evolutionary network analysis of word lists: Visualising the relationships between Alpine Romance languages. in: Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, Vol 5-3/1998:174- 187. And this one in fact /is fully documented/, including the word list. --------- LA>a third one I raised recently as a question, and do not think the one LA>response I received got me further in my understanding: LA>(c) are results sensitive to whether a dialect in a dialect net is near LA>the center, surrounded by closely related languages, with many nearby LA>characteristics to compare, ..< attention! We /must/ not mix up dialect geography with genealogy! These are quite different issues. Two languages may be direct offsprings of a mother language, in spite that one of them has lost e.g. ~90% of the original features (e.g. Albanian, mainly due to Latin influence) and the other, e.g. Greek, lost only ~ 40%. -------------- LA>that Ringe expressed "surprise" that the results of using the technique LA>were highly consistent with traditional scholarship. I found that LA>expression of surprise itself surprising, .. > indeed. It's commonplace in informatics: "garbage in = garbage out". And, vice versa, of course. --------------- Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From ie at AA5779.spb.edu Thu Feb 24 21:19:25 2000 From: ie at AA5779.spb.edu (Artem V. Andreev) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 00:19:25 +0300 Subject: R and r Message-ID: Dear sirs! I have a question that at a glance might seem not to have any relation to the domain of the present list; but I humbly ask u to believe that it has a direct connection with my studies in IE and that I am very hard to solve it myself. The question is: is there any language in the world which has a *phonemic* opposition between dental vibrant /r/ and uvular *vibrant* /R/? Thank u very much in advance, Sincerely yours etc Artem Andreev From edsel at glo.be Thu Feb 24 11:46:31 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 12:46:31 +0100 Subject: Lusitanian/Celtic/Italic [was Basque ] Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard M. Alderson III" Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2000 10:28 PM > I notice that no one else has responded. I have a couple of comments: > On Sun, 6 Feb 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> Yes, the /p/ problem does distinguish it from Celtic >> I've also seen the theory that it was cognate with Celtic and Italic as a >> member of a W IE branch >> Ed Selleslagh has floated the idea that it might be Q-Italic > Q-Celtic, I think you mean. [snip] [Ed Selleslagh] No, I really said Q-Italic. The reason is that most of the Cabe?o das Fraguas text can be interpreted as some not too deviant form of Latin. Actually it can almost entirely be transposed in more normal Latin without the help of far-fetched analogies. The only real problem is the manifest incompleteness of the sentence. But this still is a personal idea of mine, of course. Ed. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Feb 24 09:46:09 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 09:46:09 +0000 Subject: Basque Message-ID: Ante Aikio writes: [on borrowing verbs] > This may be true in the cases you mention above, but the generalization is > incorrect. To name just one counterexample: Saami has a huge amount of > verbs borrowed from both Finnish and Scandinavian, and most of these are > quite recent borrowings. They are without exception inflected according to > the normal Saami inflectional paradigm. This even holds for new > borrowings: a borrowed verb root that has not even been phonologically > nativized gets Saami mood, tense, number and person suffixes attached to > it quite regularly. Very interesting, and I thank you for the information. I presume, though, that the inflectional pattern of Saami is such that a foreign verb-stem can be readily absorbed and inflected. In many other cases, the two languages involved have such different verbal morphologies that there is no way the borrowing language can inflect the borrowed verb-stem. Arabic loans into Turkish are a good case in point: there is no earthly way that an internally inflected Arabic verbal root can be handled within the purely suffixing Turkish verbal morphology, which requires verb-stems to contain vowels. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From colkitto at sprint.ca Fri Feb 25 03:45:07 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 22:45:07 -0500 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: For "warg" the meaning "wolf" in Germanic is, however, secondary, see, Weitenberg 1988: 194 (The Meaning of the expression "To Become a Wolf" in Hittite", Perspectives on IE Language, Culture, and Religion, Journal of Indo-European Studies: Monograph No. 7,) and the literature cited therein. Robert Orr From sarima at friesen.net Fri Feb 25 05:44:42 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 21:44:42 -0800 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 08:10 PM 2/13/00 +0100, Stefan Georg wrote: >"bear" = "brown one" OK >"wolf" = "outlaw", I'd like an explanation The word is used in that meaning in many old texts, especially old laws, such as the Hittite legal code. It is also one of the words applied to Germanic berserkers in Roman times. However, it is not clear to me in which direction the shift of meaning occurred. I can just as easily see the original word for wolf being used as a slang term for an outlaw, or for a "wild man" in general. [Certainly the article I read on its use in the Hittite legal code seemed to assume the shift was from wolf to outlaw]. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Fri Feb 25 05:52:58 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 21:52:58 -0800 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <003e01bf78b2$7eda22c0$a2a701d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: At 08:05 PM 2/15/00 +0000, petegray wrote: > I mean that creolisation / language mixing or whatever you call it provides >us with an example of a language which goes back to two ancestors, not one. I am not sure that it actually does, though. I remember reading (second-hand) about a study done of the English-based creoles of the various islands in the Pacific. The result, as it was presented to me, was that applying standard reconstruction techniques recovered something close to the dialect of English prevalent among English sailors in the 18th century - not a hybrid of English and Polynesian. Does anybody here remember the study? Is my understanding of it correct? -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Feb 24 17:51:50 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 17:51:50 -0000 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: > The initial laryngeal *must* be *H3, given the evidence of the Greek > prothetic vowel in _onoma_. There is no way for *H1 (the "e-colouring > laryngeal") to yield an initial /o/ in Greek. I believe the argument is that analogy has so profoundly affected reflexes of laryngeals in Greek, including prothetic vowels, that the single evidence of Greek alone is insufficient to establish the nature of the laryngeal. I have read somewhere (sloppy idiot that I am, I forget where) the argument that the nature of the initial vowel in onoma is determined by the medial -o-. This only means that Rich's *must* might perhaps be softened to *can be counted as, given the lack of any evidence to the contrary*. Peter From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Fri Feb 25 16:02:51 2000 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 17:02:51 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: You should bear in mind that labels such as IE etc. used for individual languages do never (or should never) reflect the ontological status or some generic qualities of the language in question, but rather serve to identify a network of structural aspects.... It's up to linguists to weigh this network (mainly on grammatical grounds) and to decide whether it represents sufficient reflexes of a former network called e.g. PIE ... Hans Holm wrote: > Take Albanian with a rest of 10% (!) of original lexemes (cf. Anttila > 89:172), but nobody hesitates to name it an /IE language/. ***************************** Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet M?nchen Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 D-80539 M?nchen Tel.: +89-21805343 / Fax: +89-21805345 Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ ***************************** From Georg at home.ivm.de Fri Feb 25 16:48:09 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 17:48:09 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <200002231052.p2060@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: >AH>The reconstruction for (Pre-)Proto-Slavic *inmen is rather zero grade >AH>of *H1neH3mn, i.e. *H1nH3men-. >Some more "loans" (???) >to the north: >- yukagir nim/niu /niu/; /nime/ is "house" >- tshuk ninn I know /Tshuk/ only as one of the subdialects of Thakali/Nepal; since this language is to be sought "in the north", you probably mean /Chukchi/, where "name" is indeed /nynny/ >- jap namu ?? This means "amen" in Japanese >- ainu namup There is no such word in any lexical source of Ainu accessible to me (and I have more than three). Source ? >to the south (with s-mobile) >- bask izen So Basque is Indoeuropean, I see (try to inflect it, maybe it shows -r/-n heteroclisis as well). >far east: >- indones. namma /nama/, an obvious Sanskrit loan; formal Indonesian swarms with them and this is one of them. >I do not know or claim these to be cognates. But it might be. I claim these not to be cognates. No, it might not be. On the other hand, if containing - somewhere in the word - an /n/ (oops, obviously a nasal will do) is sufficient enough to suspect cognacy, well, then we could add quite an array of languages, as e.g. Tibetan /ming/, Swahili /jina/ (looks like Basque, so perhaps with j-mobile), Mongolian /ner-e/ (hey, here's the heteroclitic; I knew it had to be somewhere !), Khmer /chmua/ (remember the semitic forms !), aso. Voil?, l'unit? d'origine dell'linguaggio, how could I ever be so skeptical, silly me. St.G. PS: welcome to the beautiful land of Ruhlenistan Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From edsel at glo.be Fri Feb 25 19:16:09 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 20:16:09 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2000 10:03 PM >> edsel at glo.be writes: >> this can happen without the intermediate stage of a pidgin: Afrikaans is a >> typical example of that. > -- Afrikaans is not a creole; it's transparently a Germanic language and > transparently descended from 17th-century Netherlandish. Certainly there's > been a morphological simplification, but only slightly more so than in > English. [Ed] And Ha?tian Creole is transparently (heavily 'mutilated') French - which does not mean it's easy to understand (when spoken) for a French speaker, quite the contrary. But in written form, let's say it's not hopeless once you learn some tricks, I was told by a French speaking friend who has been there. On the other hand, Surinam Srinatong is another piece of cake: it's very, very mixed and transformed. > In fact, Afrikaans is to Dutch very much as English is to Old English -- many > of the same developments. >> including the disappearance of the participial prefix ge- that existed in >> Old English. > -- however, Frisian shares many features with English, and never had the sort > of Romance superstrate experience that English did. [Ed] This is strictly a matter of definition - or rather of how strict/fuzzy your definitions are. Actually I was referring in my mail to what Robert Whiting was saying about 'contraction and expansion' of (mainly) syntactic features, and that's what happened in Afrikaans, but it is not entirely the same as what happened to English. I clearly said that "modern Afrikaans has many of the characteristics of a creole" which is not the same as saying it IS a creole. Just one random example: there was a very major simplification of the verbal system, virtually down to the level of child talk (no offense intended) - to the ears of Dutch speakers, but also some new features were created like the ever present double negation, and modern Afrikaans is a full-flung language comparable to any European language. BTW, don't get confused by the many puristic neologisms (built upon Dutch words, retained or re-introduced) that make it look more (pseudo) Dutch than it actually is. Today you wrote: ">petegray at btinternet.com writes: >Creoles - how can you describe a Creole as descended from a single ancestor? >Doesn't his mean prioritising one of its "parents" over the other? -- in point of fact, the Creoles I'm familiar with all do owe more to one. Krio, for example, or Gullah, or Haitian creole." [Ed] This is clearly the case of Afrikaans (and Ha?tian Creole, Papiamento etc.). "Creoles also tend to have highly distinctive grammatical features which are common to all creoles as such". [Ed] Could you elaborate on that? What do you consider to be grammatical features which are common to all creoles (Apart from the process of destruction and later reconstruction of a number of basic features)? I believe most of this apparent disagreement is about how much residue of the major component's features (of Dutch in Afrikaans, of French in Ha?tian Creole, of Spanish/Portuguese in Papiamento...) you accept in order to still call it a creole - or not. To me it's a matter of degree. About Frisian : I haven't seen any of the changed syntactic features of English in Frisian; the parallelism is rather with Old English. It certainly didn't change its syntax as English did (e.g. word order inversion). I wonder (but don't know) if some Western Germanic (e.g. Dutch Saxon) dialects ever had a ge- prefix. English lost it in historical times. (As a non-specialist of OE, I am not so sure about its participial use, but it certainly existed in its other uses, e.g. "ge-thenc"). I am a native speaker of Dutch, with French as my second language and an inhabitant of a country where French speakers often make the same mistakes when speaking Dutch, and I can easily see that English word order has been seriously affected by French (partially copied on it). In fact, if you used English word order in Dutch (or any continental West-Germanic for that matter), or vice-versa, it would sound very weird and foreign indeed, except in very simple sentences like 'I have a car' (SVO). E.g. What would you think of a sentence like *"I said clearly that "modern Afrikaans many of the characteristics has of a creole"* (cf. above)? Of course all these are considerations of a non-specialist. Ed. Selleslagh From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Feb 26 00:21:56 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 01:21:56 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>edsel at glo.be writes: >>this can happen without the intermediate stage of a pidgin: Afrikaans is a >>typical example of that. >-- Afrikaans is not a creole; Afrikaans has been described as a "creoloid". There was a "bottleneck", though not as narrow as with a real creole. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Fri Feb 25 07:15:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 07:15:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: RW>The "items" Anttila is talking about are languages and dialects. .. that would be unusual. But if you decide it, this ends the discussion here. RW>It is equally useless to state .. > see above. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From adahyl at cphling.dk Sat Feb 26 15:25:26 2000 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 16:25:26 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > Adam Hyllested wrote: >> So if the IE suffix isn't >> analogical, the Indo-Uralic form must be reconstructed as *(n)newmn-. > But what about the laryngeals? They can't have sprung out of > thin air in the Indo-European part of Indo-Uralic. That was my point (see below). > is a cognate, we should at least reconstruct something like > *(H)neGumn-, for some value of H and G. Not necessarily. What if the phonetic realization of the phoneme cluster /H1n/ or /@1n/ was *nn-, i.e. syllabic n + consonantal n ? In my own language (Danish), /@n/ is often pronounced in that way. Adam Hyllested From adahyl at cphling.dk Sat Feb 26 16:15:24 2000 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 17:15:24 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <200002230027.QAA10916@netcom.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Richard M. Alderson III wrote: > On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Adam Hyllested (adahyl at cphling.dk) wrote: >> The reconstruction for (Pre-)Proto-Slavic *inmen is rather zero grade of >> *H1neH3mn, i.e. *H1nH3men-. > The initial laryngeal *must* be *H3, given the evidence of the Greek > prothetic vowel in _onoma_. There is no way for *H1 (the "e-colouring > laryngeal") to yield an initial /o/ in Greek. Except the umlauting of prothetic *H1 before a syllable containing *o. This would explain why we also have Greek _enuma-(kratidon)_, and make us able to reconstruct the IE word for 'tooth' (Greek _odont-_) as *H1dont-, originally present participle of the root *H1ed- 'eat'. Adam Hyllested From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Feb 27 01:42:17 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 20:42:17 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >proto-language at email.msn.com writes: >Dangerous', an adjective, is more likely to be derived from 'wolf' ('wolflike') than >deriving a noun ('dangerous one') from an early adjective. -- since the Germanic word for "bear" is precisely a derivative from an adjective -- "the brown one", this argument is a little odd. Especially since the original PIE word itself -- *h(2)rtkos -- is itself probably a nominalized adjective (via a stress shift), from *h(2)rektes; see Sanskrit raksas, "destruction". From adahyl at cphling.dk Sat Feb 26 15:50:51 2000 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 16:50:51 +0100 Subject: Michif (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 23 Feb 2000, Larry Trask wrote: > Now let's turn to a real and much better example: the North American language > Michif. Michif is probably the finest example of a mixed language on the > planet. > To oversimplify a bit, Michif consists of a French nominal system (with > French > lexicon and phonology) bolted onto a Cree (Algonquian) verbal system > (with Cree > lexicon and phonology) > OK. What should we say about Michif? Is it well described as a language > descended from two ancestors? Or is it better described as a language > descended from no ancestor at all? I suppose Michif wasn't created overnight, which means that it is best described as a language descended from EITHER French OR Cree - depending on its prehistory. What do we know about earlier stages of Michif? Adam Hyllested From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Feb 25 03:43:23 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 22:43:23 EST Subject: Celtiberian Message-ID: I wrote: >>>That would put you at (1000BC minus 2000 minus 2000 more) 5000BC. >>>And of course, the differentiation between [Mycenaean, Latin, Hittite] and >>>Tocharian, Luwian, the undecipherable Thracian, Albanian and Celtiberian >>>should send your date of dispersal hurtling back to that magic 7000BC >>>you've mentioned so frequently. Mr. Stirling replied with the usual pertinent pointedness: >> -- another bizzare statement. Would you care to elucidate why the >>existance of Celtiberian should affect our datings? Particularly as we >>know virtually nothing about it, or Thracian. On 2/23/2000 6:51:30 PM, sonno3 at hotmail.com further replied: >I think you are overstating a bit on Celtiberian - we may not know as much >about it as Gaulish, but we are far from knowing "virtually nothing about it" >(and it is certainly not undecipherable!) In any case, we know Celtiberian was >already being spoken in Spain in the 6th century BC, and that it shares many >similarities with the Goidelic branch (PIE -Kw->=Qu/Ku/Cu, for example). Its >vocabulary preserves some archaisms not found in Goidelic or Brythonic (Silbur >"silver" next to regular Common Celtic word Arganto-) and its sentance >structure was SOV. Just want to point out that I never called Celtiberian 'undecipherable' as I did not call Albanian indecipherable. As the author above points out, we actually know a bit about Celtiberian. The problem is that the language is not the 'remarkably uniform' Celtic that has been represented on this list. Since evidence of Celtiberian dates back as far as early Latin, contrary to what was said above, it certainly is a candidate as one of the earliest IE languages on record and needs to be accounted for on an equal basis, I think. I received some additional information on Celtiberian: "The 'first full manual' on the language appeared in 1998. Jord?n C?lera, Carlos. Introducci?n al Celtib?rico. Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza. Wolfgang Meid's commentaries on Celtiberian Inscriptions Archaeologica (Budapest 1994) have been considered authoritative. Francois Villar's A new interpretation of Celtiberian grammar (Innsbruck 1995) approaches the issues of both the non-Indoeuropean and what may be singular indoeuropean aspects of the language. Some general observations: The Iberian "syllabic" script that was used to write Celtiberian has often been described as unable to represent the opposition of voiced and voiceless consonants, as well as being limited to representing a limited range of final consonants (s, m, r, n, l). These conclusions have been questioned recently... On the basis of Latin scripts used in the last phase of Celtiberian, it was concluded that the language fell into the Q-Celtic category. However, it now appears that this may also have been the result of the Latinization of the language in the late period, since some early texts now seem to show signs of being P-Celtic... The lexical data shows that Celtiberian innovated or borrowed a good many words and roughly half the vocabulary is not known with real certainty... It has been said that Celtiberian also contains some Indoeuropean archaisms, but far outnumbering these are elements that remain to be explained - including the frequent use of the genitive singular ending -o. And while the predicted Indoeuropean passive -r ending does not now seem to be present, some researchers feel they have detected evidence of mutation (lenition) in the Celtiberian script... There is also the difficult problem, mentioned above, as to whether Latinization in the mid 2d century BC altered the language so that it was at least dialectically different from the one used in the Iberian script. Familiar structure that appears in Latin alphabet texts are not often confirmed in the earlier texts. And this difficulty is amplified by the fact that the accepted phonetic interpretation of early Celtiberian texts have not proved especially useful in elucidating the original Iberian script...>> Regards, Steve Long From sarima at friesen.net Fri Feb 25 05:28:56 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 21:28:56 -0800 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) In-Reply-To: <011b01bf761a$89716300$27d31b3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: At 12:00 PM 2/13/00 +0000, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >How would some of you feel if Renfrew's premise were altered to: >Nostratic spread through Europe with agriculture. >? Well, if one or more of Etruscan, Basque or one of the other non-IE languages of Europe could be reasonably be placed within the Nostratic group, that would be plausible. But as long as IE appears to be the only likely Nostratic language in Europe - It seems unlikely. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From alderson at netcom.com Fri Feb 25 23:57:39 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 15:57:39 -0800 Subject: Hypergeometric? [was Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?)] In-Reply-To: <200002241521.p2121@h2.maus.de> (Hans_Holm@h2.maus.de) Message-ID: On Thu, 24 Feb 2000, Hans Holm (Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de) wrote in reply to Stefan Georg: SG> as if lexicon had *anything* to do with lg. classification, HH> correct, regarding the percentage calculations \340 la Dyen. Only by HH> understanding and applying the properties of the 'hypergeometric' and, HH> using a complete etymological dictionary, it is possible to compute HH> split-off bases between any two languages. Not more, and nothing less. HH> And the brain of homo sapiens has not been constructed to grasp the HH> hypergeometric ad hoc. All right, I'll ask: What is meant here by "the hypergeometric"? Rich Alderson From sarima at friesen.net Fri Feb 25 05:40:40 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 21:40:40 -0800 Subject: *hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-? In-Reply-To: <31.13b8430.25d8e3ec@aol.com> Message-ID: At 11:51 PM 2/13/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Let me ask, does evidence of (*hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-?) appear in any >other IE languages? >I guess it would have to. Otherwise you'd have at best a Tocharian/Hittite >connection, but not necessarily PIE. Am I right? Not necessarily. In fact in the *particular* case of a cognate in Tocharian and Hittite, reconstructing a PIE word is at least reasonable. >After all, you wouldn't want to be finding PIE roots every time just two >ancient IE languages showed cognates Naturally. One does not reconstruct a PIE root for just *any* cognates found in a pair of IE languages. But when the languages are as geographically separated, and when at least one of them is likely to have split off very early, then there are few other good alternatives. Thus cognates in Latin and Celtic just suggest an old northern European word. But a word in Sanskrit and Celtc is hard to explain by means of later shared vocabulary (whether borrowed or jointly innovated). Tocharian and Hittite are about as deeply split as any two IE languages can be, and there is no real possibility of late contact. >I wouldn't of course think - if these two languages were the only evidence of >root mentioned above - that a PIE root or root-stem would need to be >conjectured simply because of some assumption that Hittite and Tocharian had >no contact or common ancestor after PIE split. I can't take seriously the >idea that it is ENOUGH to say that Hittite and Tocharian are "very widely >separated IE languages." For one thing, all IE languages are geographically >widely separated from Tocharian, but that couldn't always have been true. >And for another thing, some trees at least (e.g., the UPenn tree) have >Hittite and Tocharian right next to each other in terms of relatedness. But with no shared ancestral nodes that are not also shared with all other IE languages. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From inakistand at yucom.be Sat Feb 26 01:42:20 2000 From: inakistand at yucom.be (jose.perez3) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 02:42:20 +0100 Subject: *hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-? Message-ID: > Yes. Lexicon der Indogermanischen Verbum lists h_2werg, `sich umdrehen, > sich wenden' (quoting Latin uergere as the evidence for intransitive > meaning, and Hittite for h_2 so that Greek e as due to assimilation), > with finite verb forms in Sans (though the meaning changes to `turn away > from' => avoid for the most part in Classical Sans), Greek and Latin, > and a participle in Toch A. Hello IEists, I've just started reading the list and was wondering wether any of you might help me with the following: Could you, please, give me the complete reference of the Lexicon der Indogermanischen Verbum? Does anybody know whether it could be purchased via internet? I'm also after other "classics" such as Rick's Laut und Formenlehre des Griechisches and Meiser's Laut und Formenlehre des Lateins... can they be bought in the net? Can somebody give me the reference of the Pokorny's CD version of his roots dictionary? Is there any more up-dated IE roots dictionary (I remember Beeke's mentioning that the Dutch were working on a "new Pokorny". Has it come out yet?) Could anybody recommed a German dictionary organized by IE roots? (something on the lines of Clairborne's The Roots of English or, still better, of Robert's and Pastor's Diccionario etimol?gico indoeuropeo de la lengua espa?ola). I'm sure that the Germans must have brought out some good stuff. And since I've mentioned German... Is there such a dictionary for French? Duch? Greek? (I'm afraid I'm still using Andrioti's etymological dictionary for Modern Greek, which unfortunately doesn't usually take you far if you don't use an Old Greek etymological dictionary to go with it. Would Chantraine's Dictionnaire ?tymologique still be your best recommendation?) Russian? Final request: Ernout and Meillet's Dictionnaire ?tymologique de la langue latine has been out of print for ages and my photocopies (yups!) were never much good to start with. What shall I replace them with? Thanks a lot for your assistance and keep the good work, Joe From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Feb 25 05:16:04 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 00:16:04 EST Subject: ? Both ts > c^ and c^ > ts ? Message-ID: I gather from responses that both of these occur, and that folks do not believe there is a preference for one vs. the other? Or if a preference, it is the opposite of what I had suggested? (In any case, I think I cannot make more sense out of the "satem" area as a dialect net, whichever one were to choose.) *** On the following (please reply privately if you wish; I do not think the following topic is appropriate for the general list). >the prognathizing that produces /ts, dz/; it has its >origins in the belligerent facial posture as seen today in the generally >hostile tribal environment of the Afghan-Nuristani ethnic divide. I do not remember often hearing suggestions that sound changes were driven by social interaction norms (except some matters of men's vs. women's speech). One other case I do remember concerned the fact that Japanese /u/ is normally not strongly rounded -- I have heard or read the suggestion that this is because facial expressions are minimized by social convention in Japan. Do other correspondents have cases they believe strongly in? (Again, please reply privately to me only; anyone wanting a summary of responses I may receive to this last question, I'll be happy to send a compilation of them if you ask me privately.) Lloyd From strand at sedona.net Mon Feb 28 09:16:34 2000 From: strand at sedona.net (Richard F.Strand) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 04:16:34 -0500 Subject: Nuristani (was k' > ts > c-hachek order of changes?) Message-ID: Stefan George wrote: >You are doubtlessly having the Nuristani languages of SE Afghanistan in >mind, which are sometimes viewed as the third Aryan group besides Indic and >Iranian. Not to be too picky, but Nuristan is in *north*-eastern Afghanistan, on the southern slopes of the Hindu Kush range. I would add that only non-specialists in the region would deny the linguistic and ethnic validity of the Nuristanis' place as a third group within Indo-Iranian. However, while both Iranians and Indo-Aryans claim to be "Aryan" (AryA'i in Afghan FArsi), I have found no linguistic or cultural evidence for an "Aryan" consciousness among any Nuristanis (aside from a few intellectuals who have taken this notion from Western researchers). From the cumulative evidence it would appear that the Proto-Nuristanis were ethnically non-Aryas who were swept up in the earliest expansion of those Aryas who later became Iranians, only to be displaced later into the Indo-Aryan milieu of northeastern Afghanistan. Details of the Nuristanis' migration to their present homeland appear on my website. Richard Strand Richard Strand's Nuristan Site http://users.sedona.net/~strand From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Feb 26 09:37:01 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 10:37:01 +0100 Subject: Correction Message-ID: I stated earlier: >- jap namu ?? This means "amen" in Japanese This of course reveals that I don't exactly *know* Japanese. The rendering "amen" is of course highly, so to speak, acculturated (though Japanese Christians use it in this sense, so I'm told). A better translation could be "reverence, bowing", and it is, surprise, a Sanskrit loan, from the well-known Buddhist formula "namo Buddha:ya, namo dharma:ya, namo saMgha:ya" (reverence to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Congregation". The word HH probably had in mind is /namae/; but here /na/ means "name", and the rest of the compound - for a compound it is - is /mae/ "front". Though it doesn't mean exactly "first name" or sthlth. according to my sources and the informants I was able to interview yesterday, it seems likely that its semantic history involves something along these lines. Anyway, the resemblance to IE words is entirely fortuitous. