From Georg at home.ivm.de Tue Jan 4 22:33:34 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 23:33:34 +0100 Subject: Erich Neu In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I just received the sad news that Erich Neu, Professor of Indo-European Linguistics and Hittitology at Bochum university, for most of us the finest connoisseur of things Anatolian, passed away on 31st Dec 1999. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jan 11 12:17:05 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 12:17:05 +0000 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Ed Selleslagh writes: I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with most of what Ed has written here. > After my first response on Dec. 18, 1999, I have been thinking about the PIE > root *kwekwlo- (and *rotH-) in a wider context, in particular about its > possible presence in Basque. It is almost certain that the Basques, who had > been living in virtual isolation throughout the last Ice Age, Maybe a little rash? The Basque language was certainly in place before the Romans arrived in the first century BC, and very probably before the Celts arrived in the first millennium BC. But anything before that is sheer speculation: there is no evidence. > learned about the > wheel from IE peoples or their otherwise spreading culture, since the terrain > of the Pyrenean peoples offered little incentive for inventing the wheel, as > opposed to steppe peoples who had to travel long distances over essentially > flat terrain. Maybe, but what evidence is there? There is no evidence for IE speech near the Basque Country before the first millennium BC. But I confess I simply don't know how early the wheel is attested there. > In Basque, there is a root *bil that has a meaning of 'round'. Correct. Though our reconstructed * is nowhere recorded as an independent word, its presence in a number of transparent formations makes its former reality certain. > It appears in compounds like 'ibili' ('walk', originally: 'go around') No; I can't agree. First of all, the verb does not mean 'walk', though it is often so glossed, for want of a better equivalent. It is a verb of undirected motion, and the best English gloss I can offer is 'be in motion'. And no such sense as 'go around' is attested or reconstructible. Perhaps I should explain that Basque, like its Romance neighbors, is a language in which verbs of motion incorporate path but not manner. English is just the opposite. English is full of motion verbs expressing manner, such as 'walk', 'run', 'sidle', 'trot', 'swim', 'fly', 'drive', 'ride', 'limp', 'scramble', 'toddle', 'stagger', 'sail', 'float', 'crawl' and 'creep'. But path is not incorporated into native verbs, and particles like 'up', 'down', 'in', 'out', 'across' and 'through' must be added to express this: 'ride out', 'go in', 'walk across', 'run down', and so on. (Formal registers of English of course have the other type of verb, like 'enter', 'exit', 'ascend', 'descend' and 'traverse', but these are borrowed from French or Latin, in which they are normal.) But Basque is full of verbs like 'go up', 'go down', 'go in', 'go out', and the like. And manner must be expressed by adding an adverbial, such as 'on foot', 'on horseback', 'swimming', 'toddling', 'by car', 'by train', 'on wing', 'on all fours', and so on: there are lots of these. Unlike its Romance neighbors, Basque has a dedicated verb of undirected motion, , used when no goal or source is stated or implied. So, for example, is 'walk', 'be walking' (with no goal), and is 'swim', 'be swimming' (with no goal). Furthermore, the verb is definitely not a compound, nor does it contain the element * 'round'. It has the normal structure for a native Basque verb. The citation form of a Basque verb is its perfective participle, and a native verb has a participle of this form: *. Here <-i> is the participial suffix, possibly identical with the ancient adjective-forming suffix <-i>, as in 'salty', from 'salt'. Removal of this suffix yields the stem of the verb, which was formerly a free form and still is in the east, where it is called the 'radical'. The prefix * is of unknown function, but it occurs in all non-finite forms of native verbs. In my 1990 paper, I argued that it was probably a nominalizer which created verbal nouns. The original (well attested) becomes modern by a well-understood phonological change, a vowel-height assimilation: e --> i / #Co __ C(C) V[+high] C V Now, it seems clear that, in early Basque, verbal roots were sharply distinguished from all other roots. A verbal root could only be verbal, and never nominal or adjectival, unless converted to a nominal or adjectival stem by the addition of a category-changing affix. There is no known case of a nominal or adjectival root appearing inside a prefixing verb (a verb taking the prefix *). Hence surely cannot contain adjectival *, and the resemblance in form is a coincidence. > and 'biribil' (a reduplicated form meaning 'round'). Agreed. > This could be a phonological adaptation of a derivation of *kwekwlo-, > especially its Germanic forms (cf. Eng. wheel, Du. wiel), or -just maybe- > one of its oldest Celtic forms (But: mod. Welsh: 'olwyn' = wheel, apparently > with metathesis), because Basque doesn't have /w/, and the closest Basque > phoneme is /b/ (a tendency that is still alive in Castilian: Washington = > Bassinton, at times even on TV! And a WC is often called 'un bater'). I am not sure what the word 'this' at the beginning is meant to refer to. But I cannot see how * can plausibly be derived from the IE word, and still less its reduplication , which itself can be accounted for within Basque. > The Basque word 'ibili' needs some further explanation. It is obviously a > compound, but of what? No; I can't agree. It is not a compound at all. It consists of one root and two affixes. > My hypothesis is as follows: *i-b(i)-bil-i, with haplology. The initial and > final i's are common features of Basque verbs. -b(i)- would be a root that > means 'walk, run' (cf. IE wad-), and -bil- '(a)round', of course. Those vowels are more than "common features": they are affixes, one of which is fully understood, the other of which is only partly understood. And this proposal strikes me as very fanciful: it is supported by no evidence at all, and it conflicts with the observation that a native Basque verb has the form *, where the root must be strictly verbal. Moreover, native verbal roots are usually monosyllabic and very commonly of the form -CVC-. > The hypothetical root *b(i) is the subject of a long running historical > controversy. It is supposedly found in words like: > bide ('way, road'), probably a compound of *bi- and the common suffix (of > 'extent') -te, meaning something like 'the physical area where one walks'. No such root as the suggested * can be defended, in my view. Moreover, <-te> is not a suffix of extent, but rather a temporal suffix indicating 'duration'. Examples: 'wartime' ( 'war'), 'famine' ( 'hunger'), 'rainy season' ( 'rain'), 'wintertime' ( 'winter'), 'drought' ( 'dry'), and many others. Finally, an original * should *not* develop into . There is no parallel for such a development. > ibi, more commonly ubi ('ford, a place where one can wade through the > water'), according to e.g. Michelena, u-bide ('water-way': u-, uh- or ug- is > the form of ur, 'water', in compounds), Correct. In Basque word-formation, a first element loses its final /r/. Hence 'water' + 'way' yields * regularly, followed by reduction to (such reductions in final elements are sporadic but frequent), and then by vowel assimilation to . In fact, the form , with assimilation but no reduction, is recorded in 1630, in the writer Etxeberri of Ziburu, so the etymology is directly confirmed. > and to Bertoldi, a compound of ibi-bide, with haplology. Far less likely, I'd say, and in fact unnecessary: why try to derive from a hypothetical *? What does this achieve? Anyway, the attested form confirms the proposal *. > The existence of a root *(i)b(i) has been posited since Hubschmidt, > because of its wide diffusion, not only in the Basque areas, but also, and > mainly in the Iberian zones. But Hubschmid was not a Vasconist, and his ideas about Basque have been widely dismissed by specialists as fanciful and unsupported. His problem was that he wanted to find Basque sources for just about every problematic word and name in the Romance-speaking area -- though, to be fair, his conclusions are somewhat more sober than I'm making them appear here. > Both explanations are not necessarily contradictory: u-ibi-bide > ubi or ibi. > A related problem is that of the Basque word for 'bridge': zubi, a compound > of zur ('wood, wooden', possibly a remote relative of a.Grk. xylon) and ubi > or bide, thus meaning either 'wooden road' or 'wooden ford'. Michelena proposed 'wood' + 'way', and I endorse this, even though this time we are not so fortunate as to find * recorded. > ibai ('river') and ibar ('river valley bottom, Sp. vega, Du. waard, polder'), > but this is very controversial. Not all of it. The word 'river' is pretty clearly a derivative of . This may look funny, but recall that a final /r/ is regularly lost in the first element in word-formation. Compare cases like 'thigh', 'groin', the second being plus a suffix of the approximate form *<-ei> or *<-i> (or quite possibly *<-egi>, in fact, but that's another story). > It would be explained via 'running [water]'. Sorry, but I can't follow this. How on earth can be assigned such a meaning? > Ibai is often thought of as the origin of Sp. vega (via ibai-ka), This etymology is popular in some Romanist circles, but I stress that it remains speculative at best. See Corominas and Pascual for some discussion. > while ibar is usually related to Iberia, the Iberians and the river Ebro, > etc. Well, I query that "usually". Modern is clearly from Latin , but the origin of this name is unknown, and Basque is an implausible place to look. The Romans used the name before they encountered the Basques, I believe. > Finally, I would not exclude the possibility of *(i)b(i) being related to IE > wad- (ua-dh-) (Eng. wade, Du. waden, Lat. vade:re), especially via the forms > ibai and/or ibar, if the initial i is a prefix, as has often been thought. But there *is no evidence* for this fanciful *<(i)b(i)>. It looks to me, I'm afraid, like nothing more than an excuse for dragging in everything under the sun containing /ib/ or /bi/ or even just /b/. As for the idea that initial /i/ is a prefix, this goes back to Schuchardt, but it has proved entirely fanciful, and it is accepted today by no specialist known to me. > All this is, of course, rather speculative, even though based upon a body of > pretty well accepted ideas. Not all of the ideas put forward above can reasonably be described as "pretty well accepted". > Anyway, it looks like the hard core of very ancient and definitely Basque > words is still shrinking after words like (h)artz (bear, Gr.arktos), gizon > (man, PIE*ghdonios) and maybe buru (head, Sl. golova) etc. have been exposed > as of IE origin - or was it simply a very ancient common substrate origin? This is far too fanciful for me, and I object to that word "exposed". Some kind of IE origin for 'bear' is considered plausible by many specialists, but no good IE source is known, and the proposal remains speculative. As for the other two, these strike me as beyond belief. Sorry to be such an old grouch, but, with comparisons like these, we can derive anything from anything. > If you don't believe Basque has any relatives, not even extinct ones, forget > what I said. My own view is that no one has ever made an even vaguely plausible case for linking Basque genetically to any other language at all, living or dead, apart from its own ancestral form Aquitanian, and that there now remain so few stones unturned that it is extremely unlikely that any link will ever be found. > If you do, Er...what? If you *do* believe that Basque has relatives? How can any reasonable person believe this, when no link has ever been demonstrated? > I hope it will stimulate you to look into this type of > problems. Something interesting might come out of it, both for Basque and for > P...PIE. Well, with respect, I think we need a lot more than very vague resemblances and entirely fanciful etymologies. We need hard evidence. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From stevegus at aye.net Tue Jan 11 12:52:34 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 07:52:34 -0500 Subject: Northwest IE attributes Message-ID: JoatSimeon writes: > But Baltic and Slavic both share dateive and instrumental case endings in > *-m- rather than in *-bh- as in all other IE languages which still have these > cases. > Exemplia, Lithuanian 'vilkams', OCS 'vulkomu', meaning 'to the wolves', but > Sanskrit 'vrkebhyah'. > This overlap indicates that after Indo-Iranian had moved far enough away to > no longer share innovations with, say, Germanic, it was still in contact with > Baltic and Slavic, and that Baltic and Slavic were still in contact with > Germanic. Not sure what it does to your hypothesis, but one of the most dependable features of Germanic languages with a dative case is, the dative plural ends in -m. 'To the wolves' in Old Norse is -ulfum-. -- Sella fictili sedeo Versiculos dum facio. From rdrews at richmond.edu Tue Jan 11 13:57:39 2000 From: rdrews at richmond.edu (Robert Drews) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 08:57:39 -0500 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <0.5891f6ba.258c6752@aol.com> Message-ID: It now seems that the wheeled vehicle was invented ca. 3500 BC (calibrated C14 dates), and spread very quickly through most of western Eurasia. See Jan Bakker, Janusz Kruk, et al., "The Earliest Evidence of Wheeled Vehicles in Europe and the Near East," pp. 778-790 in 73 (1999). The evidence extends from Uruk to Jutland. 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 rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jan 12 04:31:46 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 22:31:46 -0600 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <000b01bf4afd$d686c100$aa01703e@edsel> Message-ID: There are also similar words throughout the postulated Nostratic languages --see Larry Trask's text on Historical Linguistics. And also, it seems, in African and SE Asian languages as well. Several researchers have proposed that "wheel" was a technological word, much like "computer" today, e.g. Japanese kompyutaa [sp?]; If this is true, the concept and the word may have spread so fast that it looks like as if it were inherited from IE There also seems to be an onomatopoetic [or expressive] element to the class of words dealing with circles, spheres and balls I'd like to see some intelligent reasoned commentary on this [snip] >In Basque, there is a root *bil that has a meaning of 'round'. It appears in >compounds like 'ibili' ('walk', originally: 'go around') and 'biribil' (a >reduplicated form meaning 'round'). This could be a phonological adaptation >of a derivation of *kwekwlo-, especially its Germanic forms (cf. Eng. wheel, >Du. wiel), or -just maybe- one of its oldest Celtic forms (But: mod. Welsh: >'olwyn' = wheel, apparently with metathesis), because Basque doesn't have /w/, >and the closest Basque phoneme is /b/ (a tendency that is still alive in >Castilian: Washington = Bassinton, at times even on TV! And a WC is often >called 'un bater'). [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Jan 13 07:10:12 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 07:10:12 GMT Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <000b01bf4afd$d686c100$aa01703e@edsel> Message-ID: "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >In Basque, there is a root *bil that has a meaning of 'round'. It appears in >compounds like 'ibili' ('walk', originally: 'go around') and 'biribil' (a >reduplicated form meaning 'round'). This could be a phonological adaptation >of a derivation of *kwekwlo-, especially its Germanic forms (cf. Eng. wheel, >Du. wiel) But these forms with /i/-like vowel are very recent. The PGmc. form was something like *hwe(g)wlaz, not really similar to Basque -bil-. This apart from the geographical and chronological difficulties of Germanic-Basque contacts. >The Basque word 'ibili' needs some further explanation. It is obviously a >compound, but of what? Obviously??? The infinitive is clearly *e- (verbal noun formant) + *-bil- + *-i (adjectival suffix), the inflected forms (e.g. na-bil "I walk (around)") show nothing but the verbal root *bil (which also, and probably not by coincidence, happens to be a nominal root *bil "round"). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Jan 13 07:29:32 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 02:29:32 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 1/10/00 10:21:08 PM, sarima at friesen.net replied: <> I wrote: (In some cases, they have even been conformed after the fact to the local sound rules.) The reply: <> Remember that I offered two ways for the word for "wheel" to spread across a already existing IE diversity. The first was as a technological innovation. The second was as a preexisting word adapted to a new meaning. With regard to the way the word would have altered if it were imported with the technology - Technology can create and carry its own vocabulary, of course. (I was amazed to hear the word 'plinth' being used by a builder the other day.) "Learned words" are adapted to the phonotactics of the language but only so much - something being in English still does have some connection to . So we do in fact see at least some consistent "retrofitting" with words like 'theatre' and 'coffee/kava.' and 'telephone.' And the words for wheel in IE languages are not as consistent or wide-spread as any of these examples - which might suggest diverse origins and no original word. But there is also the "technical innovation' that is a cultural innovation. You reminded me of something Sean Crist wrote awhile ago (Fri, 30 Jul 1999 10:23:36 -0400) that struck me - <<...there are recent loan words [in Japanese] (e.g. tiishatsu "T-shirt")...>> I would love to compare T-shirt as it has been "accepted" into languages that are nearer or farther from English and see if the pattern did not approximate the kind of changes 'wheel" underwent. Also, post hoc sound changes make sense when a system is being introduced - which I have reason to think would have accompanied the wheeled vehicle and wheel-making. Such systems will give a nod to pre-existing sound differences between languages - especially when there is an awareness of the differences - as in: " For example, when British missionaries introduced the root pask- 'Easter' (from Latin pascha), the Irish changed it to casc- in order to conform to the correspondence between P-Celtic and Q-Celtic established by sound changes that had been completed centuries before (compare Thurneysen 1980: 570-72 on the phenomenon; also Schmidt 1993 on the relative dating)." Finally there is the matter of about half of IE apparently not using *kwelos/*kolos (fl. Buck) at all as the source of its word for wheel. So that the predicted sound changes extend as far as I can see only to some IE language families - particularly German and Slavic - and agreeing with Buck I don't think Greek is one of them. (And when you have at least two words for wheel you don't have strictly speaking the singularity that necessarily suggests pre-divergence unity - compare the word for 'wool' e.g., which demonstrably would be older than the word for wheel.) Which brings me back to what I think is the more convincing explanation - that diverse PIE speakers used a pre-existing word to describe the wheel. Which I'd like to address in another message. <> And I'd like to address 'horse' too. And I hope at least that I'm suggesting that the theory that PIE can be dated by such vocabulary is not entirely leakproof - even to those who have been convinced by such methods in the past. Regards, Steve Long From edsel at glo.be Wed Jan 19 18:24:49 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 19:24:49 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2000 1:17 PM > Ed Selleslagh writes: > I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with most of what Ed has written > here. >> After my first response on Dec. 18, 1999, I have been thinking about the PIE >> root *kwekwlo- (and *rotH-) in a wider context, in particular about its >> possible presence in Basque. It is almost certain that the Basques, who had >> been living in virtual isolation throughout the last Ice Age, > Maybe a little rash? The Basque language was certainly in place before the > Romans arrived in the first century BC, and very probably before the Celts > arrived in the first millennium BC. But anything before that is sheer > speculation: there is no evidence. [Ed] See H. Haarmann's article in FLV77 (1998) "Basque ethnogenesis, acculturation and the role of language contacts". He is very cautious, but the text contains serious indications for what I said. Of course no 'evidence'. >> learned about the wheel from IE peoples or their otherwise spreading >> culture, since the terrain of the Pyrenean peoples offered little incentive >> for inventing the wheel, as opposed to steppe peoples who had to travel long >> distances over essentially flat terrain. > Maybe, but what evidence is there? There is no evidence for IE speech near > the Basque Country before the first millennium BC. But I confess I simply > don't know how early the wheel is attested there. [Ed] Evidence, no, indications: yes, albeit almost exclusively cultural and in suspected substrate effects. See also above. What is much better known, is the presence of 'Basque genes' in the area, probably going back to the Upper Palaeolithic. >> In Basque, there is a root *bil that has a meaning of 'round'. > Correct. Though our reconstructed * is nowhere recorded as an > independent word, its presence in a number of transparent formations makes > its former reality certain. >> It appears in compounds like 'ibili' ('walk', originally: 'go around') > No; I can't agree. [Ed] I learned it (i.e. "go around") from you, maybe two years or so ago, on the Basque-l list. > First of all, the verb does not mean 'walk', though it is often so > glossed, for want of a better equivalent. It is a verb of undirected motion, > and the best English gloss I can offer is 'be in motion'. And no such sense > as 'go around' is attested or reconstructible. > Furthermore, the verb is definitely not a compound, nor does it > contain the element * 'round'. It has the normal structure for a native > Basque verb. [Ed] In that case I don't understand your statement of a few years ago. Have you changed your opinion? (which I would readily accept). > The citation form of a Basque verb is its perfective participle, and a native > verb has a participle of this form: *. Here <-i> is the > participial suffix, possibly identical with the ancient adjective-forming > suffix <-i>, as in 'salty', from 'salt'. > Removal of this suffix yields the stem of the verb, which was formerly a free > form and still is in the east, where it is called the 'radical'. > The prefix * is of unknown function, but it occurs in all non-finite > forms of native verbs. In my 1990 paper, I argued that it was probably a > nominalizer which created verbal nouns. > The original (well attested) becomes modern by a > well-understood phonological change, a vowel-height assimilation: > e --> i / #Co __ C(C) V[+high] C V > Now, it seems clear that, in early Basque, verbal roots were sharply > distinguished from all other roots. A verbal root could only be verbal, and > never nominal or adjectival, unless converted to a nominal or adjectival stem > by the addition of a category-changing affix. There is no known case of a > nominal or adjectival root appearing inside a prefixing verb (a verb taking > the prefix *). Hence surely cannot contain adjectival *, > and the resemblance in form is a coincidence. [Ed] Do we really know the kind of root *bil originally was? >> and 'biribil' (a reduplicated form meaning 'round'). > Agreed. >> This could be a phonological adaptation of a derivation of *kwekwlo-, >> especially its Germanic forms (cf. Eng. wheel, Du. wiel), or -just maybe- >> one of its oldest Celtic forms (But: mod. Welsh: 'olwyn' = wheel, >> apparently with metathesis), because Basque doesn't have /w/, and the >> closest Basque phoneme is /b/ (a tendency that is still alive in Castilian: >> Washington = Bassinton, at times even on TV! And a WC is often called 'un >> bater'). > I am not sure what the word 'this' at the beginning is meant to refer to. > But I cannot see how * can plausibly be derived from the IE word, and > still less its reduplication , which itself can be accounted for > within Basque. [Ed] 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-. >> The Basque word 'ibili' needs some further explanation. It is obviously a >> compound, but of what? > No; I can't agree. It is not a compound at all. It consists of one root and > two affixes. [Ed] That may be right or not: at face value it looks right, but not if it is a contraction of syllables as explained hereafter. I agree I shouldn't have said 'obviously': it was only to me. >> My hypothesis is as follows: *i-b(i)-bil-i, with haplology. The initial and >> final i's are common features of Basque verbs. -b(i)- would be a root that >> means 'walk, run' (cf. IE wad-), and -bil- '(a)round', of course. > Those vowels are more than "common features": they are affixes, one of which > is fully understood, the other of which is only partly understood. And this > proposal strikes me as very fanciful: it is supported by no evidence at all, > and it conflicts with the observation that a native Basque verb has the form > *, where the root must be strictly verbal. Moreover, native verbal > roots are usually monosyllabic and very commonly of the form -CVC-. >> The hypothetical root *b(i) is the subject of a long running historical >> controversy. It is supposedly found in words like: >> bide ('way, road'), probably a compound of *bi- and the common suffix (of >> 'extent') -te, meaning something like 'the physical area where one walks'. > No such root as the suggested * can be defended, in my view. Moreover, > <-te> is not a suffix of extent, but rather a temporal suffix indicating > 'duration'. Examples: 'wartime' ( 'war'), 'famine' > ( 'hunger'), 'rainy season' ( 'rain'), > 'wintertime' ( 'winter'), 'drought' ( 'dry'), and many > others. [Ed] It is also part of (compound) 'extent' suffixes like -ate, -arte, ...You're right if you consider -te in isolation. > Finally, an original * should *not* develop into . There is no > parallel for such a development. [Ed] Right, but not impossible for such an old term. >> ibi, more commonly ubi ('ford, a place where one can wade through the >> water'), according to e.g. Michelena, u-bide ('water-way': u-, uh- or ug- is >> the form of ur, 'water', in compounds), > Correct. In Basque word-formation, a first element loses its final /r/. > Hence 'water' + 'way' yields * regularly, followed by > reduction to (such reductions in final elements are sporadic but > frequent), and then by vowel assimilation to . In fact, the form > , with assimilation but no reduction, is recorded in 1630, in the > writer Etxeberri of Ziburu, so the etymology is directly confirmed. >> and to Bertoldi, a compound of ibi-bide, with haplology. > Far less likely, I'd say, and in fact unnecessary: why try to derive > from a hypothetical *? What does this achieve? Anyway, the > attested form confirms the proposal *. >> The existence of a root *(i)b(i) has been posited since Hubschmidt, >> because of its wide diffusion, not only in the Basque areas, but also, and >> mainly in the Iberian zones. > But Hubschmid was not a Vasconist, and his ideas about Basque have been > widely dismissed by specialists as fanciful and unsupported. His problem was > that he wanted to find Basque sources for just about every problematic word > and name in the Romance-speaking area -- though, to be fair, his conclusions > are somewhat more sober than I'm making them appear here. >> Both explanations are not necessarily contradictory: u-ibi-bide > ubi or >> ibi. A related problem is that of the Basque word for 'bridge': zubi, a >> compound of zur ('wood, wooden', possibly a remote relative of a.Grk. xylon) >> and ubi or bide, thus meaning either 'wooden road' or 'wooden ford'. > Michelena proposed 'wood' + 'way', and I endorse this, even > though this time we are not so fortunate as to find * recorded. >> ibai ('river') and ibar ('river valley bottom, Sp. vega, Du. waard, >> polder'), but this is very controversial. > Not all of it. The word 'river' is pretty clearly a derivative of > . [Ed] 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). > This may look funny, but recall that a final /r/ is regularly lost in the > first element in word-formation. Compare cases like 'thigh', > 'groin', the second being plus a suffix of the approximate form > *<-ei> or *<-i> (or quite possibly *<-egi>, in fact, but that's another > story). >> It would be explained via 'running [water]'. > Sorry, but I can't follow this. How on earth can be assigned such a > meaning? [Ed] Through the meaning of 'movement' in the hypothetical root (i)b(i). >> Ibai is often thought of as the origin of Sp. vega (via ibai-ka), > This etymology is popular in some Romanist circles, but I stress that it > remains speculative at best. See Corominas and Pascual for some discussion. >> while ibar is usually related to Iberia, the Iberians and the river Ebro, >> etc. > Well, I query that "usually". Modern is clearly from Latin , > but the origin of this name is unknown, and Basque is an implausible place to > look. The Romans used the name before they encountered the Basques, > I believe. [Ed] 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. Quite a few Iberian toponyms could just as well be Basque (Oriola, Aspe, Ibi, Tibi.....and maybe Calpe). So looking for a Basque-like etymology is not far-fetched, even though it hasn't been proven that this is admissible. 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). >> Finally, I would not exclude the possibility of *(i)b(i) being related to IE >> wad- (ua-dh-) (Eng. wade, Du. waden, Lat. vade:re), especially via the forms >> ibai and/or ibar, if the initial i is a prefix, as has often been thought. > But there *is no evidence* for this fanciful *<(i)b(i)>. It looks to me, I'm > afraid, like nothing more than an excuse for dragging in everything under the > sun containing /ib/ or /bi/ or even just /b/. [Ed] Of course: this is exploratory thinking! See below. > As for the idea that initial /i/ is a prefix, this goes back to Schuchardt, > but it has proved entirely fanciful, and it is accepted today by no > specialist known to me. >> All this is, of course, rather speculative, even though based upon a body of >> pretty well accepted ideas. > Not all of the ideas put forward above can reasonably be described as "pretty > well accepted". [Ed] Accepted by quite a few people, and often not the least. >> Anyway, it looks like the hard core of very ancient and definitely Basque >> words is still shrinking after words like (h)artz (bear, Gr.arktos), gizon >> (man, PIE*ghdonios) and maybe buru (head, Sl. golova) etc. have been exposed >> as of IE origin - or was it simply a very ancient common substrate origin? > This is far too fanciful for me, and I object to that word "exposed". > Some kind of IE origin for 'bear' is considered plausible by many > specialists, but no good IE source is known, and the proposal remains > speculative. [Ed] Grk. arktos (and related IE) looks like a pretty good candidate to me. Of course, it is possible that it is a shared substrate. > As for the other two, these strike me as beyond belief. Sorry to be such an > old grouch, but, with comparisons like these, we can derive anything from > anything. >> If you don't believe Basque has any relatives, not even extinct ones, forget >> what I said. > My own view is that no one has ever made an even vaguely plausible case for > linking Basque genetically to any other language at all, living or dead, > apart from its own ancestral form Aquitanian, and that there now remain so > few stones unturned that it is extremely unlikely that any link will ever be > found. >> If you do, > Er...what? If you *do* believe that Basque has relatives? How can any > reasonable person believe this, when no link has ever been demonstrated? [Ed] 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. >> I hope it will stimulate you to look into this type of problems. Something >> interesting might come out of it, both for Basque and for P...PIE. > Well, with respect, I think we need a lot more than very vague resemblances > and entirely fanciful etymologies. We need hard evidence. [Ed] 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. Regards, Ed. Selleslagh From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jan 12 04:39:28 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 22:39:28 -0600 Subject: Northwest IE attributes In-Reply-To: <0.16dcbdd2.258c8ec8@aol.com> Message-ID: Why the exception kravih? Is it because of the vowel or a combination of /r/ and non-palatal vowel? Is pekus exceptional because of the velar vowel? Is Balto-Slavic Satem necessarily linked to Indo-Iranian Satem? Sometimes, it almost looks as if IE has recessive genes, e.g. Romance Satem, the various p/q dichotomies, /r/ in various dialects of English, etc. ;> [ Moderator's note: The following material is quoted from a message by JoatSimeon at aol.com, with additional material by the moderator. --rma ] >>X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >>Satem is still a very good way to separate I-Ir from the western group. (I >>believe the current stance is that satem may have been adopted by >>Balto-Slavic.) >-- The Baltic and Slavic languages have undergone satemization; there's no >'may' about it. [ moderator snip ] >But both Slavic and Baltic (especially Baltic) also show some exceptions; >eg., PIE *peku, 'cattle', becomes Lithuanian 'pekus', not 'pesus'. >[ Moderator's note: > Even Indo-Iranian shows some exceptions: Cf. Skt. _kravih._ "raw meat", > Latin _cruor_ "gore, blood". > --rma ] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Wed Jan 12 16:11:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 16:11:00 GMT Subject: Northwest IE attributes Message-ID: >PIE *peku, 'cattle', /becomes/ Lithuanian 'pekus .. wouldn'd it rather be 'remained'? Mit freundlichen Grüszen Hans J Holm __________monere et moneri______________ From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Jan 14 19:09:44 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 14:09:44 EST Subject: Northwest IE attributes Message-ID: I wrote: <> You miss my point. *IF* satem was innovated among I-Ir speakers and then only later 'adopted' by Balto-Slavic speakers, then we can still keep B-S out of the "original" satem group and in the original NW group - since satem would have been only adopted in B-S after the NW split-off. (I'm sure you are aware of the old East-West IE distinction that is now called dubious. I believe there was some controversy there at one time. :)) Sean Crist writes: <> Yes and no. Exclude only Anatolian and I-Ir. Greece is certainly northwest of Anatolia and east of the Caucasus. Consider Armenian a border territory of the NW group on the edge of Anatolian and I-Ir. Tocharian obviously the result of a radical migration needs a separate categories as do the largely unknown groups. Sean Crist writes: <> Actually I think it sort of matches the UPenn tree - with the possible exception of IIr - but maybe not. Group Two goes NW and forms the NW branch. Group Three goes east and forms the I-Ir group. And Group One stays in Anatolia. Sean Crist writes: <> I hope you see here that you have not negated an NW IE in any way here. All you are pointing to is an innovation in "I-C" that did not occur in Germanic. This does not prove they were not once one group, but only that they split at some point and innovated separately. PS - B-S could be included. I wrote: <> Sean Crist replied: <> I believe you've already said there is no published complete list and none is mentioned on the web. But I will promise not to bring the matter up again, so long as the tree is not used to "prove" anything. Regards, Steve Long From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jan 12 04:52:13 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 22:52:13 -0600 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: What is the basis of this tree in Germanic? How secure is East Germanic? Why is it not just an early form of N. Germanic? i.e. what are the points that distinguish it? Is there any merit to the idea that there was a separate branch of Germanic including Anglian, Jutish and pre-Frisian, intermediate between N & W Germanic, andf that modern English and Frisian are the result of a fusion between this and W Lowland Germanic? [snip] > PGmc > / \ > PNWGmc \ > / \ \ > WGmc NGmc EGmc [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jan 16 09:02:02 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 04:02:02 EST Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: I wrote: <> Sean Crist replied (1/11/00 1:52:22 AM): <> Well, then that raises a very interesting question. One of the criticisms that came up often when I asked some linguists to comment on the tree was that it mixed apples and oranges. And cherries. Syd Lamb wrote in a private message (repd w/permission) that lexical, phonological and morphological items "are largely independent of one another in how they are involved in change. Hence a tree constructed on purely phonological grounds, for IE or Uto-Aztecan, or any complex family, will come out quite different from one constructed on purely lexical grounds, and both will differ from one constructed on purely morphological grounds." There's no question that morphology can reflect different genetic relationships than lexical or phonological items. This is precisely what happened with Germanic in the UPenn exercise. It was pointed out in another post that "there are a great many morphological and constructional elements to be found in the earliest Indoeuropean texts that are in opposition to apparent lexical similarities and dissimilarities. One example is the accusative of specification discussed by Hahn in 'Naming Constuctions in Indoeuropean languages' ... This kind of morphology and syntax points in a very different direction than mere homonyms." It was also pointed out that the UPenn "outcome showed that their lexical choices in German were older than their morphological choices,..." so that it looks as if "the Germans got their words from Latin and Celtic first and their syntax from Slavic later." Suggesting perhaps that the "problem is trickier than it looks." Does all this reflect the possibility that an accurate and true morphological IE tree would and should look different than an accurate and true lexical IE tree? Is the process of change that complex? If that is the case, then measuring "relatedness" by mixing the two together in a lump of shared charcteristics may very well render the result inaccurate on both counts. I was also given an example that I will try to repeat related to how conservatism might affect the usable evidence of relatedness: Two IE languages - possibly in contact - accidentially retain a feature from PIE. All other IE languages lose that feature before any records exist. The researcher would be forced to conclude that this feature is a shared innovation, having NO WAY OF KNOWING of the PIE origins. He would have no way of knowing that it should go in the "lost" category for the other languages. On that basis, the two languages might have a common "character" in the UPenn analysis and show evidence of relatedness. But in fact all that is being measured is the relative conservatism of the two languages. (As far as non-borrowability of "syntactical morphology" goes, I was given the example of the overwhelming and extensive use of the original Latinism <-tion> in modern English. And the comment was that if that sort of thing showed up in two ancient languages with no recorded history to explain how it got there, "some historical linguists would probably say that it had to come from the proto-language.") Which brings me back to the point of my original post. A language borrows and innovates radically. To the point where let's say - to make the point clear to the most obtuse degree - 99% of all lexical and morphological features are not from the original parent. Sean Crist replied: <> This misses the point. The point is simply evidentiary. The radically changing language could have little or no evidence left of its genetic affilation. CRITICAL EVIDENCE OF THAT 'GENETIC' AFFILATION HAS BEEN LOST. (And whether the borrowings happened before or after the sound changes is not relevant here - the borrowings are the bulk of the language and all the evidence you have.) Saying that these attributes fall into the "lost" category on the UPenn grid just won't do. And that's simply because there is no way of knowing if they were lost or if they were ever there. Something that is "lost" looks and acts exactly like something that was never there. The UPenn tree uses some 300 features across all of IE and some 4000 years. Is it possible that the absence of some of those features in some languages is not due to recent innovations but losses in other languages? Is it possible that things that are categorized as "lost" in the UPenn grid were never there? These problems are not simple ones and the solutions mentioned in your post do not neatly answer them. The sum total of the relationships between 12 language families over 4000 years may be too complex to settle with just 300 "shared" features. Regards, Steve Long PS - Someone - I forget who - also wanted to know how the UPenn tree analysis could claim to "confirm the Indo-Hittite hypothesize" when the actual language used was Luwian. From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Jan 18 20:45:02 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 15:45:02 EST Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: [I'm using asterisks instead of brackets on Mr. Crist's quotes because this e-mailer has seemed to have gone south in honor of Y2k. Hope it doesn't make the reading too difficult.] On Nov 5, 1999, I wrote: << If - for example - a language has innovated and borrowed so wildly that it retains very little of the ancestor, it may be "more closely related" in some chronological sense. But in fact we can imagine it being far more different from the immediate ancestor than say some conservative cousin that retained the attributes common to the family.