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From sarima at friesen.net Fri Feb 25 06:21:40 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 22:21:40 -0800 Subject: Assumptions in Computing phylogenies In-Reply-To: <6e.c8dd3a.25dadcce@aol.com> Message-ID: At 11:46 AM 2/15/00 -0500, ECOLING at aol.com wrote: >According to one of our correspondents (Stanley Friesen?), >the biologists have found that this (?) technique is not highly >robust, is subject to artifact effects in several ways, >and that the UPenn team have not taken account of these. >... >Here are two such claims I think I have seen about artifact effects: >(a) results are highly sensitive to the choice of initial characteristics This is true, and some doubt about their selection of characters has been expressed. However, I am not sure how important that is in this case. >(b) results may be systematically biased by the technique > (what someone referred to as the "long branch" attraction effect, > if I remember correctly) Actually, these are two different things. Long branch attraction is a general problem with deeply branched sparse trees, across virtually all known techniques. Biologists are still struggling with this one, with no final answers yet. Basically, it is hard to recover the *true* branching order for deep branches in the absence of very early sub-branches. (This is probably one of the reasons why the relationships of the animal phyla are so hard to determine). But technique can also be biasing. (And I have some issues even with the more common techniques used in biology). >(c) are results sensitive to whether a dialect in a dialect net >is near the center, surrounded by closely related languages, >with many nearby characteristics to compare, >or near the periphery, surrounded by unrelated languages or isolated, >with fewer nearby characteristics to compare? >Will these different positions influence results expressed as trees >in ways they should not? (That is to say, peripheral dialects >may split off or innovate earlier; or they may fail to follow innovations >spreading from another part of the dialect network; two quite opposite >possibilities. Is the technique biased in these respects?) This could actually be considered a special case of the same basic problem as long branch attraction. >But results *do* quite properly depend crucially both on the choice of >characteristics included in the data and on the interpretation of >those characteristics, both in prior scholarship. >So there is a sense in which results are partly built in by the selection >of characteristics and the interpretation as innovations vs. retentions. Actually, properly done, cladistic analysis *determines* which characters are innovations and which are retentions. That is one of its real powers. The distribution of the characters determines the tree topology, with the character transitions placed on the branches between nodes. Then one uses some method to determine the root of the tree. Now, each transition is an innovation as one moves away from the root. Any character lacking a transition rootwards is retained. Actually, this reminds me of another problem with the UPEnn tree! They effectively *assume* the placement of the root. They do not use any of the various established means for locating the root. Unfortunately the most powerful method, outgroup comparison is not available in linguistics at this time depth (unless one accepts a relationship of PIE with the Uralic languages or some such thing). [The rooting problem is why many biological trees based on gene analysis or protein comparison are presented in "rootless" form, as seen in the recent article in Scientific American on the relationships of the various eukaryotic and prokaryotic groups]. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Fri Feb 25 06:46:31 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 22:46:31 -0800 Subject: language and biology In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 01:29 AM 2/22/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >But is this question relevant to the issue of whether recent biological >models may help in linguistic analysis? I was talking *methods*, not models. (OR at least I was talking about the mathematical features of models of change in general). >Does really doesn't matter if you classify languages as biological phenomena >or not? It gives insight into what *sorts* of processes are likely to occur. It suggests that sharp, well-defined boundaries are unlikely, indeed virtually impossible, which was my original point. It suggests that using analogies based on discrete physical systems are likely to be unproductive. All electrons are *identical* - absolutely interchangeable in all respects: this is fundamentally different than biological systems, where no two of *anything* are ever more than similar. Thus one must give up treating languages as simple discrete entities, and deal with them a "fuzzy" biological entities, for which "same" means "not enough different to matter for the present purpose (whatever that happens to be)". >It would seem that if you are after 'genetic' relatedness, biology provides >pretty good models for such concepts associated with the transfer of >attributes by 'descent' as wll as by other mechanisms. The analogy may not >be perfect, No analogy ever is - but this is *especially* true when biology is involved. > but the prototypical idea of attributes passing from parental to >filial generations must come from biology. In fact, I suspect the whole idea >of relatedness among languages is by analogy from the biological notion of >inheritance. (Although I'm conscious that Grimm predates Mendel.) Ideas of inheritance long predate Mendel - they just used a different model. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From alderson at netcom.com Fri Feb 25 18:46:32 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 10:46:32 -0800 Subject: Philologists' metaphors [was Re: language and biology] In-Reply-To: (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: > In fact, I suspect the whole idea of relatedness among languages is by > analogy from the biological notion of inheritance. (Although I'm conscious > that Grimm predates Mendel.) And clearly the notion of strata in languages > must have been a concept borrowed from geology. It is, _ab origine_, a biological metaphor, but one much older than Mendel: I'll remind everyone that (Indo-European) historical linguistics was once known as comparative philology, and that the comparative method as applied to a set of languages descends from that of the manuscript studies of the philologists, who used the metaphor of a family tree to describe the descent of manuscript recensions. It wasn't so much *biological* inheritance as inheritance _per se_ that was the model. As for the notion of strata, that is an explicit borrowing from geology, one made in the 20th Century. Prior to that time, there was a vague notion of "influence", but no explicit metaphor. Rich Alderson From sarima at friesen.net Fri Feb 25 07:01:30 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 23:01:30 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 03:50 AM 2/22/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >sarima at friesen.net wrote: ><ancestor of those three languages (which is why the Indo-Hittite hypothesis >often is considered to exclude Anatolian from the IE family proper).>> >I think that is the other way around. The I-H hypothesis I believe has >Hittite < PIE. Not at all. In fact the very *form* of the word implies exclusion of Anatolian from IE proper (unless you want to suggest it means that Hittite is more closely related to Indic than to other branches of IE :-) The way the names of proto-languages are formed pretty much requires PIE to be derived from PIH. > In fact I believe there's still an open question whether >Anatolian was the innovator or 'narrow PIE' was. Actually, it is clear that *both* must have innovated in some respects (assuming such a branch sequence). >Which means yes you would still have to account for the Anatolian differences >in dating PIE, accepting the I-H hypothesis. Well, actually I do anyhow, since I reject the Indo-Hittite hypothesis! But the differences in form of the actual cognates are very minor. In fact the retention of some laryngeals is very telling. It significantly limits the date of divergence. >sarima at friesen.net replied: ><minus a few years. Phonologically, and (with some exceptions) >grammatically, it is quite archaic. The only reason it *seems* so >different is the relatively few inherited IE words it retains.>> >Really, 500 years. Kind of Italian (1500AD) to Italian (2000AD) - except of >course for the lack of gender in Hittite - and some other small matters like >that. Nothing important. It is rather interesting: gender has virtually disappeared in some IE languages in rather less time than that. English lost grammatical gender between 900 AD and 1200 AD, if I remember correctly. It actually *is* a minor matter. [Though I have some doubts about reconstructing a full fledged grammatical gender system for PIE]. >And I see that the rate of loss of "inherited IE words" also does not enter >into the time equation. It has some bearing, but rates of borrowing vary greatly, and so this is not very illuminating (glottochronology notwithstanding). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From alderson at netcom.com Fri Feb 25 19:23:30 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 11:23:30 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: > sarima at friesen.net wrote: >> Indeed, in some ways PIE could be *defined* as the most recent common >> ancestor of those three languages (which is why the Indo-Hittite hypothesis >> often is considered to exclude Anatolian from the IE family proper). > I think that is the other way around. The I-H hypothesis I believe has > Hittite < PIE. In fact I believe there's still an open question whether > Anatolian was the innovator or 'narrow PIE' was. The "Indo-Hittite" hypothesis was put forth most strongly by Edgar Sturtevant in the 1930s and 1940s. His view was that since Hittite (and the Anatolian languages generally) retained in consonantal form reflexes of the "laryngeals" which had disappeared leaving only vocalic effects (timbre and length) in the other Indo-European languages, perhaps the entire Anatolian branch should be seen as a sister to Neogrammarian PIE. Sixty years later, we know that the laryngeals persisted into several, if not all, of the daughter languages past the time IE unity, and thus the Anatolian languages are not especially marked out by this feature. More important are morphological innovations and retentions in the Anatolian group, but nothing in all this calls for a 2000 year gap between them and PIE proper (your "narrow PIE"). More like about 500 years. In anticipation, > Really, 500 years. Kind of Italian (1500AD) to Italian (2000AD) - except of > course for the lack of gender in Hittite - and some other small matters like > that. Nothing important. How about English (1000CE), which had grammatical gender in nouns, and English (1500CE), which did not? French (1200CE), which had a case system in nouns, and French (1700CE), which did not? As noted in another thread (or perhaps this one, but very long ago), Comanche and Shoshone are no longer mutually intelligible, in less than 300 years. So why do you have so much difficulty with Hittite (Anatolian) developing away from the mainstream in that amount of time? On linguistic grounds, mind you, not archaeological ones. > On the other hand, if early IE were as undifferented as being claimed here, > many of these problems in discipherment logically should not have occurred. One would think so, but then, one would have only to look at things like early Latin inscriptions, some of which have not been satisfactorily deciphered to this day, to know that logic has nought to do with the question. After all, we are supposed to *know* Latin... Rich Alderson From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Fri Feb 25 17:43:59 2000 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath K. Rao) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 12:43:59 -0500 Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > A pity the Sinashta charioteers didn't write their word for "one > hundred" on the bronzework of the horse-harness, I will appreciate a reference where I can examine photographs of the said bronzework of these harnesses. [The only thing from harness/bridling I have seen photos of are the cheekpieces. I don't remember of the top of my head if these were bronze or bone.] From alderson at netcom.com Fri Feb 25 19:48:36 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 11:48:36 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <65.1d863d4.25e399b1@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: > (We have full texts by the way in Thracian, but nothing "leaps off the page" > to say the least.) Full bibliographical citation, s'il vous plai^t. Only Thracian data I know of is some small inscriptions (personal names and the like) and glosses in Greek texts. Full texts in Thracian would excite entire generations of Indo-Europeanists. So please, where are these to be found? > JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>> the word for "fire" in Sanskrit and Latin: >>> Nom. sing. agnis ignis >>> acc. sing. agnim ignem >>> dative agnibhyas ignibus > I replied: >> ...do all these languages decline with only a change in the initial >> vowel... thus justifying a 2000 year separation between all of them. > Let's get back to this proof you offered. Does Mycenaean decline 'fire' the > same similar way as Latin and Sanskrit? Does Hittite? I just had a tacky thought: The answer to the question *as posed* is "Within the bounds of phonological change in the individual languages, yes, Mycenaean and Hittite decline their words for 'fire' similarly to Latin and Sanskrit. That is one of the defining characteristics of the IE family, after all." But that's not what you meant to ask, is it? >JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >> It's 'tatis tiwaz' and 'tiyaz papaz' in Anatolian (Luvian and Palaic, >> specifically); same meaning -- "Sky Father" or "Father Sky". > Well, it seems that Anatolian is in the picture when the evidence helps, but > not when it doesn't. But that's the way of *all* evidence in *every* discipline: If there's nothing to be said by a particular witness, you don't bother to call her to the stand. Rich Alderson From sarima at friesen.net Sat Feb 26 02:28:23 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 18:28:23 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 03:56 PM 2/22/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >I wrote: >>> Do the similarities between Latin and Hittite 'leap off the page" as you >>> say? (Please recall how long it took for relationship to even be >>> detected.) >In a message dated 2/22/00 3:08:16 AM, Rich Alderson replied: >>Knudtson published the Tell-el-Amarna letters in 1902, as I remember, and put >>forth the claim that Hittite was Indo-European at that time. Hrozny' demon- >>strated the IE-ness of Hittite in his 1917 monograph to the satisfaction of >>the general IEist populace. How long did you think it took? >Did it take 15 years for the similarities to "leap off the page?" No - notice the statement: "in 1902, as I remember, and put forth the claim that Hittite was Indo-European at that time". It was *immediate*. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From alderson at netcom.com Fri Feb 25 22:37:17 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 14:37:17 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: >>> Do the similarities between Latin and Hittite 'leap off the page" as you >>> say? (Please recall how long it took for relationship to even be >>> detected.) In a message dated 2/22/00 3:08:16 AM, Rich Alderson replied: >> Knudtson published the Tell-el-Amarna letters in 1902, as I remember, and >> put forth the claim that Hittite was Indo-European at that time. Hrozny' ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >> demonstrated the IE-ness of Hittite in his 1917 monograph to the satisfac- >> tion of the general IEist populace. How long did you think it took? > Did it take 15 years for the similarities to "leap off the page?" That is > still rather slow leaping. No, it apparently took Knudtson looking at it for him to state that this was an Indo-European language. I'd call that "leaping off the page". Hrozny''s book was simply a setting forth of large bodies of evidence for the claim. If we date the founding of IE studies to Sir Wm. Jones' little dictum, but the *scientific* study of the question to Rask, Hrozny' beats Rask by about 15 years. > (And it appears that laryngeals are still more hesitant about any such > acrobatics.) No linguist who ever examined with an open mind the evidence set forth by Saussure in 1868, and that of Hittite, ever doubted that Saussure was correct. I can't speak for what *close-minded* folks might have done. > What are the chances that the gap between Hittite and Classic IE languages is > actually much older? [ than 500 years or so, as stated by several posters, myself included ] What are the chances? Not good. Not zero, but not good. Yes, we have the example of the extreme conservatism of Old Lithuanian, but that is so unusual that we *do* make note of it. Historical linguistics is, after all, a *historical* science, and so must make assumptions about such things as rates of change based on *historical* obversation of similar occur- rences--the development of the Romance languages from Latin, the development of modern English from Anglo-Saxon, and so on. In order for Hittite (and the other Anatolian languages) to have diverged from the rest of the Indo-European languages very much more than 1000 years earlier (my own outside estimate), we would have to reject the evidence for rates of change provided by all the historical obversations we can make and instead say that Old Lithuanian is the expected result, and *every* *single* *other* *IE* *language* underwent accelerated development. An archaelogist may be willing to do that; I, and I think most if not all of my colleagues as well, will not. > If Hittite were separated from Sanskrit-Latin-Mycenaean by an additional 2000 > years, how would the comparison be different than it is now? What would one > expect in the comparison to change if in fact Hittite separated 1500 or 1000 > years earlier? If you wanted to see what Hittite would have been like if its > ancestor were a distinct language in 6000-5500BC, how would it reconstruct > differently? I'm sorry, but the question is meaningless. Linguistic change is not determin- istic; we *cannot* say "these changes must, or should, or will, take place if languages are separated by X centuries/millennia". In a historical discipline, we can only say "similar changes, or similar *kinds of change*, took place over a period of X in these families or languages under our control, so we expect that it will have taken a similar amount of time for a group of languages *not* under our control to have undergone similar changes". > Does the degree of variance in the reconstructed forms become greater in some > way? Do the numbers of retentions or innovations increase? What changes > would one expect to reflect the greater effects of a longer time period? Lexical retention as a measure is of course the usual stalking horse, although this means not only "words on a list" but occurrence both of free and of bound morphemes when being done by a non-glottochronologist. Innovation is of course simply 1 - (measure of retention), so one only gets the one when one gets the other. I've already address the last question above, which answer also covers the next query: > If I have been successful in posing this question understandably, then one > should see the value in considering what the reconstructed proto-Hittite of > 6000-5500BC would look like. What would it be missing? What would it have > lost? What additional signs of age should we expect? This would give us a > way of saying 'Hittite texts would need to look like this if proto-Hittite > indeed separated from PIE about 7500 years ago.' And that would seem to me > to be of great value. > Go back to the original post and you'll see that agnis/ignis was being used > to selectively support the 2000 year separation between those early IE > languages. No, it wasn't. It was being used as an easily accessible example of the large number of similarities which "leap off the page" to anyone familiar with both languages. Nothing selective about it, not in the secret-cabal sense I read into what you've written. > My point that this was very convenient for Latin and Sanskrit to be compared > this way. And equally inconvenient not to find anything like the same > similarity in either Greek or Hittite. If agnis/ignis prove something about > the degree of differentiation over time, then what does the absence of > agnis/ignis in other early IE languages prove about time and differentiation? Absolutely nothing. Similar sets from each pair of IE languages can be set up, as well as sets from larger groups; several have been posted in the last couple of days. > (As a matter of fact, I'm surprised that the closeness between agnis/ignis in > Sanskrit and Latin does not suggest a much more recent date of commonality > for those words by themselves, without regard to the rest of those two > languages. But as linguists, we *don't* disregard the rest of the languages--we leave that to the people who claim kinship between Basque and Xalxa Mongolian or the like. If the form of the word in either Latin or Sanskrit were somehow anomalous, we might suspect contact later than (near) the time of PIE unity, but since both show all the expected developments for all sounds within the word, there is no reason to look for zebras in the stable. > If all the words in Latin and Sanskrit matched like this, you could argue 50 > years separated the two languages. And if the differences between these two words were the only differences between them, you might even be correct. That's why we don't focus on any word pair in particular to the exclusion of all other data, to see whether such a claim *would* be justified. > Lehmann tells me that Sjoberg and Sjoberg showed why words in south Asia like > 'sun' should be eliminated from the "glottochronological core" precisely > because they reflected very early and widely borrowed religious vocabulary. > Forgive me for asking whether agnis/ignis might not fall into the same > category.) You're forgiven. They don't, even if there were such thing as a "glottochrono- logical core" for them to fall into. (I agree with the sentiment that we have to be wary of such possibilities, just deny that anyone can come up with an _a priori_ list of things we *must* leave out, or in, or whatever.) Rich Alderson From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Feb 26 21:59:33 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 21:59:33 -0000 Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: > >Sanskrit, Latin and Mycenaean .... > ...Has anyone here disputed their close similarity? I'm happy to, if required. The "similarity" depends where you look. There are some major restructurings in Latin verb morphology that seem to be being ignored by the claim of "close similarity". And since no finite verb forms other than third persons occur in Mycenaean, the claim might also seem to be based more on classical Greek, where we can identify traces and relics of an original situation, but which is certainly not "closely similar" to Sanskrit in the form in which we actually have it. I freely grant that Greek and Sanskrit present closely similar pictures of what their common ancestor probably was, but let's remember that the claim was made to support an argument about the time it takes for languages to change. In that context, the claim can only be valid if based on the languages as they actually are, not on our reconstructed proto-forms. Greek as it is has thematicised the vast majority of verbs. The "closely similar" claim ignores that. Greek as it is has collapsed nominal morphology (or Sanskrit has expanded it) so that one language has five cases, the other 8. The "closely similar" claim ignores that. Sanskrit does not show the aspectual system which is so vital to the non-finite verb forms of Greek. I could go on. I had not disputed the claim to "close similarity" because I recognised it as an unimportant over-statement, and in effect an unprovable generalisation - since it depends so much on what you look at, how you count, and so on. But when you suggest that I actually approve of your claim, you go too far! Peter From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Feb 25 15:18:15 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 10:18:15 EST Subject: Indo-Hittite Hypothesis Message-ID: In a message dated 2/25/2000 3:30:24 AM, Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de wrote: >>the "Indo-Hittite" hypothesis is accepted by very few, almost all >>students of one person (and certainly of one department) in the US. >.. correct. I hope that is now clear to everyone in this list at least. >Unfortunately, Ringe did feed this opinion /into/ the UPenn tree. (It was >/not an outcome/ of the Warnow tree, because the algorithm produces >so-called 'unrooted' trees). Actually, I've tried to figure out how the UPenn tree could possibly 'confirm' the Indo-Hittite hypothesis and I think that the term may have been misapplied in the papers that are available on this subject. You may recall that the top of the UPenn tree was diagrammed on this list as: > PIE > / \ > / Anatolian This is not the I-H hypothesis, which would yield something like this: > PIH > / \ > PIE P-Anatolian The premise being that PIE and proto-Hittite/Anatolian are sister languages with a common parent. My understanding is now that the difference between these approaches is not trivial. The reconstruction of the hypothesized PIH gives substantially more weight to the Anatolian languages than does a reconstruction of PIE that makes Hittite et al a mere branch of Indo-European. And although the I-H hypothesis has been associated with, e.g., the new version of the IE obstruent system offered by Hopper, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, I'm told that the actual scope of its possible ramifications for PIE reconstruction has not yet been explored. As far as I-H support goes in the US, I suspect that the biggest problem it faces is the understanding of its implications. And possibly - as evidenced by the usage in connection with the UPenn tree - even its proper definition. Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de also wrote: >Unfortunately, Ringe did feed this opinion /into/ the UPenn tree. (It was >/not an outcome/ of the Warnow tree, because the algorithm produces >so-called 'unrooted' trees). I do not believe - again, from the papers we have - that the algorithm used on IE at UPenn ever produced an 'unrooted tree'. Contrary to what has been said on this list in the past, the external adjustments appeared to have been made directly to the algorithm from the outset. What we see in the papers is a model of a 'unrooted tree', but I could not find one that represents the IE languages. Regards, Steve Long From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Fri Feb 25 09:04:38 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 11:04:38 +0200 Subject: basic vocabulary borrowing (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [I wrote:] Concerning the affix *-teks?(n) [in e.g. Finnish kahdeksan 'eight', yhdeks?n 'nine'], this explanation has been >> recently revived: it has been argued that it is a loan from Proto-Iranian >> *detsa. The phonetics are flawless; there are other examples of U *ks < >> Iranian *ts (The cluster *ts was illegal in U, hence the substitution). >> This explanation seems more plausible to me at least than the previous >> rather fabricated theory that Finnish kahdeksan and yhdeks?n developed >> from *kakta e-k-s?-n 'two do not exist' (i.e., "two are missing from >> ten") and *?kti e-k-s?-n. [Adam Hyllested replied:] > Well, what speaks in favour of the latter theory is of course the fact > that '10' in Finnish is not **teksa:n, but , a word > that also exists in Mordvin, Yukaghir, and Omok. Furthermore, it > resembles full grade of a root cognate to the IE *kmt- 'hand' (with the > derivations *dekmt '10' and *(d)kmtom '100'); the zero grade shows up in U > *ka:te 'hand', Finnish . Whether a loanword, a cognate, or a word > of totally different origin, kymmenta: '10' must be older than '8' and > '9', if these are borrowed from Iranian. I don't think that Finnic-Mordvin *k?m(m)ini '10', PU *k?ti 'hand and arm' and PIE *kmt- have anything to do with each other. Loaning is out of question, because PIE *mt would not give U *m(m) (in *k?m(m)ini) or *t (in *k?ti), since PU *-mt- was fully possible. Also, the words for '10' and '100' have PIE palatal *k?, which regularly gives PU palatalized *s? in loan words. Thus, in case of loaning one would rather expect U *s?VmtV or something like that. Cognateship of course remains a possibility, but this is pure speculation. There is internal evidence suggesting suggesting that Fi.-Mordv. *k?mmini is secondary, whatever its origin might be. There is an apparently native U word for '10' with a wider distribution: PU *luka '10', found in Saamic, Mari and Manysi. This is obviously connected with PU *luki- 'count, say', even though the morphology is unclear. The origin of *k?mmini- is obscure, but it resembles curiously Finnish k?mmen 'palm of the hand'. However, the sound correspondence (*-?- ~ *-?-) has no internal explanation. And what are the Yukaghir and Omok cognates of *k?mmini? This sounds susceptible to me. > By the way, on the basis of what material you are reconstructing a > Proto-Iranian *detsa ?. PIE *dekmt became *das'a already in > Indo-Iranian; compare Sanskrit '10' and Avestan '10'. It's not my reconstruction really, but one of Asko Parpola and Jorma Koivulehto. They maintain that PIE *e was retained in early Proto-Iranian, which has something to with palatalization of velars in Iranian, if I recall correctly - I can dig up the references for you, if you are interested. Regards, Ante Aikio From edsel at glo.be Fri Feb 25 10:18:31 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 11:18:31 +0100 Subject: SV: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2000 4:37 AM >> X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >> This seems to me to be an interesting observation. Have you got any >> bibliographic references on lactose tolerance? > -- Cavalli-Sforza, "The History and Geography of Human Genes" and "The Great > Human Diasporas". >> Number one, linguistically, do we find the IE languages discriminating cow's >> milk from mother's milk > -- unlikely to be the latter, since the terms actually usually derive from a > verbal form, "to milk"; eg., *melk > Also *dhedhnos, 'sour milk, cheese'; *pipiusi, giving Lithuanian papijusi, > 'cow rich in milk'; *tenki, 'buttermilk'; *nguen, 'butter'; *turo, 'curds, > curdled milk', etc. >> Number two, do all the milk of all cattle or even of wild cattle produce the >> intolerance syndrome? > -- if drunk unprocessed. [Ed Selleslagh] That's only true if 'processing' involves 'fermentation', because otherwise lactose is still present. Fermentation transforms lactose (sugar) into lactic acid, which causes no intolerance. That's the basic reason why Eurasian steppe peoples invented yoghurt and similar products, apart from the fact that milk, even boiled, spoils easily, while the products obtained through a fermentation process (yoghurt, cheese, etc.) do not (except butter, but that's a different story: formation of butyric acid). Ed. Selleslagh From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Feb 26 01:51:47 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 02:51:47 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>But not linguistically. There are 250 million people speaking >>Dravidian languages in the Indian subcontinent. >-- and currently around 800 million speaking Indo-European languages there, >which if you add in Iran, eastern Anatolia and central Asia, comes to over 1 >billion. That wasn't my point. >>"Steppe invasions" have affected Northern India, Iran, Anatolia, >>the Balkans, the Hungarian plains. >-- the Huns got as far as France, the Avars raided all over western and >southern Europe, and the Mongols devastated Poland. They weren't stopped by >the Europeans, either; Ogedai Khan died and they all went back to Mongolia. None of which had any linguistic effects. >In any case, with the IE expansion in the Neolithic, we're talking about a >social-political-ecological setting which has no historic parallel. Eg., the >sparsity of population in Europe, the small size of the political units, the >focus of settlement on what are now heath and upland areas, and the existance >of broad and largely uninhabited areas of scrub and second growth. >>Mallory's scenario requires "steppe pastoralists" >-- well, no. Mobile mixed agriculturalists with a pastoral emphasis. It's >clear from the archaeological record that true steppe nomadism was a _much_ >later development. >Even the Andronovo culture east of the Volga isn't pastoralist in the way >that, say, the Kirgihz or Mongols were. >>to have become linguistically dominant after 3500 over an area that was >>densely populated by contemporary standards >-- no problem. Roman Britain was densely populated too, and also politically >decentralized. In fact, there were more people in Britain c. 400 CE than in >1400 CE. And it was Anglo-Saxonized to a startling degree; just from the >linguistic evidence, you wouldn't know that the Romano-British had ever >existed at all. I consider Welsh (including its Latin component) to be pretty solid linguistical evidence. >The Germanic incomers were highly decentralized too. What seems to have >happened there is small war-bands accompanied by their families bullying or >bashing their way in among a less militant native population, making deals >with the small local polities (often to help them against their domestic >British rivals) and then turning on them later as they expanded by >assimilating individual locals and/or bringing in more people from their >homeland. Eventually the British settlements get overrun, or encapsulated >and assimilated. >And then the Germanicized areas of initial settlement in turn served as bases >for the same process further west. >Sort of like a series of ink-blots slowly growing and merging on a map, for a >visual metaphor. >>In Northern Europe, there were no cities and no sizeable political >>structures to take over. >-- well, that makes things easier for incomers, not harder; In general it doesn't. >see the example >of England, above. All that's required is one-way assimilation, which could >be accounted for by the intruders having a hierarchical social structure >suited to assimilating individual outsiders, and the natives not having such >a mechanism. >When the paradigm is: "What's mine is mine, what's yours is negotiable", the >process has only one end -- regardless of the relative numbers. >>Only massive infiltration might conceivably have done the trick, and we know >>there was none of that (the population still has largely "Anatolian" genes). >-- not according to Cavalli-Sforza, who shows a wave of migration starting >north of the sea of Azov and spreading throughout Europe. Yes, *precisely* according to Cavalli-Sforza. >>The most parsimonious solution is therefore to assume that Northern/Central >>Europe was Indoeuropeanized rapidly from 5500 with the advance of the Linear >>Pottery culture, followed in the ensuing millennia by acculturation of the >>peripheral sub-Neolithic areas (N.Germany-Denmark-S.Sweden; >>Baltic-Bielorussia; Pontic-Caspian). >-- that's ruled out by the linguistic evidence. How so? The linguistic evidence confirms that there is a sizeable Pre-Germanic substrate element, which fits exactly with the genesis of the TRB culture in the area around Denmark. Early infiltration in the Baltic area fits with the PIE borrowings into Uralic, and possibly the early differentiation of both Tocharian and, in the Pontic area, Indo-Iranian. >Archaeological stuff can >only be a supplement, useful to confirm linguistic information, but unable to >disprove it. But linguistic information gives no absolute dates. There's nothing about the "linguistic information" that "rules out" a date of 5500 BC. >>After 4000, the Pontic area became a secondary center of >>(re-)Indo-Europeanization, affecting mainly the Balkans and Central Asia (-> >>Iran, India) >-- that presupposes a complex set of overlapping re-migrations which (very >conveniently!) wipe out the supposed "IE" languages of the original European >agricultural hearth. Not necessarily Indo-European, but related to Pre-IE, as expected for the Neolithic timeline (Anatolia->Balkans, 7000 BC). Not wiped out entirely by historical times was Etruscan-Lemnian in the Aegean area. >>ca. 3500 (Corded Ware-Bell Beaker) carried Indo-European languages further >>into Eastern Europe (Russia) and Atlantic/West-Mediterranean Europe (France, >>Italy, Spain, British Isles). >-- it's more parsimonious to assume that the Corded Ware culture and its >Bell-Beaker offshoot were in fact the agents of Indo-Europeanization of >northern and western Europe; But that glosses over the origin of the Corded Ware horizon. There is no evidence for invasions and no evidence for a link with the Pontic area. On the other hand, Corded Ware is initially found in exactly the area occupied by the earlier TRB culture. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From sarima at friesen.net Sat Feb 26 03:01:40 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 19:01:40 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 07:55 AM 2/23/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >Stanley Friesen wrote: >>[Though I actually question tracing B-S back to Corded Ware]. >G-B-S. I am coming from the position of being unconvinced of the reality of Germano-Balto-Slavic. In fact I cannot consistently place Balto-Slavic in the IE tree. Depending on how I analyze it, it either comes out linked to Germanic (as you suggest), or linked to the Greek and Indo-Iranian groups. [Actually, I tentatively associate Corded Ware with German-Italo-Celtic, with *possible* inclusion of Balto-Slavic: I call this loose grouping "North European"]. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Sun Feb 27 06:02:31 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 00:02:31 -0600 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: At 11:06 PM 2/14/00 -0800, Stanley Friesen wrote: >At 05:48 PM 2/8/00 +0100, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: >>They were sacrificed though: see e.g. G. Dum?zil (La religion romaine >>archa?que) : Equus October in Rome, As'vamedha in India. (note also Brahman >><> Flamen). Usually (I don't know in this case) at least parts of sacrificed >>animals were eaten. >Quite possibly. But animals that are *primarily* food animals are rarely >sanctified. >A subtle, but important distinction. I believe that there may be a slight problem with the notion of "sacrificed" and/or "sanctified" when read through the framework of modern thought. In traditional cultures even a 'tree' can be understood to be giving up its life when cut down; or an herb when plucked from the soil. I would argue that we need to be careful about rendering judgements on past ritual practices based on the secular view that dominates western thought vis-a-vis the natural world and the way that its 'resources' are regularly utilized. Ritualization of the death of an animal, asking its forgiveness when the hunter is about to take its life, it not unusual in traditional cultures, whether that animal be a bear or a rabbit. Therefore, I would be interested in knowing what the source is, i.e., the ethnographic data base, for the statement "... animals that are *primarily* food animals are rarely sanctified." In the case of the traditional cultures with which I'm familiar, it is precisely those animals and plants that are used by humans for food that receive the most elaborate and special ritual treatment, not others that are left alone and not harvested. In such traditional cultures, there tends to be a sanctification, if you wish, of life and the natural world as well as humans' relationship to it. On egin, Roz From brent at bermls.oau.org Fri Feb 25 11:28:17 2000 From: brent at bermls.oau.org (Brent J. Ermlick) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 06:28:17 -0500 Subject: English as a creole In-Reply-To: <000201bf7e02$4cd19060$1306703e@edsel> Message-ID: On Wed, Feb 23, 2000 at 01:07:53PM +0100, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: . . . > English can be considered a mild case of creolization without an intermediate > pidgin (even though the former existence of a pidgin cannot be ruled out > entirely, but it would not have been the origin of modern English): not only > the vocabulary was altered very seriously (which doesn't mean it's a creole), > but syntax was moderately altered as well, e.g. lack word order inversion > after an adverbial phrase (a typical error of French speakers who learn Dutch > or German) and in some other cases, and the simplifications of the verbal > system, including the disappearance of the participial prefix ge- that > existed in Old English. But the "ge-" shows up until the end of the Middle English period, and even appears in Spenser as "yclept". The inversion after an initial adverb or phrase still appears in Elizabethan English and the King James Bible. One old piece of advice for Americans used to be to imitate the syntax of the Pilgrim Fathers when trying to speak Dutch. Native Norman French speakers in England appear to have died out by the early 14th century. It is unlikely that their influence would have lain dormant for the next 3 or 4 hundred years. -- Brent J. Ermlick Veritas liberabit uos brent at bermls.oau.org From sonno3 at hotmail.com Fri Feb 25 16:05:24 2000 From: sonno3 at hotmail.com (Christopher Gwinn) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 11:05:24 -0500 Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: > Well, my point - perhaps too subtle - was that the Celtic inscriptions on > ogham sticks might be like the Latin inscriptions on coins and such. If you > recall, a number of folks on this list asserted that the Celtic on ogham > sticks had a great deal of similarity to the Celtic found (also mainly in > inscriptions I believe) on the continent maMy point was that the inscriptions > on ogham sticks may have had an artificial uniformity as one finds in > inscriptional Latin. To the extent that these ogham sticks had some > religious or ritual significance and were not meant to be 'littera' - > communications for more everyday purposes, that seems possible. Tacitus > describes Germanic priests carving sacred words on wood sticks and sacred > words might tend to preserve anachronisms. You are correct, Ogam inscriptions portray an "official" language learned by the scribes which does not necessarily reflect the spoken language at the time (specifically the later Ogmas) - though I would imagine that it DID reflect "proper" or "learned" Goidelic of the 2nd/3rd centuries (probably the time that the Irish were recieving enough Latin influence from Britain - if only through trading/raiding - to base a new alphabet on the Latin one). -Chris Gwinn From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Feb 26 10:01:03 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 10:01:03 -0000 Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: > the verbal morphology of Mycenaean and Sanskrit are much closer than > English and German. I think you are underestimating the similarity of German and English. (a) the overall pattern of the verb is remarkably similar: present, simple past (with strong & weak forms); past participle (strong and weak forms); future formed by modal verb + infinitive etc. (b) largely, strong verbs in English are also strong verbs in German, with similar patterns. come, came, come kommen, kam, gekommen etc etc (c) Even where the patterns for particular verbs are different, they are mostly recognisably present in English: eg the -en ending on strong participles: begotten etc. (d) subjunctive formed similarly, even if much more restricted in English: If I were ... (ich waere) (d) English of a slightly earlier time (still intelligible today) shows good similarities in person endings, eg: Thou hast, thou makest; she hath, she maketh du hast, du machst, sie hat, sie macht Peter From sarima at friesen.net Sat Feb 26 03:12:43 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 19:12:43 -0800 Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario In-Reply-To: <90.10d86e9.25e591f9@aol.com> Message-ID: At 02:41 PM 2/23/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- good point. The pronunciation has changed a lot more than the orthography. > When English spelling was regularized, it was fairly phonetic. Far more than most people realize. I recently discovered that the vowels in 'bead' and 'deed' were different in Elizabethan English (and the 'head' probably had the same vowel as 'bead'). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From alderson at netcom.com Fri Feb 25 22:41:10 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 14:41:10 -0800 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: (message from Miguel Carrasquer Vidal on Tue, 22 Feb 2000 21:27:19 +0100) Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal (mcv at wxs.nl) wrote: > "petegray" wrote: >> (b) How are you treating roots which show CeRC / CRC ablaut? > Benveniste treats them as CeRC roots. Technically, he treats them as CeR roots, with a -C enlargement. Rich Alderson From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Feb 25 15:49:37 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 10:49:37 EST Subject: Please accurate message titles Message-ID: Subject lines of messages on our list, as on many other lists, often bear no resemblance to the contents of the messages. This makes it very difficult to find a message we want at a later time, and difficult to retrieve messages from Archive, etc. It also makes it difficult to sort incoming messages. I beg our list members to title their messages by deliberate choice, not by simply pressing the "reply" button. Just as three examples: *** Messages with this title: Re: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] have been appearing for some time which are about NEITHER of those topics, but which are about the PIE vowel system, whether it had only /e/ or also others, specifically /i,u/ independent of ablauting /ei, eu/, and etc. I would love to have been able to find and group the messages which really were about the centum/satem topic. quite enlightening and full of details. I cannot do so. Or can do so only with much greater difficulty. *** Messages with the title: "Urheimat..." appeared for a long time which had nothing to do whose subject had moved, first to Uralic and IE locations, and then moved further to very specific topics in Uralic-IE loanwords. Since Uralic-IE relations are an important topic, and since only *some* of the messages under the subject line "Urheimat..." were about Uralic, I would LOVE to be able to retrieve all of these messages, or to sort them in displaying the contents of my storage disk, which would mention Uralic. Or even more specifically which would mention Uralic-IE loanwords. Or even more specifically, given the number of messages on the subject, Uralic-IE loanword 'name'. I cannot do so. Or can do so only with much greater difficulty. *** Messages with the title: Re: "is the same as" appeared for a long time which had nothing to do with that original discussion. Whatever they were about, they are now essentially lost to retrieval. *** Can we do a better job of choosing subject lines in messages? Do we all want to give our list moderator permission to retitle messages whose content is clearly and blatantly not any longer about what the subject line refers to? (Would our moderator even like to have that freedom? It would be a small amount of work, occasionally, though after each retitling presumably the "Reply..." button would then work properly for quite a while, and the list would be much better organized.) *** Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson [ Moderator's comments: I have, from time to time, taken it upon myself to change the Subject: line when messages have drifted far from their original topic, but I do not have the time to do this consistently. The search facility at the archives maintained on our behalf by the fine folks at linguistlist.org can, and does, work on message content as well as on subject lines. But I agree that topic changes should be reflected in the message headers. There is even a standard for such: Include the old text in square brackets with the word "was:" prepended, as in the first example above. --rma ] From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Feb 25 17:44:57 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 17:44:57 -0000 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: Dear Joat and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2000 3:29 AM >> I believe the process through which this happened is roughly that Nostratic, >> which had phonemic /e,a,o/ came into areal contact which Caucasian languages >> that favored extreme vowel reduction, and transference of vocalic >> differences to glides: CE -> Cya; CO -> Cwa, >> > -- I thought this was the _Indo-European_ list? Since most people here > probably classify "Nostratic" with the tooth fairy, must we waste our time? > [ Moderator's comment: > Would your reaction be as strong if Mr. Ryan had said "pre-IE" instead of > "Nostratic"? > --rma ] As I have explained, I do really understand the sensitivity of some list-members to this topic of Nostratic. But, let us approach this from another avenue. 1) What I believe we find in the earliest IE is one vowel, /*e/, which has a conditioned variant , /*o/. 2) I believe with Benveniste that /*u/ and /*i/ are to be accounted as avocalic instances of /*w/ and /*y/. 3) I also believe that all /*a/ and any long vowels are due to the presence of "laryngeals", and that /*a(:)/ cannot exist in a syllable that did not contain a "laryngeal" at some earlier stage. I presume you disagree with one or more of these premises. Let us discuss it and see if we can elucidate matters in any meaningful way. I would be grateful to any list-member for suggestions of a methdology that would allow us to convince each other of a pro or con position on any of these premises --- if one can be devised. 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 proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Feb 25 18:16:36 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 18:16:36 -0000 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2000 11:22 AM >>> Bird's summary of Pokorny's roots, ....2050 core roots. >>> Of these exactly 775 have neither e nor e: anywhere. >> 38%. Is that including a(:) and o(:)? > I simply got the computer to check - so it includes absolutely everything > listed in Bird without e or e:. >> Benveniste treats roots with CeRC / CRC ablaut as CeRC roots. > Then it is no wonder that so few (comparatively) roots appear with CRC - > whether the R is /i/ or /u/ or anything else. > Is it possible that the apparent imbalance in numbers of CeC roots and > CiC/CuC is a chimaeara - merely the result of the way we record the root > in question? This is, of course, the crux of the matter. Though there are some nominals with no full-grade roots in evidence, I do not believe there are any verbal roots of the form CRC. This suggests to me, at least, that, unless we want to posit two different root-forms: one for nominals and another for verbals (which, I consider rather unlikely), that the aberrant nominals are zero-grade forms of verbal roots which have been lost, or possibly expressive formations, or even borrowings. > And further, since CeC includes CeR, a comparison would not be about -e- > and -i-/-u- at all, but about the number of roots without a third consonant > compared with the number of roots with third consonant, with medial R, but > without full grade. Is anything meaningful being compared there? It > does not seem to be a comparison of like with like. Not sure I understand all the implications of this paragraph but I think I agree. 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 friesen.net Sat Feb 26 02:37:20 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 18:37:20 -0800 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <200002222335.PAA05381@netcom.com> Message-ID: At 03:35 PM 2/22/00 -0800, Richard M. Alderson III wrote: >Benveniste's root theory is very specific: *All* roots are of the form C1VC2, >where the V is the apophonic *e/o vowel, and C1 and C2 have some co- >occurrence restrictions: Yes, and I believe he gets there by over generalization. There are a fair number of roots for which e/o cannot be reconstructed, and even more for which it is doubtful (finding an e- or o-grade in just one branch of IE is not, IMHO, sufficient to securely reconstruct a PIE e/o, given the power of analogical change). Now, I suspect the 38% listed in the other post does include forms for which an e/o plus laryngeal is the best reconstruction. On the other hand, adding in some of the forms with doubtful e/o somewhat compensates for this. I would not be surprised to find as many as 20% of roots as having no reconstructible vowel except i or u. >Benveniste's theory treats *i and *u as conditioned variants of *y and *w, >only occurring on the surface when *e/o is not present for accentual reasons. >The real problem is that there are occurrences of *i and *u which do not ever >vary with *y and *w, so they must be phonemic, and the interchange is no >longer phonetically or phonemically automatic. Quite so. Nor am I convinced all of these *ever* had an e/o. [I also question Benveniste's root+enlargement concept]. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Feb 26 00:26:04 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 01:26:04 +0100 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: <20.277b1b9.25e641a1@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >>Did something change while I wasn't looking? I thought > was ass. >-- my reference lists it as "Arm: es, 'horse'. There's (in transcription) a macron over the e, a hac^ek over the s, and the word means "donkey". The details were discussed here not long ago. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From varny at cvtci.com.ar Fri Feb 25 23:57:55 2000 From: varny at cvtci.com.ar (Vartan Matiossian) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 20:57:55 -0300 Subject: Horses Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2000 5:11 AM >> X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >> Did something change while I wasn't looking? I thought > was ass. > -- my reference lists it as "Arm: es, 'horse'. I don't have an Armenian > dictionary on hand -- does anyone? I'm a native speaker of Armenian, and I know Modern Arm. e:s with the meaning of "ass". For a more accurate view, I went to check Ajarian's Etymological Dictionary (the standard work for Armenian), and I found no single mention of "e:s" as "horse" in ancient Armenian. So, it's "ass" and not horse. Regards, Vartan Matiossian From varny at cvtci.com.ar Sat Feb 26 00:04:08 2000 From: varny at cvtci.com.ar (Vartan Matiossian) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 21:04:08 -0300 Subject: Horses Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Hans Holm Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2000 5:04 AM >> Armenian also has a word for horse, 'es', that's derived from *ekwos; > .. that is not generally accepted. As I explained in a previous posting, 'es' doesn't mean 'horse', but "ass". On the other hand, what's the meaning of "not generally accepted"? Ajarian gave the etymology of "es" < I.E. ek'wos (see "Etymological Dictionary of the Armenian Language", in Armenian, vol. II, Yerevan, 1973, reprint from the 1926-1935 edition), which has been commonly recognized as the standard etymology and it hasn't been challenged since then. In his "Le vocabulaire indoeuropeen" (Paris, 1984, just to mention a recent work in an European language), X. Delamarre gives that same etymology. I'm curious to hear about alternative etymologies, of course. Regards, Vartan Matiossian From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Sun Feb 27 06:29:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 06:29:00 GMT Subject: Horses Message-ID: >I don't have an Armenian dictionary on hand -- does anyone? .. < what do you understand by 'Armenian' ? Eastern? Or Western? or hopefully, Graban? Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover, (no mails >16kB please). From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Feb 25 18:40:29 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 18:40:29 -0000 Subject: Domesticating the Horse Message-ID: Dear Joat and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2000 8:53 PM >> X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >> To PIEians wild and tame seemed to be one and the same. > -- PIE has another word for horse -- *markos -- which has a derived feminine > in Germanic, *markiha. > In animal names a derived feminine in *-eha seems to denote a domestic animal > (eg., PIE *h(1)ekueha, 'mare') and in *-iha denotes a wild animal. (eg., > *ulkwiha, 'she-wolf). Therefore the original meaning of *markhos was > probably specifically a wild horse. Another point of view. It seems to me that IE *-y and *-H(2)e are both established as feminine formants; and I would need several more examples to be convinced that females are differentiated by wildness through these suffixes. By the way, Pokorny lists *u.lkwi: for 'female wolf'. Where do you get *ulkwiha? > Although in point of fact, English has no separate word for "wild horse", and > we distinguish the wild from the domestic variety without any particular > problem. Well, perhaps. But 'mustang' comes very close, does it not, to being a 'wild horse'? 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 Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Fri Feb 25 06:44:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 06:44:00 GMT Subject: Domesticating the Horse Message-ID: SL='I wrote'>>the horse would be an rather unlikely candidate for a dating SL>>of PIE unity .. Please remember, how fast the American Plains Indians adopted horse riding! So - how can we be shure ascribing horse riding to any language community, logically? Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Feb 26 17:52:28 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 12:52:28 EST Subject: Domesticating the Horse Message-ID: I wrote: The linguistics seems quite against you here, I think. No word for 'the wild horse' in early IE or *PIE as far as I can tell. To PIEians wild and tame seemed to be one and the same. Colin P. Groves suggests that there's very good evidence that the possibly ancestral wild 'tarpan' of eastern Europe and possibly even an ancestral wild Equus ferus were still frequently encountered in Roman times, but those wild horses apparently were given no distinctive name - except to be called 'wild' horses. (OED says 'tarpan' is a Khirgiz Tartar name.) In a message dated 2/25/2000 1:25:12 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- PIE has another word for horse -- *markos -- which has a derived feminine >in Germanic, *markiha. In animal names a derived feminine in *-eha seems to >denote a domestic animal (eg., PIE *h(1)ekueha, 'mare') and in *-iha denotes >a wild animal. (eg., *ulkwiha, 'she-wolf). Therefore the original meaning >of *markhos was probably specifically a wild horse. Your saying *-iha denoted a wild animal, but it only shows up in the female ending. (eg., *ulkwiha, 'she-wolf). And that the -(i)ha ending for in Germanic meant the same thing. In Germanic, could have ended in -eha? And are there any other examples of this? This should apply to other domestics and wild species, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't. (Cf., *k^(h)e:i-eha (stative, intrans, "be fast") <*k^(h)e:- (deer, run fast), Porkorny I 538 (1954)) An OHG word for a domesticated horse is , female domesticated horse, . Only Germanic uses the word for the female horse and that use is obviously derivative. The word appears throughout Germanic for all horses and for female horses, but in Celtic it is ONLY used for the horse in general. A number of Greek historians tell us the Celtic word for horse was , never mentioning or or any other name. Early 6th Century BC uses of have been found on inscriptions to the Thracian and Illyrian "horseman" god. (Cf.Marcomanni.) Colin P. Groves mentions a whole series of references to WILD HORSES going back to Roman times and NOT ONE appears to use the word. JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Although in point of fact, English has no separate word for "wild horse", and >we distinguish the wild from the domestic variety without any particular >problem. No. I've seen not one shred of serious evidence of ANY IE language EVER actually using a separate native word for "wild horses." JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >There's also an eastern-IE word, *gheios (from "impells, drives") which gives >reflexes in Armenian -- 'ji', 'horse' -- and Sanskrit 'haya', 'horse'. This was discussed extensively on this list this month and a good account of the word's separate usage was given by rao.3 at osu.edu and of its relative dating by mcv. JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Therefore the original meaning of *markhos was probably specifically a wild >horse. This is the usual careless, bilbous overstatement that we've come to expect. There appears to be no serious linguistic evidence that PIEians distinguished between wild and domesticated horses, so that using the horse word to date PIE dispersal with any kind of overblown, absolute statements would appear to be a serious misrepresentation of the truth - intended or not. Horses were there before there was a PIE. Nothing identifies the *ekwos word with either originating with a rider or domestication. The only root it has been connected with so far is (*ok^us "fast"). I wrote: >>It is not hard to see how Sredni Stog culture might have learned >>domestication and livestock breeding from Tripolye and applied it to the >>animal it had a wealth of - the horse. JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- no objection there; that's probably exactly what happened. PIE-speaking >Sredni Stog picked up Neolithic traits from the non-PIE-speaking Tripolye >culture and then did them the dirty. Please recall that then you have just dated PIE at about 4500BC. If the Uralic borrowings of PIE words are indeed from before 5000BC, then you have good evidence that IE-speaking Tripolye gave IE-speaking Sredni Stog a language, domestication and maybe even a population. You see there is no discernible evidence of Sredni Stog before 5000BC. But there may now be evidence of PIE in the same area - before 5000BC. Regards, Steve Long From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Sun Feb 27 06:31:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 06:31:00 GMT Subject: Domesticating the Horse Message-ID: >PIE has another word for horse -- *markos -- which has a derived >feminine in Germanic, *markiha. .. Only Cel & Grmc. Not necessarily PIE. Cf the Sino-Tibetan langs & Korean! Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover, (no mails >16kB please). From sarima at friesen.net Sat Feb 26 02:25:33 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 18:25:33 -0800 Subject: "Upper limit" of PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 05:33 PM 2/23/00 +0100, Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Stanley Friesen wrote: >> [...] [W]e can >> place a fairly secure *upper* *limit* on how old the divergence of PIE is. >> That upper limit is about 4500 BC. >> [...] >Help me, I'm dumb and ignorant, what is up and down in archaeological >dating? Does the quoted statement mean that PIE split up "no later than" >4500 BC, or does it mean "no earlier than" 4500 BC? No earlier than. It is the upper limit on the size of the number used to specify the date. > Is the present moment the low or the high end of the scale? It is high AD. That was high BC. The two have opposite polarities. [Or at least that is how I was using the numbers: I make no claim to this being in any way a formal usage]. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Sun Feb 27 06:33:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 06:33:00 GMT Subject: "Upper limit" of PIE Message-ID: LT>The archaeologists' calendar runs backward in time from the bottom of LT>the page to the top. So, a "high" date is earlier than a "low" date, LT>and an "upper" limit is a *terminus non ante quem*, while a "lower" LT>limit is a *terminus non post quem". .. 16kB please). From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Feb 26 06:48:33 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 01:48:33 EST Subject: reality of PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 2/25/2000 4:33:08 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk wrote: >But nobody is claiming that our reconstruction contains every detail of the >speech of the PIE-speakers. That's out of the question. What we *do* claim >is that we can reconstruct a great deal of PIE. I cannot think of stronger, more compelling evidence in favor of the actual existence of PIE than what Ante Aikio presented in his list of PIE borrowings in Uralic. The claim that PIE can be reconstructed accurately is always going to be confirmed by internal evidence, after all that is what the reconstruction is made of. There's really no way to disprove it internally, because by definition it was created to be consistent with the evidence. But to see it confirmed in Uralic is very, very impressive. That's predictability. It is very hard to be cynical about the actual existence of *PIE when you have that kind of external evidence. I wonder if the full impact of that work has been appreciated. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Feb 26 08:24:19 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 03:24:19 EST Subject: reality of PIE Message-ID: Someone wrote: >Genetically related languages were once the same language. Just want to point out that there is one very big difference betwen languages and other things that are genetically related. An animal species is basically made up of a bunch of animals all of the same basic genotype. Each individual chicken is supposed to be more or less genetically like all the other chickens in terms of genetic relatedness. But languages are made up of a bunch of different parts. Individual words in the vocabulary of a language can carry different 'genes'. Sprachbund affects grammar. Morphological features may be traceable to different sources. And of course innovations should bring brand new 'genes' into the picture. (Words and specific morphologies are different. They DO act like other things we call genetically related. But languages don't.) I'm not saying that some fundamental aspects of a language doesn't come from a single parent. Rather that - unlike a biological species - one part of a language does not carry the whole defining genetic profile. Languages aren't made up of individual parts that all have the same genes. Unlike biological relatedness, the individual parts do not carry the genes that would faithfully reproduce (clone) the language somewhere else. The nouns won't tell you what the verbs are like. The pure cognate vocabulary won't give you proper syntax. In fact, the pure cognate vocabulary may not even give you a very good vocabulary to work with - if you were hoping for a working language. And if you put all those pure genetic parts together, you may not have much of a language left. Poul Anderson I think gave us that example of a science essay in English without using Greek or Latin loans and of course it doesn't look like English at all. Or not as we know it. And maybe that is the problem some of us feel with "genetic relatedness" in language. It does not necessarily describe the essence of the language. Someone wrote earlier of certain Germanic dialects being so "contaminated" that you couldn't make out their immediate genetics. And there are those of us who think, as a practical matter, the more contaminated the better. Ghurkas, moccasins, brewskis and living la vita. It all comes in handy. Larry Trask writes in another post of "variation" as maybe being part of his definition of a language. And maybe there's also a characterization that can capture a language's ability to assimilate or borrow what it needs. Something like platform free compatibility in computing. The degree of "openess" or something like that. Something that goes beyond mere variation in describing the range of diversity of genetics within a language or that a language is capable of. Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 27 17:35:30 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 17:35:30 +0000 Subject: reality of PIE as dialect network Message-ID: Lloyd Anderson writes: > The following comments by Larry Trask on comments by Peter Gray > reveal yet again that the use of absolutely discrete categories > yes-or-no may be a model not fitting the facts, and attempts to force > such a terminological usage on us may be counterproductive, > by rendering such a model incapable of application to messy reality. > [PG commenting on someone else] >>>> No. Relationship is an absolute. .... >>>> Genetically related languages were once the same language. >>> Sorry, Bob, I can't agree, and I suspect you're in a minority these >>> days (though I may be wrong!). > [LT, with clarifying inserts [ ] in the first sentence] >> You [PG] are [wrong], I'm afraid. The statement above is true not just >> because all linguists believe it: it is true by definition. Languages which >> do not descend from a common ancestor are not genetically related. > Not so, the matter is not so simple. Yes, it is. (This is beginning to sound like a British Christmas pantomime. ;-) ) > Sufficiently massive borrowing *does* constitute a kind of > genetic relation, No, it doesn't. This is rather like arguing that I can become more closely related to you by copying your behavior and your clothes. English has borrowed no words that I know of from Pitjantjatjara, and the two are not related. English has borrowed one word ('sauna') from Finnish. This doesn't make them genetically related. English has borrowed a handful of words from Chinese. This doesn't make them related. English has borrowed quite a number of words from Algonquian. This doesn't make them related. English has borrowed a couple of hundred words from Italian. This doesn't make them related -- or, at least, it doesn't make them more closely related than they were before. English has borrowed several thousand words from Old French and modern French. This doesn't make them related. Lloyd, are you trying to tell us that there exists some number N, such that, as soon as a language borrows N words from another language, the two suddenly become related? If not, then what *are* you trying to say? > and the more sophisticated researchers today > do recognize that all of these kinds of genetic relation do occur > simultaneously, in various different combinations and mixtures. OK. Which "more sophisticated researchers" have you got in mind here? Can we have some names and publications, please? *Who* exactly has argued that borrowing on any scale constitutes a genetic relationship? Answers, please. > That does not mean we cannot distinguish the kinds. > And with careful work and also some luck, we can also use the manifest > results of language cross-breedings Now we have cross-breeds? Lloyd, just which languages would you regard as cross-breeds? Cross-breeds of what? > to conclude something about > the circumstances of the language contacts and social contacts > which led to them. We would all like to do this, but that doesn't mean we have to ruin our established terminology in favor of a pink haze of undifferentiation. > If two language clusters are in intimate contact > (whether ultimately descending from some proto-world or not) > long enough that their interaction creates a complex dialect > network, then that dialect network *is real* > (referring here to Trask's phrase that PIE is real, > which Peter Gray did not in any way deny), But this state of affairs is *not* what we call a 'dialect continuum'. It's more like an extreme -- and so far hypothetical -- variety of Sprachbund. > yet it may be impossible in the time frame of that dialect net > or in any time frame somewhat preceding it > to say that there is a single point uniform ancestor, > from which all descendants evolved. No common ancestor, no dialects. The Balkan languages do not constitute a dialect continuum merely because they are in a Sprachbund. > The same may be true of a single language having spread > across an area with a number of other languages which > become substrates of different parts of the proto-language cluster. I'm getting a bit edgy about this repeated incantation of 'substrates', and I may shortly fire off a comment or two. > It simply may be a more useful model to think in terms of > an ancestor with some regional variations which do *not* > go back to a common origin, in either of the real sorts of situations > just mentioned (and others). > This in no way denies that there should *also* be single origins > for some common elements in such situations, nor does it deny > that much significant IE morphology *does* go back to a common > singular origin in PIE. This sounds to me like a version of Dixon's punctuated-equilibrium scenario. Well, we've discussed that before, and we'll doubtless do so again. But note: Dixon explicitly *denies* that his scenario is relevant to IE, and he accepts the reality of PIE. > Nor, more importantly than either of the above, which are conclusions, > does it deny that it is useful to try to lead various attested forms back > to common origins in PIE, to discover more cognate forms and > structures than are known at any given time. > All of these models and techniques can operate simultaneously, > with more benefit that if we limit ourselves to only one, > as long as we keep in mind the limited capabilities of each > technique we use, that *every* technique is biased towards > certain sorts of answers rather than others, biases which may > be more harmful or helpful depending on the particular nature > of the context being investigated. I don't object to anything in this last paragraph. But I do object to the repeated assertions that there is something fundamentally wrong with our current understanding of IE and of PIE. If you want to seek evidence that proto-languages and family trees are less than universally applicable, IE is one of the very worst places to look. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 27 16:17:31 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 16:17:31 +0000 Subject: Tree or wave? Message-ID: Lloyd Anderson writes: [on the policy of using a tree-model presentation of the IE family] > But as a result or conclusion to be reported to non-specialists, > I believe the policy proposed above is a quite pernicious policy. > We should rather be conservative and report what we actually have evidence > for, that is the weakest hypothesis that is sufficient to account for the > data, > not anything unnecessarily stronger than that. Er -- "pernicious"? Well, the *weakest* hypothesis consistent with the data here is the one we adopt: the IE languages are descended from a single common ancestor, PIE. No weaker hypothesis can account for the data. The links among the languages are due to chance? Falsified. The links are due to borrowing? Falsified. The links are due to extensive language mixing? Falsified. The only hypothesis that accounts for the data is descent from a single common ancestor. End of story. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From edsel at glo.be Sat Feb 26 19:46:22 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 20:46:22 +0100 Subject: R and r Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Artem V. Andreev" Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2000 10:19 PM > Dear sirs! > I have a question that at a glance might seem not to have any relation > to the domain of the present list; but I humbly ask u to believe that it > has a direct connection with my studies in IE and that I am very hard to > solve it myself. > The question is: is there any language in the world which has a *phonemic* > opposition between dental vibrant /r/ and uvular *vibrant* /R/? > Thank u very much > in advance, > Sincerely yours etc > Artem Andreev [Ed Selleslagh] (Brazilian) Portuguese? What do the native speakers say? Maybe also Classical Greek (rho / rho with spiritus asper or dase?on)? Ed. From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Feb 26 11:17:56 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 12:17:56 +0100 Subject: R and r In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > The question is: is there any language in the world which has a *phonemic* >opposition between dental vibrant /r/ and uvular *vibrant* /R/? Such languages seem to be extremely rare and it has been questioned that they exist at all. The only example I can give is that of now elderly speakers of some Eastern dialects of Occitan, which, according to some sources, have such a contrast, continuing the Latin contrast of single vs. geminate /r/, e.g.: /gari/ "cured" vs. /gaRi/ "oak tree". Refs: Coustenoble, Helene N.: La phonetique du Provencal Moderne en Terre d'Arles, Hertford: Austin 1945 Bouvier, Jean-Claude: Les parlers Provencaux de la Drome: Etude de Geographie Phonetique, Paris: Klincksieck 1976 St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From adahyl at cphling.dk Sat Feb 26 15:05:46 2000 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 16:05:46 +0100 Subject: R and r In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 25 Feb 2000, Artem V. Andreev wrote: > The question is: is there any language in the world which has a *phonemic* > opposition between dental vibrant /r/ and uvular *vibrant* /R/? European Portuguese has a phonemic opposition between a dental *flap* /r/ and a uvular *vibrant* /R/. Compare /karo/ 'dear, expensive' to /kaRo/ 'car'. But I suppose that is not quite what you are looking for. Adam Hyllested From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 27 13:44:55 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 13:44:55 +0000 Subject: R and r Message-ID: Artem Andreev writes: > The question is: is there any language in the world which has a *phonemic* > opposition between dental vibrant /r/ and uvular *vibrant* /R/? Ladefoged and Maddieson, in The Sounds of the World's Languages (Blackwell, 1996) report as follows (p. 227): ...it would be necessary to examine a language which uses both apical and uvular trills, although we are not sure that any such language now exists. Older speakers of Eastern dialects of Occitan...may still maintain a contrast between lingual and uvular trills, deriving from the Latin contrast of single vs geminate 's, in words such as 'cured' vs 'oak tree'. We do not know of any articulatory or acoustic measurements on such speakers' trills. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Feb 28 11:47:21 2000 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max Wheeler) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 11:47:21 +0000 Subject: R and r Message-ID: -- Begin original message -- > From: "Artem V. Andreev" > Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 00:19:25 +0300 (MSK) > The question is: is there any language in the world which has a *phonemic* > opposition between dental vibrant /r/ and uvular *vibrant* /R/? -- End original message -- That may depend a bit on what you mean by 'vibrant' (and whether you insist on 'dental'). Many varieties of Occitan, and of Portuguese, contrast an alveolar tap with a uvular trill. Max Wheeler ____________________________________________________________ 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 rao.3 at osu.edu Sat Feb 26 10:49:15 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 05:49:15 -0500 Subject: Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?) Message-ID: >> Blumenthal, [comparing] strong aorist ..and weak aorist > Thanks! But can I check two things: > (a) Has he used "strong" to mean "asigmatic" rather than "second"? >[...] > (b) What about verbs that appear to be asigmatic/"strong" merely because > they lost their -s- in the development of the language? I don't remember any details being given about the classification. As the couts were used to support an historical distinction, I assumed that history of the verb forms was taken into account. In hindsight, this is unwarranted. The only way to find out seems to be to do a recount. From adahyl at cphling.dk Sat Feb 26 16:48:47 2000 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 17:48:47 +0100 Subject: PU *nimi / PIE *HneH3men- (was: Re: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 23 Feb 2000, Ante Aikio wrote: > But if you reconstruct *H3 phonetically as *[Yw], this should give PU *x > (which was phonetically most probably *[Y]). The reconstruction of *H3 as Yw is Indo-European, not Indo-Uralic. I suggest: PIU *(n)newme- or *(n)neYme- Pre-PIE (with analogical -men) *H1neH3men > PIE *H1noH3mn PU-Yuk *niwme > PU *nime > Finnish nimi > But you can't reconstruct PU *-? for this item: the reconstruction must be > *nimi (= traditional *nime). Why are you reconstructing an *-i for traditional *-e ? From what I know, *-e > Finnish -i, whereas Finnish -e < *-eC. Adam Hyllested From inakistand at yucom.be Sat Feb 26 19:07:32 2000 From: inakistand at yucom.be (jose.perez3) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 20:07:32 +0100 Subject: Linking some words in Germanic languages... Message-ID: Hello I-Es: I was trying to relate some cognate words in Germanic words that seem to come from IE *(s)ter "stiff". It seems that the ones which kept the initial s will give us "st" in English (stiff, starch) and German (stiff, starren). While those which had lost it will yield "d" in German (Dorn, derb) and the expected "th" in English (thorn). Can somebody remind me why?. I reckon that it was a change that applied to other "s" clusters: like *sk in *skel "to cut" -though not in all the Germanic dialects (E. shirt vs. skirt)- and *sp. I also reckon that some roots starting with an aspirated plosive could be linked to s+unaspirated plosive... which would render I-E. initial /s/ a prefix. What would it indicate? If somebody has this information on the tips of her/his fingers a brief explanation and a list of examples it would be very welcome. I'm also having trouble explaning one of the semantic changes that several etymological dictionaries. Namely arriving to the idea behind"start, startle, strike" and G. "st?rzen, Umsturz, streiten". Did this happen through an old word for tail (G. Sterz) that would be first understood as "the stiff one" and then as "the quick moving one". Somehow that doesn't seem enough. Does anybody have a clearer idea of that change of meaning?. What about the several birds that are related to this root? E. "stork, redstart"; G "Strauss, Drossel". Would you agree with the etymologies that explain their names because of their being "stiff" or "clumsy"?. Has anybody linked this root to the one that meant simply "to stand"? IE *steH2? From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Feb 27 01:27:18 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 20:27:18 EST Subject: Bandkeramik and non-Anatolian PIE Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >The one glitch is that it is not the proto-Hittites/Anatolians who left, but >the 'Indo-European' community - the first splitting or branching occuring in >either case. -- that simply does not work and makes no sense. Eg., Hittite is intrusive in Anatolia, the internal relationships of the other IE languages show none of the links one would expect (eg., Greek is not particularly closely related to Anatolian), etc. >My read on this is that "PIE minus Anatolian" forms on the Danube and becomes >Bandkeramik. -- leaving what, exactly, in the Balkans and the Mediterranean areas which were neolithicized via an east-to-west movement? >(and possibly proto-Phrygian-Thracian, though don't hold me to that.) -- good thing you added the qualifier, since Phrygian shows close links to Greek and none in particular to Anatolian. >the advantage of plausibility - for what that is worth in this crazy world. -- if one disregards all linguistic considerations, which is odd, when one is trying to solve a _linguistic_ problem. >whom must have by the way had an extremely adequate language of their own, >but who nevertheless left no substrate. -- you have evidence for there being no LBK substrate in, eg., proto-Germanic? From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Feb 27 07:44:34 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 02:44:34 EST Subject: Balkan Kurgans Message-ID: In a message dated 2/25/2000 7:59:52 PM, Hans J. Holm wrote: <PIE has a reconstructible word that *probably* meant silver, and it is SF>derivable from a root meaning "white", which makes it unlikely to be SF>borrowed. .. That is well-known. The question aimed at *professional archaeologists* for archaeological evidence whether that silver showed any traits that could be termed or compared with clearly IE art.>> I don't have the original post but perhaps this may help. The appearance of silver ornaments in Balkan 'shaft graves' is not altogether surprising, unless they were found in some large quantity. We've discovered that metallurgy is very early in the Balkans - copper appearing before 5000BC. (Metallurgy here means evidence of extraction and processing by use of extreme heat.) There is thinking furthermore that silver was actually smelted before the advent of copper as part of earlier lead extraction. Lead appears in fact to have been processed well before copper in Anatolia, lead ornaments being common already by 6500BC. And silver is a by-product of lead smelting. At about 1000 degrees centigrade lead become solid while silver not oxidizing becomes liquid. Most processed silver before the bronze age in Europe contains fair quantities of lead. 'Working silver' however was not particularly sophisticated in Europe at the time and there has not been found an identifiable style associated with these objects - unlike pottery and tools. And so, for example, silver objects have been found in so-called "shaft-graves" that are clearly Minoan as early as 2300BC, but even their character is often such that they could have been found anywhere. Once again, I don't know the site. But 'Shaft-Graves' (and by that I mean the culture associated with axe burials and red ochre, though not necessarily mounds or 'kurgans' which are rare in Europe) have not generally yielded a wealth of identifiably unique metalworks. This all leads up to the fact that nowadays I don't think you'll find a lot of professional archaeologists - at least on this side of the tracks - who would be very willing to identify anything called "IE art." The eminent Prof Casskey did venture a guess at what cultural materials at Lerna might be related to Indo-European speakers and a summary of those findings from a few decades ago can be found on the web at http://users.erols.com/gayle/lerna.htm. Reading through the summary of the excavation (pre-Renfrew's A&L) - particularly dealing with 'Shaft Grave' period I think you may get a sense of the ambiguoties involved in the idea of IE art. A very recent and thorough report on a dig in Moravia where Shaft-Grave and 'group grave' cultures interwove - with I seem to remember descriptions and maybe pictures of metal ornaments - is on the web at the Comparative Archaeology site and perhaps also at the upenn museum site. Sorry I don't have the urls but a search should turn the home pages up. Hope this helps. Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 27 13:27:52 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 13:27:52 +0000 Subject: Tocharian and Macedonian Message-ID: Pete Gray writes: > Inspired by Lloyd to ask odd questions, I dare to wonder if there is any > connection between Tocharian and Macedonian -or is our evidence for > Macedonian too weak? Too weak. Peter Schrijver summarizes the position as follows in Glanville Price's Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe: Our knowledge of Macedonian is extremely fragmentary: place-names, personal names, and a few nouns surviving as glosses in Greek sources. These have given rise to hot and often politically inspired debates concerning its linguistic affiliation, which are far from settled. The sources can be divided into three categories: (1) Greek words and names; some of these are Attic and were undoubtedly borrowed (Attic Greek was the official language of the court of the Macedonian kings); others are not Attic but show possible resemblances to northern Greek dialects; (2) words which have Greek (and sometimes wider Indo-European) cognates but whose sound structure differs markedly from any known Greek dialect (e.g., 'death', Greek ); (3) words which have no known Greek cognates and usually no convincing Indo-European etymology (e.g., 'air'). Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 27 14:33:22 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 14:33:22 +0000 Subject: Long monomorphemic Basque words Message-ID: Lloyd Anderson writes: > Trask writes: >> I am only interested in monomorphemic words, and >> monomorphemic words tend to be short, while long words tend to be >> polymorphemic, in Basque as in all the languages I know anything about. >> Consequently, Lloyd's objection could only constitute a problem for me >> in the following scenario: >> Pre-Basque had lots of long monomorphemic words as well as short >> ones, but, for some reason, the long monomorphemic words have been >> generally lost from the language, while the short ones have >> preferentially survived. >> And I don't see this as a plausible scenario. > When reworded slightly, I find it highly plausible indeed. How? Why? > It is not that the long monomorphemic words have been generally lost, > it is that Trask's criteria exclude them from his considering them as > early Basque (this has been discussed in many other messages, one a > cumulation of 9 ways in which his criteria might usefully be modified). Oh, no -- not this again! ;-) Lloyd, this is not true. My criteria are independent of phonological form, and therefore they cannot possibly systematically exclude words of any particular phonological form. > It is one respect in which the totality of Trask's criteria embody a bias > against certain vocabulary > not justified by careful linguistic methodology. And just what "careful linguistic methodology" would you put in place of my explicit criteria? Lloyd, I have asked you this question countless times now, and you have still refused to answer it. You just keep muttering darkly that there must be something wrong with my criteria, but you have *never* advanced any other explicit criteria. Now have you? If you want to pursue this matter, will you *please* finally now spell out the criteria you think we should be using? Mine are on the table: where are yours? Should any given Basque word, such as 'butterfly' or 'crest', be included in my list or excluded from it? And on the basis of what criteria? Answer, please -- and now. As far as I can see, I'm already being maximally careful, while you're urging me to throw caution to the winds and to toss all sorts of implausible things into the Pre-Basque basket just because it pleases you to see them there. > Under Larry Trask's criteria for inclusion in his data set, > some polysyllabic monomorphemic words, a set which would > generally include all but the most common expressives, > are disproportionately disfavored for written records > because of their meanings. Really? And what leads you to believe this? What evidence do you have to support such a conclusion? > Although "txitxi" 'chick' is perhaps recorded early > (Trask did not say otherwise in his message dealing with it), > Trask says it sticks out a mile. > I assume he means the two voiceless stops, > and the voiceless stop initial. Some confusion here. First, has two affricates, and it is pronounced rather like English 'chee-chee'. Second, does not mean 'chick': it is a nursery word meaning 'meat'. The word for 'chick' is usually or , with variants and . This word is recorded from 1571 -- very early, by Basque standards. It will probably satisfy my criteria and go into my list. But it will indeed stand out a mile, with its peculiar phonological form. And the origin of that peculiar form is obvious: this is a word of imitative origin. It has the same motivation as the English word 'cheep'. And, by the way, there is a British word 'cheeper', meaning 'chick (of a game bird)', recorded from 1611. And, of course, there is the American word 'peeper' for a certain kind of cheeping frog. > Words for 'butterfly' probably were also not recorded early, > among many others. Well, *one* word for 'butterfly' is recorded in 1562 -- very early by Basque standards. That word has disappeared completely from the language. The most widespread word today is only recorded from 1912, and apparently did not even exist in 1905. Lloyd, what conclusions do you draw from observations such as these? My conclusions are clear: words for 'butterfly' in Basque are overwhelmingly of expressive origin, and they are unstable and subject to frequent alteration and replacement. Accordingly, they are useless as evidence for Pre-Basque. > Some of those for 'butterfly' are monomorphemic, > at least under the sensible understanding that the > so-called reduplication is not a separate morpheme > unless some word exists with it removed, rather > the reduplication is a part of the shape of the root of > a number of expressive words. Half of a reduplicated > form is not a functioning morpheme in such cases. > Trask has argued that the endings of some of these words, > such as /-leta/ etc. are not suffixes, not analyzable > as productive Basque morphemes. If so, the forms are > monomorphemic. Arguably, yes, but there is a problem in that the first elements often recur. Recall the cases like , , and , all 'butterfly'. The first element recurs, but the second elements are unique to these individual words. Anyway, consider an English parallel: say, 'ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay'. How many morphemes would you say were present in this word, and what are they? > I do not in this message deal with the question whether > the forms in question are reconstructible back to early Basque, > that is a different question from whether they are > monomorphemic. Indeed, but I can answer the question anyway. There is *no* evidence that any of the numerous words for 'butterfly' can be reconstructed back to Pre-Basque, and there is a great deal of evidence against any such view. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From colkitto at sprint.ca Sun Feb 27 15:59:49 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 10:59:49 -0500 Subject: Turkic Message-ID: There is an Indo-European parallel to the items below (alleged homogeneity of Turkic) I will take the liberty of quoting myself (adapted) [ Moderator's note: The following two paragraphs are quoted from a posting by Stefan Georg, dated 10 Feb 2000, quoting in turn one from Larry Trask, dated 6 Feb 2000. Just to keep everything clear. --rma ] >> Indeed. Uyghur is one of the most divergent Turkic languages, and a >> glance through a comparative vocabulary of the Turkic languages reveals >> a very modest proportion of shared vocabulary between Turkish and Uyghur. > Well, this isn't "Altainet", but, while Larry is right that the degree of > "mutual intelligibility" of the Turkic languages is often overemphasized, > the scene depicted is not as inconceivable as it may seem. >From the point of view of internal heterogeneity Slavic is surprisingly uniform. Reading texts in an unknown Slavic language based on one's knowledge of another using a good dictionary is far less daunting (and entails much less of a sense of futility!) than in many other language groups. In this context one might take issue with statements that hint that it is erroneous to say that learning to read a new Slavic language based on knowledge of another is "not a very daunting task", or that confronted with a passage in, e.g., Czech, Polish, or Serbo-Croatian, based on a knowledge of, e.g., Russian alone, "you will probably have great difficulty doing more than figuring out what the passage is about, if that." However, for a hypothetical unknown language, "figuring out what [a] passage is about" with no prior knowledge is already a tremendous step forward. As an illustration of this point one only has to contrast the degree of internal uniformity within Slavic with that in, e.g., Germanic. This point will be grasped simply by attempting to read a page of Faroese with only a knowledge of English or German as a guide, and then juxtaposing the result with a comparison of any two Slavic languages. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 27 16:35:26 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 16:35:26 +0000 Subject: Hittite /wheel Message-ID: Steve Long writes: > (When I asked Sean Crist to identify the "telltale signs of borrowing" that > he offered that would tell him if "the wheel word" was borrowed in at least > some IE languages, he never replied.) OK. I'm no IEist, and I can't evaluate the IE evidence here. But I can illustrate the general point Sean was making with a Basque example. All but the westernmost dialects of Basque have a word <(h)anka> 'haunch', and also 'buttocks', 'leg', 'paw', 'foot' in places. This word is regarded by all Vasconists as a loan from Romance. A certain long-ranger has recently been interested in finding evidence of a genetic link between Basque and the two North Caucasian families. He has noted that Basque <(h)anka> looks quite a bit like something in Caucasian, and he therefore denies the loan status of <(h)anka>, insisting that the word must be native and ancient in Basque, and therefore cognate with the Caucasian item. How can we reply to him? Well, the problem is that cluster /nk/. This was indeed perfectly normal in Pre-Basque. But, in the early medieval period, Basque underwent a categorical phonological change, in all but the easternmost dialects, by which plosives were uniformly voiced after /n/. For example, the Latin word 'anvil', which was borrowed early into Basque, appears today as in all but the easternmost dialects. Likewise, the native adverb-forming suffix <-ki> appears today as <-gi> after /n/. For example, 'beautiful' forms 'beautifully', but 'good' forms 'well' in all but the easternmost dialects, which alone preserve . Now, the word in question is *everywhere* <(h)anka> in Basque, and no such form as *<(h)anga> is recorded anywhere. Therefore, the very form of the word is enough to *prove* that it was not in the language at the time of the change, and must have entered the language later -- from whatever source. As it happens, we know the source: it is the very widespread Romance 'haunch', with regular regional developments like French , all ultimately from a Frankish *. But, even if we didn't know the source, the form of the word would tell us at once that this is a late entry into the Basque lexicon, and therefore probably a borrowing. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 27 17:47:00 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 17:47:00 +0000 Subject: "pronoun" is semantic or distributional? Message-ID: Pat Ryan writes: > But, I would ask Larry if, given the analysis above, 'pronominal' is > inappropriate to distinguish 'my' from 'this' etal., what would be the > appropriate term? Certainly, I do not believe anyone will easily agree that > there is no discernible difference between 'my' and 'this' etal. There is no difference in the syntax, which is all that matters for part-of-speech assignments. There are semantic differences, of course, but these are of no relevance for assignment to syntactic classes. There are enormous semantic differences among 'dog', 'arrival' and 'colorlessness', but all are nouns, regardless, because they all behave like nouns. > Certainly, > 'possessive', the term Larry employs in his published definition is > unproblematical so far as I can see but is it entirely without merit to > identify the substitutional difference between words like 'my' and 'this'? And what 'substitutional difference' would that be? The problem with 'pronominal determiner' is not so much that it's intrinsically inappropriate -- though it is -- but that it is not in use. Pretty much everybody calls 'my' a possessive determiner, so why not just accept this standard piece of terminology? > A more troublesome omission(?) in Larry's definifitions concerns words like > 'mine', which he has assured us in a recent posting are 'pronouns'. But > under his published definition of 'pronoun', we find only personal, > reflexive, demonstrative, indefinite, interrogative, and relative --- listed > as categories. > Larry, under which of these categories does 'mine' belong? None, probably. I probably would have been wise to make it clear that my list was not meant to be exhaustive, but I see now that my wording is unfortunate. Thanks for pointing that out. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Feb 28 04:47:55 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 23:47:55 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: In a message dated 2/27/2000 11:16:35 PM, edsel at glo.be wrote (re English syntax): >E.g. What would you >think of a sentence like *"I said clearly that "modern Afrikaans many of the >characteristics has of a creole"*...? Pennsylvania Dutch. Regards, Steve Long From mclasutt at brigham.net Mon Feb 28 08:07:42 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 01:07:42 -0700 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >> [AH] I do not know or claim these to be cognates. But it might be. > [Stefan George] I claim these not to be cognates. No, it might not be. > On the other hand, if containing - somewhere in the word - an /n/ (oops, > obviously a nasal will do) is sufficient enough to suspect cognacy, well, > then we could add quite an array of languages, as e.g. > Tibetan /ming/, Swahili /jina/ (looks like Basque, so perhaps with > j-mobile), Mongolian /ner-e/ (hey, here's the heteroclitic; I knew it had > to be somewhere !), Khmer /chmua/ (remember the semitic forms !), aso. > Voil?, l'unit? d'origine dell'linguaggio, how could I ever be so > skeptical, > silly me. > St.G. > PS: welcome to the beautiful land of Ruhlenistan ...and Shoshoni, Panamint, and Comanche /nahnia/; Lushootseed /da?/ (Proto-Salish *n > d)... Let's make it even more explicit. /n/ occurs in about 90% of the world's languages. About 99% of the world's languages have any kind of nasal (I'll assume this is 100% in the calculations below). Within these languages, /n/ accounts for, on a rough average, for 5-10% of the consonants occurring in the words of any lexicon. Nasals account for 10 to 20% of the consonants. Let's assume that there are 500 unrelated language families and isolates in the world. That means that in 23 to 45 of these unrelated language families the word for 'name' will have an /n/ (500 x (.05 or .1) x .9) and that in 50 to 100 of them it will have any nasal (500 x (.1 or .2)). That's based on pure chance. It doesn't take much rocket science (or linguistic skill) to find "compelling" evidence from around the world linking very disparate language families based on chance correspondences. That's especially true if one finds W in the word for X in language families A, B, G, and R, then finds Y in the word for Z in language families B, H, N, M, and R. We now have a "language family" consisting of A, B, G, H, N, M, and R! The mass comparativists would be most pleased. 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 whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Mon Feb 28 09:45:12 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 11:45:12 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <200002231030.p2059@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: On Wed, 23 Feb, Hans Holm wrote: >RW>has been dropped in the last 10 years and replaced with >RW>something like 'related languages are those that have some >RW>features in common or are somehow connected', or 'there is no >RW>such thing as genetically related languages'. >French and Rumanian have Latin as one common ancestor language. >Only in this sense they are said to be genealogically related >and named Romance languages. And in historical linguistics this is the only sense that 'related' has. >Anttila shows that not in all cases it is clear which language >should be called the "mother language" insofar as we prefer >lexical versus grammatical & morphological features as criterion. >Take Albanian with a rest of 10% (!) of original lexemes (cf. >Anttila 89:172), but nobody hesitates to name it an /IE >language/. All of which is quite true, and all of which is quite beside the point (irrelevant). The degree of difficulty of establishing relatedness is not part of the definition of 'related'. If 'related' is defined (as it is in historical linguistics) as "sprung from some common source", then 'non-related' languages are not "not sprung from some common source" and that is the end of the matter. The ease or difficulty of demonstrating relatedness, or even the impossibility of demonstrating unrelatedness, simply does not affect the definition. In human beings it is sometimes difficult to determine if an individual is male or female by normal criteria. But this does not affect the general division of human beings into male and female. Relatedness is an absolute (by definition). Languages are either related or they are not (by definition). The difficulty of establishing relatedness does not change this. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Mon Feb 28 09:59:42 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 11:59:42 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <200002250915.p2222@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: On Fri, 25 Feb, Hans Holm wrote: >this ends the discussion here. >RW>It is equally useless to state >.. > see above. Well, I'm glad you agree. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Feb 28 15:50:45 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 16:50:45 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Stefan Georg wrote: >>to the south (with s-mobile) >>- bask izen >So Basque is Indoeuropean, I see (try to inflect it, maybe it shows -r/-n >heteroclisis as well). Careful now, Basque *does* have -n/-r- "heteroclisis" of sorts (e.g. "day", "weather"[*]) and even one case of true -r/-n- heteroclisis (erg. oblique "this"). [*] Despite PII *ag^her, ag^hnas "day", I do *not* think that the Basque phenomenon can be equated with the PIE one. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 29 03:11:05 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 19:11:05 -0800 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 08:42 PM 2/26/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Especially since the original PIE word itself -- *h(2)rtkos -- is itself >probably a nominalized adjective (via a stress shift), from *h(2)rektes; see >Sanskrit raksas, "destruction". This brings up a little hypothesis of mine: the principle origin of the thematic inflection of nouns (the o-stems) was via nominalization of adjectives. How reasonable is this? -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 29 04:24:07 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 23:24:07 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: In a message dated 2/27/00 8:26:05 PM Mountain Standard Time, W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de writes: >and to decide whether it represents sufficient reflexes of a former network >called e.g. PIE ... >> -- or, in plain English, a former language called PIE. From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Tue Feb 29 11:55:58 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 13:55:58 +0200 Subject: PU *nimi / PIE *HneH3men- (was: Re: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [I wrote:] >> But if you reconstruct *H3 phonetically as *[Yw], this should give PU *x >> (which was phonetically most probably *[Y]). [Adam Hyllested replied:] > The reconstruction of *H3 as Yw is Indo-European, not Indo-Uralic. Yes - what I meant was that if PU *nimi is an IE loan word, one would expect that IE *H3 (= [Yw]) was substituted with *x (= [Y]) in PU. > I suggest: > PIU *(n)newme- or *(n)neYme- > Pre-PIE (with analogical -men) *H1neH3men > PIE *H1noH3mn > PU-Yuk *niwme > PU *nime > Finnish nimi This sounds completely ad hoc. But I'm ready to inspect the validity of your Indo-Uralic reconstruction with an unbiassed attitude. So, could you give exact parallels for the sound correspondences between the items? >> But you can't reconstruct PU *-? for this item: the reconstruction must >> be *nimi (= traditional *nime). > Why are you reconstructing an *-i for traditional *-e ? From what I know, > *-e > Finnish -i, whereas Finnish -e < *-eC. PU high *i is reconstructed in non-intial syllables in place of traditional mid *e by Juha Janhunen and Pekka Sammallahti. There are at least two good reasons for this (although these were not the reasons stated by P.S. and J.J.; they based their reconstruction on the assumption of maximal distinctions): - Saami and Ugric show metaphony *(C)e(C)Ci > *(C)i(C)Ci. (*e-e > *i-e hardly makes sense). - Finnish shows sporadic labial assimilation *-i > y/u in some stems with y/u in the first syllable (e.g. PU *kuli- 'wear out' > Finnish kulu-, PU *s?ks?i 'autumn' > Finnish syksy). Again, *u-e > u-u and *?-e > y-y would not make sense; one would rather expect *o-e > o-o, but there is no evidence of such a development. According to this assumption, Finnish -i (alternating with -e- and zero when non-final) comes regularly from PU *-i and Finnish -e (phonologically /-e?/, alternating with -ee-) comes from PU *-ik and *-iS. Regards, Ante Aikio From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Feb 28 09:01:45 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 09:01:45 +0000 Subject: Michif Message-ID: Adam Hyllested writes: > I suppose Michif wasn't created overnight, which means that it is best > described as a language descended from EITHER French OR Cree - depending > on its prehistory. What do we know about earlier stages of Michif? Not much: nobody was taking notes at the time. But it's clear the language was created by a generation of people who were fluently bilingual in Cree and in French (its modern speakers can speak neither language, though they are now bilingual in English). And we may reasonably surmise that Michif was created as an act of identity. That is, for some reason its creators decided that they did not want to be regarded either as Cree-speakers or as French-speakers, but as a quite different group. So they must have deliberately set about the job of constructing a distinctive language for themselves. Such acts of identity are far from rare, and a number of cases have been reported in the literature. But few such cases are as remarkable as Michif. More usually, speakers content themselves with altering the form of a single language, so as to make it different from the speech of another group originally speaking the same language. This is the process that has been dubbed 'exoterogeny'. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From Georg at home.ivm.de Mon Feb 28 10:00:38 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 11:00:38 +0100 Subject: Jose Perez' questions In-Reply-To: <000201bf7ffa$d305fdc0$68a608d4@joseperez3> Message-ID: > Could you, please, give me the complete reference of the Lexicon der >Indogermanischen Verbum? LIV - Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben. Die Wurzeln und ihre Primaerstammbildungen, Unter Leitung von Helmut Rix und der Mitarbeit vieler anderer beearbeitet von Martin Kuemmel, Thomas Zehnder, Reiner Lipp, Brigitte Schirmer, Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag 1998, ISBN 3-89500-068-X > Does anybody know whether it could be purchased via internet? Reichert Verlag, together with some other purely scholarly-oriented publishers here, has not, AFAIK, made its holdings accessible through the usual book search engines (though this may be yesterday's news). So, you'd have to write to them personally. I don't have an e-mail address for them handy at the moment, but any powerful search-engine should turn one up. > I'm also after other "classics" such as Rick's Laut und Formenlehre des >Griechisches and Meiser's Laut und Formenlehre des Lateins... can they be >bought in the net? H. Rix: Historische Grammatik des Griechischen and Meiser: Historische Laut- und Formenlehre der Lateinischen Sprache have been published by the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft in Darmstadt. Their books usually don't turn up in normal search engines either, but they, at least, have a web-site of their own: http://www.wbg-darmstadt.de > Can somebody give me the reference of the Pokorny's CD version of his >roots dictionary? There is none. > Is there any more up-dated IE roots dictionary (I remember Beeke's >mentioning that the Dutch were working on a "new Pokorny". Has it come out >yet?) No, not yet. But when it does, it is most likely to be published by Rodopi/Amsterdam (www.rodopi.nl) in the "Leiden Studies in Indo-European" series; you could ask them to notify you upon publication (but as far as I understand it, this may still take some time) > Could anybody recommed a German dictionary organized by IE roots? >(something on the lines of Clairborne's The Roots of English or, still better, >of Robert's and Pastor's Diccionario etimol?gico indoeuropeo de la lengua >espa?ola). I'm sure that the Germans must have brought out some good stuff. Alas, they haven't. >And since I've mentioned German... > Is there such a dictionary for French? If you are after a general etymological dictionary (not of the type described above), you can still use E. Gammilscheg: Etymologisches Woerterbuch der franzoesischen Sprache, Heidelberg: C. Winter 1929 (as with other older books from that publisher, it might still be available in non-used form). > Dutch? P.A.F. van Veen: Etymologisch woordenboek. De herkomst van onze woorden, Utrecht/Antwerpen: Van Dale Lexicografie 1989, ISBN 90-6648-302-4 > Greek? (I'm afraid I'm still using Andrioti's etymological dictionary for >Modern Greek, which unfortunately doesn't usually take you far if you >don't use >an Old Greek etymological dictionary to go with it. Would Chantraine's >Dictionnaire ?tymologique still be your best recommendation?) Chantraine is a truly remarkable work. However, its main focus is on "etymologie - histoire des mots", whereas the "etymologie - origine" approach is better represented in Hj. Frisk: Griechisches etymologisches Woerterbuch, Heidelberg: Winter; but it is usually considered best by Hellenicists to have them both > Russian? M. Vasmer: Russisches etymologisches Woerterbuch, Heidelberg: Winter; there is an upbeat Russian translation of this with copious comments and amendments on almost every single entry > Final request: Ernout and Meillet's Dictionnaire ?tymologique de la >langue latine has been out of print for ages and my photocopies (yups!) were >never much good to start with. What shall I replace them with? Walde/Hofmann: Lateinisches etymologisches Woerterbuch, Heidelberg: Winter (yes, that publisher once was the Microsoft of publishers of etymological dictionaries); but W-H is not necessarily considered the best one of the "blue" et. dict. published by Winter (this prize goes, IMHO, to Frisk). I think it could be time to produce a new one. Any takers ? St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From jrader at m-w.com Mon Feb 28 09:38:25 2000 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 09:38:25 +0000 Subject: Jose Perez' questions [was: Re: *hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-?] Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: I have taken the Subject: from Stefan Georg's reply for postings relating to Mr. Perez' questions. --rma ] > From: "jose.perez3" > Hello IEists, > I've just started reading the list and was wondering wether any of you > might help me with the following: > Could you, please, give me the complete reference of the Lexicon der > Indogermanischen Verbum? > Does anybody know whether it could be purchased via internet? > I'm also after other "classics" such as Rick's Laut und Formenlehre des > Griechisches and Meiser's Laut und Formenlehre des Lateins... can they be > bought in the net? Helmut Rix's _LIV: Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben_, his _Historische Grammatik des Griechischen_ (the title I assume you mean), and Gerhard Meiser's _Historische Laut- und Formenlehre der lateinischen Sprache_ can all be purchased through Amazon.de, though they are not cheap. Perhaps if you are in Europe you can evade the astronomical shipping and handling charges that Amazon.de charges American customers for air shipment. Incidentally, does anyone on the list have an opinion on Meiser's book, which I have not seen? Jim Rader From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 29 03:14:46 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 19:14:46 -0800 Subject: Jose Perez' questions [was: Re: *hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-?] In-Reply-To: <000201bf7ffa$d305fdc0$68a608d4@joseperez3> Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: I have taken the Subject: from Stefan Georg's reply for postings relating to Mr. Perez' questions. --rma ] At 02:42 AM 2/26/00 +0100, jose.perez3 wrote: > Could you, please, give me the complete reference of the Lexicon der >Indogermanischen Verbum? > Does anybody know whether it could be purchased via internet? Ditto here. The copy at UCLA has "disappeared" (probably on indefinite loan to somebody). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From Georg at home.ivm.de Mon Feb 28 10:22:02 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 11:22:02 +0100 Subject: Nuristani (was k' > ts > c-hachek order of changes?) In-Reply-To: <200002280926.KAA20001@home.ivm.de> Message-ID: > Stefan George wrote: >>You are doubtlessly having the Nuristani languages of SE Afghanistan in >>mind, which are sometimes viewed as the third Aryan group besides Indic and >>Iranian. >Not to be too picky, but Nuristan is in *north*-eastern Afghanistan, on the >southern slopes of the Hindu Kush range. Obviously, sorry. >I would add that only >non-specialists in the region would deny the linguistic and ethnic validity >of the Nuristanis' place as a third group within Indo-Iranian. This is interesting. Being such a non-specialist (but not *denying* this, of course), I'd like to hear more about this. What would be most interesting, is: which criteria aside from the representation of /k'/ (the only criterion I have heard about, or better: I remember having heard about without reaching for the books) may be cited in favour of this view, e.g. from morphology ? Some references would be welcome, too (post-Morgenstierne). St.G. PS: as I just discover, your fine web-site contains some answers to my questions, and I'd like to recommend it for anyone interested. But maybe there are more features of N. lg. relevant for Aryan subclassification which could be mentioned ? Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 29 04:32:10 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 23:32:10 EST Subject: Nuristani (was k' > ts > c-hachek order of changes?) Message-ID: >strand at sedona.net writes: << From the cumulative evidence it would appear that the Proto-Nuristanis >were ethnically non-Aryas who were swept up in the earliest expansion of >those Aryas who later became Iranians -- we should be careful to maintain the distinction between ethnic and linguistic descriptive terms here. The Nuristani languages are unquestionably a subgroup within Indo-Iranian; possibly a coequal third part of that subgrouping. From edsel at glo.be Mon Feb 28 10:55:48 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 11:55:48 +0100 Subject: Celtiberian Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Friday, February 25, 2000 4:43 AM [snip] > "The 'first full manual' on the language appeared in 1998. Jord?n > C?lera, Carlos. Introducci?n al Celtib?rico. Zaragoza: Universidad de > Zaragoza. Wolfgang Meid's commentaries on Celtiberian Inscriptions > Archaeologica (Budapest 1994) have been considered authoritative. Francois > Villar's A new interpretation of Celtiberian grammar (Innsbruck 1995) > approaches the issues of both the non-Indoeuropean and what may be singular > indoeuropean aspects of the language. Some general observations: > The Iberian "syllabic" script that was used to write Celtiberian has often > been described as unable to represent the opposition of voiced and voiceless > consonants, as well as being limited to representing a limited range of final > consonants (s, m, r, n, l). These conclusions have been questioned > recently... On the basis of Latin scripts used in the last phase of > Celtiberian, it was concluded that the language fell into the Q-Celtic > category. However, it now appears that this may also have been the result of > the Latinization of the language in the late period, since some early texts > now seem to show signs of being P-Celtic... The lexical data shows that > Celtiberian innovated or borrowed a good many words and roughly half the > vocabulary is not known with real certainty... It has been said that > Celtiberian also contains some Indoeuropean archaisms, but far outnumbering > these are elements that remain to be explained - including the frequent use > of the genitive singular ending -o. [Ed Selleslagh] This could be a Basque-like (Iberian?) feature: the derivative -ko suffix, with some subsequent alteration (lenition....), cf. etxekoandrea = the mistress/lady of the house [house-of-lady-the]. >And while the predicted Indoeuropean > passive -r ending does not now seem to be present, some researchers feel they > have detected evidence of mutation (lenition) in the Celtiberian script... [Ed] Strangely enough, according to my own reading of a particular Iberian inscription (Sinarcas), this feature, or something resembling it, might be present in Iberian. But accompanied by a subject in an apparently ergative case. > There is also the difficult problem, mentioned above, as to whether > Latinization in the mid 2d century BC altered the language so that it was at > least dialectically different from the one used in the Iberian script. > Familiar structure that appears in Latin alphabet texts are not often > confirmed in the earlier texts. And this difficulty is amplified by the fact > that the accepted phonetic interpretation of early Celtiberian texts have not > proved especially useful in elucidating the original Iberian script...>> [Ed] The latter is well known and quite easy to explain: e.g. there is a redundancy of rhotics (r/R) and sibilants (s/s') when the script is used for Celtiberian (and deficiencies on the other hand: e.g. lack of voiced/unvoiced opposition). So, Celtiberian could never elucidate distinctions (in Iberian) it doesn't have itself. Imagine we had Latin texts in Arabic script: how far would we get in determining the meaning of all Arabic characters? > Regards, > Steve Long [Ed] A more general comment: Given the presence of Q-Lusitanian (maybe Celtic, maybe Italic, or an early form of both when they were still rather undifferentiated) on the one hand, and that of P-Celtic in Gaul on the other hand, plus the admixture of Iberian or a Basque-like language and later Latinization, Celtiberian may have gone through a whole series of stages. One can even imagine it was a kind of evolving creole grown out of a pidgin used to communicate among the various very different peoples in Iberia, or an adapted/modified Lingua Franca. Ed. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Feb 28 17:03:26 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 17:03:26 +0000 Subject: "Related" debate unproductive? Message-ID: Lloyd Anderson writes: [snip passages with which I mostly agree] > By considering primarily extreme cases where we probably all > agree, we make no progress towards handing the difficult ones. Indeed. But may I suggest that anyone wanting to discuss difficult cases should identify some *particular* cases which he sees as "difficult"? Most of the discussion so far has either centered on completely hypothetical scenarios or picked on cases which are anything but problematic, such as Germanic and Indo-European. Afrikaans and Michif have now been named as possibly difficult cases. Would anybody like to name some others? Or discuss these two further? > I would note first that it is probably impossible in practice to > avoid a mixture of ordinary language with technical usage. > When Whiting says today in response to someone's > >>Genetically (in your terms), English is equally related to both > >>French and Italian. > as follows: > >They're not my terms; I didn't invent them -- they are standard > >in historical linguistics textbooks. But I agree with the > >premise -- except that I wouldn't say "equally related"; I would > >say "related at the same level." > I of course agree. And so do I. > Perhaps our common reluctance to use the phrase > "equally related" here is that it has a portion of its ordinary-language > meaning, Well, it shouldn't. In linguistics, 'related' is a technical term, and in linguistic work it has, or should have, only its technical sense. We linguists must put aside all knowledge of everyday senses of the term when we are working, or we will only get hopelessly confused. I can cite a good parallel here. I used to be a physics teacher once, and, in physics, 'work' is a technical term, with a sense quite different from its everyday sense. And I can report that it is surprisingly difficult for beginning students to forget about the everyday sense when studying physics: they keep wanting to see work done where no work is done in the physical sense. And, as a result, they become confused and get things wrong. Once upon a time, related languages were sometimes called 'cognate languages'. This usage is now dead, I think, and we restrict 'cognate' to individual words and morphemes. Maybe that's unfortunate, if 'related' as a technical term is going to cause so much confusion. > and we know clearly English *is* especially closely related > to French, as *all* linguists recognize. No. I disagree flatly. I believe I have *never* seen a linguist declare that English is more closely related to French than to Italian, and I would not expect to see any such thing, because it's not true. > (English loans from > Hindi or Chinese or Afrikaans or whatever, are also not really > to the point, I think, because such extreme cases were not mentioned > by those wishing to question an overly narrow sense of "relationship". > So bringing *them* up is at least not to the point of what I > believe many of us are concerned with, such would also be red herrings.) Er -- "extreme" cases? In what sense are they "extreme"? English has borrowed a few words from Chinese and from Afrikaans, and rather more from Hindi. What's extreme about that? Anyway, I reiterate that our established sense of 'relationship' is in no sense "overly narrow". It is simply the way the term is used in linguistics, and that's the end of the matter. Mathematicians recognize classes of numbers they call 'rational' numbers and 'real' numbers. But these numbers are no more "rational", and no more "real", than any other numbers, in the everyday senses of these words -- and any outsider who tried to claim otherwise would be looked at strangely by mathematicians. Why should linguistics be different? > It is perhaps my personal interest and bias, > but the problem that remains as a subtle and sophisticated one, > and which has clearly *not* been resolved by previous scholarship, > is the handling of trees vs. dialect areas, Maybe not "resolved", but these issues are far from unfamiliar in linguistics, and they have been disussed for generations. > and the implications of > the following paragraph, which I did not write, > and which was referred to by Whiting today: > >(b) The idea that there must be a single language progenitor of > >daughter languages is widely disputed. Some people accept the > >idea that a collection of interrelated languages might never have > >had a single ancestor, but as far back as you care to go were > >simply a collection of inter-related languages. The > >language/dialect issue comes up here. We talk of IE "dialects" > >within PIE, but this is simply terminology. The point is that > >there is no need whatever for there to have been a single unified > >PIE language. We have already discussed this. The suggestions are fanciful, and the final sentence is false. > The example Whiting mentions of the Altaic "family" > (or perhaps not a family, if long contact and mutual influences > and massive borrowings were involved) > is closer to a propos to the view expressed > by the author of the above paragraph, it seems to me. No; this is a very different issue. All parties to the Altaic debate agree that there are just two possibilities: either Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic are genuinely related within a single larger Altaic family, or they are not, and the obvious connections among them are merely the result of prolonged contact among unrelated families. The parties differ as to which view they believe is the true one, but nobody I know of is arguing for any third view. > The possibility that PIE was some close complex of languages > which exchanged even morphology, but which retained traces > of various distinct substrates or whatever one wishes to discuss, > is a real possibility. It might be a hypothetical possibility, a la Dixon, but any such idea is heavily falsified by the data. IE is a simply terrible choice of example to illustrate this hypothetical scenario -- one of the worst examples possible. If anybody wants to pursue this scenario, how about showing us a *plausible* candidate? > Not necessarily to a great degree, > not necessarily as much as Altaic, but to some degree, > it is quite possible and an entirely reasonable hypothesis > consistent with *traditional* views of historical linguistics. > Merely one that is mostly not discussed, rightly or wrongly. It *has* been discussed. This idea that the IE family results from extensive diffusion across the boundaries of unrelated languages, and that PIE never existed, was put forward by Uhlenbeck, by Trubetzkoy, and by Tovar (at least). But this idea has been categorically rejected by specialists, because *it is in flagrant conflict with the evidence*. How many times do we have to say this? The evidence for the reality of PIE is *overwhelming*, and it is *not* consistent with any kind of "language- mixing" scenario. > This possibility, which may exist for many proto-languages, > *does* have practical, as opposed to purely terminological, > implications. In order to persuade anybody of this, you must first put forward some plausible candidates, and show how the family-tree model fails badly to account for the evidence. Until this is done, it is a waste of time to invent hypothetical but unsubstantiated scenarios and merely mutter darkly that these might contain some reality. It is perfectly conceivable that some human languages were introduced by alien visitors from another planet. In fact, just such a proposal was once made for the origin of Basque (naturally). But no linguist is prepared to spend time in considering such a scenario. And why should we? Nobody has made a good case that any particular language must have such an origin, and so what is the point of discussing it? > To recognize that this is a possible situation > for a proto-language, > we must handle vocabulary and morphological > distributions across *portions* of the dialect network of any > proto-language in *at least* the frameworks of the following Sorry, but this is putting the cart before the horse. We cannot identify any possible cases of variation within a proto-language before we have first identified the proto-language itself. > 1) simple family tree, innovations on one branch, > replacement on one branch, etc. branch then dividing. Familiar. > 2) wave spread of items across a part of a dialect network, > which may have no relation to the family-tree structure Familiar. > 3) persistence as areal dialect-net isoglosses of what were > substrate inheritances in only part of the territory of > an eventual proto-language, the substrate inheritances > in another part of that territory being from a different > language or languages. When substrates are strong, > and morphology can spread, the difference between > the various kinds of "inheritance" can become quite blurred. There are not different kinds of inheritance. Modern English has inherited from Middle English a number of words of Norman French origin. But Middle English did not "inherit" these words at all: it *borrowed* them from Norman French. This is just the way the terms are used in linguistics. Anyway, I can see absolutely no point in invoking hypothetical "substrates". If we have no hard evidence for the reality, and the nature, of a particular substrate in a particular case, then there is no point in raising the issue. > 4) proto-languages need not (not even by the narrow > definition of "genetically related") be completely uniform, > they need not be indivisible points with no internal dimensions > Living languages do not fit such a simple model, > so what business do we have insisting that dead languages did? > That would make them theoretical constructs, useful primarily > for making it easier for us to think about them, > so artificially simplified. But nobody has ever disagreed with this. Once again, *nobody* maintains that ancient languages were devoid of variation. It is merely that our methods, on the basis of the evidence available, do not allow us to reconstruct the full range of that variation, or even (usually) very much of it at all. And no more powerful methods exist. > In limiting special cases, sure, when a single family or village > migrated, and became the nucleus of a new language family. > But those are limiting special cases, they do not define a narrow > total range of possibilities which historical and comparative > linguistics should restrict itself intellectually to being able > to deal with. By what right do you assume that the origin of a language family in a single rather homogeneous speech variety constitutes a "limiting special case"? How do you explain the great success of linguists in reconstructing one proto-language after another? PIE, Proto-Uralic, Proto-Algonquian, Proto-Iroquoian, Proto-Oto-Manguean, Proto-Arawak, Proto-Dravidian, Proto-Austronesian... Where are the dozens or hundreds of cases in which reconstruction of a proto-language has proved impossible? > 5) Any proto-language need not be pure, There is no such thing as a "pure" language, and such a notion has no place in linguistic work. > it may share substrate > inheritances from quite a number of substrates, > substrates which either are known as separate language > families, or which have become extinct as independent > languages, or in an intermediate situation, which may appear > as substrates also for some other language or language family. > It may be possible to reconstruct part of the vocabulary even > of a language or family which survives *only* as substrates > to two or more other languages or language families, > if we can determine that the substrates within each of those > latter are indeed substrates, rather than being later innovations in > some area which crosses language boundaries, > or later loans from part of the area of one language or family > to part of the area of another language or family. Substrates again. Sigh. OK. One day when I have a little spare time, I'll post the entry on substrates from my new dictionary. > So let us sharpen our existing tools, develop new tools, > avoid oversimplifications, *and* recognize the inherited > wisdom of comparative and historical-reconstructive linguistics. > There is absolutely no reason we should need to choose > between these as if they were mutually exclusive alternatives. Between what? Between comparative linguistics and historical-reconstructive linguistics? What's the difference? > And let us treat the contributions of others by always trying > to find the *most* reasonable view of them, or the part of them > which we believe we can make the most productive contributions to, > rather than spending most of our words trying to defeat them. Well, again, let's stop introducing hypothetical but unsubstantiated scenarios, and let's stop illustrating these with dreadful examples like IE. Let's see some *genuinely* problematic cases. > There is absolutely no reason to throw out *any* of the tools > of comparative-historical linguistics. There *is* reason to > sharpen those tools and to add more tools and to add > less simplistic formats for recording results of using those tools. Sounds good, but what exactly is being proposed? And what on earth are you describing as "simplistic"? Grumble, grumble, grumble. Guess I must be in a bad mood today. ;-) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 29 05:29:21 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 00:29:21 EST Subject: English as a creole Message-ID: >brent at bermls.oau.org writes: >Native Norman French speakers in England appear to have died >out by the early 14th century. It is unlikely that their influence >would have lain dormant for the next 3 or 4 hundred years. -- Correct. Bartlett, in THE NEW OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLAND 1075-1225 shows strong evidence that, apart from the Royal court itself, the aristocracy became predominantly English-speaking within about 100 years of the Norman conquest. They continued to learn French, but as a secondary "learned" language. "Knowledge of 'correct' French was thus, by the later part of the twelfth century (if not before) a prestigious ability that the children of the aristocracy had to work hard to acquire". (Bartlett, p. 490). Incidentally, this isn't without relevance for the question of the spread of Indo-European languages. The Norman conquest of England presents a case where the entire aristocracy, their retainers, and the higher parts of the eccesiastical hierarchy were French-speaking, where contacts with France were close (politically and socially), where French was available in written form, and where French had immense social prestige as the language of government and 'high culture', yet where English prevailed within four or five generations at the utmost. This fact, and the nature of French loanwords in Middle English, suggest a parallel with the influence of Indo-Aryan on the Mitannians in the second millenium BCE Near East. From edsel at glo.be Tue Feb 29 11:36:47 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 12:36:47 +0100 Subject: English as a creole Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brent J. Ermlick" Sent: Friday, February 25, 2000 12:28 PM > On Wed, Feb 23, 2000 at 01:07:53PM +0100, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: > . . . >> English can be considered a mild case of creolization without an >> intermediate pidgin (even though the former existence of a pidgin cannot be >> ruled out entirely, but it would not have been the origin of modern >> English): not only the vocabulary was altered very seriously (which doesn't >> mean it's a creole), but syntax was moderately altered as well, e.g. lack >> word order inversion after an adverbial phrase (a typical error of French >> speakers who learn Dutch or German) and in some other cases, and the >> simplifications of the verbal system, including the disappearance of the >> participial prefix ge- that existed in Old English. > But the "ge-" shows up until the end of the Middle English period, > and even appears in Spenser as "yclept". The inversion after an > initial adverb or phrase still appears in Elizabethan English and > the King James Bible. One old piece of advice for Americans used to > be to imitate the syntax of the Pilgrim Fathers when trying to speak > Dutch. > Native Norman French speakers in England appear to have died > out by the early 14th century. It is unlikely that their influence > would have lain dormant for the next 3 or 4 hundred years. [Ed] You're right of course, I should have mentioned Middle English. About the influence of native Norman French speakers: it is not because there weren't any left that their influence didn't continue. You could look at this as an inoculation or injection with a slow acting poison. Or foundations attacked by termites. Basically, it's a weakening of the awareness of its roots and idiosyncrasies, leading to vacilation when applying syntactic rules. The texts you are referring to are 'high' style, probably voluntarily archaicizing (Lawyers still do it : 'What say you?'). Do we know how the ordinary people were (already) speaking in the 16-17th century? There are lots of monolingual Brussels French speakers who continue to transmit Flemish-influenced deviations (including pronunciation) to their children and grandchildren, even though none of them can speak Flemish Dutch. Of course, the situation is not entirely the same (there are still 10-15% Flemings in Brussels, but they have little social contact with strictly monolingual French speakers - who tend to be very defensive/isolationist). In the 19th century, Victor Hugo noticed similar things in then entirely French (and/or Walloon) speaking Wallonia where nobody knew any Dutch; he thought it was German influence. In short, I am not convinced Norman French wasn't still influencing English 'posthumously'. But I try to keep an open mind on this. Ed. Selleslagh. From edsel at glo.be Mon Feb 28 17:32:22 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 18:32:22 +0100 Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard M. Alderson III" Sent: Friday, February 25, 2000 8:23 PM [snip] > In anticipation, >> Really, 500 years. Kind of Italian (1500AD) to Italian (2000AD) - except of >> course for the lack of gender in Hittite - and some other small matters like >> that. Nothing important. > How about English (1000CE), which had grammatical gender in nouns, and > English (1500CE), which did not? French (1200CE), which had a case system in > nouns, and French (1700CE), which did not? [Ed] Two remarks: 1) French? A 'case system' consisting of nominative and accusative can hardly be called that. (the plural -s was/had become a more or less independent feature). The V.Latin/Romance genitive had given rise to new words, considered to be nominatives. Very soon, the (morphological) accusative was used for all cases, like in virtually all Latin languages (with loss of the final nasal, which had already begun in Latin). 2) A comparison with the case of 20th century Dutch in Holland and Flanders is interesting : in the Netherlands (starting in Holland proper), the grammatical M/F distinction for inanimates and animals has virtually vanished in the last 60 (yes: sixty!) years or so (the neuter is maintained, but not generalized to all inanimates - except ships - like in English): they all became formally 'male'. In Flanders there is no sign of that, probably due to the fact that in local dialects the articles, demonstratives etc... are still flected differently for M/F (and neuter) (which makes a speaker much more aware of grammatical gender, cf. German), while this is no longer the case in the standard language after the end of Middle Dutch (except in artificially archa?cizing book language until WW II, a bit like Greek Kathar?vousa). Example: the indefinite article (M/F/N): Standard: een, een, een.(/@n/) Many Flemish dialects: ne, en, e. (e = /@/): ne man, en vrouw, e kind (a man, woman, child) [snip] >> On the other hand, if early IE were as undifferented as being claimed here, >> many of these problems in discipherment logically should not have occurred. > One would think so, but then, one would have only to look at things like > early Latin inscriptions, some of which have not been satisfactorily > deciphered to this day, to know that logic has nought to do with the > question. After all, we are supposed to *know* Latin... [Ed] How true this is! A few years ago I read two different Spanish translations (by actual linguists!) of a sentence from Strabo(:n) about the Iberians: according to one (A. Garc?a y Bellido) they had a 6000 year old tradition of poems, laws etc. in verses, according to the other (J. Caro Baroja) they had poems 6000 verses long (hexakischilio:n epo:n). Aren't we supposed to know Classic Greek? Ed. Selleslagh From maxdashu at LanMinds.Com Mon Feb 28 23:33:19 2000 From: maxdashu at LanMinds.Com (Max Dashu) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 15:33:19 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000224225116.009c34d0@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: >>The I-H hypothesis I believe has Hittite < PIE. >Not at all. In fact the very *form* of the word implies exclusion of >Anatolian from IE proper I'm puzzled by why the IE languages have come to be referred to as "Anatolian." What then do they call non-IE tongues like Hurrian? (Or are non-IE languages other than Hurrian known in Anatolia?) Max Dashu From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 29 01:20:07 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 17:20:07 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <31.1a4b89c.25e5fe44@aol.com> Message-ID: At 10:23 PM 2/23/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >-- Kind of like Anglo-Saxon (1000 AD) and Early Modern English (1500 AD), >actually. Massive freight of Romance loan-words, drastic grammatical >simplification, and -- right around 1500 -- an equally drastic set of >sound-shifts. This is better than my example. It is especially interesting that many of the borrowed Romance words are in the area of government and religious ritual, given what happened in Hittite. >The sum total of extant Thracian consists of a small series of short >inscriptions in Greek script, which are difficult to translate because of >problems in word division. (This is characteristic of _short_ inscriptions.) Even in longer inscriptions word division can be an issue, just not quite so critical. Our convention of spaces between words makes quite a difference. > There are some glosses found in Hesychius and Photius which give us about 30 >certain Thracian terms. The rest of our information comes from personal and >place-names. >In sum, we have less than a hundred Thracian words -- most of them names. >Those we do have, are transparently IE, and present no particular difficulty: > -para, 'settlement', -bria, 'town', for instance. Not to mention the river names, which are equally transparent. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 29 03:28:01 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 19:28:01 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <200002252237.OAA10978@netcom.com> Message-ID: At 02:37 PM 2/25/00 -0800, Richard M. Alderson III wrote: >No, it wasn't. It was being used as an easily accessible example of the large >number of similarities which "leap off the page" to anyone familiar with both >languages. ... >Absolutely nothing. Similar sets from each pair of IE languages can be set >up, as well as sets from larger groups; several have been posted in the last >couple of days. Indeed I have a stack of paper about a foot tall consisting almost entirely of such sets sitting in one corner of my room. It is my copy of Pokorny. If he wants to look at more examples he can go to the library and look at their copy. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 29 08:03:56 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 03:03:56 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: In a message dated 2/28/2000 11:09:16 AM, Rich Anderson wrote: >Full bibliographical citation, s'il vous plai^t. Only Thracian data I know of >is some small inscriptions (personal names and the like) and glosses in Greek >texts. >Full texts in Thracian would excite entire generations of Indo-Europeanists. >So please, where are these to be found? Fighting sarcasm with sarcasm, I'm sure some IEists would be more excited about at least two of the text if 'agnis/ignis' were found in them, but unfortunately it appears there's more cognate and common morphology written over the starter in my late model automobile ('ignitio/ignition') then there is in those Thracian text. But the lack of obvious - jump off the page - reflex doesn't mean that Thracian wasn't IE. But it might mean that it is very old IE. Of course, somehow the question of time of separation keeps on getting reduced to Indoeuropean-ness, which of course is not the question at all. Going back to what all this was supposed to prove, what is supposedly "leaping off the page" is NOT IEness. What is supposed (according to the original premise in this thread) to "leap off the page" is the time of separation. No one argues that Thracian is not Indoeuropean. The problem is not indoeuropean cognates or morphology. The problem is that what little we have can't be read. I'm sure that might be of interest to some IEists. You are quite correct, they are Thracian "inscriptions", but hardly 'personal names and such.' And they certainly appear to be complete if small "texts". I only have my old notes with me from an old post that's in the archive on Thracian (I think related to ancient Balkan languages.) But of course I had to answer this before it became too old: "The Ezero inscription was found in a Thracian burial mound with all the context and res gestae to identify it as Thracian. It made up of [either 61 or 81 - I can't read it] Greek charcters engraved on a golden ring. The reading of the letters poses no difficulties but division of the text into words is uncertain. Up to now there appeared more than 20 translations of this text [See D. Detschew, Die thrakischen Sprachreste, Wien, 1957, pp.567-582], none of them being commonly accepted. The Kjolmen inscription was carved on a stone tablet found in another Thracian grave. It is also written with Greek characters but in bustrophedon: a line written from right to the left and the next from left to the right. (a practice found in Greek in the 6th century BC) It contains 51 characters and no acceptible translation has been made. Note is made that the arrangement of the characters in these inscriptions often match identically thsoe found on the more numerous fragements at Samothrace and elsewhere, so that the fact that they actually represent Thracian has not been in dispute." "There are several more smaller inscriptions mentionrd by Duridanov in The Thracian Language and duNays in Origins of Romanian. ." The above was extracted from Duridanov (1985) and duNays, which I don't have date for right now - but which is excerpted on the web and the URL should be in the archives. I actually have a jpg of a close-up on the Ezero inscription and a separate gif of the text on this harddrive and would send these if that would be okay on the list. These shots are from a web page on a tour of US museums a few years ago it went on along with pottery fragments with writing on them. The text accompanying the pottery say that "the phrases" on them "make no sense in the ancient Greek language." If Thracian is ever deciphered, many IE reflexes will no doubt "leap off the page." But these my not genuinely yield any more absolute date than "ignitio/ignition" Regards, Steve Long by ARA From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Feb 27 08:08:52 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 08:08:52 -0000 Subject: reality of PIE Message-ID: Thanks for your patience, Larry, with what might seem a tedious debate. I'm happy to concede that I have overstated (or even grossly overstated) the point I was trying to make, and you seem happy with the idea that genetically related languages can derive from different varieties of the same language. (I hope that's a fair statement?) Is that a good place to draw stumps and quit the field? Peter From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Feb 29 11:27:12 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 11:27:12 +0000 Subject: reality of PIE Message-ID: Steve Long writes: > I cannot think of stronger, more compelling evidence in favor of the actual > existence of PIE than what Ante Aikio presented in his list of PIE borrowings > in Uralic. This external confirmation is indeed gratifying. But it's not essential. The IE-internal evidence is already sufficiently strong to justify the reconstruction of PIE. > The claim that PIE can be reconstructed accurately is always going to be > confirmed by internal evidence, after all that is what the reconstruction is > made of. There's really no way to disprove it internally, because by > definition it was created to be consistent with the evidence. Oh, no. Not so. You're overlooking something vastly important. We can't just choose some arbitrary languages and "reconstruct" a common ancestor for them. For example, we can't choose Norwegian, Basque and Zulu and "reconstruct" a Proto-NBZ. The data simply won't allow this. But the IE languages *do* permit the reconstruction of PIE. > But to see it confirmed in Uralic is very, very impressive. That's > predictability. It is certainly helpful in persuading non-specialists that our methodology really works. > It is very hard to be cynical about the actual existence of *PIE when you > have that kind of external evidence. I wonder if the full impact of that > work has been appreciated. Linguists certainly appreciate it. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 29 00:11:25 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 01:11:25 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000225185738.009bddf0@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: Stanley Friesen wrote: >At 07:55 AM 2/23/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >>Stanley Friesen wrote: >>>[Though I actually question tracing B-S back to Corded Ware]. >>G-B-S. >I am coming from the position of being unconvinced of the reality of >Germano-Balto-Slavic. In fact I cannot consistently place Balto-Slavic in >the IE tree. Depending on how I analyze it, it either comes out linked to >Germanic (as you suggest), or linked to the Greek and Indo-Iranian groups. Actually, I'm not suggesting a GBS genetic node. I think Germanic "broke away" quite early on (while "Balto-Slavic" was still more or less undifferentiated eastern PIE). Afterwards, Germanic and Balto-Slavic came into close areal contact (a "GBS Sprachbund", possibly in the Corded Ware period). In fact, the opposite of what Ringe seems to be suggesting (GBS, later areal Gmc-Ital/Celt contacts). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 29 03:36:51 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 19:36:51 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.20000226235841.006e7d4c@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu> Message-ID: At 12:02 AM 2/27/00 -0600, roslyn frank wrote: >I believe that there may be a slight problem with the notion of >"sacrificed" and/or "sanctified" when read through the framework of modern >thought. In traditional cultures even a 'tree' can be understood to be >giving up its life when cut down; or an herb when plucked from the soil. I >would argue that we need to be careful about rendering judgements on past >ritual practices based on the secular view that dominates western thought >vis-a-vis the natural world and the way that its 'resources' are regularly >utilized. >Ritualization of the death of an animal, asking its forgiveness when the >hunter is about to take its life, it not unusual in traditional cultures, >whether that animal be a bear or a rabbit. If *that* is the sort of rituals the IE horse rituals were, this would be meaningful. But they do not have the structure of ritualized prayers for forgiveness - at least not *from* the horse. (Some variants may have been supplications for forgiveness from Dye:us P'ter - but the horse's permission was not asked for). Indeed the common elements of horse rituals that show up in all the early IE cultures are more associated with martial pursuits, or at least competition, than with hunting. >Therefore, I would be interested in knowing what the source is, i.e., the >ethnographic data base, for the statement "... animals that are *primarily* >food animals are rarely sanctified." I was thinking more in terms of the sorts of treatments where the horse stands in for some other person or activity. Shamanistic sanctification is of a different sort. > In the case of the traditional >cultures with which I'm familiar, it is precisely those animals and plants >that are used by humans for food that receive the most elaborate and >special ritual treatment, not others that are left alone and not harvested. Certainly the ones *left *alone* are not given special religious significance. My point was that the horse in PIE culture was *even* *more* central to the culture than if it were a domesticated food animal. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 29 04:56:20 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 23:56:20 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>-- and currently around 800 million speaking Indo-European languages there, >>which if you add in Iran, eastern Anatolia and central Asia, comes to over 1 >>billion. >That wasn't my point. -- well, it was my point. The Indo-Iranian expansion into these areas was _later_ than the probable Indo-Europeanization of Europe, but comparable in scale... and demonstrably due to the infiltration of elements ultimately derived from the Eurasian steppe zone. If Iran/India, why not Europe? >I consider Welsh (including its Latin component) to be pretty >solid linguistical evidence. -- of a Celtic language _in Wales_. In the absence of written records, it would be virtually impossible to show that there had ever been such a language in most of England. Even the place-names of minor landscape features are mostly Germanic; those Celtic names that do survive are few and often the product of misunderstanding -- eg., a number of western English rivers are called "Avon", which means... 'river'. >>>In Northern Europe, there were no cities and no sizeable political >>>structures to take over. >>-- well, that makes things easier for incomers, not harder; >In general it doesn't. -- there are plenty of examples to the contrary; in Africa, particularly. (Eg., the spread of Somali, Maa and Luo in East Africa.) In the absence of large-scale state structures, there's no possibility of large scale _resistance_ to a folk-migration. >>-- not according to Cavalli-Sforza, who shows a wave of migration starting >>north of the sea of Azov and spreading throughout Europe. >Yes, *precisely* according to Cavalli-Sforza. -- he shows two migrations into Europe, one in the early neolithic from the south-east, and one in the late neolithic, from the east. How do you valorize the earlier one over the later? >How so? The linguistic evidence confirms that there is a sizeable >Pre-Germanic substrate element, which fits exactly with the genesis of the >TRB culture in the area around Denmark. -- a pre-Germanic substrate in _Germanic_, not in the rest of the IE languages. In fact, Baltic and Slavic -- closely adjacent -- show the _least_ evidence of pre-IE substrates. >Early infiltration in the Baltic area fits with the PIE borrowings into >Uralic -- nonsense. Much too far to the west. There's virtually universal agreement that the Uralic languages dispersed from the _Ural_ area (that's why they're called "Uralic", of course) and any contact with PIE which produced loans present in all the Uralic languages would have had to be in that area -- thousands of miles east of the Baltic. >But linguistic information gives no absolute dates. There's nothing about the "linguistic information" that "rules out" a date of 5500 BC. -- sure there is. It's too early, unless we make radical assumptions about slow differentiation; which is chopping and fitting the linguistics to fit the pots. >Not wiped out entirely by historical times was Etruscan-Lemnian in the >Aegean area. -- I would point out that there is, to put it midly, no consensus on the origins or genetic relations of Etruscan. Except that it's generally agreed Etruscan is non-IE. >But that glosses over the origin of the Corded Ware horizon. -- no; it just acknowledges that we don't _know_ the origin of the Corded Ware horizon. We do know that it spread rapidly (within a few centuries) over previously highly differentiated local archaeological cultures from the Rhine delta to east of the Volga. It was also, of course, in contact with the steppe cultures of the Ukraine (over a broad front) and shared some features with them. (Cord-marked pottery and stone battle axes, wheeled vehicles, the plow, etc.) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 29 04:59:09 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 23:59:09 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >frank at uiowa.edu writes: >Ritualization of the death of an animal, asking its forgiveness when the >hunter is about to take its life, it not unusual in traditional cultures, >whether that animal be a bear or a rabbit. -- in some. In others, they just kill the damned thing. Primarily ritual _use_ of an animal is usually fairly easy to distinguish from routine use, whether the later is accompanied by ritual or not. Eg., if you find the complete skeleton of a horse in a grave, with no disturbance of the bones or butchering marks, it's a sacrifice. From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 29 17:12:47 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 12:12:47 EST Subject: Hittite /wheel Message-ID: >Steve Long writes: >> (When I asked Sean Crist to identify the "telltale signs of borrowing" that >> he offered that would tell him if "the wheel word" was borrowed in at least >> some IE languages, he never replied.) In a message dated 2/29/2000 8:33:58 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk wrote: >OK. I'm no IEist, and I can't evaluate the IE evidence here. But I can >illustrate the general point Sean was making with a Basque example.(snipped) >But, in the early medieval period, Basque underwent a categorical >PHONOLOGICAL CHANGE, in all but the easternmost dialects, by which plosives >were uniformly voiced after /n/. >Now, the word in question is *everywhere* <(h)anka> in Basque, and no such >form as *<(h)anga> is recorded anywhere. Therefore, the very form of the word >is enough to *prove* that it was not in the language AT THE TIME OF THE >CHANGE, and must have entered the language later -- from whatever source. >(snipped) >But, even if we didn't know the source, the form of the word would tell us at >once that this is a late entry into the Basque lexicon, and therefore >probably a borrowing. (Caps are mine.) I think you may be making a rather different point. The issue was not whether "signs of borrowing" would show up AFTER pertinent sound changes - telltale signs or flat-out obvious signs. The question was how borrowing would be evidenced IF it occurred AFTER PIE dispersal but BEFORE the sound changes that show up in those words. I made the assertion that the sound changes in the wheel words did not necessarily occur right at the moment of PIE dispersal or even soon after. Crist asserted that he could find tell tale signs of borrowing even if the sound changes HAD NOT occurred yet. I ask for examples of such pre-change signs. No answer. Your example, on the other hand, depends on sound changes already having occurred. So though it is interesting, it doesn't appear pertinent. Regards, Steve Long by ARA From alderson at netcom.com Tue Feb 29 00:30:40 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 16:30:40 -0800 Subject: Indo-Hittite Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <84.1e38fb2.25e7f737@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Fri, 25 Feb 2000, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: > Actually, I've tried to figure out how the UPenn tree could possibly > 'confirm' the Indo-Hittite hypothesis and I think that the term may have been > misapplied in the papers that are available on this subject. > You may recall that the top of the UPenn tree was diagrammed on this list as: >> PIE >> / \ >> / Anatolian > This is not the I-H hypothesis, which would yield something like this: >> PIH >> / \ >> PIE P-Anatolian > The premise being that PIE and proto-Hittite/Anatolian are sister languages > with a common parent. Let's stop here for a moment, and revisit what the UPenn tree purports to do, vis-a-vis the standard models presented in linguistics texts. The standard model has for years been a 10-way branching from a central node labeled PIE, sometimes with minor branches provided for languages like Phrygian and Thracian. This model is always accompanied by text to the effect that we know that there must have been binary or trinary branches at some point, but that we don't really know where they go. (NB: That's 10 branches including Anatolian, and accepting Balto-Slavic. If we remove Anatolian--the "Indo- Hittite hypothesis"--there are 9.) The UPenn work is supposed to provide exactly the information we have lacked till now, that is, where to put in branches. Having generated their branching structure, they then picked a root position such that Anatolian branches away from the entire rest of the family, all of which can be viewed as going back to a single proto-language. This is *precisely* the position taken by Sturtevant and his followers: That we can reconstruct a "narrow PIE" (to use one correspondent's characterization) that is opposed to Anatolian under a higher branching structure. Under that reading of the UPenn tree, ignoring the actual label placed on the root of the tree, the Indo-Hittite hypothesis is *indeed* "confirmed"--or at least made plausible if one accepts their placement of the root. > My understanding is now that the difference between these approaches is not > trivial. The reconstruction of the hypothesized PIH gives substantially more > weight to the Anatolian languages than does a reconstruction of PIE that > makes Hittite et al a mere branch of Indo-European. Actually, in its original form, the IH hypothesis *trivializes* the data of the Anatolian languages with regard to "Indo-European proper" (the more common term in IH writings): We know everything we need to know to reconstruct the proto- language from which all 9 branches derive, and need not look at those pesky Anatolian languages at all! Oh, sure, they're interesting, with those funny obstruents that match up with Saussure's _coe'fficients sonantiques_, but they have nothing to say to us about the wonderful PIE we've worked on for so long. > And although the I-H hypothesis has been associated with, e.g., the new > version of the IE obstruent system offered by Hopper, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, > I'm told that the actual scope of its possible ramifications for PIE > reconstruction has not yet been explored. I've just laid out its ramifications: It *has* *NONE*! It *doesn't* *MATTER*! But it has nothing at all to do with, at least, Hopper's proposal regarding the PIE stop system. When Paul Hopper made his proposal about 30 years ago, two things were true of Indo-European studies: Almost no one accepted the Indo- Hittite hypothesis, and a large number of IEists rejected the laryngeals at the stage of IE immediately prior to breakup. Hopper's proposal had to do rather with the question of the phonological naturalness of the reconstructed stop system, and nothing to do with "the Indo-Hittite hypothesis" or "the laryngeal theory". > I do not believe - again, from the papers we have - that the algorithm used > on IE at UPenn ever produced an 'unrooted tree'. Contrary to what has been > said on this list in the past, the external adjustments appeared to have been > made directly to the algorithm from the outset. What we see in the papers is > a model of a 'unrooted tree', but I could not find one that represents the IE > languages. Since the papers available on their website state that it was an unrooted tree to which they added rooting information, you appear to be accusing the group of deliberate falsehoods. I'd be very careful of that, were I you. Rich Alderson From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 29 03:56:00 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 19:56:00 -0800 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <000801bf7fb8$0a101780$3454113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: At 05:44 PM 2/25/00 +0000, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >But, let us approach this from another avenue. >1) What I believe we find in the earliest IE is one vowel, /*e/, which has a >conditioned variant , /*o/. Many have tried to make this so. But all attempts I have seen come up short. At the level of the final unity, there are many minimal pairs that differ in /*e/ vs. /*o/. It is simply not possible for them to have been conditioned variants anymore well prior to the breakup. It is possible that some pre-PIE language had such conditioned variation, but any such conditioning factor had disappeared by the time we reach the reconstructible time layers. [One viable possibility is an old accent system as the conditioning factor, with conditioning destroyed by a shift in the accent pattern to the one reconstructed for PIE]. Note, when there is only one non-high vowel in a language, it is *always* best viewed as /a/, not /e/. (It may have /e/ as an *allophone* in some environments, but its neutral allophone will always be low). >2) I believe with Benveniste that /*u/ and /*i/ are to be accounted as >avocalic instances of /*w/ and /*y/. I can only accept this where there is good evidence of alternation with /*ue/ or /*eu/. There are just too many cases where there *is* no such variation visible. [The obvious examples are mostly inflectional ending and pronouns, but there are certainly others as well]. One *additional* reason for this is that languages without high vowels are exceeding rare in the world. They are topologically marked - highly so. Typologically reasonable vowel systems include: /a/, /i/, /u/; /e/, /o/, /i/, /u/; and so on. (There are a fair number of languages in which the high-back vowel is non-rounded, but there are reasons to reject that for PIE). >3) I also believe that all /*a/ and any long vowels are due to the presence >of "laryngeals", and that /*a(:)/ cannot exist in a syllable that did not >contain a "laryngeal" at some earlier stage. I strongly suspect that this *is* the case. [In a number of cases, I treat some words as later borrowings: words found only in Europe I do not treat as going back to PIE]. I am still struggling with the number and phonetic nature of the laryngeals. In my own notes I generally, and tentatively, use H for H1, X for H2, and X^w for H3. [I am fairly confident that the o-coloring laryngeal had to be labialized, since that fits so well with the PIE obstruents, and explains its phonetic effects so well]. If I were to accept the evidence for voicing in (some instances of) H3, I would probably want to add two more laryngeals, to make a more consistent set (that is I would tend towards both voiced and unvoiced variants of both H2 and H3). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 29 03:59:03 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 19:59:03 -0800 Subject: "Upper limit" of PIE In-Reply-To: <3e.13de478.25e624da@aol.com> Message-ID: At 01:08 AM 2/24/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Probably rather later. My own take would be "sometime after 4000 BCE" for >the split with Anatolian; "Sometime after 3500" for the beginning of the >breakup of the rest of PIE. I would agree entirely. I was just stating a terminus non ante quem. Any earlier date is just too unlikely to be considered seriously, and that date was (intentionally) on the extreme side. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From Georg at home.ivm.de Tue Feb 29 03:13:00 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 04:13:00 +0100 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: <200002270829.p2342@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: >>I don't have an Armenian dictionary on hand -- does anyone? >.. < what do you understand by 'Armenian' ? >Eastern? Or Western? or hopefully, Graban? /e:sh/ "donkey" is the same in EArm, WArm and in ClassArm ("graba*r*"). Maybe, before trying to show off one's erudition, one should make sure to have some. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 29 05:43:03 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 00:43:03 EST Subject: Domesticating the Horse Message-ID: >proto-language at email.msn.com writes: >>By the way, Pokorny lists *u.lkwi: for 'female wolf'. Where do you get >>*ulkwiha? -- Carl Darling Buck's _A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages_. Old High German "mariha" is a reflex. >Well, perhaps. But 'mustang' comes very close, does it not, to being a 'wild >horse'? -- "feral horse", actually, rather than "wild". And it's a recent North American dialect term, borrowed from the Spanish "mestengo", meaning "a stray or ownerless beast". From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 29 05:48:59 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 00:48:59 EST Subject: Domesticating the Horse Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >>Your saying *-iha denoted a wild animal, but it only shows up in the female >>ending. (eg., *ulkwiha, 'she-wolf). -- to be more precise, that it is the femine ending when denoting a wild animal. Thus, *ulkwos, (male) wolf, *ulkwiha (female) wolf. If the term "wolf" had denoted a domestic animal, we might expect **ulkweha. >In Germanic, could have ended in -eha? -- no. Eg., OHG 'meriha'. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 29 05:54:55 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 00:54:55 EST Subject: Domesticating the Horse Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >This should apply to other domestics and wild species, but I'm pretty sure >it doesn't. -- *H(1)el(1)niha, "female elk", which is a feminine noun regularly derived from *h(1)elh(1)en, "elk". etc. >and that use is obviously derivative. -- well, of course it is. It's the way you made the ending for a feminine noun when the subject was a wild animal. See above for 'elk'. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 29 05:58:55 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 00:58:55 EST Subject: Domesticating the Horse Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >A number of Greek historians tell us the Celtic word for horse was , >never mentioning or or any other name. -- wrong, and completely wrong at that. Eg., the following Celtic words for "horse", deriving from *ekwos: Old Irish: ech Gaulish: epo (plus "equos", as the name of a month) Welsh ebol (colt) You really should be more careful... 8-). From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 29 08:10:38 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 09:10:38 +0100 Subject: Domesticating the Horse In-Reply-To: <003401bf7fbf$cb7fe1a0$72d31b3f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >From: >> In animal names a derived feminine in *-eha seems to denote a domestic >> animal (eg., PIE *h(1)ekueha, 'mare') and in *-iha denotes a wild animal. >> (eg., *ulkwiha, 'she-wolf). Therefore the original meaning of *markhos was >> probably specifically a wild horse. > >Another point of view. It seems to me that IE *-y and *-H(2)e are both >established as feminine formants; and I would need several more examples to >be convinced that females are differentiated by wildness through these >suffixes. >By the way, Pokorny lists *u.lkwi: for 'female wolf'. Where do you get >*ulkwiha? For read

(or ). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From rdrews at richmond.edu Tue Feb 29 14:10:44 2000 From: rdrews at richmond.edu (Robert Drews) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 09:10:44 -0500 Subject: non-Anatolian PIE In-Reply-To: <1a.df651e.25e9d776@aol.com> Message-ID: At 08:27 PM 02/26/2000 EST, you wrote: >>X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >>The one glitch is that it is not the proto-Hittites/Anatolians who left, but >>the 'Indo-European' community - the first splitting or branching occuring in >>either case. >-- that simply does not work and makes no sense. Eg., Hittite is intrusive >in Anatolia, the internal relationships of the other IE languages show none >of the links one would expect (eg., Greek is not particularly closely related >to Anatolian), etc. Although it has been assumed since Hrozny's time, there is no evidence that Hittite was intrusive in Anatolia. Intrusive in the Halys arc, yes, but "Hittite" seems to have come to Hatti from the south, where Luwian and other Anatolian languages seem to have been spoken as far back as there were permanent settlements. Three years ago in a JIES article, "PIE Speakers and PA Speakers," I tried to make this point, and also the point that PIE must have arisen as a result of a population movement FROM western Anatolia, and from this population's subsequent separation from its western Anatolian roots. When I wrote the article, Ryan and Pitman had not yet published their Black Sea Flood discovery. Now that flood will have to be taken into account by anyone speculating how the community that gave us PIE could have been severed from the community that gave us PA. Robert Drews (for spring of 2000) Department of Classical Studies University of Richmond Richmond, VA 23173 Telephone: (804) 289:8421 e-mail address: rdrews at richmond.edu From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Feb 29 17:10:31 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 12:10:31 EST Subject: Bandkeramik and non-Anatolian PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 2/29/2000 6:20:54 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- that simply does not work and makes no sense. Eg., Hittite is intrusive >in Anatolia, the internal relationships of the other IE languages show none >of the links one would expect (eg., Greek is not particularly closely related >to Anatolian), etc. First you say that Greek is intrusive than you say Hittite must be intrusive because it is not related to Greek. Well, then my explantion is either Hittite's intrusive or Greek's intrusive and that's why they don't have to be closely related. Using a language that came from somewhere else to prove that another language came from somewhere else - because the two languages are not closely related. That makes NO sense. So the answer is - Hittite should not be closely related to Greek, if Greek is intrusive. So Greek proves nothing about Hittite's lack of intrusiveness. If you even looked at my post for a moment to see what I actually was saying, you'd see that I'm NOT sure that Renfrew (not the Bible) might not need to be revised about Greek - not as sure as you might be about ALL such things anyway. JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Hittite is intrusive >in Anatolia, the internal relationships of the other IE languages show none >of the links one would expect... I know this is a waste of time, but what SPECIFIC internal relationships are you talking about? What SPECIFIC links would you expect? And what do you mean by other IE languages? I know you won't answer any of these, but I'll ask anyway. What do you think Hittite is closely related to? Where was it supposed to be intruding from? In your last post, you have the entire Ukraine and maybe even the Balkans occupied by a Greek-Sanskrit-Armenian dialectical continum. You have Anatolia completely encircled. So where do you think Hittite came from? What PRECISELY is Hittite supposed to be closely related to in this scheme? Are you hinting at something extraterrestial? I wrote: >>My read on this is that "PIE minus Anatolian" forms on the Danube and becomes >>Bandkeramik. >-- leaving what, exactly, in the Balkans and the Mediterranean areas which >were neolithicized via an east-to-west movement? Well, if you didn't snip out the answer in my original post, you'd have already have half an answer. <> Cardial Ware cultures in the Italian and Iberian peninsulas pose a different problem. These are somewhat distinct from Bandkeramik and not clearly related in assemblages to the earlier Balkan-Anatolian culture. And Cardial really is a group of related assemblages without the coherence of Bandkeramik. Miguel Carrasquer Vidal I believe thinks Cardial Ware represents non-Indoeuropean speaking cultures. Renfrew in 1987 has it coming out of the Balkans, but a number of its features can now be associated very early with the Levant and Cyprus and as someone else mentioned elsewhere on the list there may be some North African evidence - particularly I think with regard to the genes found in some domesticates. Where Cardial culture was present, we find the only indisputable evidence of non-indoeuropean languages in western Europe (aside from perhaps the Picts.) The ranges of Basque, Iberian, Etruscan, non-IE Ligurian and other vestiges of non-IE languages in Italy all match almost identically the former territory of Cardial Ware - with IE languages generally appearing intrusive. It's obvious that along most of the Mediterranean coast, neolithization would not have been the province of IE speakers. Clearly there were other neolithic settlements or conversions going on throughout the Near East and around the Mediterranean and those cultures emerge as not being IE speaking. Cardial Ware may have represented somesuch cultures. I wrote: >(and possibly proto-Phrygian-Thracian, though don't hold me to that.) JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- good thing you added the qualifier, since Phrygian shows close links to >Greek and none in particular to Anatolian. Once again, I'll have to ask you what SPECIFIC links you are talking about. >From all I know, Phrygian doesn't show much of anything and its evidence is about a 1000 years later than Luwian and Hittite. I wrote: >>the language of the first large, widespread technically advanced population >>in Europe - adept at trade, agriculture, building and metallurgy - >>whom must have by the way had an extremely adequate language of their own, >>but who nevertheless left no substrate. JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: >-- you have evidence for there being no LBK substrate in, eg., proto-Germanic? Couldn't be better evidence against it. The linguistics match almost perfectly with the material when it comes to attributing that substrate to something else besides Bandkeramik. It is easy to attribute the proposed Germanic substrate to the successful and somewhat isolated mesolithic culture found in Jutland and thereabouts. The demarcation line is almost a perfect match for the resulting hybrid TRB and the earliest locations of Germanic speakers. The ONLY place where funnel beaker (TRB) shows up is in historic Germanic (and some western Slavic) territories. The supposed substrate in Germanic does not appear in Celtic. TRB does not appear in historic Celtic territories. You couldn't have a better correlation between material cultural and a substrate. And because Bandkeramik extended from Holland to the Ukraine, you couldn't have a worse fit for the unique substrate alleged in Germanic. I wrote the Bandkeramik-narrow PIE theory has the... >>the advantage of plausibility - for what that is worth in this crazy world. JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- if one disregards all linguistic considerations, which is odd, when one is >trying to solve a _linguistic_ problem. Now I'm disregarding ALL linguistic considerations, am I? The ability to understand this special meaning of "linguistic considerations" must be very exclusive. It may even be only understood by only one person. Most of us will ever be able to fully grasp it, no matter how deeply we drink of its mysteries. Am I right? Regards, Steve Long by ARA From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Feb 29 05:34:34 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 00:34:34 EST Subject: Renfrew's Celtic Scenario Message-ID: >petegray at btinternet.com writes: >English of a slightly earlier time (still intelligible today) shows good >similarities in person endings, eg: Thou hast, thou makest; she hath, she >maketh >du hast, du machst, sie hat, sie macht -- But the English of today -- and of the past few centuries -- uses much simpler forms: You have, you make, she has, she makes. There's been a radical loss of inflection (not to mention the loss of grammatical gender, the declension of the noun, the role of word order in forming sentences, etc.) By way of contrast, early Greek and Sanskrit share many retained PIE features -- the present, aorist and perfect, for instance. From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Tue Feb 29 12:19:17 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 14:19:17 +0200 Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Re:=20Tocharian=20A=20w=E4s,=20B=20yasa?= In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Feb 2000 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >> anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi writes: >> 1) What was the Proto-Tocharian form? (If it was something like *wVsV with >> front vowels, it fits quite well with Proto-Samoyed *wes?. A loan Samoyed >> > Tocharian is also geographically the most sensible alternative, if >> Tocharian was connected with the Afansevo culture.) > -- Tocharian A/B 'was' and 'yasa' from proto-Tocharian *wesa. >> 2) Is there any other plausible etymology for the Tocharian word? > -- Proto-Tocharian *wesa from *haues (with metathesis) from PIE *haeus > PIE *haeusom, 'gold' also producing Old Latin 'auron', Old Prussian 'ausis', > Lithuanian 'auksas'. Thank you for the information. So, Samoyed *wes? ~ Tocharian *wesa seems like chance correspondence. But, assuming that the Toch. form requires an irregular (?) metathesis, the loan etymology perhaps remains as a(n unlikely) possibility? - Ante Aikio From colkitto at sprint.ca Tue Feb 29 12:31:08 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 07:31:08 -0500 Subject: R and r Message-ID: I forget the exact reference, but there may well have been one in Common Germanic. See Runge, The Pronunciation of Prmitive Germanic R Robert Orr >-- Begin original message -- >> From: "Artem V. Andreev" >> Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 00:19:25 +0300 (MSK) >> The question is: is there any language in the world which has a *phonemic* >> opposition between dental vibrant /r/ and uvular *vibrant* /R/? >-- End original message -- [ moderator snip ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Feb 29 02:39:46 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 20:39:46 -0600 Subject: R and r In-Reply-To: <004601bf8093$289a1e40$6702703e@edsel> Message-ID: In (some varieties of) Brazilian Portuguese and (among some speakers of) Caribbean Spanish you see (non-initial) as tap /r/ and initial and as a uvular trill For me the question is what is exeactly meant by "vibrant". I'm not a linguist and I interpreted it as meaning "trill" Arabic may qualify in that ghayn is similar to a uvular trill, and it also has that I've heard as both trilled and tapped by speakers of different dialects An Armenian housemate in college told me that they have "uvular r" and "trilled r" yet his /r/ sounded a lot like American /r/, even though he was from Lebanon [ moderator snip ] >[Ed Selleslagh] >(Brazilian) Portuguese? What do the native speakers say? >Maybe also Classical Greek (rho / rho with spiritus asper or dase?on)? >Ed. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From mclasutt at brigham.net Tue Feb 29 15:33:36 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 08:33:36 -0700 Subject: R and r In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >> The question is: is there any language in the world which has >> a *phonemic* >> opposition between dental vibrant /r/ and uvular *vibrant* /R/? Assuming you mean the uvular fricative (IPA turned R) as in French and the dental/alveolar trill (IPA lower case r). "Vibrant" isn't an English phonetic term. I've got records of this phonemic contrast occurring in (I use Ruhlen's labels for consistency) Yukaghir, Bats, Ingush, Avar, Yaghnobi, Yami, Kabardian, Riff, Budux, Tamasheq, Shughni, Tsaxur, Khakas, Lezgi, Aramaic, Ubyx, Xvarshi, Western Arabic, Xinalug, South Arabian, Tabasaran, Okanagan, Talysh, Burushaski, Karakalpak, Chaplino, Karachay, Ukrainian, Abipon, Yazgulami, Rimi, Mapos, Maninka, Hinux, Tatar, Chechen, Altai, Pashto, Wakhi, Dido, Ishkashmi, Tajiki, Chulym, Adygh, Hunzib, Gilyak, Georgian, and Bezhta (48 out of 1017 in sample). Obviously, the original materials varied in phonemic sophistication, but that's a fairly sizable group of languages from widely scattered parts of the world, although there seems to be a high concentration of them in the Caucasus/Central Asia region. 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 petegray at btinternet.com Tue Feb 29 20:20:54 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 20:20:54 -0000 Subject: R and r Message-ID: Ed suggested a contrast in Classical Greek (rho / rho with spiritus asper or dasemon)? I cannot think of any words where there would such a contrast. In the absence of such words, the presence or absence of the spiritus asper is purely mechanical, and therefore not phonemic, so there cannot be a phonemic contrast. Some modern publications no longer even print the spiritus asper, since it is so predictable. Peter From sarima at friesen.net Tue Feb 29 03:04:44 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 19:04:44 -0800 Subject: Basque In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 09:46 AM 2/24/00 +0000, Larry Trask wrote: >is no way the borrowing language can inflect the borrowed verb-stem. Arabic >loans into Turkish are a good case in point: there is no earthly way that an >internally inflected Arabic verbal root can be handled within the purely >suffixing Turkish verbal morphology, which requires verb-stems to contain >vowels. Umm, what will get borrowed into Turkish is one of the "expanded" variants *with* its vowels, which will then be treated as a Turkish verb stem, and inflected according to the Turkish rules. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Tue Feb 29 19:27:44 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 13:27:44 -0600 Subject: Basque <(h)anka> (was Re: Hittite /wheel) Message-ID: At 04:35 PM 2/27/00 +0000, Larry Trask wrote: [snip] >All but the westernmost dialects of Basque have a word <(h)anka> 'haunch', >and also 'buttocks', 'leg', 'paw', 'foot' in places. This word is regarded by >all Vasconists as a loan from Romance. >A certain long-ranger has recently been interested in finding evidence of a >genetic link between Basque and the two North Caucasian families. He has >noted that Basque <(h)anka> looks quite a bit like something in Caucasian, and >he therefore denies the loan status of <(h)anka>, insisting that the word >must be native and ancient in Basque, and therefore cognate with the Caucasian >item. How can we reply to him? >Well, the problem is that cluster /nk/. This was indeed perfectly normal in >Pre-Basque. But, in the early medieval period, Basque underwent a categorical >phonological change, in all but the easternmost dialects, by which plosives >were uniformly voiced after /n/. >For example, the Latin word 'anvil', which was borrowed early >into Basque, appears today as in all but the easternmost dialects. >Likewise, the native adverb-forming suffix <-ki> appears today as <-gi> after >/n/. For example, 'beautiful' forms 'beautifully', but >'good' forms 'well' in all but the easternmost dialects, which alone >preserve . >Now, the word in question is *everywhere* <(h)anka> in Basque, and no such >form as *<(h)anga> is recorded anywhere. Therefore, the very form of the word >is enough to *prove* that it was not in the language at the time of the >change, and must have entered the language later -- from whatever source. >As it happens, we know the source: it is the very widespread Romance >'haunch', with regular regional developments like French , all >ultimately from a Frankish *. >But, even if we didn't know the source, the form of the word would tell us at >once that this is a late entry into the Basque lexicon, and therefore probably >a borrowing. There does seem to be a good case that could be made for <(h)anka> being related to the French/Romance forms mentioned above and consequently a recent borrowing. But what is one to make of the Basque word ( in composition) that means 'leg, foot, calf' and its phonological variant in ( in composition) with the same meanings? Are we to assume that 1) it that isn't related in anyway to <(h)anka>; 2) that Euskera borrowed a French form and then added a sibilant to it; 3) that Euskera has two totally unrelated words, one borrowed and the other native; or 4) that Euskera has two words, one clearly a recent borrowing and yet another that derives from a deeper layer, i.e., a western European substrate that gave rise to the Romance items as well. If one were to choose the fourth alternative, it would provide a slightly different source for the Old French and one wouldn't have to rely only on an unattested Germanic/Frankish form, but rather there would also be an amply attested word field available for comparative purposes in Euskera. Finally, there is another aspect of that I've always found curious. Although metaphoric conventions can pass from one language to another, much as lexical loans do, at times the metaphors call attention to themselves. For example, in Euskera the Labourdin expression is defined as 'pantorrila/mollet/calf of the leg'. However, since in Euskera actually means 'fish roe' there is an explicit connection made between 'fish roe' and 'calf of the leg'. This same metaphor occurs in Russian and Dutch among the Indo-European languages, while in the Finno-Ugric languages the examples are very abundant. According to Otto J. Von Sadovszky (_Fish, Symbol and Myth: A Historical Semantic Reconstruction_ Budapest/Los Angeles 1995: 3), "there is no equation between the two items ['fish roe' and 'calf of the leg'] in any of the Romance or Celtic languages, and geographically the closest [to Euskera], where it occurs, are [the] Dutch, Slavic and Finno-Ugrian languages". In terms of the analogy, obviously we are speaking of the way that the shape of the muscle in the calf moves under the skin, the way it suggests the form of an egg-laden ovary of a fish. Or at least that would be my interpretation of this analogy. Again it suggests familiarity with, if not direct knowledge, of the gestation cycle of fish, as well as the fact that the eggs in question might have been a source of food for the name-givers. Stated differently, we might argue that the metaphor in question would be typical of a people familiar with harvesting fish such as sturgeon and salmon, for example, as opposed, say, to populations occupying a steppe or desert zone. Here I am only pointing out the sort of information that one might derive from finding such a metaphor in the lexicon of a given language. As I said, metaphoric conventions can arise independently or pass from language to language. In the case of the expression , while the use of this metaphor doesn't necessarily attest to the antiquity of the word , it does suggest that we are dealing with a type of association that is attested in other languages, most abundantly in Finno-Ugric languages. Roz Frank From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Feb 29 14:15:50 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 09:15:50 EST Subject: possessive [form of a] pronoun Message-ID: It has taken some time to get to the bottom of the differences in the use of terminology here, but I think we have arrived: To summarize into its most succinct form: The relation: he :: his is from syntactic and semantic points of view essentially the same as the relation the man we met yesterday :: the man we met yesterday's and this parallel extends to many different uses of the apostrophe-s form, whatever one wishes to call it, whether the syntactic relation marks possession, part-whole relation, or agency or object-status relative to a verbal noun. * Therefore the form "his" can quite properly be referred to as the possessive or genitive form of "he", just as much as the form "the man we met yesterday's " can quite properly be referred to as the possessive or genitive form of "the man we met yesterday". *EVEN* using "pronoun" in a purely distributional meaning, the reading "possessive [form of a] pronoun" for "possessive pronoun" is fully legitimate. Possessive pronouns, so meant, were originally case-forms of (nominative) pronouns, and are still to a considerable extent so analyzable -- (or substitute whatever term one wishes instead of "case" -- if the English " 's " is not considered a case form, but is considered for example something of a clitic, since it can follow entire NPs including a relative clause, as illustrated above, it need not follow only simple noun stems). * At the *same* time (and neither of these excludes the other), on the basis of a distributional analysis, just as Trask says, the possessive forms of NP's do not substitute for nouns, they substitute for NP's (whether pronoun, or whether complex NP including relative clause). * Therefore, there are legitimate syntactic and semantic reasons to use the terminology "possessive pronoun" in this way, where "possessive pronoun" can quite plausibly be taken as meaning "possessive form of a pronoun", and that can be meant primarily based on syntatic and semantic grounds rather than on morphological or slot-filler analysis. This is true whether or not it is someone else's standard terminology. We all know what Pat Ryan has been referring to, and we all are capable of understanding his terminology and giving it the best interpretation we can, to proceed to discuss content. End of argument, as far as I am concerned. In the future, I will simply refer back to this message. Lloyd Anderson From garatea at gaia.es Thu Feb 24 18:15:41 2000 From: garatea at gaia.es (Jokin Garatea) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 19:15:41 +0100 Subject: call for papers Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: This was sent to the administrative address for the mailing list. Since there have been some discussions of related topics here, I have decided to pass it on, so that those interested may act on it as they wish. I have *not* included the usual "Reply-To: indo-european at xkl.com" header, because I don't see any benefit to the list in continued discussion here. --rma ] Dear madam/sir, I would like to inform you on the above mentioned congress that could be of your company interest. In case of being so, please do not hesitate to contact us. call for papers Multilinguae congress. A way to promote the use of ITs, Multimedia and language industries in lesser used languages. San Sebastian, Spain 8-9 November 2000. Please forward this notice to any people/lists interested in this proposed event to be held in San Sebastian, Spain. Papers and/or workshops (of up to 30-45 minutes duration) from academics, software and multimedia developers and distributors, experts in the digital distribution channel and information organisations (including libraries, government, and the private sector) are sought for presentation at the congress. All papers & presentations should be designed for non-specialist audiences, and connect theory and practice. Abstracts of up to 500 words should be sent to me directly (garatea at gaia.es) for consideration by the committee, before end of march (31st of March). BACKGROUND Within the European Union, there are more than 40 autochthonous languages in everyday use. Of these, only 11 are official languages of the Union: Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. In addition, Irish is a "treaty language". Of Europe's 370 million citizens, nearly 50 million speak a language other than the official language of the State in which they live. These other languages are an integral part of our cultural heritage. They include some of the oldest languages in the Western world, and most of them have rich cultural, literary and folk traditions. Technology is simply one of the tools with which we involve as community members in learning and using minority languages in our daily lives. It is also a link with the culture that surrounds most of us today and which is so attractive to the younger generations. What we would like to present, briefly in this Congress is that new technologies have, among others, the potential to: * Document and promote culture and minority speech * Help to revitalise language * Promote the status of the language as a viable medium of communication expand and strengthen minority language communities by creating an audience and purpose for writing in minority languages * Make Minority language resources available beyond educational institutions. * Expedite production and distribution of relevant, quality Minority language materials and resources. * Provide opportunities to create multimedia projects * Excite learners to become motivated, engaged in the learning process and producers in the target language. * Aspects of multi-modal capability include integrated text, sound, and graphics which are suitable for a range of learner types * Increase student-student communication and collaboration * Enhance and expand instructional strategies * Build upon/enhance existing and effective pedagogy * Promote literacy skills * Promote computer literacy. Computers add to the study of minority language, and computer skills that are learned transfer to other courses and aspects of students' lives. For all the above mentioned we must have a clear idea of the following statements: * The market is there. 50 million of potential European users/buyers, as minority speakers. * The industry is there but a bit dispersed and not very well known. OBJECTIVES The organisation of the Multilinguae International Congress, which is organised by GAIA, the Telecommunications Cluster of the Basque Country and will be co-financed by the European Commission (DG XXII), intends, on the one side, to facilitate contacts between small and medium European companies, technologists, content providers, and researchers belonging to the Multimedia and Software sector working for Minority or endangered languages (if we are talking about IT, apart from English almost all languages of the world), and, on the other side, to provoke the utilisation of this Multimedia tools by the education, administration bodies and end users coming from minority communities. The general objective of the MULTILINGUAE congress is to develop channels, links and activities between institutions representing similar collectives in different cultural and geographical areas where minority languages are spoken for interchange of experiences, best practices and for the realisation of joint actions with a view to promoting Multimedia Development and the Linguistic Diversity of the EU. All this, providing: competitive expansion of the companies of the sector, the development of new business activities, promotion of employment and innovation in the creation of support infrastructures for the European Linguistic Diversity and for technological and socio-economic development, by giving incentives to investment in research, training and inter-regional and inter-company co-operation. Why to organise the multilinguae international congress. It will take more than conferences to keep most European Minority Languages from becoming extinct. If all it took was conferences, then the minority languages would not be in the sad condition that most of them are in now because many of them have been exposed to conferences before. If not conferences, what then? Lots of different approaches have been tried. These are not startling innovations; what we need is a critical mass of committed people, and this critical mass can only be created through continuous capillary infiltration of information and encouragement. This conference is intended to be a part of such an effort. It will be disseminated not only to those who attended of the sessions, but to a much wider audience consisting of Minority and non-Minority individuals and institutions because of its needed market oriented approach. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------- Jokin Garatea GAIA International Department C\ Camino Portuetxe, 14 Email: garatea at gaia.es Edificio Ibaeta 1 20018, San Sebastian Spain Tel. +34 943 31 66 66 Fax. +34 943 31 10 66 ---------------------------------------------------------------- From fabcav at adr.dk Tue Feb 29 21:52:48 2000 From: fabcav at adr.dk (Fabrice Cavoto) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 22:52:48 +0100 Subject: PU *nimi / PIE *HneH3men- (was: Re: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >> But if you reconstruct *H3 phonetically as *[Yw], this should give PU *x >> (which was phonetically most probably *[Y]). > The reconstruction of *H3 as Yw is Indo-European, not Indo-Uralic. I > suggest: > PIU *(n)newme- or *(n)neYme- > Pre-PIE (with analogical -men) *H1neH3men > PIE *H1noH3mn [Fabrice Cavoto] The use of analogies is one of the things which has made long range comparativists so unpopular years ago. If analogies do indeed happen from time to time and must be accepted, either as paradigmatic analogies, or as recurrent for the same elements (that is, for this precise topic, if one could prove that there are other cases where a root ending in *-me has become, analogically, a *-men- stem in IE, and it is not sure there are other examples of this), the fact is that recurring to those is often interpreted by skeptics as the proof that we don't know exactly what happened. However, in this precise case, why should analogy be invoked at all? Couldn't it simply be that the root itself in PIE was *H1neH3m-, and that it was formed by the addition of the whole *-men- suffix: *H1neH3m-men-. Do we have any case at all of geminate nasals in IE roots? Because if we don't, as I think, then one only needs to assume that the sequence *-mm- was reduced, by a regular sound law, to simple *-m-. This way, we can avoid the use of analogies (which problem is also that when they don't belong to one of the categories above, they simply can't be verified), and instead have a set of regular evolutions. As for the Uralic part, if the root itself is identical with IE, then the stem formation doesn't have to be. In the same way that IE has a productive *-men-suffix, Ural. has also different stem formations, more or less productive, and can simply have choosen another one, thus *-e. However, what I just proposed can't, I am afraid, be used for or against the Indo-Uralic (or older) origin of the word. I think that both options might have their argumentation. > PU-Yuk *niwme > PU *nime > Finnish nimi >> But you can't reconstruct PU *-a for this item: the reconstruction must be >> *nimi (= traditional *nime). > Why are you reconstructing an *-i for traditional *-e ? From what I know, > *-e > Finnish -i, whereas Finnish -e < *-eC. [Fabrice Cavoto] I don't see why neither. *-e and *-a seem to be needed, but I don't see why *-i. From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Tue Feb 29 08:37:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 08:37:00 GMT Subject: "name" - was: evidence for "Urheimat" Message-ID: SG>you probably mean /Chukchi/ .. thank you so much. But I hate the //ch//. Just a personal tick. SG>welcome to the beautiful land of Ruhlenistan .. excuse me for not to own any work of Ruhlen;-(( You might have observed that different sources give different spellings. In this case it seemed not nessessary to name the village/dialect of the speaker,the year and author of the wordlist. What I started to demonstrate by my selection of 'name'-representations: It seems to me that "name" is a widespread "Wanderwort", for in any language contact you will ask after for the *name* of your counterpart. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover, (no mails >16kB please). From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Feb 29 23:56:01 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2000 00:56:01 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000228190939.0099c240@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: Stanley Friesen wrote: >At 08:42 PM 2/26/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>Especially since the original PIE word itself -- *h(2)rtkos -- is itself >>probably a nominalized adjective (via a stress shift), from *h(2)rektes; see >>Sanskrit raksas, "destruction". >This brings up a little hypothesis of mine: the principle origin of the >thematic inflection of nouns (the o-stems) was via nominalization of >adjectives. >How reasonable is this? Pretty reasonable. The o-stems show a good number of pronominal endings, and may well once have been definite adjectives, comparable to the later development in Balto-Slavic. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Tue Feb 29 09:20:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 09:20:00 GMT Subject: Hypergeometric? [was Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?)] Message-ID: MAI>What is meant here by "the hypergeometric"? A stochastic distribution used in many cases to guess outcomes of independent losses or drawings, e.g. in poll events, wildlife abundance, industrial rejections, loss of linguistic features, and many others. It is too difficult to explain it in a nutshell here. I am still trying to work out a short version in a personal discussion with SGeorg. For further information, see e.g. the Kotz/Johnson 'Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences'. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover, (no mails >16kB please). From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Tue Feb 29 09:25:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 09:25:00 GMT Subject: Assumptions in Computing phylogenies Message-ID: SF>Actually, properly done, cladistic analysis *determines* which SF>characters are innovations and which are retentions. .. In my humble understanding it is vice versa. The biologist or linguist decides which features are retentions vs. innovations, and the cladistic algorithm computes the 'optimal' tree. See my parallel mail for a textbook on the topic. But perhaps it is a misunderstanding. SF>Unfortunately the most powerful method, outgroup comparison is not SF>available in linguistics at this time depth .. correct. Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover, (no mails >16kB please). From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Tue Feb 29 10:11:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 10:11:00 GMT Subject: Indo-Hittite Hypothesis Message-ID: >I do not believe - again, from the papers we have - that the algorithm >used on IE at UPenn ever produced an 'unrooted tree'. Contrary to what >has been said on this list in the past, the external adjustments >appeared to have been made directly to the algorithm from the outset. >What we see in the papers is a model of a 'unrooted tree', but I could >not find one that represents the IE languages. .. see Warnow/Ringe/Taylor in 'Proceedgs 7th Ann.ACM-SIAM Symp on Discrete Algorithms', p.318: "In Linguists, ..., we are interested in /minimal/ trees." Minimal trees are not inferring additional (ancestral) nodes (cf. Kruskal 1956). And exactly out of this reason Warnow explained: p.319 "(note that it is a rooted tree, because our encoding of our linguistic judgements includes the directionylity constraints)." On the same page, you will further find that decisions were partly made on single (!) lexemes, and if not fitting, these were simply declared as undetected borrowing (!). Regards Hans J. Holm D-30629 Hannover, (no mails >16kB please).