>> In a message dated 1/11/00 1:52:22 AM, Sean Crist replied: **No. The _amount_ of innovation is not the basis on which we draw Stammba"ume; we draw these trees on the basis of what is _shared_.** I think if you look closely you'll see that you cannot identify "shared" innovations if they are no longer there to identify. Putting aside for the moment the question of how much that is lost is recoverable, I think you'll agree that a language that has changed quickly and radically could have lost some or all of the evidence of "sharing" that you draw your Stammbaume with. I am simply trying to proceed one point at a time. The only issue is how you know that evidence of what was shared has not disappeared. Which is why I wrote: <> Sean Crist wrote: **The presence of loan words doesn't alter the genetic affiliation of a language.** Maybe not. (I think that may be terminological again. Since a language that is made up entirely of loan words would have no genetic affilation except the languages it loaned from.) But the real question is not genetic affilation but EVIDENCE of genetic affiliation. In dealing with prehistoric languages, we don't have God's eye on things. We can only go by the evidence we have. And a robust language exposed to new ideas and things may be too interested in change to retain the very shared attributes and innovations that you might be using to show relatedness. If this is true, it should throw up a big caution sign in terms of measuring relatedness in the context of varing rates of change among languages. If I subject a group of plants to a good does of radiation and they mutate like crazy and then compare the next generations to their unmutated relatives, I may be hard put to call them very closely related at all. Their genes are markedly different. Their phenotypes are markedly different. If I didn't know about the induced mutations, I would HAVE conclude that they were not related at all. (And in a certain respect, they are not. And, please, there is no reason to think the same sort of thing cannot happen to languages.) Sean Crist wrote: **Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor did not just "count" any old differences; what they were specifically looking for are shared characteristics which cannot reasonably be attributed to parallel innovation.** Nevertheless, Ringe, et al., are still counting. And "the shared characteristics" may not all deserve equal weight. See my prior post in this thread. Sean Crist wrote: **No, no, no. It's well known that things such as morphological categories can be independently lost; this is a very common sort of parallel innovation. Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor were well aware of this, and dealt with this problem by assigning a separate numeric code to each language in the case of such loss so that such spurious groupings would not occur.** Yes, yes, yes. Ringe, et al., did not create a separate numeric code for "was never there." And in some cases, it might be argued that what is being called "lost" in this category may "never have existed" - as the two categories often look exactly alike -evidence is absent. AND conversely things that are truly "lost" - unidentifiably so - might have altered the shared characteristic scheme showing a completely different evidence of relatedness. Sean Crist writes: **A _separate_ value is assigned for each branch to mean "lost".** Not relevant here. "Lost" logically means that the absence has been accounted for, the character was once shared and the characteristic does not negate relatedness. "Was never there" is the opposite, showing that a characteristic may never have been "shared" and shows unrelatedness. Using the "lost" value can be seen in some cases as a means of creating evidence where there is none. I also wrote: <> Sean Crist replied: **Languages can certainly develop new tense markings over their history, but the explanation you've given here is teleological. There's nothing that would suggest that languages develop more complex tense systems upon coming into contact with a technologically more sophisticated culture.** I think I will be able to challenge you on this one. I'm hoping to have some evidence of what happened to modern primitive languages when they are exposed to more complex cultures. I will pass it along when it comes. But let me point out that the highest and therefore earliest "node" on the UPenn IE tree - Anatolian - includes a language - Hittite - that lacks syntactical aspects (e,g,. gender) that arrive in lower and later "nodes" and that those new features certainly add new complexity to those languages and hide to some degree the old simplier system. Conversely, English's loss of inflection has been attributed to contact with and the need to communicate with the Danes. AND finally the evolution of Frankish to French may be direct and historical evidence of a how a language with insufficient resources needed to alter substantially to absorb a much more complex cultural situation. As far as "teleological", I'd prefer ontological. After all, it seems to make common sense that when you suddenly have a lot of new things to talk about, you are going to need lots of new ways to say them. Regards, Steve Long From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jan 12 04:58:14 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 22:58:14 -0600 Subject: PIE words for sexual organs In-Reply-To: <006a01bf491f$7a7d2960$cd9f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: Is this ultimately based on an expressive/onomatopeic form similar to the English expressive pu, pew, Spanish expressive puchi, uuf, puaf, Italian expressive puzzi, etc.? Are these expressive forms pretty universal? [snip] >*pu:to-s, I think it is relatively certain that its >basal meaning is 'source or site of strong fragrance' (as attested by >*pu:ti-, 'rot'), a concept broad enough to include both cunnus and podex >olfactorily. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jan 12 05:04:18 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 23:04:18 -0600 Subject: PIE words for sexual organs In-Reply-To: <007c01bf523b$de486de0$338f01d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: How 'bout a form ancestral to English "balls", Gaelic palla [sp?], perhaps *bhel-; or are these later developments? Gaelic palla "penis" is obviously borrowed (or expressively mutated) but the meaning is different from English I believe Theo Vennemann mentioned similar forms in Afroasiatic Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Thu Jan 13 18:54:30 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 13:54:30 -0500 Subject: PIE words for sexual organs In-Reply-To: <000401bf4b1e$5440d3e0$bf9301d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Sun, 19 Dec 1999, petegray wrote: > The overlap need not be a surprise. Even in English (at least some > dialects) this can happen. Some women of my acquaintance refer to "front > bottom" and "back bottom", as if bottom meant both vulva and anus. Another case in point: the word _fanny_ means "buttocks" in American English but "vulva" in British English. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From MPeter4165 at aol.com Thu Jan 13 01:03:48 2000 From: MPeter4165 at aol.com (MPeter4165 at aol.com) Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 20:03:48 EST Subject: responses to renfrew Message-ID: I've just finished Renfrew's Archaeology & Language and I'm interested in reading responses to it. Is any prior list discussion collected and available on the Web somewhere? Or can anyone give me a list of some responses in the literature? I don't need (or have time for) an exhaustive list; just a few high points would be fine. Thanks! Melanie S. Peterson [ Moderator's response: One major response to Renfrew is J. P. Mallory's book _In Search of the Indo- Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth_, available in paperback. The IE list archives are located at http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/indo-european.html I believe that there is a search engine available. --rma ] From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Jan 14 08:20:32 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 08:20:32 GMT Subject: Refining early Basque criteria In-Reply-To: Message-ID: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote: >Once children reach the stage at which they are beginning to have enough >control over their vocal tracts to produce speech sounds consistently, they >behave in a highly consistent fashion, as argued by Jakobson as long ago as >1941. The first vowel they learn to produce is [a] -- the easiest vowel to >produce, since it requires minimal tongue action. The first consonants they >produce are labials -- [m], [b], [p] -- presumably because these require no >tongue control. The next consonants they learn are coronals -- [n], [d], [t] >-- presumably because these require no more than the raising of the tip/blade >of the tongue. Velars, which require bending of the tongue, come later, as do >other consonants. >From limited personal observation, I'd say that within the coronals, palatals ([n^], [d^], [t^]) seem to be produced earlier or more easily than alveolars or dentals, which is somewhat unexpected given their absence or markedness in most languages. On the other hand, that would explain their frequent use in "nursery" or "affective" vocabulary. Does Jakobson or any other literature confirm this? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From thorinn at diku.dk Fri Jan 14 11:20:49 2000 From: thorinn at diku.dk (Lars Henrik Mathiesen) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 12:20:49 +0100 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria (miau) In-Reply-To: (larryt@cogs.susx.ac.uk) Message-ID: > Date: Wed, 22 Dec 1999 09:31:53 +0000 > From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) > Nor does the use of a computer in any way guarantee greater > objectivity. If I decide to reject words showing property P, then I > can do this by hand or with a computer program, and the results will > be the same. After all, the computer isn't going to inform me that > it doesn't like my criteria. Given total objectivity in the researcher, that is true. However, in many scientific communities it is recognized that most researchers will unconsciously bias their evaluation of experimental data to reject more of those instances that will not support their theory. That is the reason for the use of double-blind experimental procedures in medicine, for instance: Not so much a fear of dishonesty, but a recognition that even honest researchers cannot avoid bias. Having the researcher set the rules for acceptance of data and the computer apply them, would make it much harder to get a bias in there. Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Jan 16 07:47:33 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 07:47:33 -0000 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria Message-ID: Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ralf-Stefan Georg" Sent: Saturday, December 18, 1999 10:44 PM >> I would suggest rather that these very ancient words have been retained in a >> substantially unchanged form because of the strong emotional significance >> they have in most human societies. >> Let us assume that, for reasons I cannot fathom, children all over the world >> are *independently motivated* (by what, pray tell ???) to employ for >> 'mother'. > I don't see any difficulty here. When you do nothing, repeat nothing > specific with your vocal tract or articulatory apparatus but keep your > mouth shut and switch on your vocal cords you have /m/. If, then, you go > one step further and open your mouth for a change, guess what is the most > likely vowel to come out ? Right. It is my understanding that oral consonants are articulated by children before nasal consonants. Is this incorrect in your view? > Now, what happens next is that mothers *do* like to be addressed by their > infants as early as possible by something which could be interpreted as > something in the way of a "word". What is more natural, then, to > *conventionalize* the simplest audible syllable any infant is likely to > produce very early in its career as a language-user as precisely that: > "mother" ? To make it a bit more harder to meet this requirement for the > infant, one introduces reduplication as a further requirement, and there > you are. Of course, this doesn't *have* to happen in each and every speech > community of mankind, it is only tremendously likely. Any different > conventionalizations like Georgian /mama/ "father" or language without > bilablials or whatnot should not disturb us here. In this respect, Pat may > even be right in assuming that the first homines loquentes might have had a > conventionalized "mother"-term closely resempling /mama/ or sthlth. *But*, > the fact that it is still so wide-spread today among the world's languages > would *not* cry for the explanation that it is a *retention* from olim's > times. The very reasons outlined above make it clear that it is likely to > be *innovated* time and again in languages. So, again, we have an attractor > here, and the nursery words go out. All you have written is, of course, very plausible. But --- and there is always a but, is there not? --- this does not really address my argument, I do not think. I am *not* maintaining that *mama is the early term for 'mother' but rather *ama. Larry brushes by this difference but I am hoping you will not. While *mama may be a perfectly plausible child's word for 'mother', the frequently found form *?ama can, with an implausible level of difficulty, be derived from it. Do you not 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 proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Jan 16 08:00:30 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 08:00:30 -0000 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Larry and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Tuesday, December 21, 1999 10:45 AM > Pat Ryan writes: > [on Mama-papa words like Basque 'mother'] >> I feel that you may be mixing apples with oranges here. >> I would, myself, be quite sceptical of any claim that an imitative word like >> indicated anything more than an attempt to capture the quintessential >> acoustic impression of a cat-call. >> But, 1) there is nothing "imitative" about for 'mother'; > Agreed, but I didn't mean to say there was. The point is not that such words > are imitative; the point is that they are *motivated*. >> 2) more importantly, does not have the form we would expect from >> childish babbling, which, I hope you would agree, would be along the lines >> of C(1)V(1)C(1)V(1). > Yes; babbling is stereotypically of the form CVCV (reduplicated). But not > invariably so. No, but for your argument to be plausible, *(?)ama would have to be frequent enough to be widely accepted as a word for 'mother', is that not correct? >> I gladly concede that , , , etc. are childish attempts >> to render other words, e.g. <*?ama> and <*?atV>, etc. > Oh, no -- this is not the point at all. See below. Perhaps not your point! But it is my point. >> but there is nothing that I know which *necessitates* or universally >> *inclines* children all over the world to connect /m/ with 'motherhood' or >> /d/ or /t/ with 'paternity' --- short of some universalistic sound-symbolism >> argument, which I provisionally do not accept. > No; this is a misunderstanding. > Children do not make any such connections as those suggested at all. > The point is that nursery words are *not* invented by children: they are > invented by adults. > Once children reach the stage at which they are beginning to have enough > control over their vocal tracts to produce speech sounds consistently, they > behave in a highly consistent fashion, as argued by Jakobson as long ago as > 1941. The first vowel they learn to produce is [a] -- the easiest vowel to > produce, since it requires minimal tongue action. The first consonants they > produce are labials -- [m], [b], [p] -- presumably because these require no > tongue control. The next consonants they learn are coronals -- [n], [d], [t] > -- presumably because these require no more than the raising of the tip/blade > of the tongue. Velars, which require bending of the tongue, come later, as > do other consonants. > Accordingly, the first consistent noises the eager parents hear from the > child are things like [(m)ama], [(b)aba], [(p)apa], followed by [(t)ata], > [(d)ada], and so on. It is at this point that the delighted parents decide > that their child is trying to speak -- which is very doubtful -- and assume > happily that the little bugger is trying to say 'mother' and 'father'. The > assumption that the kid is trying to say 'mother', rather than 'tickle' or > 'telephone' or 'banana' is one made *entirely* by the parents. Jumping to > this conclusion, the happy parents begin to speak back to the child, using > what they fondly -- but wrongly -- believe to be the child's own words. In > this way, such "mama-papa words" -- as we call them -- can become > institutionalized in adult speech. This scenario is attractive but rather weak when carefully considered. Unless you are arguing that *mama almost invariably is produced *first*, and that the mother is inclined to accept the baby's *first* "word" as referring to herself, then it is equally likely that the mother will reinforce *baba or *papa as a selfg-designation --- a very rare occurrence. > So, such words recur in lots of languages as a direct consequence of the > observable universal progression of speech-sound production in infants, > coupled with the widespread tendency of parents to interpret these early > sounds as having specific meanings. That's all. Merely adding parentheses to *mama {*(m)ama} does not responsibly address the argument, IMHO. >> I would suggest rather that these very ancient words have been retained in a >> substantially unchanged form because of the strong emotional significance >> they have in most human societies. > But this is fanciful, and there exists a far simpler explanation. Just > listen to an infant producing its first speech sounds, and you have your > explanation. Nothing more elaborate is called for. I have listened to children making their first "noises" and am under the impression that oral consonants are produced before nasal ones. Is that incorrect? 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 Jan 14 06:38:27 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 06:38:27 -0000 Subject: Fwd: Re: Pre-Basque Phonology Message-ID: Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ralf-Stefan Georg" Sent: Saturday, December 18, 1999 12:05 PM [ moderator snip ] > The wine-word has for long been thought to be an originally near-eastern > Wanderwort, mainly because it is so widespread in the NE and because this > region is generally thought to be the origin of wine-cultivation. However, > there may be reasons to believe that the word is originally IE after all, > since a connection to the root *weiH- "twist around athl." seems likely (cf. > Latin vi:tis "vine", vieo: "bind", Lith. vyti, veju` "wind" etc.). The NE > words, then, would be loans from one or several IE sources (Hattic windu-, > Ar. wain, Hebr. yayin [which show a rather old intra-Semitic sound-law, > pointing to some early date of the borrowing], Georgian Gvino may evidence > the intermediate stage of the Armenian w- > g- shift, and thus point to a > loan-scenario from (pre-)Armenian to Georgian (it doesn't seem to be of > proto-language age in Kartvelian). > So, the IE > elswhere-scenario is favoured over the elsewhere > IE one by its > possibly being derived from an IE verbal root. Of course, there is room for > doubt. Well, I guess we need someone else to assert "elsewhere to IE". My view roughly parallels your own; and like you, I acknowledge the likelihood though not the certainty of that direction of movement though, of course, I would also consider the possibility of a common Nostratic derivation. "Wine", after all, seems only to be a specific use of "vine" so perhaps the region of origin for grapes is not really the bellwether, 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 Jan 14 06:41:46 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 06:41:46 -0000 Subject: Fwd: Re: Pre-Basque Phonology Message-ID: Dear Vartan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Vartan and Nairy Matiossian" Sent: Saturday, December 18, 1999 2:49 PM [ moderator snip ] > Dear Pat, > I'm not aware of any counterclaim to Illyich-Svidich. It doesn't mean > there isn't any, just I'm too far from University-Libraries to be aware > of daily developments. (For instance, I know personally Vahan Sargisian, > I have been contributing to his Armeno-Basque studies journal, "Araxes", > in Yerevan, I have several of his other articles, but I was pleasingly > surprised to hear about his latest article in Fontes Linguae Vasconum, > thanks to Ed Selleslagh). In connection to the Arm. etymology of "gini" > (wine), Guevork Djahukian --besides noting VIS-- has advanced the view > that it could be stemmed from IE *uin ("to twist, to twirl"), bearing in > mind the regularity of the Arm. root. Yes. But for the fuller exposition of the premise, see Ralf-Stefan's nice summary of the counterevidence. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Jan 14 14:27:24 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 14:27:24 +0000 Subject: Basque 'sei' Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Ed Selleslagh writes: >>> Iberian has two sibilants (and also rhotics) that might very well be the >>> same as the Basque ones, including the affricated varieties. [LT] >> Iberian certainly had two contrasting sibilants (at least), but the phonetic >> nature of the contrast is entirely unknown. Aquitanian probably had at >> least four, and perhaps six, of the things, but the Roman orthography was >> defective, and the various sibilants were not written in any very consistent >> manner. > [ES] > The nature of the contrast of the two Iberian sibilants is not entirely > unknown, as some toponyms have survived: e.g. Saitabi(a) > Xa'tiva, Very interesting. I didn't know that this etymology had been established. Has it been? > which indicates that the S must have been rather closer to Basque (apical) s > than z. Why? True, at a much later stage, a shushy sibilant in Arabic sometimes came into Castilian as [esh], developing later to jota. But on what basis can we extend this pattern centuries further back into the past? > Some Iberian words are extremely similar to some Basque words I'd be very careful here. First, it is not trivial to identify Iberian words at all. Many Iberian texts use a mark which l0oks like a word-divider, but not all do so, and not all do so consistently. For example, one Iberian text contains the following unsegmented sequence: IKBAIDESVISEBAR'TAS'ARTIDVRAGVNAN Decisions about word-boundaries in such cases are difficult and debatable. In practice, nothing much interesting can be said about Iberian words. Instead, it is the seemingly recurrent morphs which attract attention. These are presumed to represent morphemes, and some of them do indeed resemble items in Basque. However, in almost no case do we know the meaning of the Iberian item, and hence the comparisons must be strictly of forms -- not very illuminating. The few Iberian morphs to which meanings can be assigned with some confidence do not, in general, look like anything in Basque. In its phonological structure, Iberian seems to be rather similar to Basque, and hence it is perhaps not very surprising that similar sequences exist in both languages. But, when we don't know the meanings of the Iberian items, we have no right to claim that Iberian and Basque possess "extremely similar words". For example, Iberian has a recurrent element BIOS-, which looks like Basque 'heart'. But we have not the faintest idea what the Iberian item means, and there is no more reason to assign it the meaning 'heart' than there is to assign it any other meaning. Why not 'life', for example, given Greek 'life'? Finally, recall that Basque is of no more assistance in reading Iberian than is, say, Norwegian or Zulu. This must count for something. > (I know you don't accept this to be anything but coincidence), There is no reason to see anything other than coincidence when all we have is resemblances in form, with no meanings attached. > and these similarities always point to a systematic correspondance of the two > Iberian sibilants and Basque s and z. Really? This is news to me. What evidence can you adduce to support this claim? > From toponyms and other words one can deduce that Aquitanian and Iberian also > had the corresponding affricates (ts and tz). In Iberian script these are > written exactly as the non-affricated ones. In other scripts and in > Aquitanian in Latin script orthography is pretty confusing, but often > resembles later usages. The Iberian script distinguishes only two sibilants, and I know of no hard evidence that the language actually had four. The defective Roman script used for writing Aquitanian doesn't distinguish any sibilants at all very clearly, except that X or XS seems to have represented affricates, while S and SS appear to have represented fricatives. > I don't know where you found that Aquitanian may have had two additional > sibilants. This derives from the conclusion that Aquitanian represents an ancestral form of Basque, more or less identical to the Pre-Basque reconstructed from Basque-internal evidence. Modern Basque has the following sibilants: laminal , apical , and palato-alveolar . Now, one feature of our reconstruction is that only the first four could ever appear in the unmarked forms of lexical items, while were entirely confined to expressive variants -- mainly diminutives. We therefore surmise that Pre-Basque -- and hence Aquitanian -- *may* also have had these last two, even though they don't show up clearly in the written records. Now, I know of one piece of evidence suggesting that may indeed have been present in Pre-Basque and in Aquitanian. Basque has an ancient diminutive suffix <-to>, long unproductive but still present in a handful of fossilized forms, such as 'little girl', from 'girl'. As is normal with diminutive suffixes, this one long ago underwent spontaneous palatalization to <-txo>, the productive diminutive suffix today. The palatalization of to is completely regular. Now, Aquitanian appears to exhibit <-to>, for example in the female personal name NESCATO, to be identified with modern . But it also exhibits a frequent suffix written <-xo> or <-xso>, which presumably contains an affricate. For example, the Aquitanian female name ANDERE, identified with modern Basque 'lady', is seemingly related to the Aquitanian female names ANDEREXO and ANDEREXSO. We surmise that this -XO ~ -XSO may represent the modern palatalized diminutive suffix <-txo>. >>> The Castilian s and z/c (theta) are the descendants of the old Basque-type >>> distinction, I believe. [LT] >> I don't follow. Castilian /s/ simply continues Latin /s/, except that it is >> apical, whereas the Latin /s/, on the Basque evidence, was probably laminal. >> But the Castilian theta derives ultimately, in most cases, from Latin /k/ >> before a front vowel; this is thought to have become some kind of affricate >> before developing into theta (or into /s/, according to region). [ES] > In derivations from Latin this true, but in all other cases it is not. I > didn't mean that the Castilian s/z distinction is descended directly from the > Basque apical/laminal opposition, as a parallel evolution in particular > words, but that its very existence is due to a pre-existing awareness of such > a phonological distinction (it did in Iberian), something most European > languages don't have (and ditto for the rhotics). "A pre-existing awareness"? Strange wording, almost mystical. May I translate into terms more familiar to me? I presume the suggestion is that the Castilian s/z contrast derives from areal pressure, from the influence of neighboring languages that already had it. But the modern s/z contrast dates only from the 16th century -- rather late for areal influence from Iberian, I'd say, or even from Basque -- which in any case has a distinction decidedly different from the Castilian one. As for other European languages, I will remind you of Martin Joos's 1952 paper in Language, in which he argued that an apical/laminal contrast in sibilants was in the medieval period widespread in Europe. >>> What about Arabic? It certainly has various sibilants. [LT] >> Yes, but it does not have an apical/laminal contrast, and I know of no >> evidence that Arabic phonology had any effect on Castilian phonology, still >> less on Basque phonology. [ES] > As far as Castilian is concerned, I am not so sure: does any one have any > references or information on that subject? No, but I no of no evidence or argument that Arabic ever had the slightest effect upon Castilian phonology, apart from the forms of a few individual words that entered Castilian after Arabic mediation, like 'soap'. > In Basque, it is rather the opposite: e.g. kuttun < kitab, i.e. Arabic words > were adapted to Basque phonology. Yes, and this is what normally happens in borrowing. By the way, Basque ~ ~ (and other variants), which has been applied to various kinds of written things, is thought to derive from the Arabic plural 'books'. This appears to be one of the rare cases in which Basque has taken over an Arabic word without Romance mediation. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Jan 15 05:49:24 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 23:49:24 -0600 Subject: Basque 'sei' In-Reply-To: <000f01bf494c$8d87e9a0$b701703e@edsel> Message-ID: [snip] >[Ed Selleslagh] >The nature of the contrast of the two Iberian sibilants is not entirely >unknown, as some toponyms have survived: e.g. Saitabi(a) > Xa'tiva, which >indicates that the S must have been rather closer to Basque (apical) s than z. >Some Iberian words are extremely similar to some Basque words (I know you >don't accept this to be anything but coincidence), and these similarities >always point to a systematic correspondance of the two Iberian sibilants and >Basque s and z. [snip] >>Castilian /s/ simply continues Latin /s/, except that it is >>apical, whereas the Latin /s/, on the Basque evidence, was probably laminal. >>But the Castilian theta derives ultimately, in most cases, from Latin /k/ >>before a front vowel; this is thought to have become some kind of affricate >>before developing into theta (or into /s/, according to region). There were voiced and unvoiced forms affricates /_dz_/ and , [c cedilla] /c/ in Castilian, although the spelling is not always coherent In some cases, /c/ is from Arabic, e.g. >[Ed] >In derivations from Latin this true, but in all other cases it is not. I >didn't >mean that the Castilian s/z distinction is descended directly from the Basque >apical/laminal opposition, as a parallel evolution in particular words, but >that its very existence is due to a pre-existing awareness of such a >phonological distinction (it did in Iberian), something most European >languages >don't have (and ditto for the rhotics). >>> What about Arabic? It certainly has various sibilants. >>Yes, but it does not have an apical/laminal contrast, and I know of no >>evidence that Arabic phonology had any effect on Castilian phonology, still >>less on Basque phonology. It does have a relaxed/emphatic contrast [if that's the right terminology] (both voiced and unvoiced) and the emphatic /S/ does have a muffled quality that is similar in some aspects to apical /S/ On the other hand, there may have been differences in Andalusian Arabic or Arabic spoken by Berbers who settled in Spain There is a class of words in Spanish, of which Ja/tiva is one, in which > /_sh_/ > /x, h/ jabo/n "soap", is another example In grad school, these were quicked explained as "Mozarabic" forms, giving the impression that this was a phenomenon of Southern Ibero-Romance [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rdrews at richmond.edu Fri Jan 14 15:25:09 2000 From: rdrews at richmond.edu (Robert Drews) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 10:25:09 -0500 Subject: date of wheeled vehicles Message-ID: It appears now that the wheeled vehicle was invented ca. 3500 BC, and almost immediately established itself over a huge area, from Uruk to Jutland. Good article by Jan Bakker, Janusz Kruk et al., "The Earliest Evidence of Wheeled Vehicles in Europe and the Near East," in the last fascicle of Antiquity (Antiquity 73 [1999], pp. 778-790). 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 rao.3 at osu.edu Tue Jan 18 10:35:40 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 05:35:40 -0500 Subject: Wheeled Vehicles. Message-ID: I wrote: > In footnote 10 (p.105), he says ``The yoke saddle was a harness device > that seated the yoke firmly on the withers and shoulders of chariot > horses, preventing slippage of the yoke more firmly on the withers and > shoulders of chariot horses, preventing slippage of the yoke and keeping > the weight off the horses throats and chests.'' I repeated the words ``more firmly on the withers and shoulders of chariot horses, preventing slippage of the yoke'' and let it slide while editing. I apologize for the error. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jan 18 21:17:05 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 16:17:05 EST Subject: Wheeled Vehicles. Message-ID: >rao.3 at osu.edu writes: >the only evidence for this (s)he has given is quotations from the article of >Anthony and Vinogradov in Archaeology. -- "A two-wheeled vehicle with wheels some 60 cm in diameter was recovered from a Catacomb burial at Maryevka in the Ukraine, presumably of the third but possibly second millenium BCE... the chariot is well attested in the Shinasta culture southeast of the Urals. Dating from c. 2100 to 1700 BCE, this culture provides abundant evidence for chariots... The wheels have eight to twelve spokes. The vehicles, found in burials, are unequivocally associated with horses and were drawn by a paired team." -- Mallory & Adams, Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, ps. 627-8 >Secondly, the slippage of the neck bands was prevented by placing the axle >of the chariot at the back -- this is a specific feature of _Egyptian_ chariots, and was not common elsewhere. Hittite chariots, for example, used a mid-body location for the axle. Mallory & Adams' reconstruction of the Shinasta chariot shows a yoke with Y-fork additions at the front -- precisely the form of "primitive horse-collar". From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Jan 14 15:44:48 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 10:44:48 EST Subject: Hawk /siiiii/ ! Message-ID: Thanks to Larry Trask for this absolutely delightful example of how a common expression (even across mammal and bird species!) can have a motivated cause, a quite unexpected one. Quoted below. I hope all linguistics students get educated about such examples. Whenever we find some highly ubiquitous term, a wide consistency of sound-meaning link, we should be alert to the possibility of such a motivated cause, and just because we haven't found one yet, we should not assume there isn't one. However, Trask goes on to say: >To put it another way, comparative linguistics is obliged to work with >linguistic items which are arbitrary in form -- items, that is, >whose form is in no way motivated by their meaning. >Trying to work with motivated >(non-arbitrary) items is a guarantee of spurious conclusions. There is no simple dichotomy between linguistic items which are arbitrary in form, and those which are in no way motivated by their meaning. Linguistic items can be *mostly* arbitrary in form, in the sense that there is only a very weak and partial motivation for their form, which we usually see reflected by a less-than-ubiquitous distribution, and by a less-than-overwhelming similarity of form. There are intermediates. And since a *limited* but widespread distribution of a form can arise through any of three mechanisms at least: (a) motivated by the real world, arising independently (b) inherited from a common ancestor language (c) inherited in some languages, borrowed into others we cannot logically assume merely from a widespread distribution across what we *currently* take to be independent families of languages that the reason for this distribution is (a) rather than (b,c). For *kukurru*, *miaou*, *mu*, *me*, the case is a rather easy one. For many other bird names equally so (though it is not to be sneezed at that some bird names were the same in Sumerian as in the present day, there can also be historical influences at work simultaneously). For the warning cry /siiiii/ for avian predators, the case is not an immediately obvious one, and it presumably took considerable work to establish that there was a cause of type (a), which as I noted does not exclude that there might be also a cause of type (c) operating, if animals can learn at all, which we certainly know they can. So there is reason to leave conclusions open when we really do not have sufficient evidence to give a conclusive answer. Withholding judgement is in fact the *conservative* position when we do not have sufficient evidence. (Just as a well-known error of logic is to assume that lack of evidence is evidence of lack of phenomenon.) Sincerely, Lloyd Anderson >Now, it has been observed that a diverse array of species -- >birds and small mammals -- all use acoustically very similar >danger calls for warning of hawks and similar flying predators: >a kind of high-pitched [siiiii] noise. >Since such calls are found in a range of birds and mammals, >the descent view [...] would require us to derive all these calls >from a single ancestral hawk-warning call in Proto-Mammal-Bird, >over 300 million years ago. Right? Could it also have been originated by one group of animals, and learned by some of the others? That is, be a loan-"word"? >But there's a much better explanation. >Hawks have acute hearing, and they are >very good at locating the source of a sound accurately. >This fact would appear to make the production of *any* danger call >a very dangerous enterprise for the individual producing it, >and hence an evolutionary disaster for his species. >*But*. It turns out that the hawk's usually reliable sound-location >mechanism breaks down with high-pitched noises resembling [siiiii]: >it can't locate the source. >So, we have a simple explanation for the widespread form-meaning >pairing that we observe in diverse species: >independent motivated creation. >Individuals that produce such calls are not spotted, >and they survive and pass on their genes. >Individuals that produce other calls get spotted and eaten. >So, since there exists a simple explanation for the widespread form-meaning >pairing in terms of motivation, its "ubiquity" is already accounted for, >and there is no reason to appeal to common origin. From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Jan 14 15:44:46 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 10:44:46 EST Subject: Egyptian 'cat' ? Message-ID: Joat Simeon writes: >Ancient Egyptian for "cat" was "miw" actually, given the lack of voweling and some difficulties in interpreting the "i" and "y" writings, could it have been "mi(ao)w" or "mi(u)w" or ?? For the last, compare English "mew" [myuw], the verb. Lloyd Anderson From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Jan 14 20:56:59 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 15:56:59 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE) Message-ID: >sarima at friesen.net writes: >My take on this would be that this supports my idea that the chariot proper >was invented by Proto-Indo-Iranian speakers (as opposed to being PIE proper >in origin). -- true at present; although with a date of 2100 BCE, we're nearly back to PIE times (3000 BCE or so). The Shinasta vehicles show definite signs of an ox-cart ancestry, although they're indubitably chariots. From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Jan 15 05:10:28 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2000 00:10:28 EST Subject: Dates for "PIE technology" Message-ID: In a message dated 1/11/00 1:31:47 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> I thought twice about responding. But I also thought that members of the list may be interested in how this "great slew" of items affects the latest dating of PIE. JUST HOW LATE A DATE DO THESE ITEMS SUPPLY FOR PIE UNITY? Using mainly my Harper Collins Atlas of Archaeology (1997 Borders Press) w/intro by Colin Renfrew, we might DATE THE ABOVE TECHNOLOGIES AS FOLLOWS: - Evidence of the PLOW in Mesopotamia and Lower Danube by 4500BC. Evidence of horticultural implements that would have functioned as "short plows" and been called plows, @7000BC at Ain Mallaha in the Levant; 5500BC in the Danube basin. - Evidence of METALWORK (copper beads and jewelry) at Catal Huyuk in Anatolia (possible IE homeland) circa 7000BC. Recently discovered evidence of arsenic and tin bronze being made in Thailand @8000BC. First casting technology, Anatolia and SE Europe, 7000-6000BC, by 4400BC along the Dnieper, in Scandinavia and the Italian Penisula. Earliest tin/bronze metallurgy: Anatolia, southern Caucasus @ 5000BC. - Evidence of the WEAVING dates back to paleolithic times (e.g., among the Swiss lake dwellers). - With regard to the WEAVING of fine cloth... "Fragments of simple linen burial cloths prove that circa 6,000 B.C. weaving with flax existed in Catal Huyuk,... In Jarmo in northeast Iraq there is evidence of woven cloth circa 7,000 B.C., while in Nahal Hemar in the Judean desert there is proof of woven cloth circa 6,500 B.C" Also as to the WEIGHTED LOOM, "The discovery at Catal Huyuk of what seem to be ceramic warp weights and a heading band seems to prove the existence of the warp-weighted loom in early Neolithic Anatolia." - With regard to MILKING AND MILK PRODUCTS, I have these citations: earliest evidence for regular goat herd milking, North Africa @7000BC (SFEC 11/2/97 Z1, page 6). Earliest representational evidence of cheese-making 4000BC (HFA, 1996, p.121) (Historiel�rarnas F�renings Arsskrift, Uppsala, Sweden). A. Sherrat's "secondary product revolution" premised on the surplus economy first developed during Bandkeramik period (@5500-4000BC). (I'll put off the wheel for another occasion.) Not one of these items argues for a date after 4500BC. Most leave open the possibility that PIE speakers could have come in contact with these items - enough to name them - thousands of years before the arbirary date of 3500BC. <> QUITE TO THE CONTRARY, as a group they seem to suggest that PIE could have been exposed to these items about 5000BC or earlier if it was anywhere in the vicinity of Europe or Anatolia. There is hardly any definite conclusion to be drawn from them together or separately, except that they won't support anything like a Copper Age date for PIE. Far from it. Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Jan 15 20:37:16 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2000 15:37:16 EST Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter Message-ID: In a message dated 1/11/00 12:05:57 AM, Sean Crist wrote: <> (caps mine) So we get back to why one way of looking at it is THE RIGHT WAY and the other is not. My point in this post was only to suggest that if one calls a Parent coexisting with a Daughter "reification" then speaking of two Daughters coexisting might also be "reification". But let's put that aside for the moment and consider the forking versus branching question again. Sean Crist wrote: *A forking in a language follows from a forking in the community of speakers, typically because of migration leading to geographical separation. When the original single group splits into two groups who wander off from each other, the copies of the language information in the minds of the members of both groups start out basically identical. Over time, however, the norms in the two communities DRIFT IN DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS, since the two groups are no longer in contact* Which does not answer the question why the proper model is a forking rather than a branching. The DEGREE OF DRIFT may vary between the two groups. A RADICAL DEGREE OF DRIFT in one group and a SMALL CONSERVATIVE DRIFT in the other would suggest a branching not a forking. What is important to my post is: WOULD YOU HAVE CALLED THE SMALL CONSERVATIVE DRIFT A NEW LANGUAGE IF THE SPLIT HAD NEVER OCCURED? Methodologically, it appears that you are "reifying" a new language because a split has occurred - NOT because of any quality of change in the language. A splits into B and C. You would have continued to call A "A" if no split occurred. But because of the split, you call it "B." I hope you understand there is a bit of a problem here. But my question now is does it matter? If you go back in the archive, you'll see that you answered my question without using the "parent cannot co-exist with its daughter" idea and that it was Prof Trask who cited it. I suspect that the difference between branching and forking are terminological and operationally cannot tell us about the degree of drift in both or either language. It also does not tell us if what is drifting is going to become a designated "innovation" in determining any kind of a family tree. Some innovations don't matter, some do. My question was something like - could Anatolian, after say innovating away from "narrow PIE", borrow back features that it had lost? I was looking for b orrowings that imitated genetics. E.g., Mencken noted that after abandoning the "King's English", Americans rediscovered and adopted it. <> Actually, this does happen biologically in non-sexual reproduction. The amoeba splits in two and technically there is no parent left. If this is your model, I'm fine with that. But the real question is I think - can we mistake the influence of one daughter on another and mistakedly call it the remains of the parent? E.g., -if Slavic loaned the word for wheel from Greek - or vice versa - could we mistake it as being a gift to both from the reified parent - PIE? Regards, Steve Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Jan 16 07:37:12 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 07:37:12 -0000 Subject: Re Personal pronouns Message-ID: Dear John and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dr. John E. McLaughlin" Sent: Saturday, December 18, 1999 11:41 PM > I love jumping into the middle of a discussion without having read in detail > the previous discussion, but this is just too tempting. > I've been reading quite a number of introductory syntax books lately for > teaching purposes, and every single one of them lists the possessive > pronouns as straightforward determiners. They aren't even classed as > "components of a determiner" in the way that "The little poor child" is a > component of a determiner in the sentence, "The little poor child's > Christmas was quite happy." This really isn't a point of contention among > linguists. If the question had been framed as such, I would understand your position completely. But, if I understand the issue clearly, the question is really different. I have no problem with Larry's definition of 'determiner' as recorded in his dictionary; and I have no problem acknowledging the usefulness of categorizing several different kinds of words ("articles...demonstratives...quantifiers...", etal.) as 'determiners'. But Larry seems to me to be denying the validity and usefulness of the term 'possessive pronoun' altogether though, of course, "possessive" is included as one of the various categories of 'determiners'. Larry's definition of pronoun contains all the classses traditionally considered pronouns *except* possessive pronouns though it seems odd in the extreme that, in spite of the rejection of possessive pronouns, demonstrative pronouns are included *as well as* being listed under 'determiner' as "demonstrative". Perhaps you could explain to me why you think "demonstrative" may occur in both classifications but "possesive" may not. Finally, I think it useful to retain the term "possessive pronoun" because it overtly identifies the fact that the pronoun stands for a noun in the possessive --- in addition to its function of deteremination. 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 Jan 18 02:46:52 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 02:46:52 GMT Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Sean Crist wrote: >A few months ago, I made a post to the list in which I stated that the PIE >word *ekwos "horse" is not probative in the question of the PIE homeland, >since one need not have domesticated the horse to have a word for it. >I want to retract that post. Beekes (1995) reports that horses (wild or >domesticated) were not found in Anatolia in the period which Renfrew >claims for the final IE unity, and Ringe (personal communication) has >corroborated this claim. This is an important incongruity between the >firmly reconstructed IE vocabulary and the homeland which Renfrew posits; >it is a strong argument against Renfrew. But Armenian eys^ (< *ek^wos) means "donkey". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Jan 18 05:36:56 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2000 23:36:56 -0600 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: Message-ID: The word presumibly could have applied to other equids. I don't know if wild asses were present in Anatolia at that time but they were present in nearby Mesopotamia and Iran. The weakness, of course, is that words derived from *ekwos almost invariably apply to the horse. >A few months ago, I made a post to the list in which I stated that the PIE >word *ekwos "horse" is not probative in the question of the PIE homeland, >since one need not have domesticated the horse to have a word for it. > >I want to retract that post. Beekes (1995) reports that horses (wild or >domesticated) were not found in Anatolia in the period which Renfrew >claims for the final IE unity, and Ringe (personal communication) has >corroborated this claim. This is an important incongruity between the >firmly reconstructed IE vocabulary and the homeland which Renfrew posits; >it is a strong argument against Renfrew. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Jan 18 13:09:35 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 08:09:35 EST Subject: Horses - retracting the retraction? Message-ID: In a message dated 1/17/00 8:09:31 PM, Sean Crist wrote: **A few months ago, I made a post to the list in which I stated that the PIE word *ekwos "horse" is not probative in the question of the PIE homeland, since one need not have domesticated the horse to have a word for it. I want to retract that post. Beekes (1995) reports that horses (wild or domesticated) were not found in Anatolia in the period which Renfrew claims for the final IE unity, and Ringe (personal communication) has corroborated this claim. This is an important incongruity between the firmly reconstructed IE vocabulary and the homeland which Renfrew posits; it is a strong argument against Renfrew.** The retraction may not have been necessary. See Russell and Martin, Catal Huyuk Bone Reports 1998 Br Arch Repts -- preliminary report can be found on the web at: http://catal.arch.cam.ac.uk/catal/Archive_rep98/martin98.html (watch the wrap-around) Summary states: "A wide range of taxa have been identified from �atalh�y�k, including sheep and goats, cattle, wild horses and asses,... Among the equid remains from �atalh�y�k West, several bones were observed as belonging to 'large' equids, which is likely to mean Equus caballus..." Exposure to wild horses by Anatolians could be postulated in any case, based on such earlier findings as those at Diana Kirkbride's excavation at Beidha in southern Jordan (occupied in first half of seventh millennium (9000-8500 BP)) where animal remains included "aurochs, wild board, ibex, wild goats, gazelle, hares, jackals, hyrax, and wild horses." Extensive trade contacts with Anatolia were established by the presence of large amounts of obsidian brought from that area. Wild horse remains have also been found in early neolithic layers in the Nile Delta (BOESSNECK Y., Joachim und Angela von den DRIESCH, Tell el-Dab'a VII. Ethnographisch-arch�ologische Zeitschrift 34 (1992)). See also Norbert Benecke, The Domestication of the Horse/Abstract: "On the basis of subfossil bone remains, archaeological findings and artistic representations the current state of research concerning the domestication of the horse.... New osteometric data from Early and Middle Holocene wild horses, as well as from early domestic horses, support the assumption of a polytope origin of the domestic horse, with Central Asia, Eastern, Central and South-Western Europe being more or less independent regions of domestication. In all those areas the domestication of the horse took place within agrarian societies or at least in contact with them." (30th WAHVM-Congress, Veterinary Faculty, Munich 1998.) (This would suggest that the technology being exchanged was not "the horse" - already present - but rather domestication.) On the otherside of Anatolia, at Franchthi Cave in the Argolid, the hunting of wild horses as the main source of meat occurred right up until the end of the mesolithic - so the memory of such animals might be fresh in the minds (if not the stomachs) of those who would have adopted neolithicism and PIE on its way to Europe where subspecies of wild horses (tarpan, equus ferus) probably still existed. I'm not familiar with Beekes approach to this issue, but I would question something else. The presence of wild equids - not equus caballus - in the area could just as easily have given rise to a common name for equids that was later transfered specifically to the horse. I have a note here that Gordon Childe in his 1954 article "Wheeled Vehicles" mentions that as early as 3000BC the pictograph appears that would become the regular cuneiform ideogram for horse - it is a compound of "ass" and "mountain", possibly either referring to the special size or source of the "true horse." Also, the problem of the decent of the horse shouldn't obscure the fact that wild horses (e.g., Przewalski's) may not have had all the characteristics of the domesticated animal, including large size, that would have so clearly distinguished it from other equids, especially as the object of a hunt. (As a parallel, I'm told that the Dakota gave the horse a name that was a compound of their name for dog, "pte" - probably observing that it was also domesticated.) Furthermore, given the habit of Indoeuropean languages to generalize and transfer the names of everything from body parts to colors over time, it strikes me as a bit overzealous and overenthused to say that such evidence - if it were accurate - would supply "a strong argument against Renfrew." The idea that there could be no "semantic" drift for such a word since 4000BC or before seems somewhat implausible. A reasonably objective approach could even have suggested that the word could have been imported in the late stages of PIE when Renfrew has it a short distance away from the northwest shore of the Black Sea, where wild horses were apparently in abundance. In any case, it really isn't all that clear that the horse needs to be there when PIE occurs - there are certainly enough IE languages where *ekwos is not the word for horse. And one of them is Hittite. But more on that later. Regards, Steve Long From swheeler at richmond.edu Tue Jan 18 04:06:37 2000 From: swheeler at richmond.edu (Stuart Wheeler) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 00:06:37 -0400 Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords In-Reply-To: <0.7660cba5.25908425@aol.com> Message-ID: The conversation now proceeding is very helpful to me as a non-IndoEuropeanist and reminds me to remind you that this topic is directly in the path of a colloquy the University of Richmond is hosting March 17-19, 2000. .The topic of our colloquium is "Greater Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite Language Family." Robert Drews, professor of Classics and History at Vanderbilt University and this semester visiting professor of Classics at Richmond is the genius behind the colloquy and the host. The keynote speaker is Colin Renfrew. Speakers include Elizabeth Barber, Bill S. Darden, Margalit Finkelberg, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Peter Kuniholm. Alexander Lehrman, Craig Melchert, Colin Renfrew, Jeremy Rutter, and Paul Zimansky. There will be significant periods of time for participant discussion and interaction. February 20, 2000 is the deadline for registration. You can find all the information about the colloquy including the full program and registration procedure at http:hermes.richmond.edu/anatolia. Stuart Wheeler From rohan.oberoi at cornell.edu Tue Jan 18 06:38:05 2000 From: rohan.oberoi at cornell.edu (rohan.oberoi at cornell.edu) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 01:38:05 -0500 Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: Dear Steve, The lag time on this list is so bad that I can't call up what you originally wrote, so my last letter may well not have been "in the context of your post"; if so I do apologise. [ Moderator's apology: I am sorry for the recent lapses in the posting frequency. I believe that everything is now fully under control again, and that we can look forward to a timely, working list for the foreseeable future. --rma ] The consensus between 1987 and now can I think be fairly demonstrated from the literature to be in favour of defining the earliest and latest bounds of probable PIE dispersal, referring to 2500BC as "no later than", and varying on the other end between 3000 and 4500 BC. (I personally find Renfrew's analysis of the literature unconvincing, but that may be just me. To prove that historical linguistics is built upon faulty assumptions about archaeology requires going through the latest literature to demonstrate that linguists are not regularly revisiting their assumptions, as they should. How does quoting Friedrich 1970 or Gimbutas 1960 prove that?) The upper bound is obviously what you have trouble with. Anthony's 1991 JIES article based his 3300BC on what he termed the dates of the earliest indisputable evidence for wheeled vehicles in Europe, combined with these arguments for reconstructing wheeled vehicles (not just circles or spheres or balls) to PIE. Since I have a para from it, let me quote it here: "...linguistic studies that have never been seriously challenged (Specht 1944:99-103) suggest that the final period of PIE unity can be firmly dated on the basis of shared PIE terms for wheeled vehicles. At least five word roots related to wheeled vehicles can be safely assigned to the PIE lexicon. These common roots occur across all of the major IE language stocks, from Celtic to Tocharian. Words based on these roots in the daughter IE languages have retained their specific references to "wheel"...; "axle"...; "thill" or yoke pole...; and "wagon"... Most of the roots are demonstrably IE, meaning that most of this vocabulary was created within the IE community. ... Moreover, the thematically inflected stems that characterize this entire group of terms identify them as relatively late additions to the PIE vocabulary, words that were created not long before the dispersal of IE speakers (Lehmann 1990:13). These terms form a semantic field in which the documented phonetic and semantic regularities are so pervasive throughout the IE languages that it is virtually certain that late PIE speakers were familiar with wheeled vehicles (Anthony and Wailes 1988)." You may disagree with that sort of argument, but I don't think you can reasonably attack it as based on circular assumptions. Of course, "articles" in my last post should have been "words". Regards, Rohan. From rao.3 at osu.edu Tue Jan 18 10:31:17 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 05:31:17 -0500 Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: "Stanley Friesen" wrote: > In particular the evidence from Egypt prior to 1100 BC shows > clearly that the chariot was a mobile combat platform, actively used in > shock warfare. What is ``shock'' warfare? 2nd millennium BCE chariots, as far as we know, were extremely light. Given the size of horses in use then (ponies by modern standards) and the requirement of quick acceleration, they could not have been otherwise. It would not possible to use them except as mobile archery platforms or personal transport (more like a motor cycle than a pick-up truck). Much latter, Assyrians and Persians used much heavier vehicles to drive through opposing ranks. But, firstly, they had knives affixed to their axle, and any effect they had came from this. Secondly, they did not turn very fast. This kind of ``chariot'' would not be any improvement over the straddle cars and such in use in ANE by 2300 BCE. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jan 18 20:57:55 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 15:57:55 EST Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Latin was spoken among the Celts before the Roman Army ever arrived. -- by a few traders. Are you suggesting that Latin would have spread over the whole of Europe in the _absense_ of Roman conquest and subsequent political power? >Latin's main attraction was the badge of Roman citizenship. -- and Roman citizenship was important because the Romans had conquered a huge area. QED. ><folk migrations and conquests starting in the 5th century AD.>> >I don't know what this has to do with anything. The point was that there >have been many cases where the "dominant elite" disappear in the pre-existing >language. -- _my_ point was that the spread of Slavic is an excellent illustration of the sort of mechanism by which PIE probably originally spread -- folk-migration accompanied by establishment of political dominance. This does _not_ require any elaborate state structure -- the Slavs didn't have anything above a local chieftainship. There are numerous African examples in historic times; the Galla migrations into the Ethiopian highlands, for instance. >The point was, e.g., the Russians do not speak Mongul, Turkic, Gothic, Greek >or Scandinavian - although all of these arguably represented the languages of >various "dominant elite" - these speakers all seem to have been assimilated >by Russian. -- quite true; I don't buy Renfrew's "elite dominance" model. Something much more substantial is required, especially in a pre-state and pre-literate setting. >Be assured I find your reply not absurd but very confusing. "Every major >Middle Eastern power" were NOT steppe invaders nor IE speakers. -- to begin with, the Hittites _were_ IE speakers, and the elite of the Mitannian kingdom were (originally) IE speakers too -- Indo-Aryan, to be precise. Even after they were assimilated by their Hurrian-speaking subjects, they retained Indo-Aryan terms for chariot and horse technology (as well as throne-names for their kings and the names of some gods, Indara, Mitra and so forth). Moreover, the chariot was invented _not_ in the Middle East, but in the Eurasian steppe zone, by IE speakers. They _introduced_ it into the Middle East; we have more records of chariot warfare there because that was the zone of literacy. However, the Vedas (dating from the mid-2nd-millenium BCE) are full of descriptions of chariot warfare -- archers shooting from moving chariots -- essentially identical to that in the Middle East. The Shang Chinese also adopted the chariot as their elite military arm. Archaeological sources show it was common in barbarian Europe; so do later written sources by Mediterranean observers. There's a petroglyph of a chariot from as far north as Sweden dated to about 1300 BCE. the chariot was the dominant military arm from the early 2nd millenium on -- the battle of Kadesh would be an example, but there are hundreds of others. We have more examples from the Middle East because >I took your suggestion to heart and discovered that by all accounts the use >of the chariot by archers was innovated by the Eygptians about 1200BC. -- that is grotesque. The chariot-born archer was a staple of warfare centuries before that and all through the region. From rdrews at richmond.edu Tue Jan 18 14:20:38 2000 From: rdrews at richmond.edu (Robert Drews) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 09:20:38 -0500 Subject: archers in chariots In-Reply-To: <0.d3f21126.2591c1ea@aol.com> Message-ID: Steve Long has written, >By the "period when the chariot was an actual factor", you say you mean when >it was being used by archers. I took your suggestion to heart and discovered >that by all accounts the use of the chariot by archers was innovated by the >Eygptians about 1200BC. >I take it therefore that it is your well thought-out contention that the >IndoEuropeans borrowed this idea from the Egyptians to conquer many lands and >force IE languages upon them? I will further "study the data" from the >period and let you know what I turn up. >Steve Long This is wrong. Ca. 1200 BC chariots as mobile platforms for archers were suddenly going out of style. Chariot warfare began ca. 1700 BC, and was basic to the success of both the 15th (Great Hyksos) Dynasty in Egypt and to Hattusili and Mursili of Hatti. And although most linguists and Aegeanists would not agree, I am still convinced that it was not coincidental that the Shaft Grave dynasty appeared at Mycenae just after chariot warfare began. 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 larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jan 18 11:29:06 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 11:29:06 +0000 Subject: Basque butterflies Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister writes: [on the Basque 'butterfly' words in ] > Any possible link between and Spanish "bug, > critter, varmint" and also various slang meanings Doubt it. Basque means 'pretty', 'pretty little thing', 'ornament', 'jewel'. It has no connection with bugs or any other critters anywhere except in the 'butterfly' words cited. And let's face it: as bugs go, butterflies are exceptionally pretty. This occurs in various other names. For example, the common Basque word for 'daisy' is -- literally, 'jewel-flower', I guess. [on Basque 'grasshopper', literally 'Marty-jump'] > maybe influenced by Spanish "Grasshopper", literally > "jump weeds" In fact, formations of this general kind are fairly frequent as names for small creatures in both Basque and Spanish. Note, for example, 'Mary-witch' for 'praying mantis', 'Martin-fisherman' for 'kingfisher', and others in this vein. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Tue Jan 18 13:17:16 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 15:17:16 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: Good IE-ists! I'm interested in knowing how widely accepted is the theory that the Indo-European "Urheimat" was located in Eastern Europe. And how much support do such theories as e.g. Colin Renfrew's idea of the Anatolian origin of IE languages have? I ask this beacause one central piece of evidence in support for the East-European origin comes from outside the field of IE studies, namely Uralic linguistics. But it seems to me (correct me if I'm wrong!) that among many IE-ists, there's a tradition of uninterest in diachronic linguistics done outside the IE language family. So, I'd also like to ask how well is the recent progress in Uralic linguistics known inside your field of research? And especially, I'd be interested in hearing comments on what is presented below from those who do NOT support the East-European original home. During the last ten years it has been discovered that Uralic languages possess extremely ancient IE loan words: they were loaned from proto-IE to proto-U[ralic], which has been dated approximately 4000 bc or before. In order to provide some substance for discussion, I will give some examples on the loan etymologies. All etymologies derive from the Germanist Jorma Koivulehto and most can be found in his book "Uralische Evidenz für die Laryngaltheorie" (1991). The etymologies are meant to serve only as an illustration. Thus, only a fraction of the credible loan etymologies put forward are presented here. proto-U *pel(x)i- 'fear' < proto-IE *pelH- 'grau, fahl; schreckig' p-U *toxi- 'bring, give, sell' < p-IE *doH- 'give' p-U *koki- 'see, find' < p-IE *Hokw- 'see' p-U *kulki- 'move, flow, walk' < p-IE *kwelH- 'drehen, sich drehen usw.' p-U *mos´ki- 'wash' < p-IE *mozg(-eye)- 'untertauchen' p-U *s´alkaw- 'pole, rod' < p-IE *g´halgho- id. p-U *weti- 'water' < p-IE *wed- id. The criteria by which the loans must be judged proto-Uralic are the following: 1) The phonological shape of their cognates in present-day U languages does not warrant one to assume that they were loaned separately into (and between) already differentiated U languages / dialects. The distribution suggests the same: all the etymologies above have cognates in at least one U language in the Baltic Sea area and one in Siberia. 2) the proto-U form requires a specifically proto-IE loan original. Many even show proto-U *k or *x as a substituent of an IE laryngal. It is undeniable that the contacts between speakers of U and IE languages date back to the earliest stages recovered by the comparative method. Thus the speakers of proto-U and proto-IE must have been geographical neighbors. As a result, theories such as Renfrew's Anatolian "Urheimat" must obviously be discarded (it is of course impossible to assume that proto-U spekers would have occupied an area south of the Black Sea). It seems that the only logical option is to place proto-IE in Eastern Europe north of the Black Sea. This area is just about south from area where current research usually places the center of the Uralic expansion. Ante Aikio student of the Saami language and general linguistics The Department of Finnish and Saami Language and Logopedics University of Oulu, Finland anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Jan 19 14:37:54 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 14:37:54 +0000 Subject: Basque butterflies again Message-ID: This is a joint response to the comments made by Ed Selleslagh and by Lloyd Anderson. First, I endorse Ed's observation that words for 'butterfly', at least in European languages, often appear to exhibit a moderately high degree of instability, rendering them of questionable value in investigating linguistic prehistory. Second, and far more importantly, I am not happy with attempts at considering the numerous Basque words for 'butterfly' in isolation from the rest of the Basque lexicon. The 'butterfly' words in Basque, or most of them, exhibit a number of phonological and distributional characteristics which are entirely typical of expressive formations but not at all typical of ordinary lexical items: unusual length, unusual segments and sequences, severe localization, great and unusual variation in form, and other things. Take the mainly Lapurdian forms ~ . Lapurdian, almost alone among the varieties of Basque, is very fond of expressive formations in , and . Here are some examples of such expressive forms: 'bounce' 'back' 'favorite' ~ 'bud' (of a flower) 'tit' (bird) ~ 'garfish' 'bang!' 'somersault' 'sound of falling' 'rag doll' 'thud', 'heartbeat' ~ 'chatterbox', 'long-winded person' 'a kind of bell' 'hitting' (nursery word) '(a) blow' ~ 'doll' ~ 'heartbeat', 'elegantly dressed' ~ 'petite, plump and pretty' (of a woman) ~ 'very large mushroom' 'sound of a fall', 'sound of a gunshot' '(a) fall', 'peashooter' 'in a slow, trudging manner' 'large bell' ~ 'bounce' (of a ball) 'hammering' 'tuft', 'tassel' ~ ~ '(a single) tear', 'dewdrop', 'bubble', 'bulb' 'somersaulting' 'clog' (footwear) (nursery word) 'poppy' These words have no identifiable morphological structure, and they contain no recognizable morphemes, apart from the adverbial <-ka> found in a couple of them. They are nothing but sequences of speech sounds. Now, I submit that the Lapurdian butterfly words in belong strongly to this group of expressive formations, and that their origins should therefore be sought in this specifically Lapurdian pattern of coining expressives, and not among vague resemblances in implausibly far-flung languages. It appears that the Lapurdians, some centuries ago, settled on an expressive pattern consisting of , or followed by more or less arbitrary sequences of agreeable sound in order to coin expressives. Items of such a form are all but unknown in other varieties of Basque. And, of course, native Basque lexical items with the slightest claim to antiquity never begin with /p/ (the ancient Basques apparently couldn't pronounce initial /p-/) and never contain the sequence /np/ (which was categorically voiced to /nb/ in Lapurdian and in most other dialects in the medieval period). A few further comments. The word 'pretty', 'pretty little thing', 'ornament', 'jewel', apparently present in the large group represented by , is of uncertain origin but is often suspected of being a palatalized form of 'alive', 'living'. The suggested semantic development is 'living' > 'moving' > 'flashing', 'sparkling', > 'pretty', 'jewel', or something similar. So, as Ed suggests, is very likely the *ultimate* source of the first element, but it cannot be the *direct* source. The final sequences <-tola>, <-dola> and <-tera>, found in some of the words, are described by Ed as familiar derivational or diminutive suffixes. Not in Basque, I'm afraid. No such word-forming suffixes as these are attested in Basque in any function at all: they appear to be no more than arbitrary extensions. Finaly, I am amused by Ed's suggestion that the of (and variants) might represent "the noise of a flying insect". Butterflies don't make any noise. I therefore conclude that Lloyd's efforts at linking some of the Basque words to words in other languages (and also to one another) are without foundation. The Basque 'butterfly' words are numerous and severely localized; they conform strongly to observed patterns for coining expressive formations; and they can scarcely be of any antiquity. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From edsel at glo.be Wed Jan 19 18:17:39 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 19:17:39 +0100 Subject: Root versus lexical languages. Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Wednesday, December 29, 1999 9:25 PM > I wonder if we really can "distinguish" the two types of language? Is it > not more of a spectrum, of which we can identify the two ends? We might > well be able to compare two languages and recognise that one lies more one > way along this spectrum than the other, but I don't think we can make a > division, in the way Stephane's posting suggests. Indeed, I have seen > precisely this comparision usefully made for English and German in a German > book about English. > As for "lexical" languages developing into "root" languages, is that not > currently happening in Chinese - where new formations are transparently > formed from lexical items by the addition of a further syllable or even > syllables, whose "lexical" meaning has become less important than their > lexicalising function? E.g. the plural marker on pronouns, the -zhe suffix, > the temporal/aspectual markers, the directional markers on verbs, and so on. > Peter [Ed. Selleslagh] What about the following theory: isolating > agglutinating > flecting, in a continuous manner. And much later on > isolating. That seems a fair description of what's happening to Chinese (first step), Finnish (second step), English (third step) etc. Ed. From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Wed Jan 19 19:00:26 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 14:00:26 -0500 Subject: permissible IE roots? In-Reply-To: <003c01bf53a9$2791aca0$b37819d4@bigcomputer> Message-ID: On Fri, 31 Dec 1999, Daniel Baum wrote: > Hi all, > > On a similar subject, would anyone happen to know why there appear to be no > roots of the form CHH? There are roots with two laryngeals (such as one of > the words for "to sit", as in Skt aaste), but none with two contiguous. If it's the case that the laryngeals are some sort of fricatives (which is as good a guess as any), this isn't too surprising; it's not uncommon for languages to prohibit sequences of two consecutive fricatives. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Wed Jan 19 06:32:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 06:32:00 GMT Subject: IE etymological dictionary Message-ID: In spite of the dated and questionable quality of the old "Indoeuropaeisches etymologisches Woerterbuch" by Pokorny, many scholars would like to have a CD-ROM-version of it. Does anyone know the state of the work on a new IE etymological dictionary at LEIDEN, NL? I tried an e-mail to Kulikov at pcmail.LeidenUniv.nl, but that was returned by the net. Regarding to the Leiden-University homepage, Kulikov is not listed in their staff nor did I find any hint on such a project. Does anyone have an up-to-date information on the Leiden project? Does anyone know of digitalized versions of the 'Pokorny IEW' What font has been used? Hans J Holm - - et monere et moneri - - From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Jan 20 07:01:51 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 07:01:51 GMT Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <006c01bf62aa$825f28a0$e401703e@edsel> Message-ID: "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) Only ON hwel < *kwelo-. The English and Dutch vowels can only derive from *ew. The development was: *kwekwlo- > *hwegwlo ~ *hweGwlo > *hwewlo > { OE hwe:ol > wheel | ODu. *hwi at l > wiel }. Curiously, the loss of -g- here is only semi-regular (or we wouldn't have OE hweogul), which makes me wonder why Szemere'nyi, in his "Introduction", chose this example to illustrate the regularity of sound laws in general (2.1. "... To give an extreme but by no means untypical example: the correspondence between Eng. wheel, Gr, kuklos, and OInd cakra-, despite appearances to the contrary, is exact to a hair (as we shall see later, 4.7.5.1)." Cakra is exact to hair from *kwekwlo-, but the Greek word too is only semi-regular (regular would have been **teklos, would it not?). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Jan 20 21:32:17 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 16:32:17 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >Several researchers have proposed that "wheel" was a technological >word, much like "computer" today, e.g. Japanese kompyutaa [sp?]; >If this is true, the concept and the word may have spread so fast >that it looks like as if it were inherited from IE -- apart from the fact that the PIE words for "wheel" can be analyzed into PIE roots, this wouldn't make any difference even if 'twere so. If it was borrowed into PIE while PIE is still united, that dates the era 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. From edsel at glo.be Fri Jan 21 12:09:50 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 13:09:50 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2000 8:29 AM [snip] > Remember that I offered two ways for the word for "wheel" to spread across a > already existing IE diversity. The first was as a technological innovation. > The second was as a preexisting word adapted to a new meaning. [snip] > Finally there is the matter of about half of IE apparently not using > *kwelos/*kolos (fl. Buck) at all as the source of its word for wheel. So > that the predicted sound changes extend as far as I can see only to some IE > language families - particularly German and Slavic - and agreeing with Buck I > don't think Greek is one of them. (And when you have at least two words for > wheel you don't have strictly speaking the singularity that necessarily > suggests pre-divergence unity - compare the word for 'wool' e.g., which > demonstrably would be older than the word for wheel.) [Ed. Selleslagh] To that, I would like to repeat what I said before Xmas (but it got published on the list two weeks later), and recently (about the reduplication in *kwekwlo), becuase it widens the range of probably pre-existing words: "What if all the IE words like *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- , and Gr. trochos are older than the wheel/chariot/wagon, and represent only new uses as required by the emergence of new technology? (cf. German Rechner = computer, a new use of a much older word). My suggestions would be the following: - Tro'chos/trocho's: maybe a variant (Mycenean inspired? cf. iqo - hippo's) related to Tro'pos/tropo's, meaning 'turn, return' - *kwekwlo-, Gr. kyklos: meaning 'circle, round'. - *rotHo- : meaning 'rotate, turn around, revolve, spin'. [*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. On the other hand, M. Carrasquer said: "The PGmc. form was something like *hwe(g)wlaz", which would mean my view is wrong.] That would mean various things: 1. IE languages had a choice among pre-existing semantically related roots for the new technology. 2. Even if they had all chosen the same root, quod non, this would still not be proof of IE unity at the moment the wheel was invented or became known to IE lgs. speaking peoples. Just a thought..." BTW, I don't understand why you exclude Greek from the *kwe(kw)los group, or is it only from the ones that share the sound changes of the word? > Which brings me back to what I think is the more convincing explanation - > that diverse PIE speakers used a pre-existing word to describe the wheel. [snip] > And I hope at least that I'm suggesting that the theory that PIE can be dated > by such vocabulary is not entirely leakproof - even to those who have been > convinced by such methods in the past. > Regards, > Steve Long I couldn't agree more. Ed. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jan 20 04:05:02 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 22:05:02 -0600 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <006c01bf62aa$825f28a0$e401703e@edsel> Message-ID: It seems like someone had Spanish "to be in motion, engage in activity, function/work (i.e. machines), go around, walk, travel, etc." in mind as the translation for Basque and then tried to come up with an English equivalent.[Note that andar does have somewhat different semantics in different regions of the Spanish speaking world.] And from what Larry Trask says, I wonder if either andar or ibili may be semantically influenced by the other form. [snip] >[Ed] >I learned it (i.e. "go around") from you, maybe two years or so ago, on the >Basque-l list. >> First of all, the verb does not mean 'walk', though it is often so >> glossed, for want of a better equivalent. It is a verb of undirected >> motion, >> and the best English gloss I can offer is 'be in motion'. And no such sense >> as 'go around' is attested or reconstructible. >> Furthermore, the verb is definitely not a compound, nor does it >> contain the element * 'round'. It has the normal structure for a >> native >> Basque verb. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Thu Jan 20 08:15:06 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 02:15:06 -0600 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: At 07:10 AM 1/13/00 GMT, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: [speaking of the non-finite form in Basque] > The infinitive is clearly *e- (verbal noun formant) >+ *-bil- + *-i (adjectival suffix), the inflected forms (e.g. >na-bil "I walk (around)") show nothing but the verbal root *bil >(which also, and probably not by coincidence, happens to be a >nominal root *bil "round"). I'd like to follow up a bit on Miguel's last comment above. First let me state that I'm a bit confused about the nature of the Basque evidence itself. But before turning to that question, let me add that the relationship between the Basque root-stem <-bil> and the IE materials is equally unclear to me at this stage. So, speaking of the meaning "round" that is attributed of proposed nominal root *, could someone explain to me the role of <-bil> in the compound (also ) defined by Azkue as "sphere, something round" (all citations are from Azkue unless otherwise indicated). Also, what is the meaning of the first element and could that element be affecting our interpretation of the prototype meaning of <-bil> (as well as *)? Actually I'm not familiar with appearing in isolation with the meaning "round". For example, the most commonly cited compound is whose meaning is glossed/translated as "round". But isn't the meaning "round" derived primarily from two expressions both being compounds? And, yes, I do know that the meaning that is assigned to * is "round" and that there are other compounds where <-bil> appears as a suffixing element. Nonetheless, I believe a closer examination of the compounds will suggest a slightly different interpretation. In the case of it seems to me that there is a question concerning its composition. One analysis could derive it from a reduplication based on which is a relatively high frequency prefixing element in Basque. Yet my own intuitive analysis of the compound would identify the first element with "his/her/its", one of two 3rd p. sg. genitive pronouns, that has undergone vowel raising, not particularly unusual in Basque. Moreover, is a common element in compounds Also, when dealing with the Basque evidence one must consider the possible relationship between the verbal root of ( "to gather up" and the <-bil-> of . The bare-stem or radical , as in , is found in a large number of compounds, and if I'm not mistaken, almost always with the notion of "gathering up, collecting", e.g., "joint, place of articulation; meeting place (from with <(g)une> "space, segment, opening, moment"); "pilgrimage, 'romeria', outing with a going and coming; reunion; ritual or communal turn for recollection of goods, i.e., usually involving following an agreed upon itinerary through the village or countryside (and hence 'movement'): from where <-era> is the allative ending ("towards") also commonly used to form nominal compound constructions. The allative ending is <-ra> after vowels and <-era> after consonants. Certainly * (*) could be interpreted as "to move/turn on oneself, to roll (oneself) up, to gather oneself up, to move toward oneself, to contract". I would note that we find the following in Azkue: () "redondear; agenciar; enroscarse una culebra"; ()"envolver, apelotonar, ganar por astucia o deseza, enredar; recoger el ganado." In addition there is the example of and its variant which were coined to mean "automobil" and said to be a compound translating quite literally the notion of "self-mover" (cf. Llande's _Dictionaire...1926), at least that was how the word was explained to me by Basque speakers many years back. In addition, there are a number of bisyllabic and trisyllabic items that appear to be compounds ending in a suffixing element in <-pil/-bil>, () "wheel", "type of pastry; hinge", (*?)"knot", whose meaning is not always entirely clear. I'm quite certain that there a several other examples that simply don't come to my mind right now, although Jon Patrick probably could pull them up from his computerized list. The difficulties involved in retrieving such items, compounds with a given suffix, is another reason that Azkue's dictionary should be computerized in its entirety and without attempting to modify the spelling of the entries in order to convert them all into Batua, the written standard invented some thirty years ago. And following up on LT's comment about the meaning of , would "to go about" be a better rendition of its meaning? Azkue translates it simply as "andar". Furthermore, I would imagine that if LT once glossed the meaning of "ibili" as "to go around", he probably meant by that to say the verb often was used to mean "to go around/about (doing X or Y)." Additionally, with respect to * giving rise to , there is a curious aspect of Basque that might be related to the meanings cited above for compounds such as and . I refer to the fact that there is a certain amount of evidence that in Basque the notion of "to turn into, transform (oneself)" is connected to the concept of "twisted" but not from the point of view of our highly negative IE image schemata which sets out "straightness" as a standard/base reality. Rather "twisted" carries strong connotations of "resistance", of "rolling up on itself/oneself" as a newly woven rope is prone to do, twisting itself back into a series of loops, coiling itself up: when pressure is applied it can be straightened out, but when the pressure/force is removed it goes back to its "natural" shape, and curls itself back up." In Spanish for instance I believe that "twisted" implies that force was applied to an object that was originally "straight" and that produced its "twisted" appearance. In Basque the internal strength of being is in , in the return to the rolled up or coiled up state in which the being's innate energy is exercised and contained in the shape itself. It would appear that in Basque the polarity of the gestalt is/was fundamentally positive although certainly the resistance offered by the rope, person or object to our will/desires can be problematic. Yet this complex image schema that is at work here making it possible for to mean "to twist up, coil up, curl up" as well as "to transform" ("to take back its original shape" almost as if an inner force, as was the case with the coiled rope, sets in motion the change). Keeping this in mind, it could be argued that the meanings of * derive from or are in some fashion related to this same gestalt. Notice that in English we "bend someone to our will", implying that the person's "resistance" is conceptualized or projected spatially as "straightness" to which force is applied and in this way it will be twisted/bend out of its original shape. The scene projected metaphorically is one in which energy source comes from the outside and is then applied to the object or person. Stated differently, there are two scenarios: 1) in English when the object's resistance ("ego/individual will") is overcome, the shape implied by the expression is "twisted" and when the external force is removed, the object remains "bent" or "twisted" and 2) in Basque while the external force iseing applied the object is offering resistance to being "straightened out" by the will/force of the other and then once the external force is removed the object is understood to immediately spring back and recover its original shape. In short, generally speaking in English, as I mentioned above, "straightness" is viewed as the "given", the natural state, and "twisted" is what results from the application of an * external * force. And a final aside. In the case of , certainly today we find it used with negative connotations, much as it is in Spanish, but at the same time it often carries a strong notion of "mischieviousness". Indeed, I've heard Basque parents who when discussing the problem of "educating/civilizing" their children, refer to this as a problem of "domesticating" their off-spring. Indeed, according to Azkue, the abstraction refers to "caracter violento; indocil" which might be rendered by the English term "wild(ness)" Again, I would emphasize that in Basque the notion of "transformation" calls into play an image gestalt or motion gestalt that doesn't appear to be present in Romance or English. Actually is used today also to mean "to translate"). In summary, I don't know of any general studies of this problem in IE languages, especially diachronic ones since it is clear that the Basque data has conceptual overlays that can be traced to the image schemata found in the surrounding IE languages and firmly embedded in the metaphoric legacy of Christianity, etc. And to conclude this perhaps already too lengthy discussion, I would mention that in Mikel Morris's highly readable and well researched Basque-English/English-Basque Dictionary (1998), we find that the English word "coil" is translated by three terms containing the element : as , and . On egin, Roz Frank From rao.3 at osu.edu Fri Jan 21 10:28:29 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 05:28:29 -0500 Subject: Wheeled Vehicles. Message-ID: wrote, in a message dated Tuesday, January 18, 2000 4:17 PM Subject: Re: Wheeled Vehicles. > -- "A two-wheeled vehicle with wheels some 60 cm in diameter was recovered > from a Catacomb burial at Maryevka in the Ukraine, presumably of the third > but possibly second millenium BCE... the chariot is well attested in the > Shinasta culture southeast of the Urals. Dating from c. 2100 to 1700 BCE, > this culture provides abundant evidence for chariots... The wheels have eight > to twelve spokes. The vehicles, found in burials, are unequivocally > associated with horses and were drawn by a paired team." But could they turn at gallop or even at canter? If not, why are they superior to the straddle cars of ANE? Horses are not magic. I am yet see any solid evidence backed up >real data< to why horse draught is inherently superior to onager draught. >> Secondly, the slippage of the neck bands was prevented by placing the axle >> of the chariot at the back > -- this is a specific feature of _Egyptian_ chariots, and was not common > elsewhere. Hittite chariots, for example, used a mid-body location for the > axle. This is questionable. See Littuar and Crowell, ``Wheeled vehicles and ridden animals in ANE''. Hittite evidence is from seals and sealing, where space constraint is a problem. Later NE evidence (Assyrian and Persian) shows rear-axle as well. This was not specifically Egyptian. To put it bluntly, mid-body axle and yoke secured by neck-bands would pose serious problems unless steps are taken to keep the weight on the axle at all times, including in turns. This is clear to any one with working knowledge of levers (which seems to be decreasing over time). If you disagree go out, do the experiments and publish the photos. If not, I will go with those who done that. If it is to work in the real world, one experiment is worth 1000 philogists/archaeologists/linguists' speculations. > Mallory & Adams' reconstruction of the Shinasta chariot shows a yoke with > Y-fork additions at the front -- precisely the form of "primitive > horse-collar". What is the evidence this is based on? I have seen the photos from the digs. There is nothing but indentations from the wheels and the ends of axles. Show me the physical evidence for these ``y-forks''. I don't buy proof by authority. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jan 20 03:48:38 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 21:48:38 -0600 Subject: T-shirt/was Wheel In-Reply-To: Message-ID: In Spanish there are probably at least a dozen words for T-shirt The most common ones I've run into are: camiseta < camisa "shirt" + -eta feminine derivative (and usually) diminuitive suffix for (mainly) objects derived from or resembling some other object --this is the most common word that I've run into playera < playa "beach" + -era feminine occupational suffix (English -er) In Cuba I heard "pulover" < English pullover I've seen "camisa de T" but only on packages of T-shirts made by US companies I've only heard "T-shirt" /ticher/ used by US Hispanics and other Hispanics in the US [snip] ><<...there are recent loan words [in Japanese] (e.g. tiishatsu "T-shirt")...>> >I would love to compare T-shirt as it has been "accepted" into languages that >are nearer or farther from English and see if the pattern did not approximate >the kind of changes 'wheel" underwent. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From mclasutt at brigham.net Thu Jan 20 07:08:58 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 00:08:58 -0700 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: <10.290418.25b62ace@aol.com> Message-ID: Steve Long wrote: "I am simply trying to proceed one point at a time. The only issue is how you know that evidence of what was shared has not disappeared." I've got a couple of points to make on this issue. If two modern languages had a common origin very long ago (past the 10,000 year boundary layer, for example), then it's highly probable that they have lost or changed in opposite directions so many common characteristics that their relationship is no longer recognizable. If we assume monogenesis, for example, then Basque has modern relatives, but all evidence of the relationship is gone or changed beyond recognition. In other words, if two languages have changed so much over a long period of time, then the evidence, as you rightly say, IS lost or unrecognizable. To tie that comment directly to the above quote, in this case we CANNOT know anything about what has disappeared or even whether or not it was there in the first place. My second point, however, calls into question your assumptions that this case must also apply to Indo-European in many respects. The process you mention (complete loss or unrecoverability) is a fixture of DEEP time depths and prevents us from crossing the BOUNDARY. Indo-European is a relatively young family (compared to, for example, Australian, whose time depth is on the order of 40,000 years and whose member languages have been subject to areal borrowing and dissemination of features on a scale that isn't really surpassed anywhere else [you should read R.M.W. Dixon, The Rise and Fall of Languages]). Let's look at English as an example of a "radically changing language". If we look at the lexicon of English, we find that well over half of the total vocabulary is Italic or Hellenic in origin. But if we look at the 1000 most common words, then they are 80% inherited from Proto-Germanic. Within the morphology of the language, much of the Proto-Germanic morphology is overwhelmed by derivational affixes borrowed from Italic and Hellenic. Yet, once again, when we look at the most common morphology it is Germanic. Our syntactic structures are also clearly derived from Germanic structures. But that is working with productive evidence and is not to your point. When a feature is "lost" in a language, it does not suddenly disappear, and usually does not completely and totally disappear even after a long period of time. Take, for example, the strong verbs of English. These reflect a productive process in Germanic for forming past tense verbs by vowel modification. In English it is dying out. It is not productive, but it is not gone either. We see the process in decay in many ways as it becomes less common, but there is still substantial evidence for it. (My wife and I were playing Boggle tonight and she found the word 'dived'. For the life of me, I couldn't make the past participle of 'dive' sound at all right. 'I have dove' is certainly ungrammatical, but 'I have dived' is equally obnoxious to me. I'm glad I don't enjoy swimming!) As another example of how "long lost" are actually not really lost, but only hiding, in Proto-Numic (ca. 2000 BP) from the Great Basin of the US (Uto-Aztecan stock), geminating the medial consonant of a verb stem (overwhelmingly CVCV) indicated that the verb was durative in aspect. Some of the daughter languages have exactly the opposite meaning for gemination, i.e., momentaneous aspect, and some have lost the feature altogether. However, the key to determining that this feature is not "lost" in any of the languages is that a very small (and dwindling) set of verbs in each of the languages also mark plural object or subject by geminating the medial consonant. It is this internal reconstruction that allows us to see evidence of older features of the grammar of a language even when that feature has long since become totally unproductive. It's been my experience after 20 years of looking at comparative data from Native America (where there is no written tradition), that using internal reconstruction can triple or even quadruple the amount of good phonological, morphological and syntactic evidence for demonstrating relationships or doing subgrouping. The time depth of Proto-Indo-European is well within any maximum limit to the effectiveness of identifying internal evidence of formerly productive processes in the great majority of languages. So then: Can every piece of evidence for a relationship be lost or unidentifiably changed? Yes, but only at very great time depths (at least over 10,000 years). Can vocabulary be borrowed to such an extent that evidence of a relationship is lost? Not that I have ever seen. Even when a language borrows really extensively from another language (as English has borrowed from Italic), there is always a base level of commonly-used vocabulary that still retains its ancestral lexicon. Can morphology and syntax be borrowed to such an extent that evidence of a relationship is lost? Most likely not. While languages in long-term contact, such as the languages of the Northwest Coast of North America, can exhibit a great many similarities in phonological, morphological, and syntactic structure, there are always significant differences. Internal reconstruction can be used to identify structures characteristic of ancestral relationships even when none of the structures are still productive. Many comparative linguists actually consider the results of internal reconstruction to be better evidence for a relationship than productive processes. There may be a few features of Proto-Indo-European that are either lost or unrecognizable by any means in some or all of the daughters, but they are undoubtedly a small minority compared to the array of recognizable features. 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 alderson at netcom.com Thu Jan 20 18:59:28 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 10:59:28 -0800 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On 16 Jan 2000, Steve Long wrote: > Which brings me back to the point of my original post. A language borrows > and innovates radically. To the point where let's say - to make the point > clear to the most obtuse degree - 99% of all lexical and morphological > features are not from the original parent. If the language has *borrowed* 99% of its lexical and morphological features from another, it is a dialect of the second language with a substrate of the first, not the first at all. If it has borrowed 99% of its lexicon, and *innovated* 99% of its morphology, such that it does not match the morphology of the lexical donor, it would most likely be best viewed as a creole. Whatever the mix envisioned, yes, as Mr. Long writes, > The radically changing language could have little or no evidence left of its > genetic affilation. CRITICAL EVIDENCE OF THAT 'GENETIC' AFFILATION HAS BEEN > LOST. However, since we would not be looking at such a language for genetic evidence, it is irrelevant to the main effort. Rich Alderson From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Jan 20 22:01:43 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 17:01:43 EST Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: >rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: > How secure is East Germanic? Why is it not just an early form of N. Germanic? >i.e. what are the points that distinguish it? -- East Germanic is the earliest attested form of Germanic (the Gothic bible) but it already shows innovations not present in the earliest form of North Germanic, the runic inscriptions. There's a very close similarity; the Germanic languages were probably still one cluster of mutually intelligible dialects as recently as 0 CE. From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Jan 20 20:11:53 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 20:11:53 -0000 Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: Rick said: > How secure is East Germanic? > Why is it not just an early form of N. Germanic? W Walker Chambers & J R Wilkie "A short history of the German language" (1970) page 23 say "The older way of accounting to the development of these Germanic dialects was to assume the Primitive Germanic divided in to three branches: North ... East ... and West. This family tree is is still useful as a classification of the Germanic dialects, but it cannot explain their growth." They then go on to outline a theory - which they admit is not universally accepted - that Germanic should not be seen as a primitive unity which broke apart, but as a collection of at least five major groups which drew together as the common political and cultural life shifted and changed. The reality is that the various forms of Germanic are interrelated in complex ways, and a simple family tree does not do justice to the complexity. Nonetheless, East Germanic cannot be seen as an early form of North Germanic - it shares too much with Allemanic and Bavarian, for a start. Peter From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Jan 20 22:10:07 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 17:10:07 EST Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Does all this reflect the possibility that an accurate and true >morphological IE tree would and should look different than an accurate and >true lexical IE tree? -- no. Not if you're talking about determining genetic relationship. Vocabulary is borrowed much more freely than morphology, and from a wider range of sources. Therefore morphology gives a more accurate picture, on the whole. >This misses the point. The point is simply evidentiary. The radically >changing language could have little or no evidence left of its genetic >affilation. -- if 99% of the original language has been replaced, you're not talking about borrowing, you're talking about language succession; ie., abandoning one language and adopting another. To give examples of how this works in the real world, Persian and English both have very large stores of borrowed lexical items -- from Arabic and the Romance languages, respectively; amounting to around 50% of the total vocabulary. Nevertheless, any linguist could -- without any prior knowledge of these two languages -- take a brief look at modern Persian or English and give you a perfectly accurate analysis of their genetic relationships, including the period in which the massive borrowings took place. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Jan 20 22:42:27 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 17:42:27 EST Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >I think if you look closely you'll see that you cannot identify "shared" >innovations if they are no longer there to identify. -- in which case the language isn't there any more either. >(I think that may be terminological again. Since a language that is made up >entirely of loan words would have no genetic affilation except the languages >it loaned from.) -- actually, no. Borrowing vocabulary is not the same thing as borrowing syntax. In any case, languages do not in fact borrow all their vocabulary -- even in the case of a radically innovative language like English, the _core_ vocabulary remains remarkably stable. That, incidentally, was how the existance of Indo-European was deduced originally -- "father", "mother", etc. >And a robust language exposed to new ideas and things may be too interested >in change to retain the very shared attributes and innovations that you >might be using to show relatedness. -- you're anthromorphizing the process of language change again. It's not a conscious process, on the whole, and languages are not individuals. A language has no interests, desires, needs or wants and does not make "decisions". >If this is true, it should throw up a big caution sign in terms of measuring >relatedness in the context of varing rates of change among languages. -- we don't measure relatedness in terms of the RATE of change, we measure it in terms of SHARED INNOVATION. English has changed much more rapidly than say, Icelandic. This affects the genetic relations involved not one iota. >If I subject a group of plants to a good does of radiation and they mutate >like crazy and then compare the next generations to their unmutated >relatives, I may be hard put to call them very closely related at all. -- no, in point of fact their relationships would be entirely obvious once you'd done a DNA comparison. There's less than 2% genetic difference between chimps and humans, for instance. If you changed _all_ or nearly all the genes in an organism, it would die 100% of the time. >I would HAVE conclude that they were not related at all. -- see above. >AND finally the evolution of Frankish to French may be direct and historical >evidence of a how a language with insufficient resources needed to alter >substantially to absorb a much more complex cultural situation. -- Frankish did not evolve into French. Where did you get this bizzare notion? Frankish (a Germanic language) became _extinct_ in the Gallo-Roman areas to which the western Franks migrated, and in which the Franks were a dominant minority. It was replaced by a local Late Latin dialect which evolved into French (a Romance language). There are a couple of hundred Frankish loan-words in French, and some Celtic loans. French is no more Frankish than English is Italian (or Hindustani). From karhu at umich.edu Fri Jan 21 02:28:18 2000 From: karhu at umich.edu (Marc Pierce) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 21:28:18 -0500 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hi, Nobody else appears to have tackled this yet, so here's my shot: East Germanic is pretty secure. It's set off by the following: (1) a long e from Proto-Germanic long e1 (North and West Germanic have either long a or long o); (2) lack of r as a reflex of PGmc *z; (3) thorn + l corresponds to NWest Germanic f+ l; (4) some miscellaneous verbal things, like a passive inflection, a fourth class of weak verbs, and a reduplicated class of strong verbs. There's some other stuff, too: Gothic lacks umlaut, and consonant gemination before PGmc *j, and so on. There are a couple of points of North and East Germanic unity (Holtzmann's Law and so on), but I think they're pretty well outweighed by the evidence for NWest Gmc. Your next question sounds like Ingvaeonic (or North Sea Germanic), which is a separate group within West Germanic, not as an intermediate stage. There's a book on this topic, by Tom Markey, published in the 1970's in the IBS series. Marc Pierce On Tue, 11 Jan 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > What is the basis of this tree in Germanic? > How secure is East Germanic? > Why is it not just an early form of N. Germanic? > i.e. what are the points that distinguish it? > Is there any merit to the idea that there was a separate branch of > Germanic including Anglian, Jutish and pre-Frisian, intermediate between N > & W Germanic, andf that modern English and Frisian are the result of a > fusion between this and W Lowland Germanic? [ moderator snip ] From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Fri Jan 21 15:42:11 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 10:42:11 -0500 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: In an earlier post, I gave the following as the family tree for Germanic: >> PGmc >> / \ >> PNWGmc \ >> / \ \ >> WGmc NGmc EGmc On Tue, 11 Jan 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > What is the basis of this tree in Germanic? > > How secure is East Germanic? > Why is it not just an early form of N. Germanic? > i.e. what are the points that distinguish it? > Is there any merit to the idea that there was a separate branch of > Germanic including Anglian, Jutish and pre-Frisian, intermediate between N > & W Germanic, andf that modern English and Frisian are the result of a > fusion between this and W Lowland Germanic? Okay, let me answer your first two questions first. The sound changes which characterize NWGmc, which are not shared by EGmc, are as follows: -Stressed */e:/ > */a:/ -Word final */-o:/ > */-u/ -Unstressed word-final */-am/ > */-um/ There's also a morphological character whose specific identity is slipping my mind at the moment; there's some noun case or verb form where NWGmc has an innovative form. Now, it's true that some earlier authors grouped NGmc and EGmc together, so that the tree would show PGmc branching into WGmc and "NEGmc". The one decent argument for doing this is the so-called "sharpening" (Verscha"rfung). PGmc *-ww- comes out in Gothic as something spelled , and in Old Icelandic as something spelled or . This does superficially look like a shared innovation, but when you consider this one character against the four listed above, it appears that the correct analysis is that the Verscha"rfung is a parallel innovation (Alternatively, the phonologist Rolf Noyer and I have discussed the possibility that the Verscha"rfung was a _synchronic_ rule of PGmc which was lost in WGmc, which would likewise be consistent with the tree I drew above). Now, for your second question. You asked: > Is there any merit to the idea that there was a separate branch of > Germanic including Anglian, Jutish and pre-Frisian, intermediate between N > & W Germanic, andf that modern English and Frisian are the result of a > fusion between this and W Lowland Germanic? Within West Germanic, it's not possible to draw a clean Stammbaum, because the dialects developed in close contact with one another. Still, we recognize a major division within WGmc: 1) Ingvaeonic, also known as North Sea Germanic, which includes Old English, Old Frisian, and, with some complications, Old Saxon; versus 2) Old High German. (You used the term "Jutish"; we don't have any documents written in a language called "Jutish", but given that there's a traditional claim that there was a people called the Jutes who participated in the Germanic invasion of Britain, we can take Jutish to mean some part of the Ingvaeonic dialect continuum. Anglian, of course, is a dialect of OE.) There's sometimes been an idea floating around that "West Germanic" is an artificial designation, i.e. that "WGmc" is really an amalgamation of dialects which don't actually descend from any single Proto-West-Germanic language. This idea is can be safely rejected; there are some seven secure cases where the WGmc languages all share early innovations which are not found outside WGmc (again, I can list them if there's interest, but it would take a lot of time). The Ingvaeonic languages all show the common WGmc developments, and none of the NGmc developments; Ingv. is thus securely WGmc and not "intermediate" between WGmc and NGmc. There are a few sound changes which distinguish Ingvaeonic from the other WGmc languages. I won't go thru them all here unless there's interest, but one change which gives readily recognizable results to anyone who knows English and German is this: in Ingv., but not in OHG, a nasal before a voiceless fricative deletes with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel (this had already happened before */x/ in PGmc, but Ingv. extended it to all voiceless fricatives). Examples: English German other ander tooth Zahn soft sanft five fu"nf (etc. - many more examples) OE and the other Ingv. languages all underwent this change; none of the OHG dialects did. So if I were going to further flesh out the tree I drew above, I'd put a further branching under WGmc with a two-way split into Ingvaeonic and OHG. I wouldn't care to draw a Stammbaum for WGmc with any further detail than that, because there's just too much cross-contamination between dialects. I can't tell you how refreshing it is to actually talk about something with some real linguistic content for a change, rather than the interminable and largely vacuous discussions about whether a parent can coexist with its daughter, etc. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From jer at cphling.dk Thu Jan 20 16:27:46 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 17:27:46 +0100 Subject: NW vs E Germanic In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 11 Jan 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > What is the basis of this tree in Germanic? > How secure is East Germanic? > Why is it not just an early form of N. Germanic? > i.e. what are the points that distinguish it? Gothic is opposed to an innovating group of North and West Germanic in the following respects: 1. Final /-o:/ yields NWG -u, but Goth. -a. 2. Final /-am(z)/ yields NWG -um, but Goth. -am. 3. Voiced /z/ is not developed in the direction of /r/ in Goth., but is in NWG. 4. The pronoun *ju:z preserves its original vowel in Goth., but is changed to *ji:z in North and West. 5. Reduplicated ablauting verbs are preserved in Goth., but replace their interior part by the odd "/e:/2" in North and West. That spells unity for Norse and West Germanic. However, then there is the Verschaerfung problem which seemingly combines Norse and Gothic to the exclusion of West Germanic. On balance I believe one must see this as secondary disappearance of (at least some) Verschaerfung in West Germ., so that the events that produced Versch. operated in the common prehistory of ALL the Germanic we know. Jens > Is there any merit to the idea that there was a separate branch of > Germanic including Anglian, Jutish and pre-Frisian, intermediate between N > & W Germanic, andf that modern English and Frisian are the result of a > fusion between this and W Lowland Germanic? [...] I would like to know what linguistic facts that idea is based on. Jens From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Jan 20 11:21:54 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 11:21:54 +0000 Subject: Indo-Hittite Message-ID: Steve Long writes: > PS - Someone - I forget who - also wanted to know how the UPenn tree analysis > could claim to "confirm the Indo-Hittite hypothesize" when the actual > language used was Luwian. This is perhaps a misunderstanding arising from idiosyncratic terminology. Sturtevant's 'Indo-Hittite hypothesis' is awkwardly named, and it might better be called the 'IE-Anatolian hypothesis', or some such. This hypothesis says nothing about Hittite in particular, in spite of its name. Instead, it holds that Proto-Anatolian -- the ancestor of the entire Anatolian group, including Hittite and Luwian -- was not a daughter of PIE, but rather a sister of it. That is, it holds that PIE and Proto-Anatolian were both daughters of a single more remote ancestor, which might be called 'Proto-IE-Anatolian', or maybe 'Proto-Indo-Anatolian', but, in Sturtevant's terminology, it comes out bizarrely as 'Proto-Indo-Hittite'. Sturtevant's 'Indo-Hittite' is eccentric: it's comparable to referring to Balto-Slavic as 'Balto-Russian', or to Indo-Iranian as 'Indo-Kurdish'. I will confess, though, that I have never been able to see any testable empirical basis for distinguishing between the Indo-Hittite hypothesis and the less grandiose view that Proto-Anatolian was simply the first of the known branches of the IE family to separate from the rest. As far as I can see -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- Sturtevant's hypothesis, which requires a hypothetical single language equivalent to 'Proto-all-of-IE-except-Anatolian', can only be distinguished from a scenario in which the ancestral PIE splintered simultaneously into a number of distinct daughter branches. In fact, precisely this odd last view is the one commonly presented in those IE family trees that we see everywhere. But not many linguists are happy with such a massive sudden-disintegration scenario. It's merely that evidence has been lacking for imposing a more highly branched and more normal-looking tree structure upon the family. But this is precisely the issue addressed by the UPenn work. What Ringe's group was trying to do was to find a principled basis for drawing up just such a branching tree structure. And one of their results is that PIE did indeed undergo an original binary split into Proto-Anatolian and Proto-the-rest-of-IE. Of course, you don't have to buy their methods or their conclusions, but it is clear that the results they report confirm Sturtevant's hypothesis. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Jan 21 04:26:16 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 22:26:16 -0600 Subject: Basque butterflies again In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] >Take the mainly Lapurdian forms ~ . >Lapurdian, almost alone among the varieties of Basque, is very fond of >expressive formations in , and . Here are some >examples of such expressive forms: Not all of these seem expressive, some seem to be modified loanwords from Romance with assimilated consonants; perhaps "expressive" forms of loanwords I don't know the Gascon, Aragonese, Catalan or Occitan cognates to the French and Spanish forms [nor do I have access to dictionaries of those languages. But these may offer better matches > 'rag doll', ~ 'doll' See French poupon, English pompon < French ?; see proposed *bunn-/*munn- "lump, bump, hill, etc." > ~ ~ '(a single) tear', 'dewdrop', >'bubble', 'bulb' See Spanish bombilla, French ampule [sp?] > 'a kind of bell'; 'large bell' See Spanish campana --with assimilation of /k/ > /p/ > 'poppy' See Spanish amapola > 'thud', 'heartbeat' See Spanish palpitar [admittedly very weak] [snip] >A few further comments. The word 'pretty', 'pretty little thing', >'ornament', 'jewel', apparently present in the large group represented by >, is of uncertain origin but is often suspected of being a >palatalized form of 'alive', 'living'. The suggested semantic >development is 'living' > 'moving' > 'flashing', 'sparkling', > 'pretty', >'jewel', or something similar. >So, as Ed suggests, is very likely the *ultimate* source of the first >element, but it cannot be the *direct* source. Is it possible that < ? IE *wiwos "live" ? [ Moderator's note: The IE etymon of Latin _vivo-_, Greek _bio-_, Sanskrit _jiva-_, clearly has an initial labiovelar; other bits of evidence lead us to reconstruct an "o- coloring" laryngeal in the root, so *g{^w}iH{_3}-. Whether or not the Basque form can be derived thereform must be answered by someone else. --rma ] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Jan 21 04:46:12 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 22:46:12 -0600 Subject: Basque butterflies In-Reply-To: Message-ID: It might work, given that Spanish bicho also means "pecker" --like Yiddish schmuck < German schmuck "jewel". In [Brazilian] Portuguese, it's also acquired the meaning "sissy, pansy" [i.e. "effeminate"] >Rick Mc Callister writes: >[on the Basque 'butterfly' words in ] >> Any possible link between and Spanish "bug, >> critter, varmint" and also various slang meanings >Doubt it. Basque means 'pretty', 'pretty little thing', 'ornament', >'jewel'. Is it from a Gascon, Catalan or Occitan term cognate to French bijou? > It has no connection with bugs or any other critters anywhere except >in the 'butterfly' words cited. And let's face it: as bugs go, >butterflies are >exceptionally pretty. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From Georg at home.ivm.de Thu Jan 20 09:06:24 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 10:06:24 +0100 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria In-Reply-To: <007001bf5ff5$f6003c20$669f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: >It is my understanding that oral consonants are articulated by children >before nasal consonants. Is this incorrect in your view? Yes, this is incorrect in my view. You will not repeat that keeping your moputh shut and simply turn on your vocal cords ("/mmm/") is such a difficult thing that it invariable comes after, say, /p/, /ts/ or /r/, will you ? A different question is, however, whether this very simple, let's call it an "articulatory gesture", is really a "consonant". It might be sensible to reserve this technical term for non-vocalic articulatory gestures *when they form part of linguistically meaningful items*, which is certainly not the case for infants who first try out their articulatory tracts. So, again, the nasal /m/ is articulated *very* early, and it's association with whatever semantic content - done by the parents, of course - is an artefact of adults fancying that the child is actually speaking to them. At this stage, the child is certainly *not* "using" "language"; it's babbling. Babbling-research has established that, in phonetic terms, the sounds produced by infants vary greatly in frequency: at the top of the list are /m/ and /b/ alike, with the same frequency, followed by, in this order, /p/, /d/, /h/, /n/, /t/, /g/, /k/, /j/, /w/, /s/, aso. (Locke, J.L.: Phonological Acquisition and Change, NY: AP 1983). >All you have written is, of course, very plausible. Yes, it very obviously is ;-) >But --- and there is always a but, is there not? --- this does not really >address my argument, I do not think. >I am *not* maintaining that *mama is the early term for 'mother' but rather >*ama. Some societies conventionalize the fully reduplicated form /mama/, some don't. Some languages do know initial labials, some don't (and among these, some may allow for such a thing in a marked nursery term, some won't). Some cultures chose to conventionalize /deda/ for "mother", reserving /mama/ for "father". Some will conventionalize a one-syllable /ma/, some won't. When it comes to the act of conventionalizing, which is to be kept sharply apart from the "pre-speech-act" of babbling, the phonotactic rules of the language the poor child is about to learn from now on, do play a role (after all, the happy parents of a Tlinkit child do of course think that their napper is talking Tlinkit to them, and not Abkhaz, so even when the little one constantly babbles /mama/ they'll assume for convenience' sake that it actually wanted to say /ama/ [for argument's sake I assume that Tlinkit is one of the labialless languages of the American NW,. and that /ama/ is "mother" there; if this is not the case, take any language, where it is, and replace this example]). There may be other reasons, apart from phonotactics, and in some individual cases they may be hard to tell. So what ? >Larry brushes by this difference but I am hoping you will not. This is not brushing by. The word is "linguistics" (;-). >While *mama may be a perfectly plausible child's word for 'mother', the >frequently found form *?ama can, with an implausible level of difficulty, be >derived from it. Do you not agree? Of course, such words may change, once they have become conventionalized items of a language, they may be subject to any systematic change of the sound structure of this language. They may, however, and this is the point, why such terms shouldn't be allowed to play a decisive role in any classificatory work, escape this, either remaining stable in spite of sound-changes in other parts of the lexicon, or be innovated over and over again to maintain their emotional connotations (or, for that matter, in the case of imitative words, their iconicity). St.G. PS: Shoot, "mother" is /tla/ in Tlinkit, so think up a different example ... Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From Georg at home.ivm.de Thu Jan 20 09:17:10 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 10:17:10 +0100 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria In-Reply-To: <008501bf5ff7$da7dc6a0$669f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: >Unless you are arguing that *mama almost invariably is produced *first*, and >that the mother is inclined to accept the baby's *first* "word" as referring >to herself, then it is equally likely that the mother will reinforce *baba >or *papa as a selfg-designation --- a very rare occurrence. No, Pat, this is independent of what a given child utters "first" to its given mother. Language is social convention, and even if in Arkansas children are so linguistically gifted that they utter /tata/ or /kaka/ long before they manage to produce the enormously difficult nasals, their parents won't have the power to change the *conventionalization* of /mama/ = "mother" all on their own. They may well tell everyone that their child "said" /takata/ long before /mama/, and they may even decide that in their family from now on, /takata/ "means" "mother". Why not ? But it won't have any consequences for the speech-community on the whole, which has conventionalized "mummy" and the like long ago. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Thu Jan 20 22:53:53 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 17:53:53 -0500 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria (miau) In-Reply-To: <200001141120.MAA04215@tyr.diku.dk> Message-ID: On Fri, 14 Jan 2000, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote: >> From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) >> Nor does the use of a computer in any way guarantee greater >> objectivity. If I decide to reject words showing property P, then I >> can do this by hand or with a computer program, and the results will >> be the same. After all, the computer isn't going to inform me that >> it doesn't like my criteria. > Given total objectivity in the researcher, that is true. However, in > many scientific communities it is recognized that most researchers > will unconsciously bias their evaluation of experimental data to > reject more of those instances that will not support their theory. [...] > Having the researcher set the rules for acceptance of data and the > computer apply them, would make it much harder to get a bias in there. Actually, I think there's a real danger here. The mechanical way in which a computer carries out a query can give us an unwarranted confidence in the objectivity of the results. The problem is this: the database upon which you run your query was created by humans with the same potential for bias that you point out. Let me give an example here. Suppose that I'm creating a dictionary database of Old English, and I'm coding each word for the dates and dialects where it is attested. Well, scholars have differences of opinion regarding the date and dialect of a particular document. In such cases, I have to make a decision one way or the other; I have to consider the arguments that everyone gives and make my own best judgment about how I'm going to code this particular controversial case. So suppose you're querying my database, and you say, "Give me all the words attested in such-and-such a century and dialect with properties X, Y, and Z". The computer will indeed be entirely mechanical in selecting the words which meet these critera; but I hope it's clear that the output will unavoidably reflect the choices I made when building the database to start with. I'm not saying that we shouldn't use computers for this kind of purpose; quite to the contrary, I think that we've just scratched the surface of what computers can do for work in historical linguistics. My point is that researcher bias is just as possible when you're using computers as when you're doing the same work with paper and pencil. I reject the criticism that a set of findings are any less trustworthy because they were produced without the aid of a computer. Computers merely allow you to produce the same bias-prone results more quickly. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jan 20 08:13:34 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 08:13:34 -0000 Subject: PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: Dear Rick and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Rick Mc Callister" Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2000 4:58 AM [RC wrote:] > Is this ultimately based on an expressive/onomatopeic form similar > to the English expressive pu, pew, Spanish expressive puchi, uuf, puaf, > Italian expressive puzzi, etc.? > Are these expressive forms pretty universal? [PR wrote previously] >> *pu:to-s, I think it is relatively certain that its >> basal meaning is 'source or site of strong fragrance' (as attested by >> *pu:ti-, 'rot'), a concept broad enough to include both cunnus and podex [PR] The slope dividing lexical root from expressive is a slippery one, I admit. But, perhaps, one test that might be applied to differentiate them is whether the morpheme is question is capable of compounding. 'Whew!' is a expression of relief. But we do not --- except humorously --- say *whewness for 'relief'. Therefore, provisionally, we may probably account 'whew' to expressives. *pew(H)-, on the other hand, shows derived forms in many languages: e.g. Egyptian [bw] and [bwt], 'detest, abominate'. Here, I think we may probably accept *pew(eH)- as a lexical root. However, an additional factor may be that lexical roots which have a form that may be interpreted expressively tend to be retained over long periods of time. This particular root is very well represented in languages around the world. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Jan 20 20:00:03 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 20:00:03 -0000 Subject: PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister asked: > How 'bout a form ancestral to English "balls", Pokorny is interesting here (p121, under the entry bhel-, bhle:, to blow up, swell up). He refers to 'Hess. bille "penis" middle low German (ars-)bille, Dutch bil, old high German arsbelli (buttocks); and Anglo-saxon bealluc (testicles) < *bhol-n.' He includes Greek phallos "penis". "Bollocks" is interesting - it shows the older diminutive suffix found in hillock, bullock, buttock. Peter From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Jan 20 22:45:17 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 17:45:17 EST Subject: PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: >Rick Mc Callister >How 'bout a form ancestral to English "balls", Gaelic palla [sp?], >> -- ah... "balls" is rather transparently derived from the English word for "round object". From oldgh at hum.au.dk Fri Jan 21 09:24:16 2000 From: oldgh at hum.au.dk (George Hinge) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 10:24:16 +0100 Subject: PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister suggested > How 'bout a form ancestral to English "balls", Gaelic palla [sp?], >perhaps *bhel-; or are these later developments? Gaelic palla "penis" is >obviously borrowed (or expressively mutated) but the meaning is different >from English > I believe Theo Vennemann mentioned similar forms in Afroasiatic The English 'ball' is traditionally derived from the IE root *bhel- "swell", cf. Pokorny 120-2, i.e. *bhol-n-; a deminutive of 'ball' (which in the most Germanic languages has the polite meaning only) is to be found in Old English 'bealluc' "testicle". Pokorny also cites the Old High German 'arsbelli' "buttocks" (with umlaut). The zero grade, *bhl-no-, is represented by Greek 'phallo/s' (if not from *bhl-ios), Phrygian 'ba(m)balon', 'ballion', Old Irish 'ball' "limb, member", and English 'bull', which has kept in some Germanic Dialects a more explicit sexual denotation: Pokorny cites Hessisch 'bulle' "vulva", and I can add from my own language, Danish, the colloquial 'bolle' "have intercourse with". The e grade, *bhel-no- is represented (so Pokorny) by Middle High German '(ars)bille', Dutch 'bil' "buttocks" and Hessisch 'bille' "penis". It is interesting how the same root can generate different meanings such as "penis" and "testicle" on the one hand and "vulva" and "podex" on the other. I don't know if the Gaelic can be derived from OI 'ball'. George Hinge The Department of Greek and Latin The University of Aarhus, Denmark oldgh at hum.au.dk From jreiss at retemail.es Thu Jan 20 14:24:52 2000 From: jreiss at retemail.es (Jordi Reiss) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 15:24:52 +0100 Subject: Fuzzy phonology and phonetic change Message-ID: Hello to all, Just a short question: Is someone investigating in fuzzy phonology and linsguistic (phonetic) change? Regards, Jordi Reiss From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Jan 20 19:47:52 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 19:47:52 -0000 Subject: Northwest IE attributes Message-ID: As I understand the debate about NW attributes, it has reduced to an either-or which I believe is misleading. People appear to be arguing either that the NW group split off early, in which case satemisation is a problem, or that the language groups concerned remained in contact with I-I, in which case we cannot say there is a NW group. I think, on the contrary, that we can talk of a group even within a spectrum. We can talk of the three colours at the red end of the rainbow as a "group" in a meaningful sense (they are the "warm" colours, etc); we can talk of the three "blue" colours at the other end as another group. Likewise, I see no problem in talking of a group within a spectrum of languages. Within the Romance spectrum from Portugal to the toe of Italy, we could talk meaningfully of a group from Catalan to Piedmont, or a Galician-portuguese group, or a Southern Italian group. Therefore I think the debate is misguided. To talk of a "NW group" does not imply that these languages must have split off early from the other IE dialects. The boundaries can also remain fuzzy: Celtic and Germanic can be seen as central to the group, with Baltic and Slavonic on the one hand, and Italic on the other, sharing some characteristics but not others. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Jan 20 19:37:43 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 19:37:43 -0000 Subject: Northwest IE attributes Message-ID: Rick asked: > Why the exception kravih? It is far from being the only such word. PIEists reconstruct three series of velar consonants, based on centum kw ~ satem k; centum k ~ satem k; and centum k ~ satem k' (and simliarly for g, and gh, except that the evidence is slighter.) There are 166 PIE roots listed in Bird which begin with /k/ rather than /k'/ or /kw/, while 51 begin with plain /g/, and 57 with plain /gh/. Baldi, Foundations of Latin, says (summarised): The palatal series: satem k>s' and kw>k except (i) before /r/ and /a/; (ii) after /u/. This accounts for nearly all cases of the plain series /k/ (as opposed to the palatal k' or the labiovelar kw), so the plain series may not be needed for the reconstruction of PIE. See Beekes, Comparative IE linguistics 1995 p 109-113, and Lehmann, Theoretical Bases, 1993 pp 100-101. Baldi seems sadly out of line with the evidence. Many of the roots in Bird do not fit his "rules", and he also seems to ignore the evidence of a three-fold series suggested for both Anatolian and Albanian. Rick also said: > Sometimes, it almost looks as if IE has recessive genes, e.g. Romance > Satem, No - palatalisation in Romance is always and only due to the following vowel, while the whole point of the three-fold velar series in PIE is that the palatalisation in the satem languages has no explanation in any surrounding phonological features - at least none that we can yet discover, pace Baldi. Peter From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Jan 20 21:59:03 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 16:59:03 EST Subject: Northwest IE attributes Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >I You miss my point. *IF* satem was innovated among I-Ir speakers and then >only later 'adopted' by Balto-Slavic speakers, then we can still keep B-S >out of the "original" satem group and in the original NW group - since satem >would have been only adopted in B-S after the NW split-off. -- both Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian are satemized at the earliest recorded dates for either of those language groupings. This is one of a number of innovations shared by Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian and indicates that they remained in contact after Indo-Iranian had _lost_ contact with the other western IE dialects. It would be more accurate to refer to satemization as a process beginning somewhere in the Indo-Iranian dialect cluster and then spreading from there, the process "fading out" as it reached Balto-Slavic (and Armenian) and not carrying over into the next tier of IE dialects -- Germanic and Greek, for instance. Hard to date, but not later than, at the extreme, 1500 BCE or so -- the earliest recorded Mitannian sources (specifically Indo-Aryan) are from about that date) Most probably about a thousand years earlier -- say around 2500 BCE. Shared innovations between Baltic and Germanic indicate continued contact from a very early date. The obvious inference is that Baltic formed a geographical "bridge" for some time between Indo-Iranian and Germanic after the breakup of PIE, which again indicates a date for the terminus ad quem of PIE between 3500 and 3000 BCE. The west-to-east line would go Germanic-Balto-Slavic-Indo-Iranian, and there's every indication that the relative positions have always been that way. (Eg., early Indo-Iranian loans in Proto-Finno-Ugric vs. Proto-Germanic loans in Finnish proper, which would put proto-Indo-Iranian around the southern Urals and Proto-Germanic on the southern shore of the Baltic and in Scandinavia.) >Greece is certainly northwest of Anatolia and east of the Caucasus. -- Actually Greece proper is due west of Anatolia. This says nothing, however, about where the IE dialect antecedent to Greek was at the time in question. And Greek and Armenian share some innovations, as do Greek and Indo-Iranian. Greek is 'closer' to Indo-Iranian than it is to, say, Latin or Germanic. It's generally classified as part of a group of SE dialects within PIE. So pre-Greek (and Armenian, and probably Phyrgian) remained in contact with the developing Indo-Iranian dialect cluster longer than Germanic, Italic or Celtic; but not quite so long as Balto-Slavic. Ie., Armenian is a satem language, while Greek isn't, indicating that at the time of the spread of the 'satem' innovation, Armenian was _between_ Greek and Indo-Iranian, probably on a northeast-through-southwest vector. This makes perfect sense, since we know that Armenian is intrusive in its historically attested location in NE Anatolia; prior to that (in the 2nd millenium BCE) it was far to the west, in the Balkans -- which is to say, precisely in the area between Greek and the nearest Indo-Iranian language. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Jan 20 21:41:16 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 16:41:16 EST Subject: Northwest IE attributes Message-ID: >Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de writes: >>PIE *peku, 'cattle', /becomes/ Lithuanian 'pekus >.. wouldn'd it rather be 'remained'? -- well, that's the point. It maintains the "k". From alderson at netcom.com Thu Jan 20 18:26:56 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 10:26:56 -0800 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: (message from Rick Mc Callister on Tue, 11 Jan 2000 22:39:28 -0600) Message-ID: On 11 Jan 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Why the exception kravih? > Is it because of the vowel or a combination of /r/ and non-palatal vowel? > Is pekus exceptional because of the velar vowel? These and similar "exceptions" to so-called "satemization" were seen by the Neogrammarians as evidence for a third series of dorsal obstruents in PIE, that is, that along side the palatovelar *k{^y} and the labiovelar *k{^w}, there was a "plain" velar (or possibly back velar) *k. Since then, it has been argued that PIE had either (1) palatals and velars, and labiovelars are a late development, or (2) plain velars and labiovelars, and palatals are a late development. Today's consensus view seems to be a third alternative, that PIE had palatals and labiovelars, and plain velars are an odd development of one or both. > Is Balto-Slavic Satem necessarily linked to Indo-Iranian Satem? Given that the two branches share not only the assibilation of the palatals but also special treatment of *s following *r, *k, *i, and *u, it seems unlikely that they are *not* linked. Further, remember that there are other "satem" branches, such as Armenian and Albanian. Rich Alderson From rao.3 at osu.edu Fri Jan 21 10:15:54 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 05:15:54 -0500 Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter Message-ID: Wouldn't the rise of new species be a better parallel to the rise of new languages? Ancestral species can exist at the same time as a species that has split off. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Jan 21 21:04:06 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 16:04:06 EST Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >So we get back to why one way of looking at it is THE RIGHT WAY and the other >is not. -- because one is accurate, and one is not. >My question was something like - could Anatolian, after say innovating away >from "narrow PIE", borrow back features that it had lost? -- no. >I was looking for borrowings that imitated genetics. E.g., Mencken noted >that after abandoning the "King's English", Americans rediscovered and adopted it. -- what exactly do you mean by this? >E.g., -if Slavic loaned the word for wheel from Greek - or vice versa - could we mistake it as being a gift to both from the reified parent - PIE? -- no. The sound-changes would reveal the date of the borrowing. From lmfosse at online.no Fri Jan 21 11:29:20 2000 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 12:29:20 +0100 Subject: SV: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: Vidhyanath Rao [SMTP:rao.3 at osu.edu] skrev 18. januar 2000 11:31: > What is ``shock'' warfare? > 2nd millennium BCE chariots, as far as we know, were extremely light. > Given the size of horses in use then (ponies by modern standards) and > the requirement of quick acceleration, they could not have been > otherwise. It would not possible to use them except as mobile archery > platforms or personal transport (more like a motor cycle than a pick-up > truck). > Much latter, Assyrians and Persians used much heavier vehicles to drive > through opposing ranks. But, firstly, they had knives affixed to their > axle, and any effect they had came from this. Secondly, they did not > turn very fast. This kind of ``chariot'' would not be any improvement > over the straddle cars and such in use in ANE by 2300 BCE. Those members of the list who would like a demonstration, might want to blow the dust off their Anabasis. Xenophon gives a description of the Persian army deploying such weaponry in the battle where the Persian prince the Greeks are working for get killed. I haven't got time to find out exactly where in the text. Another lively description of chariots in use is given in Caesars Gallic Wars, book on the invasion of Britain. 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 rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Jan 21 04:53:00 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 22:53:00 -0600 Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords In-Reply-To: <21.64b620.25b62dd3@aol.com> Message-ID: Roman citizenship wasn't universally granted until 212 AD or so. Before then, you either had to be of Italic ancestry or do something meritorious such as serve in the legions to get it. [ Moderator's note: The following quoted material is from a posting by JoatSimeon at aol.com. --rma ] >>X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >>Latin was spoken among the Celts before the Roman Army ever arrived. >-- by a few traders. Are you suggesting that Latin would have spread over >the whole of Europe in the _absense_ of Roman conquest and subsequent >political power? >>Latin's main attraction was the badge of Roman citizenship. >-- and Roman citizenship was important because the Romans had conquered a >huge area. QED. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Jan 21 21:09:45 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 16:09:45 EST Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: >In a message dated 1/21/00 3:40:49 AM Mountain Standard Time, rao.3 at osu.edu >writes: >2nd millennium BCE chariots, as far as we know, were extremely light. Given >the size of horses in use then (ponies by modern standards) and the >requirement of quick acceleration, they could not have been otherwise. It >would not possible to use them except as mobile archery platforms or >personal transport (more like a motor cycle than a pick-up truck). -- there are several references to shock action by chariots in the Egyptian records (Kadesh, etc.) and Hittite chariots carried a crew of 3. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Jan 21 21:10:46 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 16:10:46 EST Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: >In a message dated 1/21/00 3:40:49 AM Mountain Standard Time, rao.3 at osu.edu >writes: >Much latter, Assyrians and Persians used much heavier vehicles to drive >through opposing ranks. But, firstly, they had knives affixed to their axle, >and any effect they had came from this. >> -- knife-hubed chariots were always rare. Most Assyrian chariots did not have this feature. From stevegus at aye.net Fri Jan 21 12:52:47 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 07:52:47 -0500 Subject: Horses Message-ID: Rick McCallister writes: > The word presumibly could have applied to other equids. > I don't know if wild asses were present in Anatolia at that time > but they were present in nearby Mesopotamia and Iran. > The weakness, of course, is that words derived from *ekwos almost > invariably apply to the horse. It is not unknown for inherited words to fasten themselves to different species. Gk. "phegos" refers to a kind of oak, unlike Latin "fagus" and English "beech." On this side of the Atlantic, the "robin" and "buzzard" are different birds from the ones the words originally pointed to. -- Sella fictili sedeo Versiculos dum facio. From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Fri Jan 21 14:22:31 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 09:22:31 -0500 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: <3885d342.52172567@mail.chello.nl> Message-ID: On Tue, 18 Jan 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > Sean Crist wrote: >> A few months ago, I made a post to the list in which I stated that the PIE >> word *ekwos "horse" is not probative in the question of the PIE homeland, >> since one need not have domesticated the horse to have a word for it. >> I want to retract that post. Beekes (1995) reports that horses (wild or >> domesticated) were not found in Anatolia in the period which Renfrew >> claims for the final IE unity, and Ringe (personal communication) has >> corroborated this claim. This is an important incongruity between the >> firmly reconstructed IE vocabulary and the homeland which Renfrew posits; >> it is a strong argument against Renfrew. > But Armenian eys^ (< *ek^wos) means "donkey". A transparent case of semantic drift. Are you arguing that this poses some problem for the reconstruction of *ek'wos as "horse"? \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Jan 21 08:00:42 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 08:00:42 -0000 Subject: Egyptian 'cat' ? Message-ID: Dear Lloyd and Joat and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Friday, January 14, 2000 3:44 PM > Joat Simeon writes: >> Ancient Egyptian for "cat" was "miw" > actually, given the lack of voweling > and some difficulties in interpreting the "i" and "y" > writings, could it have been "mi(ao)w" or "mi(u)w" or ?? > For the last, compare English "mew" [myuw], the verb. Though Egyptologists would not agree, I believe any early Egyptian alphabetic spelling represents Ca combinations: so, [mjw] = *mayawa. This is roughly analogous with the situation we might expect if we had a very early IE MYW (*meyewe). If stress-accent is considered, one can easily imagine *mayawa taking many forms, e.g. *maya'u. 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 Fri Jan 21 21:19:44 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 16:19:44 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi writes: >I'm interested in knowing how widely accepted is the theory that the >Indo-European "Urheimat" was located in Eastern Europe. -- that depends on what you mean by "Eastern Europe". The consensus location, insofar as there is one, is the Ukraine -- the area north of the Black Sea. >And how much support do such theories as e.g. Colin Renfrew's idea of the >Anatolian origin of IE languages have? -- very little, among linguists, because of the weird contortions in linguistic development he assumes. Some, among archaeologists in Britain and the US (where extreme anti-diffusionist and anti-migrationist positions are common, essentially for ideological reasons). >I ask this beacause one central piece of evidence in support for the >East-European origin comes from outside the field of IE studies, namely >Uralic linguistics. But it seems to me (correct me if I'm wrong!) that among >many IE-ists, there's a tradition of uninterest in diachronic linguistics >done outside the IE language family. -- actually, early IE (and Indo-Iranian) loanwords in the Uralic languages have been known for some time, and are commonly cited (eg., by Mallory). >It is undeniable that the contacts between speakers of U and IE languages >date back to the earliest stages recovered by the comparative method. Thus >the speakers of proto-U and proto-IE must have been geographical >neighbors. As a result, theories such as Renfrew's Anatolian "Urheimat" >must obviously be discarded (it is of course impossible to assume that >proto-U spekers would have occupied an area south of the Black Sea). -- I see nothing to disagree with here. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Jan 20 21:39:58 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 16:39:58 EST Subject: Northwest IE attributes Message-ID: >rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >Is Balto-Slavic Satem necessarily linked to Indo-Iranian Satem? -- in a word... yes. Unless you're going to postulate that two geographically adjacent dialect-clusters of PIE underwent the same process at the same time but for completely distinct reasons. Which is highly unlikely. From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Sat Jan 22 05:57:18 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 00:57:18 -0500 Subject: IE etymological dictionary In-Reply-To: <200001190832.p65009@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: On Wed, 19 Jan 2000, Hans Holm wrote: > In spite of the dated and questionable quality of the old > "Indoeuropaeisches etymologisches Woerterbuch" by Pokorny, many scholars > would like to have a CD-ROM-version of it. > Does anyone know the state of the work on a new IE etymological dictionary > at LEIDEN, NL? I tried an e-mail to Kulikov at pcmail.LeidenUniv.nl, but that > was returned by the net. Regarding to the Leiden-University homepage, > Kulikov is not listed in their staff nor did I find any hint on such a > project. > Does anyone have an up-to-date information on the Leiden project? > Does anyone know of digitalized versions of the 'Pokorny IEW' What font > has been used? Pokorny is still under copyright; the most recent edition is copyright 1959. It will be a great many years before that edition passes into the public domain. The U.S. government keeps extending the term of copyright longer and longer; they just bumped it up another 20 years a few years ago. Now, if the publisher (Bern: Franke) wanted to release the dictionary on CD or to license it to some other publisher to distribute on CD, they could do so. Of course, since the dictionary is under copyright, this online version would only be available to those individuals and libraries that can afford it. If you're a high school student with a burning interest in Indo-European studies but little money, or if you're a college student in a low-income country with barely any library but with an Internet connection, you _could_ access these materials if they were freely available; the Internet has essentially eliminated the considerable costs of publishing. For reasons of profitability, however, an artificial scarcity is maintained. It's for this reason that I'm interested in taking old IE-related materials whose copyright has expired and placing them online for free, with the intent that volunteer effort can work to bring the materials up to date. If volunteer effort can produce a first-rate and entirely free operating system, I'm sure it can produce a set of quality online IE-related materials; we simply need to do it. I've been poking in a small way at putting IE-related materials online, but I'm champing at the bit to do this on a much larger scale. It's one of the biggest temptations which distracts me from getting my dissertation done. The next volunteer effort I want to organize is to create free online corpora of Old High German and Old English. There is an online corpus of OE, but regrettably, its creators are asserting copyright on these 1000-year-old cultural artifacts and are refusing to allow them to be freely shared, which means e.g. that I can't build a free web service where you can click on any word in a text to get dictionary information. I think this is wrong, and that the response should simply be to create a separate corpus which is under no copyright restrictions, using printed editions whose copyright has expired. Over the last few months, I've been slowly putting together a list of all the known Old High German documents with an aim toward parceling them out to volunteers for typing or scanning; you tell me how many pages you'd like to do, and I'll mail them to you (this worked extremely well for an Old English glossary which I organized last summer; it's online now, and anyone can use it). Unfortunately, I have to repeatedly tell myself that I need to make the dissertation my first priority; otherwise I'd already be asking for volunteers for an OHG corpus. I'm throwing this out here because I'm certainly not the only one capable of doing this. Anyone who wants to can find a pre-1923 dictionary or document which would be of use in creating a free body of Indo-European related materials, and organize volunteers to put sections of it online (or do the whole thing yourself, if you like). There are certainly people on this list who could make recommendations for texts, if you're not sure what to work on. For example, I've got a 60-page glossary of Old High German which I scanned, but which needs a good deal of hand correction, if someone would like to work on that. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Jan 22 07:55:02 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 02:55:02 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 1/22/00 12:12:34 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> 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? 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. 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. (And BTW how drastic are the sound changes do we see in one of the other wheel words: Latin, rota; Lith, ratas; OHG, rod; Ir, roth - cf. Skt, ratha?) Steve Long From sarima at friesen.net Sun Jan 23 06:59:26 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 22:59:26 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 02:29 AM 1/13/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Technology can create and carry its own vocabulary, of course. (I was amazed >to hear the word 'plinth' being used by a builder the other day.) "Learned >words" are adapted to the phonotactics of the language but only so much - >something being in English still does have some connection to legis>. So we do in fact see at least some consistent "retrofitting" with >words like 'theatre' and 'coffee/kava.' and 'telephone.' But very rarely to the degree that it would masquerade as an inherited word from a common ancestor. Indeed with regard to "legal" we may even *have* the inherited form: "leech" (as in physician). (This etymology is marked as uncertain, but it illustrates the basic point). Accomodation usually takes the form of merely coercing the words into the current sound structure of the receiving language or perhaps a folk etymology like "woodchuck" from Cree "ocek". > And the words for >wheel in IE languages are not as consistent or wide-spread as any of these >examples - which might suggest diverse origins and no original word. Except that the differences are greater than expected for a late borrowed word - by a great deal. ><<...there are recent loan words [in Japanese] (e.g. tiishatsu "T-shirt")...>> >I would love to compare T-shirt as it has been "accepted" into languages that >are nearer or farther from English and see if the pattern did not approximate >the kind of changes 'wheel" underwent. It won't. The word for wheel can usually be derived from the reconstructed word via the regular sound changes distinguishing each daughter language. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Jan 22 07:57:00 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 02:57:00 EST Subject: date of wheeled vehicles Message-ID: In a message dated 1/20/00 9:46:04 PM, Robert Drews wrote: <> I haven't read the article, but I have the abstract. What surprises me is that these authors have previously argued that the evidence points to European origins for the wheel. This is from 1998 SAA Symposium abtract, which is reproduced in several places on the web: "The earliest evidence of wheeled transport in Europe and the Near East. J. A. Bakker, J. Kruk,A. E. Lanting, S. Milisauskas A wheeled model from the Late Uruk site Jabel Aruda (Syria), 4500-4400 bp (GrN, uncalibrated) and earlier wagon pictographs of Uruk IV are the earliest proof of wheeled vehicles in the Near East. A cart-rut below a TRB megalithic tomb at Flintbek (Germany) has been dated 4800-4700 bp. A TRB pot with wagon motifs from Bronocice (Poland) is dated 4725 bp (GrN), but seven C-14 dates (DIC) of the same Bronocice III phase yield 4610-4440 BP." "The GrN dates and the Flintbek age seem to suggest that wheeled vehicles were invented in Europe together with the ard, ox-team and yoke, not in the Near East." The Antiquities abstract pulls back a bit on the European origin claims made 2 years earlier: "Results of excavations and 14C determinations from Poland, Germany, Iraq, Syria and Turkey suggest that the appearance of wheeled vehicles was contemporary in Europe and the Near East. (citing: Uruk-Eanna, Uqair, Bronocice III, Jebel Aruda, Arslantepe and Flintbek)" An important thing about the Flintbek find - for this discussion- is that it occures not in connection with so-called kurgan graves but rather in an earlier megalithic context. (1994a Die Ausgrabungen chronisch gef�hrdeter H�gelgr�ber der Stein- und Bronzezeit in Flintbek, Kreis Rendsburg-Eckernf�rde: Ein Vorbericht. Offa, 49/50, 1992/93, Wachholtz, Neum�nster, Schleswig-Holstein, 1994:15-31.) "A long barrow in Flintbek in the center of Schleswig-Holstein supplied information on the use of a two-wheeled cart (Zich 1992). During excavation work, traces of a cart were exposed which had been conserved under a long barrow and led to a dolmen (Fig. 9). It is possible that the barrow had been used to transport stones or earth for the construction of a dolmen chamber. The weight of the stones or of earth is probably responsible for the deep tracks.... It is thought that a single axle vehicle was moved back and forth as clay from the pit for the chamber construction was removed." "The tomb was built during the Funnel Beaker Culture's Early Neolithic II phase. Consequently, the tracks (which were sealed by the mound that covered the chamber) date sometime between 3600 - 3400�cal BC." Bakker, Kruk, et al also don't seem to mention a find at Federsee also in Germany: evidence of plank roads across moorland preserving corduroy cart tracks. The settlement and plank roads are a good deal earlier, carbon dated all the way to 4400BC. The Federsee Museum is calling them the oldest evidence of wheeled carts in Europe. The suggestion has been made that this and other evidence (e.g.,Schacht 1995) points to the wide roads that always adjoin megalithic tombs as being for the cart rather than only foot or hoof use, and even that conservation of wood for the such things as carts may have help cause the shift from thick timber to megalith construction. (M. Baldia 1998) And of course there is little question that some kind of rotational devices had to be used to build the megaliths and that the Flintbek find emphasizes the secondary nature that evidence must take. Actual disk wheels found in Europe are older than any direct evidence of wheeled transport in the Near East. (In fact I believe Piggott gives 3625BC as a date for the earliest wagon burial!) One reason for this may be that the practice of wagon burials artificially preserve the wheels that would have otherwise been recycled. The absence of wheel finds in the Near East - despite unequivocal secondary evidence - argues in favor of this viewpoint. Bakker/Kruk's apparent new diffusion theory - that wheeled transport quickly spread from Jutland to Uruk - making it practically contemporaeneous - fits in with Sherrat's idea of a steady pipeline between the Near East and northern Europe along the old Bandkermik highway. Another conjecture would be that if the wheel-for-transport was that dispersed at 3500BC, it might have been "invented" a good deal earlier and followed the usual diffusion time table - in the case of copper metallurgy, about 1000 years. And all this may not fit in with the idea that metal made the wheel possible: ("Metal tools revolutionized crafts. For example, metal saws could cut wooden planks into circular shapes, allowing such inventions as the wheel." Littauer and Crauwel 1979). Regards, Steve Long From stevegus at aye.net Sat Jan 22 17:04:35 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 12:04:35 -0500 Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: Marc Pierce writes: > East Germanic is pretty secure. It's set off by the following: (1) a long > e from Proto-Germanic long e1 (North and West Germanic have either long a > or long o); (2) lack of r as a reflex of PGmc *z; (3) thorn + l > corresponds to NWest Germanic f+ l; (4) some miscellaneous verbal things, > like a passive inflection, a fourth class of weak verbs, and a > reduplicated class of strong verbs. There's some other stuff, too: Gothic > lacks umlaut, and consonant gemination before PGmc *j, and so on. At least some of these things may simply be because the early, geographically isolated Gothic did not participate in innovations shared by the otherwise still common Germanic. At the time of the texts, all the NW Germanic languages had bulldozed the anomalous, dwindling class of reduplicating verbs, while Bible Gothic preserves them; but I don't think you can conclude that their loss was present at the separation. FWIW, the sharpening of *ww and *jj is -shared- by Gothic and Norse, but the realization is different. Gothic has -ddw- and -ddj-, Norse -ggv- and -ggj-. On the other hand, the status of the diphthongs 'ai' and 'au' in Bible Gothic may point to a vowel shift in Gothic not shared by NW Germanic. I am not sure to what extent they hypothesis is still accepted, that both of these digraphs may have had two different realizations in speech, based on ancestral forms. When Wulfilas invented a new alphabet to write Bible Gothic in, and added these digraphs, it seems unlikely that in the process he would have ignored a phonemic distinction; it isn't like he also had to be faithful to a pre-existing tradition of Gothic literacy. If there was a phoneme pair there, he'd have found a way to write it. Umlaut seems to have been a Scandinavian feature that spread south and west. Only Old Norse seems to have kept a productive and relatively consistent -a umlaut; in the other languages, it's a relic irregularity by the time we see them. I-umlaut is the most consistent across the board, and remains productive both in German and Icelandic. U-umlaut is a consistent rule in Norse; it appears also in some Old English dialects (but is scanty in West Saxon), but it never seems to have spread to the other West Germanic languages. I suspect some rudimentary intelligibility among the NWGmc speeches may have survived into historical times, at least on the "see that house" level. The modern English pronoun -they, them- is a Norse form that was melded into the language, which suggests that Norse was not felt to be completely foreign to Old English when the Norsemen came to northeastern England. More than 30% of the Swedish vocabulary is of Low German origin; and the percentage may be higher, given the many cases where you just can't tell. The extremely productive suffixes -else and -het are Low German, fully domesticated in Sweden. This may reflect the rise of a Low-German based lingua franca among the Baltic and Hanseatic ports, which was apparently sufficient for communication among native speakers of both Low German and Swedish. -- Sella fictili sedeo Versiculos dum facio. From edsel at glo.be Sat Jan 22 19:33:01 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 20:33:01 +0100 Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sean Crist" Sent: Friday, January 21, 2000 4:42 PM [snip] > Now, for your second question. [in response to Rick McC] > You asked: >> Is there any merit to the idea that there was a separate branch of >> Germanic including Anglian, Jutish and pre-Frisian, intermediate between N >> & W Germanic, andf that modern English and Frisian are the result of a >> fusion between this and W Lowland Germanic? > Within West Germanic, it's not possible to draw a clean Stammbaum, because > the dialects developed in close contact with one another. Still, we > recognize a major division within WGmc: 1) Ingvaeonic, also known as North > Sea Germanic, which includes Old English, Old Frisian, and, with some > complications, Old Saxon; versus 2) Old High German. (You used the term > "Jutish"; we don't have any documents written in a language called > "Jutish", but given that there's a traditional claim that there was a > people called the Jutes who participated in the Germanic invasion of > Britain, we can take Jutish to mean some part of the Ingvaeonic dialect > continuum. Anglian, of course, is a dialect of OE.) > There's sometimes been an idea floating around that "West Germanic" is an > artificial designation, i.e. that "WGmc" is really an amalgamation of > dialects which don't actually descend from any single Proto-West-Germanic > language. This idea is can be safely rejected; there are some seven secure > cases where the WGmc languages all share early innovations which are not > found outside WGmc (again, I can list them if there's interest, but it > would take a lot of time). The Ingvaeonic languages all show the common > WGmc developments, and none of the NGmc developments; Ingv. is thus > securely WGmc and not "intermediate" between WGmc and NGmc. > There are a few sound changes which distinguish Ingvaeonic from the other > WGmc languages. I won't go thru them all here unless there's interest, > but one change which gives readily recognizable results to anyone who > knows English and German is this: in Ingv., but not in OHG, a nasal before > a voiceless fricative deletes with compensatory lengthening of the > preceding vowel (this had already happened before */x/ in PGmc, but Ingv. > extended it to all voiceless fricatives). Examples: > English German > other ander > tooth Zahn > soft sanft > five fu"nf > (etc. - many more examples) > OE and the other Ingv. languages all underwent this change; none of the > OHG dialects did. [Ed. Selleslagh] Somehow, Dutch (21 million native speakers) (including S. Dutch, also called Flemish, my mother tongue: my name means that my ancestors were from a 'gens Salica'), and even non-Saxon Low German, is strangely missing from this picture. Where does it fit in your schematic picture? English Dutch other ander tooth tand: here the -n- has remained! soft zacht: the ch (jota sound) - f correspondance is systematic: laugh lachen (but English orthography is still witness of a similar pronunciation in times past). With German:kraft kracht. five vijf In addition, Dutch is actually a synthesis (because of shifting of its cultural center: Brugge > Antwerpen > Amsterdam) and a mixture of the main dialect groups: coastal and West-Flemish and Frisian (Ingwaeonic), Hollands (in the narrowest sense), Brabants (basically Frankish), Limburgs (closer to Rhineland-semi-Low-German) and Saxon (E. Holland). Present unified Dutch is mainly a mixture of Antwerp Brabants and Amsterdam Hollands, mainly as a consequence of the massive emigration of the Antwerp intelligentsia to Amsterdam at the end of the 16th century (Religion wars against the Spanish Habsburgs). Limburgs and Saxon are somewhat outside mainstream Dutch, and Frisian is considered a separate language. It's the first time I see 'Ingwaeonic' used in such a wider sense, but I am no specialist in this matter. I would also like to point out that Frisian has apparently some external characteristics of NGmc., like the preservation of -isk (Eng. -ish, Du. -is(ch), pronounced -is) and similar Danish (Jutish?) sounding features. I think that the idea that Ingwaeonic is halfway between N and WGmc is due to the different use of the term (namely coastal continental WGmc). > So if I were going to further flesh out the tree I drew above, I'd put a > further branching under WGmc with a two-way split into Ingvaeonic and OHG. > I wouldn't care to draw a Stammbaum for WGmc with any further detail than > that, because there's just too much cross-contamination between dialects. >Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) >http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ Ed. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Jan 22 10:32:21 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 04:32:21 -0600 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: <006101bf6382$b247a000$239001d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: What would the postulated 5 branches be? Would they be somthing like the following? 1. Scandinavian 2. Ingwaeonic [Anglo-Frisian] 3. Dutch/Low German [Saxon-Franconian?] 4. High German [Allemanic-Bavarian] 5. East Germanic [Gothic-Burgundian-Lombard] or are the differences between 2, 3 & 4 essentially the result of a later sorting out? I'd like to see their arguments and some discussion of its merits >Rick said: >> How secure is East Germanic? >> Why is it not just an early form of N. Germanic? >W Walker Chambers & J R Wilkie "A short history of the German language" >(1970) page 23 say "The older way of accounting to the development of these >Germanic dialects was to assume the Primitive Germanic divided in to three >branches: North ... East ... and West. This family tree is is still >useful as a classification of the Germanic dialects, but it cannot explain >their growth." > They then go on to outline a theory - which they admit is not universally >accepted - that Germanic should not be seen as a primitive unity which broke >apart, but as a collection of at least five major groups which drew together >as the common political and cultural life shifted and changed. >The reality is that the various forms of Germanic are interrelated in >complex ways, and a simple family tree does not do justice to the >complexity. Nonetheless, East Germanic cannot be seen as an early form of >North Germanic - it shares too much with Allemanic and Bavarian, for a >start. >Peter Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Jan 22 10:43:31 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 04:43:31 -0600 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: thanx for everyone for the explanations [snip] >Within West Germanic, it's not possible to draw a clean Stammbaum, because >the dialects developed in close contact with one another. Would Dutch/Franconian, Low German/Old Saxon be the jokers in this framework? Or just the first of many? Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Sat Jan 22 15:11:18 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 10:11:18 -0500 Subject: NW vs. E Gmc In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I'd like to bring up a few points which were discussed in connection with the distinction between NW and E Germanic: 1. Both Marc Pierce and Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen cited *z > r as an example of a shared innovation in NWGmc. It's true that a sound change along these lines operated in both WGmc and NGmc, but it can be shown that this is a parallel change which operated after the two dialects had separated. The evidence is that there are rules both in WGmc and in NGmc which are sensitive to the *z/*r distinction; the merger of the two categories must have happened _after_ the two dialects had developed separately for a while. 2. Marc Pierce mentioned gemination before *j. Actually, this is a strictly WGmc innovation, and thus isn't evidence one way or the other for the grouping of the three Gmc branches. 3. Marc Pierce mentioned that Gothic retains the old IE passive verbal morphology. It's true that this is lost both NGmc and WGmc, but since the loss of a morphological category is something which can readily occur independently, we once again can't take this as evidence for a NWGmc grouping (even tho there are other grounds for making such a grouping). 4. Pete Gray said "...East Germanic cannot be seen as an early form of North Germanic - it shares too much with Allemanic and Bavarian, for a start." There are some Gothic loan words into Old High German, but this is an event which happened well after the Germanic languages were well differentiated. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From stevegus at aye.net Sat Jan 22 20:36:17 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 15:36:17 -0500 Subject: NE Germanic Message-ID: Couple misrememberings, further-rememberings, and corrections to my post on reduplication and sharpening in Gmc --- 1. Old Norse actually preserved a couple of reduplicated verbs. Conditions for keeping them were apparently set when the stems contained s- or r-. So -sa'- (sow) had a past 3sg. -so/ri- (<*soRi, <*sesi), and -ru'a- (row) had a past -ro/ri-. This small group actually attracted members by analogy, so that -gru'a- (grow) formed a past -gro/ri-. By this time, the 'reduplication' no doubt is no more noticed; what is added is a new past suffix in -o/r-. There are other hints of reduplication in conjugation oddities. -Auka- (add) yields -jo'k- from *aiauk. So, I don't think you can say that the presence vs. absence of reduplication is something that distinguishes Gothic from NWGmc. It's rather that we have Gothic texts before this inherited distinction got hammered. 2. In Gothic, *ww yields -ggw-, not -ddw- as I said earlier. -- Sella fictili sedeo Versiculos dum facio. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Jan 22 09:13:44 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 03:13:44 -0600 Subject: NW vs E Germanic In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator snip ] >Gothic is opposed to an innovating group of North and West Germanic in the >following respects: >1. Final /-o:/ yields NWG -u, but Goth. -a. >2. Final /-am(z)/ yields NWG -um, but Goth. -am. >3. Voiced /z/ is not developed in the direction of /r/ in Goth., but is in >NWG. >4. The pronoun *ju:z preserves its original vowel in Goth., but is changed >to *ji:z in North and West. >5. Reduplicated ablauting verbs are preserved in Goth., but replace their >interior part by the odd "/e:/2" in North and West. So the major changes in High German occurred after East Germanic split >That spells unity for Norse and West Germanic. However, then there is the >Verschaerfung problem which seemingly combines Norse and Gothic to the >exclusion of West Germanic. On balance I believe one must see this as >secondary disappearance of (at least some) Verschaerfung in West Germ., so >that the events that produced Versch. operated in the common prehistory of >ALL the Germanic we know. Excuse my ignorance. Can you explain Verschaerfung? >Jens >> Is there any merit to the idea that there was a separate branch of >> Germanic including Anglian, Jutish and pre-Frisian, intermediate between N >> & W Germanic, andf that modern English and Frisian are the result of a >> fusion between this and W Lowland Germanic? [...] >I would like to know what linguistic facts that idea is based on. Me too :> Seriously, the idea of an Ingwaeonic branch is something I've read in passing in various places without any real elaboration. I suppose they have in mind such things as retention of initial /s-/, /_th_/ & /_dh_/ in English Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From ECOLING at aol.com Sat Jan 22 13:41:41 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 08:41:41 EST Subject: Cladistic trees Message-ID: Scientific American (February 2000 pp.90-95) has a really excellent article "Uprooting the Tree of Life" describing the revolution from the biological classification of Linnaeus to trees based only on shared innovations, just like what we ideally practice in linguistics. It shows also biological trees without roots, and trees with multiple roots. This should be a very good set of analogies for thinking about where comparative-reconstructive linguistics has been and where it may be going. Also of non-analogies. In the same article there is a review of a book "In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil record to a New History of Life" which discusses the problem of what data is lost and how we recover history. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics (couldn't resist) (and the title of this message is odd, or redundant, given the origin of the term "cladistic") From lmfosse at online.no Sat Jan 22 15:00:33 2000 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 16:00:33 +0100 Subject: SV: Indo-Hittite Message-ID: Larry Trask [SMTP:larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk] skrev 20. januar 2000 12:22: >> PS - Someone - I forget who - also wanted to know how the UPenn tree >> analysis >> could claim to "confirm the Indo-Hittite hypothesize" when the actual >> language used was Luwian. .......................... > But this is precisely the issue addressed by the UPenn work. What Ringe's > group was trying to do was to find a principled basis for drawing up just > such > a branching tree structure. And one of their results is that PIE did indeed > undergo an original binary split into Proto-Anatolian and Proto-the-rest-of- > IE. > Of course, you don't have to buy their methods or their conclusions, but it > is > clear that the results they report confirm Sturtevant's hypothesis. Sturtevant's hypothesis found support in the following work: A. L. Kroeber and C.D. Chrétien (1939). "The statistical technique and Hittite". Language, Journal of the Language Association of America. LXXIII(4): 309-314. I would be curious to know if Ringe's group used Kroeber's and Chrétien's article, or arrived at their conclusions through methods that were entirely independent of Kroeber . 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 Sat Jan 22 22:54:31 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 17:54:31 EST Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: >alderson at netcom.com writes: >Further, remember that there are other "satem" branches, such as Armenian >and Albanian. -- very good point. If we take the ancestors of Armenian and the presumed Illyrian ancestor of Albanian to be originally the northern neighbors of Greek (along with Thracian and Phyrgian) then the relationship of Greek to Indo-Iranian is clarified. pre-Greek would then be the southernmost of an early dialect or proto-language chain running south-to-north as follows: Greek-Ilyrian/Phyrgian/Armenian/-Indo-Iranian-Balto-Slavic. Within the original, pre-dispersal dialect cluster proto-Indo-Iranian would be east-central, proto-Balto-Slavic central-northwestern, and proto-Greek on the southern fringe, with the dialects ancestral to the Balkan and Balkan-Anatolian languages As proto-Greek moved south toward its historic range sometime in the 3rd millenium BCE, it would lose contact sufficiently to be unaffected by satemization, with Armenian (for example) in an intermediate position. What a pity we don't know more about Macedonian and Epirote! Or Illyrian and Phyrgian, for that matter. From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Jan 23 01:53:50 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 01:53:50 GMT Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <200001201826.KAA08713@netcom.com> Message-ID: "Richard M. Alderson III" wrote: >On 11 Jan 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> Why the exception kravih? >> Is it because of the vowel or a combination of /r/ and non-palatal vowel? >> Is pekus exceptional because of the velar vowel? >These and similar "exceptions" to so-called "satemization" were seen by the >Neogrammarians as evidence for a third series of dorsal obstruents in PIE, >that is, that along side the palatovelar *k{^y} and the labiovelar *k{^w}, >there was a "plain" velar (or possibly back velar) *k. >Since then, it has been argued that PIE had either (1) palatals and velars, >and labiovelars are a late development, or (2) plain velars and labiovelars, >and palatals are a late development. Today's consensus view seems to be a >third alternative, that PIE had palatals and labiovelars, and plain velars are >an odd development of one or both. In my opinion, the likeliest possibility is that there were indeed three series (plain, palatalized and labialized), which developed out of a Pre-PIE single velar series when in contact with different vowels (which we might notate as **a, **i and **u). The allophones became phonemic when these vowels were either lost or transformed. So far, that makes sense. Figuring out the details is a different story. One thing that, in this view, seems quite certain is that stressed **a > *e and unstressed **a > zero (also: **ai > *ei ~ *i, **au > *eu ~ *u). We can also imagine that unstressed *i and *u were lost, leaving behind only palatalization [which I'll notate as ^] or labialization [which I'll notate as w]. So *h1'ek^u-os "horse" would be **h1'akiw-as and *nekwt- "night" < **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). Additionally, we should also consider the possibility of rising diphthongs **ia, **ua > *^e, *we. I do believe there is evidence for palatalization and labialization outside of the velar series. Borrowing an idea of Jens Rasmussen, I have reconstructed the 2p.sg. active verbal ending *-s as **-tw (< ***-tu), where labialized *tw is subject to specific soundlaws: it becomes *s initially and finally (or rather, it merges with *sw in these positions), but becomes *t between vowels, as in the 2pl. active ending *-te- (< **-tw-a-). The special development of final -**tw can alse be seen in the PIE nominal plural *-(e)s (< **-atw), where Armenian shows the special development *-sw > -k`, and the locative suffix *-i becomes -u after the labialized consonant (except in Greek, where *-sw-i > -si). Slavic has -*s^U, with a shibilant that is normally explained as analogical from the i- and u-stems, but might well reflect the normal development of original non-final *sw in Slavic (as in s^estI "6" < *swek^tis, or possibly the 2sg. thematic ending -es^I ~ -es^i < *-e-sw-(e)i). A special rule of dissimilation of two adjacent labialized sibilants (*swVsw > *usw) would account for *(i)us "you" (pl.) < **swesw < **tu-atu (but Hittite sumes < *suwes), and Armenian vec` < *uswec` < *sweswek^s "six" (cf. also OPr. uschts "sixth"). Here PIE *sw reflects borrowed Semitic s^ (Akk. s^es^s^e-t- "six"). Other cases of *t/*s alternation can also be explained as original **-tw > *-s and *-tw- > *-t- (e.g., pace Szemere'nyi [Myc. is not Pre-Greek]), the pf.act.ptc. masc.nom. *-wo:ts (Greek -o:s), obl. *-w(o)t- (Greek -ot-), n. *-wos (Grk. -os), fem. *-ws + ih2 (Greek -uia) [so the fem. suffix -ih2 (like -i in the present verbs) was only added after the working of the law *-tw > *-s(w)]). The active verbal endings also contain evidence for a labialized *mw, in 1pl. -*mwen ~ *-mwes ( < *mu-an, *mu-atu), -men in Greek but -wen in Hittite, and o-vocalism *-mos < **-mwes in Pre-Latin. Similarly, the independent 1pl. pronoun with m- and w- reflexes in the IE languages: ***mu-atu > **mwesw > *mes or *wes (or *wei). A lexical item like *mel- "grind" (Latin Vollstufe mol-, Greek Nullstufe mul-) can be best interpreted as original *mwel-. There is also evidence for palatalized non-velar consonants, as in the well-known doublet *nem- ~ *iem- "to take" (< **n^em-), or possibly the -i/-n- heteroclitics (Skt. asthi, asthnah "bone") if from **-n^/-n^-, cf. non-palatalized *-r./-n- < **-n/-n-. Palatalized **l^ might also have given *i, but the only example I can remember at this moment is my rather wild idea to link the Hittite 1sg. imp. -lit (-lut, -allu(t)) as in "may I be, let me be!" with the IE optative in *-ieh1- (<**-l^et-, with -t > -h1 as in the ins.sg. Hitt -it, (non-Anatolian)IE *-eh1). See further Gamqrelidze and Ivanov, which I don't have handy right now, on their hypothesized *s^, *sw, *tw, *dw. It is clear that a system with both palatalization and labialization, as I advocate for (Pre-)PIE, is not stable. Old Irish (as the result of a much later and independent development) had both i-coloured (palatalized, slender) and u-coloured consonants, but the u-colouring quickly became marginal and was lost before Middle Irish. The loss of jers in Slavic has led to a full series of palatalized consonants, but not to a parallel set of labialized/velarized consonants (not at the phonological level at least). By the time of common PIE, the plain-palatalized- labialized distinction had only been retained in the velar stops, and there too the system was in the process of breaking down, with confusions between palatalized-plain or plain-labialized, which account for the hesitations we find even among the ranks of the two main blocks ("satem" and "centum"). The generalization of front *e as the "default" vowel may have favoured the palatals, while certain positions may have had specific effects (e.g. de-palatalization before *r [*k^r > *kr], or de-labiaization before *u [*kwu > *ku]). But that still leaves plenty of non-palatal, non-labiovelar "plain velars" which cannot be explained away. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Sun Jan 23 13:31:06 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 08:31:06 -0500 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <200001201826.KAA08713@netcom.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 20 Jan 2000, Richard M. Alderson III wrote: > These and similar "exceptions" to so-called "satemization" were seen by > the Neogrammarians as evidence for a third series of dorsal obstruents > in PIE, that is, that along side the palatovelar *k{^y} and the > labiovelar *k{^w}, there was a "plain" velar (or possibly back velar) > *k. > Since then, it has been argued that PIE had either (1) palatals and > velars, and labiovelars are a late development, or (2) plain velars and > labiovelars, and palatals are a late development. Today's consensus > view seems to be a third alternative, that PIE had palatals and > labiovelars, and plain velars are an odd development of one or both. The first view, which you attribute to the Neogrammarians, is the majority view today. The main objections to the view that IE had three series of dorsals are 1) that there are no known examples of such a consonant system among the modern languages of the world, and 2) that no daughter language maintains the supposed three-way contrast intact. #1 is simply wrong; there are such languages. #2 is also wrong, since Luvian of the Anatolian group maintains the three-way dorsal contrast. However, objection #2 is simply irrelevant; it represents a misunderstanding of the comparative method. Even if no daughter language maintained the contrast, we'd still have three correspondence series among the daughter languages, with no clear phonologically conditioning environment which would allow us to collapse two of the series; so we follow the methodology and reconstruct three sets of series for the proto-language. > Further, remember that there are other "satem" branches, such as > Armenian and Albanian. That's not correct; Armenian underwent an independent set of consonant changes which roughly resemble Grimm's Law in Germanic. Armenian did not undergo the satem consonant shift. As for Albanian, I can't say much; it's so heavily mutated that it's not of much use in reconstructing PIE, and I know next to nothing about the sound changes it underwent. I can say that I've never heard anyone claim that Albanian underwent the satem shift. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From xdelamarre at siol.net Sun Jan 23 18:41:46 2000 From: xdelamarre at siol.net (Xavier Delamarre) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 19:41:46 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <200001201826.KAA08713@netcom.com> Message-ID: Rich Alderson wrote (answering Rick Mc Callister) >Since then, it has been argued that PIE had either (1) palatals and velars, >and labiovelars are a late development, or (2) plain velars and labiovelars, >and palatals are a late development. Today's consensus view seems to be a >third alternative, that PIE had palatals and labiovelars, and plain velars are >an odd development of one or both. This is not true at all. There is no consensus for a two-series system of tectals (whatever the arrangement). The doubts cast on a three-series system (k', k, k^w) goes back to Meillet in his _Introduction à la gramm. comp. des langues IE_ (last ed.1937), repeated by Lehman in his _Phonology_ (1952), and taken up since by a variety of scholars in France & US. Two prominent scholars that do not share the alleged "consensus" have shown recently the methological necessity of positing three series : - M. Mayrhofer, _Indogermanische Grammatik I-2_ (Phonology), 1986 - O. Szemerényi, _Introduction to IE Linguistics_ , 1996 Oxford. Holger Pedersen had already shown in 1900, that Albanian has 3 different reflexes of the three tectals before front vowels (article in KZ), and most recently Craig Melchert has made the same observation about Luwian (_Fs Cowgill_, 1987, inter alia). I recommend on this subject to the American reader, and others who have doubts, the reading of the excellent article by Martin E. Huld in _Festschrift for Eric P. Hamp_ Vol. 1 (JIES Monograph 25) :"Satem, Centum and Hokum", 115-138. The consensus seems to be, contrary to what stated, in favor of three tectals for IE, as posited more than one century ago by our dear Neo-grammarians. Xavier Delamarre Ljubljana 23/1/2000 From colkitto at sprint.ca Sat Jan 22 23:29:25 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 18:29:25 -0500 Subject: PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: > How 'bout a form ancestral to English "balls", Gaelic palla [sp?], >perhaps *bhel-; or are these later developments? Gaelic palla "penis" is >obviously borrowed (or expressively mutated) but the meaning is different >from English This one is coincidence. Gaelic "ball" (palla?) is related to Greek "phallos" I'm not sure of the exact history, but English "balls" is clearly a metaphorical (cf. the widespread use of forms with the primarily meaning "eggs") Robert Orr From gordonselway at gn.apc.org Sat Jan 22 23:54:44 2000 From: gordonselway at gn.apc.org (Gordon Selway) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 23:54:44 +0000 Subject: re PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: George Hinge wrote (but I am not sure yet who introduced the idea): >I don't know if the Gaelic can be derived from OI 'ball'. I'm not aware of this. I cannot lay hands on my Irish dictionaries, but there is no in Dwelly, which is to hand. Has Dennis Jung anything to add, if he's currently on this list? This is not surprising. One of the features of the Celtic languages is the P-IE p* > zero, after all. There is 'peilear' (ball, bullet - not as far as I know 'testicle', which may be 'clach' (Sc.)/'cloch'(Ir.), ie 'stone'), and 'peile' is football (ie soccer) in Irish Gaelic. I'm not sure of its earlier spelling (though 'palla' cannot lead to 'peile' - that would require a change in the quality of both consonants from broad to slender - as I understand things). But it is not an item inherited by internal tradition from PIE, whatever its source is. [As an aside, both Brythonic and Gadelic seem to have borrowed wholesale from Latin in the later imperial-early mediaeval period.] Gordon Selway From oldgh at hum.au.dk Sun Jan 23 14:48:51 2000 From: oldgh at hum.au.dk (George Hinge) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 15:48:51 +0100 Subject: PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: Gordon Selway: >George Hinge wrote (but I am not sure yet who introduced the idea): >>I don't know if the Gaelic can be derived from OI 'ball'. Rick Mc Callister did introduce the idea in his mail, asking > How 'bout a form ancestral to English "balls", Gaelic palla [sp?], > perhaps *bhel-; or are these later developments? I supposed that the bracketed [sp?] is questioning the orthography, and if the beginning of the word is spelled in some other way, the comparison might be possible? >There is 'peilear' (ball, bullet - not as far as I know 'testicle', which >may be 'clach' (Sc.)/'cloch'(Ir.), ie 'stone'), and 'peile' is football (ie >soccer) in Irish Gaelic. I'm not sure of its earlier spelling (though >'palla' cannot lead to 'peile' - that would require a change in the quality >of both consonants from broad to slender - as I understand things). But it >is not an item inherited by internal tradition from PIE, whatever its >source is. The source might be Latin 'pila' "ball" with a short -i- and consequently -e- in Late Latin / Romance. George Hinge The Department of Greek and Latin The University of Aarhus, Denmark oldgh at hum.au.dk From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Sat Jan 22 15:50:50 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 09:50:50 -0600 Subject: Basque butterflies again Message-ID: At 02:37 PM 1/19/00 +0000, Larry Trask wrote: [big snip] [LT] >And, of course, native Basque lexical items with the slightest >claim to antiquity never begin with /p/ (the ancient Basques apparently >couldn't pronounce initial /p-/) [RF] Just for the record, I'd mention that this is Larry Trask's position, one that he has discussed on other occasions. However it is not the only position. Indeed, for a rather different rendition of phonological events I would suggest taking a look at Jose Ignacio Hualde's article "Pre-Basque Plosives" forthcoming in a volume edited by Jon Franco, Alazne Landa and Juan Martin, _Grammatical Analyses in Basque and Romance Linguistics_ John Benjamins, Vol. 187 of the series Current Issue in Linguistic Theory. Since I understand that Larry read an earlier version of that article, I'm certain that he's familiar with the evidence. Given the complexity of the issue, I would only state that based on my reading of Hualde's data, the fact a word appears in modern Basque with an initial /p/ would not in and of itself argue for or against its "antiquity". And by saying this I don't mean to imply that I'm taking any particular position on the antiquity of the examples found in the current discussion. [snip] [LT] >A few further comments. The word 'pretty', 'pretty little thing', >'ornament', 'jewel', apparently present in the large group represented by >, is of uncertain origin but is often suspected of being a >palatalized form of 'alive', 'living'. The suggested semantic >development is 'living' > 'moving' > 'flashing', 'sparkling', > 'pretty', >'jewel', or something similar. >So, as Ed suggests, is very likely the *ultimate* source of the first >element, but it cannot be the *direct* source. [RF] A few additional comments on this item. I would suggest that the development suggested above >'living' > 'moving' > 'flashing', 'sparkling', > 'pretty', >'jewel', or something similar. is probably essentially correct. For example, one should note that the term is used as an adjective to mean "lively, agile' (not just "living") and this has a palatalized diminutive form in French Basque dialects in which Llande translates as: "un peu vif, un peu piquant; vivement, prestement" while he gives the meaning of as "original; drole" and in composition as "singularite" while the verb is rendered as "devenir original", these meanings being essentially the same as the ones given by Azkue in his dictionary. The words and (both listed in Llande) form verbs, i.e., and ) with the characteristic reduction of the <-tz-> to <-z>, and carry the verbal meanings of "resusciter; allumer, ranimer, germer, raciner". They form part of the semantic field of . Llande also lists and gives its meaning as "joli" but in the same entry he adds the comment "(voc. puer.)". I would note that there are other words based on the same root-stem that mean "small, tiny", e.g., "little, little bit" and from < pixka-kin> "little sticks of wood as well as others in where there <-tx-> appears to have been replaced with a palatalized /tt/. The latter term is used to refer not just to "little, tiny" in general but also to one's "little finger". Again the replacement in question is not unusual in Basque, e.g. "little" with palatalization turns into . In summary, it would appear that the development of the term could be traced back ultimately to , as both Larry and Ed agree, and that it may well have been a diminutive/affective variant of that gave rise initially to and that line of development produced a meaning chain that ultimately ended up as a polysemous term whose meanings included that of "jewel", i.e., something small and pretty. That then leads us in another direction and to other questions: what relationship should be proposed for the following items based on the following facts. It is alleged the Breton term (defined as "anneau") is the etymolgical source for Fr. , at least according to my Petite Larousse (note that Buck gives a different version). The Larousse dictionary defines as "object de parure, d'un matiere au d'un travail precieux, fig. chose admirable, elegante et d'un petitesse relative". If one were to relate the two data sets, the data enountered in the Basque semantic field would suggest that the meanings recorded in Breton and French, if they are assumed to be related to the Basque items, might be best categorized as representatives of an "extension" of the term's prototypic meaning, i.e, near the end of the chain of meanings that lead back to and finally to . Are the two data sets related? I don't know if there are even any articles on the topic or whether there has been investigations of the Basque semantic field using additional data from other sources in the same geographical zone, e.g., Provenzal, Aragonese, Asturian, etc., that should be examined. Finally, turning to a recent exchange between LT and RM: Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 11:29:06 +0000 Rick Mc Callister writes: [on the Basque 'butterfly' words in ] >> Any possible link between and Spanish "bug, >> critter, varmint" and also various slang meanings [LT] >Doubt it. Basque means 'pretty', 'pretty little thing', 'ornament', >'jewel'. It has no connection with bugs or any other critters anywhere except >in the 'butterfly' words cited. And let's face it: as bugs go, >butterflies are exceptionally pretty. [RF] However, before I respond to the comment by LT above, I'd like to review a short section from his extensive and well researched material on Basque "butterflies" that he put together and sent to the list on Dec. 13. [LT] >Where the information is available, I have listed the dialects for which a >given form is recorded and its date of first attestation, but this >information is often not available. The dialects cited, roughly from west >to east, are as follows: >B: Bizkaian >Sout: Southern (extinct; recorded in 16th-century Alava) >G: Gipuzkoan >HN: High Navarrese >L: Lapurdian LN: >Low Navarrese >Z: Zuberoan >I have grouped the forms into nine classes, of which the first is subdivided. >Group 1a. >bitxilote (B) >bitxileta pitxilote (B) >pitxoleta (B) >pitxeleta (B) >pitxilota (B) >These appear to be based on , western variant , 'pretty little >thing', 'ornament', 'jewel', an item well attested everywhere as an >independent word (though in varying senses), and also very frequent as a first >element in expressive and nursery formations. The final element is entirely >obscure, and very likely a meaningless expressive element. >(See also Alavese Spanish . Alava was Basque-speaking until >recently, and the local Spanish has, or until recently had, a number of loans >from Basque.) >Group 1b. >mitxeleta (B, G) (1745) >mitxilote (B) >mitxoleta mitxelot (B) >(and many more variants) ************************ [RF] I would note that in addition to its meaning of "butterfly", Azkue (I:173) lists (B) with the meaning of "daisy" ("margarita de los prados") while refers simultaneously to the following three objects: a butterfly, a daisy and a poppy. In what are now non-Basque speaking zones of Navarre we find evidence for the prior existence in the Basque of the zone for (<*bitxi/pitxi(n)-gorri> from "red"). Jose Maria Iribarren (1984) records this expression, spelling it as and listing its meaning as "poppy". The compound might be glossed as "pretty little red thing". Returning now to the discussion concerning the possible relationship between the Basque and Spanish (Castilian) items. First we should note that it is well known that Moliner (1966:I, 373) and others (I don't have Corominas at hand) derive from Vulgar Latin and Clas. Lat. . Yet there does seem to be room to question whether the Basque term might not have played some role also, in the development of the Romance item. Indeed, when I learned Spanish, my understanding of was that it referred to any sort of (small) flying/creeping insect. It was used by metaphoric (ironic) extension, in my opinion, to apply to large animals, e.g., a horse or cow. Again, I emphasize that that was the way that I learned the expression from those around me. Furthermore, the extension of a word meaning "butterfly" to a class of "flying insects" or to some other kind of flying objects that look like more or less like butterflies would not be unusual, particularly if speakers were no longer able to disambiguate the components of the compound in question. Morever, there is evidence from Bearn, a zone where Basque was spoken previously, that is of interest: ", masc. 1) papillote: 'Si manque de bichous, nou manque pas de toupet.' S'il manque de papillotes, il ne manque pas de toupet. 2) BICHOUS, morceaux de papier dont on garnit les cotes et la queue de d'un cerf-volant (jouet d'enfant) pour qu'il se maintienne droit lorsqu'il est enleve par le vent: 'Lous cerpentz de cerc...per defaut de bichous enta ha l'aploumb...hen la capihoune.' Les cerfs-volants, faute de morceaux de papier (en forme de papillotes) pour faire l'aplomb (pour maintenir d'aplomb), font la cabriole" (Lespy et Raymond, _Dictionnaire bearnais ancien et moderne_ [1887] 1970: 106, source: "Lettres d'Orthez, dans le journal _Le Mercure d'Orthez_)). For those who might not be familiar with the term in French, I offer the following definition: ": 1) nom vulgaire du 'lucane male', insect coleoptere a mandibules enormes (long: jusqu'a 8 cm.) [in English we are talking about a 'stag beedle' of the family Lucanidae, having long, powerful, antlerlike mandibules AHD]; 2) jouet d'enfant, compose d'une carcasse legere sur laquelle on tend un papier fort ou une etoffe, et que l'on fait voler" (Petit Larousse 1963:182). In this case, the are the pieces/strips of cloth that are tied, giving the appearance of butterflies, to the cord forming the tail of the kite. It strikes me that someone familiar with French, but not Basque, would assume that in the example above, was nothing more than a somewhat odd and/or localized use of the French word . On the other hand, a careful reading of the information found in the semantic field of the Bearnese item suggests a different interpretation. Finally, based on the implications of the data sets discussed above, I'm not convinced that LT's closing remark, cited below, fully reflects the semantic realities (and complexities) of the situation: [LT] >I therefore conclude that Lloyd's efforts at linking some of the Basque words >to words in other languages (and also to one another) are without foundation. >The Basque 'butterfly' words are numerous and severely localized; they conform >strongly to observed patterns for coining expressive formations; and they can >scarcely be of any antiquity. Ondo ibili, Roz Frank From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Jan 23 02:35:59 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 02:35:59 GMT Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter In-Reply-To: <24.47c7c4.25ba23c6@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >>E.g., -if Slavic loaned the word for wheel from Greek - or vice versa - >>could we mistake it as being a gift to both from the reified parent - PIE? >-- no. The sound-changes would reveal the date of the borrowing. This is an oversimplification. It depends on whether there *had* been any relevant sound changes in the intervening period, and in general we can only establish *relative* dates for sound changes, if we're lucky (many times not even that). Sound changes can of course not be dated absolutely if there are no written documents. In the case of closely related languages or where bilingualism is the norm, things are further complicated by people's awareness of the sound laws themselves. Basques still borrow Spanish words ending in -(i)o'n as ending in -(i)oi, despite the fact that Castilian final -e after /n/ had already dropped in the early Middle Ages, and likewise the Basque rule to drop -n- between vowels has stopped working many centuries ago (OSp. -one -> Bq. -oe > -oi :: Sp. -o'n -> Bq. -oi). If we're lucky we can catch a mistake (e.g. when two sounds have merged in one language but not in the other, and "folk etymological borrowing" assigns it to the wrong prototype), but not in general. In this case, of course, Slavic (*koles-) has not borrowed the word from Greek (*kw(e)kwl-o-). I wonder, though, whether another word for wheel, *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. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Jan 23 05:56:44 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 00:56:44 EST Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter Message-ID: >rao.3 at osu.edu writes: << Wouldn't the rise of new species be a better parallel to the rise of new >languages? Ancestral species can exist at the same time as a species >that has split off. -- not generally. Eg., we and the chimps (and gorillas and bonobos) are descended from a common ancestor, and chimps are much more _like_ that common ancestor, but we can't be said to be descended from chimps. From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Jan 23 03:16:19 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 03:16:19 GMT Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Sean Crist wrote: >On Tue, 18 Jan 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: [ moderator snip ] >> But Armenian eys^ (< *ek^wos) means "donkey". >A transparent case of semantic drift. Are you arguing that this poses >some problem for the reconstruction of *ek'wos as "horse"? I'm pretty sure that when the pre-Armenians walked (or rode) into Anatolia, their *ekw^os (however it sounded at the time) meant "horse" (and shifted to "donkey" in the apparently donkey-rich and horse-poor environment of Eastern Anatolia). But if Renfrew is right, and PIE did come from Anatolia, an *ek^wos (or however it sounded at *that* time) meaning "donkey" would have trivially drifted to "horse" in the horse-rich (donkey-poor) environment of Northern and Eastern Europe. The argument works both ways, except that it's apparently intellectually unattractive to have a theory where one thing goes from A to B and then back again from B to A. That's why such theories are rare (not because such things do not happen). As a matter of fact, I personally believe that Renfrew is wrong, but that some of the *ancestors* of the Proto-Indo-Europeans *did* come from Anatolia, became PIE-ans somewhere in the Tisza-Danube area, and then some of them (the Anatolians, later the Armenians) went *back* to Anatolia. Renfrew (because you can't have A->B->A) prefers to have the Anatolians (and I believe the Armenians as well) never to leave Anatolia, which poses some severe linguistical problems such as the lack of affinity between Anatolian and Armenian or Greek. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From Stporfiri at cs.com Sun Jan 23 04:55:27 2000 From: Stporfiri at cs.com (Stporfiri at cs.com) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 23:55:27 EST Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: In a message dated 1/22/2000 5:34:42 PM Pacific Standard Time, JoatSimeon at aol.com writes: << >Much latter, Assyrians and Persians used much heavier vehicles to drive >through opposing ranks. But, firstly, they had knives affixed to their axle, >and any effect they had came from this. >> -- knife-hubed chariots were always rare. >> It has been doubted that the knives were that effective. It seems to me that cavalry is important for breaking up the ranks; they seem to have had this value in most contexts, regardless of knives. When the other side has cavalry, the value depends on whether or not our cavalry successfully routs theirs, and on whether our cavalry remember to return to the battle scene to assault enemy infantry from the rear to obtain the happiest effects. The weakness of cavalry (and tank) is that it cannot hold ground. Dan Monroe, Latin teacher Marshfield High School Coos Bay, OR From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Jan 23 05:59:04 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 00:59:04 EST Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: In a message dated 1/22/00 5:20:06 PM Mountain Standard Time, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >Roman citizenship wasn't universally granted until 212 AD or so. Before >then, you either had to be of Italic ancestry or do something meritorious >such as serve in the legions to get it. -- exactly. It was originally the badge of membership in a conquering, ruling _ethnos_, and conveyed considerable legal privilege. (Eg., St. Paul was a Roman citizen, and so could appeal from a local court to the Emperors' judgement in Rome.) From sarima at friesen.net Sun Jan 23 06:20:37 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 22:20:37 -0800 Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords In-Reply-To: <0.d3f21126.2591c1ea@aol.com> Message-ID: At 12:55 AM 12/22/99 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Latin was spoken among the Celts before the Roman Army ever arrived. Latin's >main attraction was the badge of Roman citizenship. Mallory has something to >say about all this in ISIE and given the subtle nature of your argument, I >think something is worth repeating: And, even *after* the conquest, the main reason the Celts had for adapting Latin was NOT the Roman army. As long as you paid your taxes and didn't incite to riot, the Roman government didn't much care what language you spoke. But Latin was the language of education, trade in luxury goods, and election campaigns (even in imperial times there were still elections of local officials for many years). >I don't know what this has to do with anything. The point was that there >have been many cases where the "dominant elite" disappear in the pre-existing >language. Quite so, and also vice versa. It is hard to come up with a hard and fast rule. Britain, with its late crop of Roman loyalists, still dropped Latin, despite having few successful invasions by outsiders. France, with numerous successive conquests by various outside groups (mostly Germanic) retained Latin. Go figure. >The point was, e.g., the Russians do not speak Mongul, Turkic, Gothic, Greek >or Scandinavian - although all of these arguably represented the languages of >various "dominant elite" - these speakers all seem to have been assimilated >by Russian. On the other hand Romania speaks Romanian, a derivative of the language of a dominant elite that only ruled *there* for a short time. Persistance of one language or another in a multilingual community is often hard to predict. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Sun Jan 23 07:16:46 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 23:16:46 -0800 Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords In-Reply-To: <002701bf619f$2b0363c0$5c71fe8c@lucent.com> Message-ID: At 05:31 AM 1/18/00 -0500, Vidhyanath Rao wrote: >"Stanley Friesen" wrote: >> In particular the evidence from Egypt prior to 1100 BC shows >> clearly that the chariot was a mobile combat platform, actively used in >> shock warfare. >What is ``shock'' warfare? What the modern US army calls "mobile warfare". What we called "Blitzkrieg" a few decades ago. It is attacking rapidly with a powerful force in a manner that throws the enemy into confusion, disrupting their ability to fight. It is what cavalry was used for from late Roman times on. It is what helicopters are used for today. >2nd millennium BCE chariots, as far as we know, were extremely light. So? A *rapid* attack, with powerful weaponry is the key factor, not weight of the platform allowing the speed. >Given the size of horses in use then (ponies by modern standards) and >the requirement of quick acceleration, they could not have been >otherwise. It would not possible to use them except as mobile archery >platforms ... Which accomplishes the goal of shock warfare. (Actually, one can also use them as mobile spear throwing platforms, but that comes to the same thing). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jan 23 08:08:19 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 03:08:19 EST Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: Dear Rohan, In a message dated 1/21/00 5:10:32 AM, you wrote: <> First, let me emphasize that nothing I've written is meant to be disrespectful of historical linguistics. I certainly should not give any impression that Colin Renfrew disrespects linguistics, which I have every reason to believe is the farthest thing from the truth. And I'm not insisting that "linguists are not regularly revisiting their assumptions..." In fact, quoting "Friedrich 1970 or Gimbutas 1960" was meant to show that dates given by linguists for PIE dispersal HAVE changed. If you recall my original point was that "the earliest possible date" given by some members of this list have backed up - and I did check back in the archives to verify that. The quote from the UT Austin web page in my last post should assure you that the 3000BC-2200BC dates are still around and quite clearly, even with the benefit of the doubt, they were intended to reflect the earliest and latest possible dates - and are simply repeating old and dated information. This is not an indictment of historical linguistics. It started as and is nothing more than an observation that old ideas die hard. So my purpose was not "to demonstrate that linguists are not regularly revisiting their assumptions, as they should." But rather to figure out how those assumptions are affected by changes in archaeological information. Renfrew's neolithic hypothesis stretches the information but how does it stretch the linguistic assumptions? Is it enough to simply say that the earliest possible date of PIE dispersal is now 3300BC? Or is there something that now goes on with the linguistic analysis that might alter other assumptions or conclusions? Does the fact that PIE speakers now appear to be exposed to the horse a thousand years before this date and to chariots (once considered the equivalent of PIE) a thousand years after, change anything in the use of those items with regard to the dating PIE unity? Also let me make it clear again that my purpose is and was not "to prove that historical linguistics is built upon faulty assumptions about archaeology." Faultiness is not what I'm pointing to - although on this list there have been a number of statements about the archaeological evidence that have been quite faulty (e.g., with regard to the evidence in early Greece.) The connection between archaeology and linguistics is a complex matter. It is not always clear to me what a piece of new archaeological evidence "means" in terms of linguistics. A lot of what I have been doing is just trying to figure out what "the assumptions" are. You use the phrase assumptions that historical linguistics "is built upon." And that is perhaps an issue I am running into. Is historical linguistics finished being built? I'm sure you would say it is not, but it raises the question: just how built is it? Consider that archaeology is designed to operate in a state of almost constant dissatisfaction. Especially among American archaeologists, there is a constant race to find the next oldest date, etc. (This parallels the mentality one sees in physics and biology, where there is a persistent dissatisfaction with the limits of both existing data and theory.) There are some on this list who have privately suggested to me that they think that the only mechanism that allows for historical linguists "to revist" their assumptions is archaeology. I want to believe that is not true. I think that a consciousness of uncertainty allows one to explore accepted assumptions again even without new data. Archaeology can of course remind one of that uncertainty. The kind of uncertainty expressed in the fact that if the earliest possible date of PIE dispersal might now be say 4000BC in conservative terms, then what would that extra 1500 years over the Childe-Kossina dates mean to historical linguistics? Does that extra time mean anything in terms of the linguistic journey traveled by the language between PIE and the attested daughters? Or is everything reconstructed and are we now finished with all that and should we move on to the Nostratic list? :) And finally I should say that Colin Renfrew has been working with real historical linguists and that my speculations on how his work affects linguistics are the efforts of an amateur and may not be of much use in that direction. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jan 23 10:00:21 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 05:00:21 EST Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: In a message dated 1/17/00 6:48:58 PM, sarima at friesen.net wrote: <> Well, Renfrew does not have IE originating in Greece and in fact he does not even need to assert IE languages were spoken throughout Greece for the whole neolithic period. Herodutus tells us that non-Greek was being spoken in his time. It's been nearly 500 years since the first native American names were adopted into european languages, but native American languages are still being spoken. There is also the question whether the place names are non-IE or just non-Greek. Regards, Steve Long From sarima at friesen.net Sun Jan 23 05:54:49 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 21:54:49 -0800 Subject: Northwest IE attributes In-Reply-To: <0.81a0cd51.258c907e@aol.com> Message-ID: At 02:23 AM 12/18/99 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Eg., Both Baltic and Slavic and Indo-Iranian undergo satemization, and both >groups also show the 'ruki rule' (modifications in *-s- after r, u, k or i. I am not yet convinced this is not a sprachbund (areal) effect, and thus late. If Balto-Slavic shares other, less famous, isoglosses with Indo-Iranian, I might reconsider this >In other words, there was still a dialect continuum across the whole >Indo-European field at this time. However, this is quite possible also. For instance, there is currently *still* a dialect continuum across the entire West Romance area, some 1500 years after the split up of Latin. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From Georg at home.ivm.de Sun Jan 23 11:40:23 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 12:40:23 +0100 Subject: Northwest IE attributes In-Reply-To: <9e.2510b1.25b8daae@aol.com> Message-ID: >>rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >>Is Balto-Slavic Satem necessarily linked to Indo-Iranian Satem? >-- in a word... yes. >Unless you're going to postulate that two geographically adjacent >dialect-clusters of PIE underwent the same process at the same time but for >completely distinct reasons. Well, we donm't know at what time both dialect-clusters underwent the satemization-processes, so we cannot tell whether it was "the same time". Then, although Baltic, Slavic, and Indo-Iranian share a great deal of very specific details in the process, there are also differences (incomplete satemization in Baltic and Slavic; traces of labiovelars in Indian etc.), which may strengthen a position which tends to keep the languages apart. The major argument for not laying too much weight on Satem for classificatory reasons is the very naturalness of assibilations of inherently palatal consonants (or velars in palatalizing contexts. for that matter). There is hardly a language family in the world, where not one or two lgs. or branches could be called "satem". When the issue of satemization is defined very strictly, it consists - not of the assibilations and spirantizations - but of the merger of velars and labiovelars (with the old palatals showing distinct reflexes), as opposed to kentum lgs., where palatals and velars merged and labiovelars show autonomous reflexes. If this definition is fololwed strictly, Armenian and Albanian are out (no merger at all); Baltic and Slavic are mostly in (but not entirely, because of the sizable number not-at-all satemized elements). Which leaves us with Indo-Iranian as the only real and true-blue satem branch (and if we look at the remnants of labiovelars there, even that is not entirely sure). In short: - palatalizations and assibilations of palatal consonants (especially of tectal ones), is maybe the one most common sound-change in the languages of the world - the so-called "satemization" processes in Baltic, Slavic and Indo-Iranian do indeed show a great deal of specificity, but also important differences which leads to: - kentum/satem should not be overemphasized as a major dialect-dividing isogloss in Indo-European, though - it is likely that a contact-induced Schmidtian "wave" comprises Indo-Iranian, most of Slavic and most of Baltic (satemization peters out a bit in the west, there being slightly more non-satemized elements than in Slavic [I think; please, correct me someone]. - Armenian and Albanian are out, there being autonomous reflexes of the three series of tectal stops. >Which is highly unlikely. Not *so* unlikely, after all. Palatalizations are, so to speak, the garden-variety of sound-changes. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Jan 23 06:10:40 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 01:10:40 EST Subject: Egyptian 'cat' ? Message-ID: >proto-language at email.msn.com writes: << Though Egyptologists would not agree, I believe any early Egyptian >alphabetic spelling represents Ca combinations: so, [mjw] = *mayawa. >> -- "miw" is about as onomatopoeic as "kuku" for Cuckoo. Therefore it's pretty well impossible to trace loans or their direction. Given that the Egyptians domesticated the cat and that it spread from there, I'd bet on the Egyptians being the ones who invented the word, though. From sarima at friesen.net Sun Jan 23 06:40:40 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 22:40:40 -0800 Subject: "is the same as" [was Re: Respect goes both ways!] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 11:14 AM 12/22/99 +0000, Larry Trask wrote: >Stanley Friesen writes: >> I guess I am not so adamant that sameness always be transitive. >Well, if the relation 'is the same as' is to be taken as non-transitive, then >what, if any, semantic content can be assigned to it? How would it then >differ, say, from the relation 'is similar to'? It can be taken to be of *local* import only. Let us take an example from an area I am somewhat more familiar with to make the point clearer. In California, as I am sure you know, the mountains surround a central valley. In these mountains there are populations of salamanders of a particular sort - that cannot live in lowland areas like the Central Valley. Now, starting from (if I remember correctly) somewhere around San Fransisco, one can trace an unbroken series of populations northwards. Adjacent populations are always virtually identical, and can always interbreed successfully. By the biological species definition (the biological equivalent of the mutual comprehension definition of a language) any adjacent pair of these populations are clearly the same species. One can continue this chain on around the Central Valley into the Sierras, and then southwards to the edge of the desert.. By this time, despite each adjacent population being virtually identical, the salamanders are easily distinguished from the ones we started with on the other side of the Valley. Now we continue the chain on around, back to the coast ranges via the transverse ranges, and then north again to where we started. When we finally meet our original populations, the two sets of populations can NOT interbreed. By the standard definition they are distinct species. Or are they? After all, if one goes the other* way, the two locally distinct populations are connected by a continuous series of interbreeding populations. It seems absurd to say that just because the end-points are clearly distinct that each of the intermediate steps must *also* be held to be distinct! Ergo, I must use "same" to refer to a purely "local" state of affairs - any two *specific* populations are either the same or not, irregardless of the situation with other pairs of populations in the same series. The same sort of situation can, and *does* hold for languages. The West Romance area is a dialect continuum, with chains of locally similar dialects connecting all of the separate "languages" in West Romance. So, does one treat all of West Romance as one language? It seems silly to call French and Portugese the same language, does it not. Yet they are connected by a series of pairwise similar dialects. >> It is generally rather messy to try to apply a transitive form of >> similarity to biological entities, not just language. ... >> And natural languages are clearly biological entities. So fuzziness is the >> only useful way to go. >I have no quarrel with anything in these last two paragraphs, with which I >agree. >But, if we agree to a fuzzy interpretation of 'is the same as', and hence to >its negation 'is not the same as', then we can no longer manipulate these >relations as though they had non-fuzzy interpretations, and draw non-fuzzy >conclusions -- which I think is the practice I was objecting to in the first >place. I am a little confused here. I do not remember ever actually applying "sameness" in a non-fuzzy manner in this discussion. (Of course, given the time lags, my memory is a little fuzzy itself). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jan 23 08:53:03 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 03:53:03 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: In a message dated 1/14/00 12:53:28 AM, you wrote: <> But remember both the horse and the wagon are now pretty much "neolithic" in Europe. And the horse's domestication in is a region that is late in converting to agriculture. I wrote: >Perhaps the most recent trend has been the realization that "kurgan" >characteristics did not cause anything but minor changes in a great many >areas where they were adopted. You wrote: So? Why does language replacement *have* to make more than a minor change? I wrote > More important changes seem to have to do >with climate, economics and resulting changes in trade and material >processing and social structure. You wrote: <> Let me give you an alternative hypothesis. One characteristic of most of the technical changes that are associated with PIE or early IE languages show a pattern of regular diffusion in one direction or another. Is it possible that language did not come along with or follow those innovations, but instead made their quick diffusion possible? Is it possible that PIE became the language of technology and cultural change so that language was the pipeline for spreading everything from kurgan culture to metallurgy to wagon-making (no easy task, if you've ever tried it) to the potter's wheel? Or even the improvements in farming we find throughout the neolithic? This puts language on a higher level - where I think it belongs - as a medium for the spreading of the advances we keep on trying to attribute to something else. Homer's "winged words" outrun traders and armies and chariots and bookeepers, so that the idea of wheel (along with maybe those wheeled models we call toys) gets to Europe before any physical wheels get there? Transferred along various dialects of PIE that maintain their mutual intelligibility because they are the language of new ideas and new material goods? I wrote: > The influx was not of new peoples in >most cases and where they were we do not find horse warriors, but rather "the >sheperds of the kurgan culture" as one recent research report described them. You wrote: <> It's funny, but one of the largest replacements we see in modern times happens in migration, but the language change is not to the home population but to the migrant. The US Census estimated that 65% of the US population consists of those whose ancestors did not speak English in 1850. The parallel idea is that the PIE spread not by it coming to people, but people coming to it. Or lets say to the PIE farming settlement and polis from the countryside. Regards Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jan 23 09:45:01 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 04:45:01 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: I wrote: >We are talking about a period between roughly 2650BC - 1650BC in mainland >Greece. My statement was that there is no serious material evidence of a >significant immigration during that period, EXCEPT from Anatolia. >If there are other "lines of evidence" of an "incursion" from the north, I'd >very much like to hear what they are. In a message dated 1/17/00 6:08:29 PM, sarima at friesen.net wrote: <> Just a reminder that my original posts on this subject were in response to claims on this list that there was very clear evidence of a major incursion from the north. In fact that evidence is not there. The disconcerting thing I think you will understand is that first a piece of evidence is cited as proving something. And then when that evidence disappears, it is suddenly asserted it doesn't mean anything. <> Evidence of wheeled carts have been found in Germany and the Near East before they are found in the Balkans. Evidence of shaft graves appear in the Caucasus where Mallory said linguistics does not permit IE and they never appear in Luwian country in Anatolia or in western Europe. And evidence of the domesticated true horse apparently takes 2000 years to travel a quarter way around the Black Sea coast to get to Greece - while it appears in Denmark in about 700. If you see a clear pattern here, does it coincide with your linguistic understandings? Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jan 23 10:22:42 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 05:22:42 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: In a message dated 1/21/00 7:38:23 AM, anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fiwrote: <> Betraying my ignorance, I must once again ask why this exchange must have happened with PIE and not with an early daughter. I MUST also find out someday why Uralic would need to borrow words for water, move, bring and wash from IE. anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fiwrote: <> PIE originates just south of where Uralic originates? So that Uralic did not expand south because PIE speakers were already there? Or did somebody move in? Or is the assertion that they were all once one language and perhaps this wasn't borrowing at all. <> I'd wait until you have a chance to review the alternative explanation. Just to get both sides and seem a little unbiased. Regards, Steve Long From Georg at home.ivm.de Sun Jan 23 11:24:18 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 12:24:18 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Some, among archaeologists in Britain and the US (where extreme >anti-diffusionist and anti-migrationist positions are common, essentially for >ideological reasons). I'm just curious and don't want to open a thread on the pros and cons of Renfrew's approach here, but: What are the ideological reasons which lead people to what you call extreme anti-diffusionism and anti-migrationism ? What kind of ideology is lurking behind this ? Could you sum up in a few words ? Really only curious. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From jer at cphling.dk Mon Jan 24 01:08:01 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 02:08:01 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: In his mail of Tue, 18 Jan 2000, Ante Aikio speaks, I believe, a word of common sense. If there are pan-Uralic words of IE origin that look as old as our reconstructions, they may very well be loanwords from Proto-IE into Proto-Uralic or one of its prestages. They may of course also be older than PIE; since it is apparently only lexical material, there is little to tell us anything about the time depth of the donor forms. Therefore, it is not absolutely compelling to draw the conclusion that the two protolanguages were contiguous, but it is still one very fair possibility. It is also a quite strong argument that, if the Uralic Urheimat is placed for independent reasons somewhere in Central Ukraine and the IE ditto has been put in the southern part of the Ukraine, the two protolanguages were in fact once contiguous and the old loan relations stem from some period within that contact. As for the position of Anatolian, there are very few things that distinguish Proto-IE as it was before the break-off of pre-Anatolian from what it became during the time up to its next split when the second branch (Tocharian?) left the remaining stock. Consequently, we cannot tell from the form of an IE loanword in Uralic whether it was borrowed before or after the separation of Anatolian from the rest. That being so, we cannot quite exclude that the IE homeland was in Anatolia and that the rest had moved to the north of the Black Sea and there met the (pre-)Proto-Urals and handed them a bag of loanwords. Note that laryngeals are not retained only in Anatolian; there are enough laryngeal-sensitive phonetic changes in the individual branches to guarantee that laryngeals survived as segmental units well into the separate lifelines of the other subbranches also. 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 (the words for "earth", "bear" or "fire" would be interesting), and until such time we just cannot decide the issue on a linguistic basis and should, consequently, leave it up the archaeologists to argue about it. Flaunting my ignorance, I may perhaps ask the silly question: How can you exclude that the Uralic homeland had a prehistory south of the Black Sea? If Proto-Uralic was only one language when it split into the many that have become known, can one really exclude that the speakers of that language had earlier lived somewhere else? I'm not advocating that one should make up all sorts of fanciful scenarios, far from it, but it just could be playing a trick on us. Even so - and that is what I like about your suggestions - it should be specified how things are in case appearances are NOT deceitful and things really ARE what they seem. In that case we have certainty about the location of the IE Urheimat - and even if there is some deception involved the argument is still pretty strong that both groups lived at two stations north of the Black Sea and so may well have been in contact here. Jens From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jan 23 08:14:05 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 03:14:05 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: In a message dated 1/13/00 11:25:47 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- except that it's linguistic nonsense, which requires Celtic to remain completely unchanged for 4000 years,>> Where specifically do you find this? And I mean in Renfrew. What book? What page? Steve Long From mclasutt at brigham.net Mon Jan 24 06:42:44 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 23:42:44 -0700 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <3a.730bb6.25babc56@aol.com> Message-ID: Steve, You've got a basic flaw in your logic. Joat wrote: <> You responded with some lengthy questions about dating and specific sound changes, but it was your concluding comment that attracted my attention: <<...If this particular word for wheel entered after PIE dispersed but before those sound changes, then we'd should have exactly the same outcome.>> Absolutely not. If PIE had already dispersed into separate languages or speech areas, then there is absolutely no reason to assume that a word borrowed into one end of the Indo-European region into one dialect/language would necessarily spread throughout all the languages in the family. The ONLY way to account for the very existence of the word in nearly every branch of Indo-European (Indo-Iranian, Hellenic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Italic, and Tocharian) is that the word was borrowed when PIE was still a unity. Unless the word was borrowed when PIE was a unity, then there is no other way to account for this widespread occurrence in the family, whether or not specific sound changes had or had not occurred yet. If the word only existed in, say, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, and Tocharian, then the borrowing is quite likely one that only penetrated the eastern end of PIE. The same would be true on the western end of PIE if the word only existed in Celtic, Germanic and Italic. However, since *kwelos has reflexes throughout Indo-European, and the sound changes that have affected it in each of the daughters are completely regular, the only logical assumption that we can make is that the word was borrowed when PIE was still a unity. Any other assumption requires a leap of faith and violates the principle of Occam's Razor. 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 Jan 24 09:11:44 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 09:11:44 +0000 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister writes: > It seems like someone had Spanish "to be in motion, engage > in activity, function/work (i.e. machines), go around, walk, travel, etc." > in mind as the translation for Basque and then tried to come up > with an English equivalent.[Note that andar does have somewhat different > semantics in different regions of the Spanish speaking world.] Yes. Spanish is the usual dictionary gloss of Basque , and it certainly matches better than anything in English. The usual French gloss is , which is also better than anything in English. > And from what Larry Trask says, I wonder if either andar or ibili > may be semantically influenced by the other form. Quite possibly. Especially (though not only) among Spanish Basques, shares some of the idiomatic meanings of , such as 'fare', 'get along' and 'work', 'function'. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From karhu at umich.edu Mon Jan 24 09:33:32 2000 From: karhu at umich.edu (Marc Pierce) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 04:33:32 -0500 Subject: NW vs. E Gmc In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 22 Jan 2000, Sean Crist wrote: > I'd like to bring up a few points which were discussed in connection with > the distinction between NW and E Germanic: > 2. Marc Pierce mentioned gemination before *j. Actually, this is a > strictly WGmc innovation, and thus isn't evidence one way or the other for > the grouping of the three Gmc branches. Not quite. Gemination before *j is also found in North Germanic, but it's limited to the velars, which I should have mentioned in my original post. Marc Pierce From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jan 24 12:27:15 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 12:27:15 +0000 Subject: Basque butterflies again Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Rick Mc Callister writes: [LT] >> Take the mainly Lapurdian forms ~ . >> Lapurdian, almost alone among the varieties of Basque, is very fond of >> expressive formations in , and . Here are some >> examples of such expressive forms: > Not all of these seem expressive, some seem to be modified > loanwords from Romance with assimilated consonants; perhaps "expressive" > forms of loanwords > I don't know the Gascon, Aragonese, Catalan or Occitan cognates to > the French and Spanish forms [nor do I have access to dictionaries of those > languages. But these may offer better matches Yes. A few of the Basque words cited bear some kind of resemblance to words in Romance, and especially in Occitan. I omitted from my list a couple of cases that looked like obvious loans, but several of the others are possible loans, though, if so, they have been substantially altered within Basque. However, given the restriction of the expressives to French Basque, and largely to Lapurdian, an economical view might be that is an expressive pattern in Occitan which has been borrowed into neighboring varieties of Basque and used there to coin new formations. I don't know enough Occitan to say if this is plausible, but it can't be ruled out *a priori*. [on 'pretty' possibly from 'alive'] > Is it possible that < ? IE *wiwos "live" ? > [ Moderator's note: > The IE etymon of Latin _vivo-_, Greek _bio-_, Sanskrit _jiva-_, clearly has > an initial labiovelar; other bits of evidence lead us to reconstruct an "o- > coloring" laryngeal in the root, so *g{^w}iH{_3}-. Whether or not the Basque > form can be derived thereform must be answered by someone else. > --rma ] The IE source has been proposed by several specialists, but there appears to be no way of investigating this. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From jrader at m-w.com Mon Jan 24 10:12:47 2000 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 10:12:47 +0000 Subject: Basque butterflies Message-ID: Sorry, but just about everything in this statement is inaccurate. The word in question is Eastern Yiddish , without vowel variation between dialects, which is a pretty good indication it is not part of the Germanic component of Yiddish. German in the sense "ornament" is borrowed from Low German and did not become general until Fruehneuhochdeutsch. It has no counterpart in Yiddish. The Germanic component of Yiddish is based largely on Rhenish dialects of Middle High German. With the eastward migrations of Jews from western Germany in the 14th and 15th centuries contact between Eastern Yiddish dialects and German was virtually severed. It is not sound etymologizing to equate Yiddish words directly with modern German words. The actual origin of Eastern Yiddish , a vulgar word for "penis," has been much debated. Jim Rader > It might work, given that Spanish bicho also means "pecker" --like > Yiddish schmuck < German schmuck "jewel". > In [Brazilian] Portuguese, it's also acquired the meaning "sissy, > pansy" [i.e. "effeminate"] > Rick Mc Callister > W-1634 > Mississippi University for Women > Columbus MS 39701 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jan 24 17:12:32 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 17:12:32 +0000 Subject: Basque butterflies (and phonemes) again Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Roz Frank writes: > [LT] >> And, of course, native Basque lexical items with the slightest >> claim to antiquity never begin with /p/ (the ancient Basques apparently >> couldn't pronounce initial /p-/) > [RF] > Just for the record, I'd mention that this is Larry Trask's position, one > that he has discussed on other occasions. However it is not the only > position. Indeed, for a rather different rendition of phonological events I > would suggest taking a look at Jose Ignacio Hualde's article "Pre-Basque > Plosives" forthcoming in a volume edited by Jon Franco, Alazne Landa and > Juan Martin, _Grammatical Analyses in Basque and Romance Linguistics_ John > Benjamins, Vol. 187 of the series Current Issue in Linguistic Theory. Since > I understand that Larry read an earlier version of that article, I'm > certain that he's familiar with the evidence. Given the complexity of the > issue, I would only state that based on my reading of Hualde's data, the > fact a word appears in modern Basque with an initial /p/ would not in and > of itself argue for or against its "antiquity". And by saying this I don't > mean to imply that I'm taking any particular position on the antiquity of > the examples found in the current discussion. OK. First, let me stress that I have the very greatest respect for Hualde's work. In my view, Hualde is the finest descriptive linguist working on Basque today. And it is not often that I disagree with him, but on this issue I certainly do. The standard reconstruction of the phonology of the Pre-Basque of some 2000 years ago is that by Michelena. Michelena reconstructs two contrasting sets of plosives: the "fortis" */p t k/, of which he says */p/ was rare and may possibly not have existed at all, and the "lenis" */b d g/. These symbols are chosen to reflect the most usual reflexes in the modern language, and they should not be regarded as necessarily representing phonetic reality in Pre-Basque. These two sets, M concludes, contrasted only word-medially and mostly only intervocalically. Word-initially, only */b d g/ could occur, and moreover initial */d/ never occurred in native words, though it was used freely to render both Latin /d-/ and Latin /t-/ in early borrowings. This asymmetric distribution, or better neutralization, is not confined to the plosives. On the contrary, M reconstructs just such a neutralization for *all* his proto-consonants, all of which come in fortis-lenis pairs: free contrast between vowels, only lenes initially (and not all of them), and only fortes finally (and not all of them). This reconstruction is powerfully supported by the evidence, including the modern forms of Basque words, the treatment of borrowed words, and the medieval graphies. It cannot lightly be waved away. Now, I have heard and read several versions of Hualde's proposal here, though I have not yet read his final published version, and so I must direct my remarks to the earlier versions, which I hope are not substantially different from the final version. Important point: Hualde does *not* reject Michelena's reconstructed phonological system. Instead, he proposes to reinterpret its phonetics, and its later development. In M's analysis, word-initial */b d g/ in Pre-Basque, which were always unaspirated and usually voiced, develop regularly into /b d g/ in the modern language, with certain complications, notably for /b/, which are irrelevant here and which I shall ignore. 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. This is a perfectly plausible and respectable analysis, of course, but now it must be evaluated against the evidence. And here, I think, it falls down. The problem, in my view, is that this analysis requires that both native words and borrowed words should turn up in modern Basque, arbitrarily and unpredictably, with both voiced and voiceless plosives, or in many cases with both. Hualde has tried hard to argue that precisely this is indeed the case. But I can't agree. To me, it seems overwhelmingly clear that obviously native words with initial */b g/ (no native initial */d/, recall) turn up in modern Basque with /b g/ virtually without exception. I am thinking of words like 'head', 'two', 'road', 'new', 'heart', 'hot', 'cart', 'after, later', 'waist', 'red', 'bad', 'salt', and many dozens of others. These native words *just do not* turn up with initial /p k/. Exceptions to this statement are few, confined to small areas, and often explicable by the sporadic but familiar right-to-left voicing assimilation we find in Basque. For example, 'cart' appears nowhere as *, but its phonologically regular derivative 'cartwheel' is recorded as in the Gipuzkoan dialect -- by anticipatory voicing assimilation. In great contrast, obvious loan words overwhelmingly show both initial /p t k/ and, more particularly, enormous regional variation in initial voicing. Examples: ~ 'peace'; ~ 'beech'; ~ 'pepper'; 'pine' (no *); ~ 'tithe'; ~ 'breast'; ~ 'letter'; ~ 'onion'; ~ 'tower'; ~ 'bag'; ~ 'wine-press'; ~ 'hinge'; ~ 'rustic gate'; ~ 'cap'; ~ 'transparent'; and countless others, with both variants typically being found in many parts of the country. Such voicing fluctuation is so pervasive among loanwords that we may, with considerable confidence, take it as the signature of a loan word. When we encounter a doubtful case like ~ 'dung', with both variants found right throughout the country, we may be almost certain that we are looking at a loanword. Accordingly, I find myself obliged to reject Hualde's interpretation. It requires native words to behave just like loanwords in their initial voicing, but they plainly do not. Finally, on the particular question of initial /p/, which, recall, Michelena regarded as rare or nonexistent in Pre-Basque and as absent from initial position. I challenge anybody on this list to produce even a single Basque word with initial /p/ which meets my usual criteria: it is recorded before 1600; it occurs in all or in nearly all dialects; it does not appear to be polymorphemic; and it cannot reasonably be suspected of being borrowed from a neighboring language. Any takers? Given the dozens of words in initial /b/ which satisfy my criteria, Hualde's thesis requires us to find at least something like a comparable number with initial /p/ or with /b/ ~ /p/ variation throughout the country. And I can't think of one. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From edsel at glo.be Mon Jan 24 18:42:03 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 19:42:03 +0100 Subject: Basque 'sei' Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Friday, January 14, 2000 3:27 PM [snip] >> [ES] >> The nature of the contrast of the two Iberian sibilants is not entirely >> unknown, as some toponyms have survived: e.g. Saitabi(a) > Xa'tiva, > Very interesting. I didn't know that this etymology had been established. > Has it been? [Ed] i.e. a number of authors think so, but I haven't been able to dig that out from my documentation, for now. It can certainly be identified with Grk. Saitabi's which in turn is assumed to be Xa'tiva (the local, Valencian name, with x = [esh]. "Ja'tiva" is the Castilianized form, now widely used because Valencian is losing ground rapidly in southern parts of the province of Valencia and in Alacant). Other forms are S'aitibi (in Lat. alphabet Saetabi) and the obvious ethnonym S'aitibietar. >> which indicates that the S must have been rather closer to Basque (apical) s >> than z. > Why? [Ed] Because of the correspondence of s' with Valencian x, and with Basque apical s (wheneever a similar word or segment is encountered in Basque and Iberian). Sometimes it corresponds to Cast./Val. s (which is also rather apical) like in s'aguntiko <> (from?) Sagunt(o), Lat. Saguntum.. E.g. in the text of the stela from Sinarcas, we can interpret and re-write (because there is no distinction of voiced/unvoiced stops etc., and no word separation in the original) part of the text as saying "gauek as'ko loitegarri"; in Basque "asko" (with apical s) means Sp. 'bastante' in both its meanings: '(largely) enough' or 'a lot'. > True, at a much later stage, a shushy sibilant in Arabic sometimes came into > Castilian as [esh], developing later to jota. But on what basis can we > extend this pattern centuries further back into the past? >> Some Iberian words are extremely similar to some Basque words > I'd be very careful here. [Ed] See above. I admit anybody's guess is as good as mine. > First, it is not trivial to identify Iberian words at all. Many Iberian > texts use a mark which looks like a word-divider, but not all do so, and not > all do so consistently. Decisions about word-boundaries in such cases are > difficult and debatable. In practice, nothing much interesting can be said > about Iberian words. Instead, it is the seemingly recurrent morphs which > attract attention. These are presumed to represent morphemes, and some of > them do indeed resemble items in Basque. However, in almost no case do we > know the meaning of the Iberian item, and hence the comparisons must be > strictly of forms -- not very illuminating. The few Iberian morphs to which > meanings can be assigned with some confidence do not, in general, look like > anything in Basque. [Ed] Some do: see e.g.'asko'. > In its phonological structure, Iberian seems to be rather similar to Basque, > and hence it is perhaps not very surprising that similar sequences exist in > both languages. But, when we don't know the meanings of the Iberian items, > we have no right to claim that Iberian and Basque possess "extremely similar > words". Finally, recall that Basque is of no more assistance in reading > Iberian than is, say, Norwegian or Zulu. This must count for something. [Ed] I would object to that: there are similarities, and there was very likely some exchange among these lgs. I know a lot of crackpots have pretended to have translated Iberian texts and that most of that is simply impossible to be true (like based upon modern Basque words, or of Romance origin, and worse), but some parts of texts can be interpreted (i.e. one can guess the general meaning) if other information is available, like the likely use, purpose, archaeological context etc., and some connection with (mainly) Basque root stems or words doesn't seems too far-fetched, and this yields a compatible meaning. >> (I know you don't accept this to be anything but coincidence), > There is no reason to see anything other than coincidence when all we have is > resemblances in form, with no meanings attached. >> and these similarities always point to a systematic correspondance of the >> two Iberian sibilants and Basque s and z. > Really? This is news to me. What evidence can you adduce to support this > claim? [Ed] See above. >> From toponyms and other words one can deduce that Aquitanian and Iberian >> also had the corresponding affricates (ts and tz). In Iberian script these >> are written exactly as the non-affricated ones. In other scripts and in >> Aquitanian in Latin script orthography is pretty confusing, but often >> resembles later usages. > The Iberian script distinguishes only two sibilants, and I know of no hard > evidence that the language actually had four. > The defective Roman script used for writing Aquitanian doesn't distinguish > any sibilants at all very clearly, except that X or XS seems to have > represented affricates, while S and SS appear to have represented fricatives. >> I don't know where you found that Aquitanian may have had two additional >> sibilants. > This derives from the conclusion that Aquitanian represents an ancestral form > of Basque, more or less identical to the Pre-Basque reconstructed from > Basque-internal evidence. > Modern Basque has the following sibilants: laminal , apical , and > palato-alveolar . Now, one feature of our reconstruction is that only > the first four could ever appear in the unmarked forms of lexical items, > while were entirely confined to expressive variants -- mainly > diminutives. We therefore surmise that Pre-Basque -- and hence Aquitanian -- > *may* also have had these last two, even though they don't show up clearly in > the written records. [Ed] I'm truely sorry: this apparent disagreement is caused by my very restrictive use of the word 'sibilant', excluding the voiced and palatalized forms. Maybe I should have said somethging like 'various s sounds'. Michelena e.g. calls the palatalized forms 'chicheantes' (Fr. chuintantes). BTW, Iberian script doesn't distinguish affricated forms either. [snip generally known stuff] >>>> The Castilian s and z/c (theta) are the descendants of the old Basque-type >>>> distinction, I believe. > [LT] >>> I don't follow. Castilian /s/ simply continues Latin /s/, except that it >>> is apical, whereas the Latin /s/, on the Basque evidence, was probably >>> laminal. But the Castilian theta derives ultimately, in most cases, from >>> Latin /k/ before a front vowel; this is thought to have become some kind of >>> affricate before developing into theta (or into /s/, according to region). > [ES] >> In derivations from Latin this true, but in all other cases it is not. I >> didn't mean that the Castilian s/z distinction is descended directly from >> the Basque apical/laminal opposition, as a parallel evolution in particular >> words, but that its very existence is due to a pre-existing awareness of >> such a phonological distinction (it did in Iberian), something most European >> languages don't have (and ditto for the rhotics). > "A pre-existing awareness"? Strange wording, almost mystical. > May I translate into terms more familiar to me? > I presume the suggestion is that the Castilian s/z contrast derives from > areal pressure, from the influence of neighboring languages that already had > it. [Ed] Something like that: familiarity with the phenomenon, even if they didn't have it themselves. Like I'm aware of French uvular r, but I can't really pronounce it even though I'm fluent (and used to work) in French. > But the modern s/z contrast dates only from the 16th century -- rather late > for areal influence from Iberian, I'd say, or even from Basque -- which in > any case has a distinction decidedly different from the Castilian one. [Ed] As we know it, yes. But there must have been a precursor distinction that turned into the present one. I think this was already discussed on this list some months ago. > As for other European languages, I will remind you of Martin Joos's 1952 > paper in Language, in which he argued that an apical/laminal contrast in > sibilants was in the medieval period widespread in Europe. [Ed] In which languages you mean? >>>> What about Arabic? It certainly has various sibilants. > [LT] >>> Yes, but it does not have an apical/laminal contrast, and I know of no >>> evidence that Arabic phonology had any effect on Castilian phonology, still >>> less on Basque phonology. > [ES] >> As far as Castilian is concerned, I am not so sure: does any one have any >> references or information on that subject? > No, but I no of no evidence or argument that Arabic ever had the slightest > effect upon Castilian phonology, apart from the forms of a few individual > words that entered Castilian after Arabic mediation, like 'soap'. [Ed] Actually, I was not thinking of an Arabic influence, but it may have existed after so many centuries. I was just using it as an example of a lg. with more than one sibilant (in casu emphatic/normal). >> In Basque, it is rather the opposite: e.g. kuttun < kitab, i.e. Arabic words >> were adapted to Basque phonology. > Yes, and this is what normally happens in borrowing. > By the way, Basque ~ ~ (and other variants), which > has been applied to various kinds of written things, is thought to derive > from the Arabic plural 'books'. This appears to be one of the rare > cases in which Basque has taken over an Arabic word without Romance > mediation. > Larry Trask [Ed] I read once that there are a few more, but I can't find the reference. Ed. Selleslagh From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jan 24 11:51:42 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 11:51:42 +0000 Subject: Basque Message-ID: Roz Frank writes: [on Basque 'be in motion' and related topics] > First let me state that I'm a bit confused about the nature of the Basque > evidence itself. But before turning to that question, let me add that the > relationship between the Basque root-stem <-bil> and the IE materials is > equally unclear to me at this stage. > So, speaking of the meaning "round" that is attributed of proposed nominal > root *, could someone explain to me the role of <-bil> in the compound > (also ) defined by Azkue as "sphere, something round" > (all citations are from Azkue unless otherwise indicated). Also, what is > the meaning of the first element and could that element be affecting our > interpretation of the prototype meaning of <-bil> (as well as *)? > Actually I'm not familiar with appearing in isolation with the > meaning "round". For example, the most commonly cited compound is > whose meaning is glossed/translated as "round". But isn't the meaning > "round" derived primarily from two expressions both being compounds? And, > yes, I do know that the meaning that is assigned to * is "round" and > that there are other compounds where <-bil> appears as a suffixing element. > Nonetheless, I believe a closer examination of the compounds will suggest a > slightly different interpretation. OK. Basque * 'round' is nowhere recorded as an independent word. But it occurs as an element, usually a final element, in a number of more-or-less transparent formations. Examples: 'cartwheel', 'wheel' This is from 'cart' + *. The phonology is absolutely regular: * --> * --> * --> * -> . 'small round bread roll or pastry' This is from 'bread', and again the phonology is perfect: * --> * --> * --> * --> . 'fist' This is from the archaic 'forearm', recorded in Oihenart in the 17th century, and again the phonology is perfect: * --> The same element is also seemingly present in other formations whose first element is obscure or unidentifiable, such as 'testicle'. Now, the common word 'round' looks like a reduplication. Certainly an original * would develop regularly to , since /l/ > /r/ between vowels is a regular change. But this admittedly leaves that medial /i/ unaccounted for, and opinion is divided here. Some posit an original *, with an interfix for phonological or expressive reasons. Others favor a purely expressive formation, consisting of an arbitrary sequence plus *. As for ~ 'round thing', 'sphere', 'globe', this pretty clearly contains *, but the first element is unidentifiable, and may be of expressive origin, though there are various other stories on the table. Anyway, this word is not recorded before 1886. For all of these, Agud and Tovar's etymological dictionary provides a good review of the data and of the proposals, including the crazy ones. > In the case of it seems to me that there is a question concerning > its composition. One analysis could derive it from a reduplication based on > which is a relatively high frequency prefixing element in Basque. I presume the reference is to the common combining form ~ 'twice', 'double', 'again', as in '40', from '20'. But the origin of this is known. It is the word 'bent', 'redoubled', 'twisted', discussed below. We know this because the combining form appears as in Landucci's 1562 dictionary of the Basque of Alava, which has, for example, for '40'. Anyway, this combining form always has the trilled written between vowels, and hence it cannot be present in , which has the tapped written . > Yet > my own intuitive analysis of the compound would identify the first element > with "his/her/its", one of two 3rd p. sg. genitive pronouns, that > has undergone vowel raising, not particularly unusual in Basque. Moreover, > is a common element in compounds Yes, but what would be the semantic motivation for this? > Also, when dealing with the Basque evidence one must consider the possible > relationship between the verbal root of ( "to gather up" > and the <-bil-> of . Indeed, though 'gather', 'collect' cannot, I think, be related to . But specialists have suspected for decades that it might be related to * 'round', though the semantic link requires a bit of fancy footwork. Recall that ancient Basque seems to have had an absolute distinction between verbal roots and all other roots, which I will loosely call "nominal roots" here. Only a verbal root could occur in a verb bearing the prefix * in its non-finite forms. And, as far as we can tell, only a verbal root could ever appear inside a directly inflected (synthetic, non-periphrastic) finite verb-form. In contrast, a nominal root could not do these things, but it *could* take a suffix to form the participle of a verb. That suffix was <-i> in the ancient language, and still so in some modern verbs, but in this function <-i> has long since been displaced by the innovating suffix <-tu> (borrowed from Latin), which is now the productive suffix for forming verbs from non-verbal stems. And this is what we find in , with the usual voicing after /l/. So, it appears that we must regard as derived from a nominal stem *, and hence as having nothing to do with the verbal root <-bil-> which appears in . > The bare-stem or radical , as in > , is found in a large number of compounds, and if I'm not mistaken, > almost always with the notion of "gathering up, collecting", e.g., > "joint, place of articulation; meeting place (from > with <(g)une> "space, segment, opening, moment"); "pilgrimage, > 'romeria', outing with a going and coming; reunion; ritual or communal turn > for recollection of goods, i.e., usually involving following an agreed upon > itinerary through the village or countryside (and hence 'movement'): from > where <-era> is the allative ending ("towards") also commonly > used to form nominal compound constructions. The allative ending is <-ra> > after vowels and <-era> after consonants. Yes; all of these are derived straightforwardly from the stem of . But cannot contain the allative case-ending, which is never used to construct nouns. Surely it contains the common noun-forming suffix <-(k)era>, which usually means 'way', 'manner', but which can also mean 'act', as in 'act of requesting', 'request', from 'ask for'. > Certainly * > (*) could be interpreted as "to move/turn on oneself, to roll > (oneself) up, to gather oneself up, to move toward oneself, to contract". Doubt it. In such a formation, would require a suitable case-suffix. Compare, for example, '(to) appropriate', 'take to oneself', from 'to oneself', with the animate allative <-gana>. > I would note that we find the following in Azkue: > () "redondear; agenciar; enroscarse una culebra"; > ()"envolver, apelotonar, ganar por astucia o deseza, > enredar; recoger el ganado." Yes, but all of these are merely derivatives of . > In addition there is the example of > and its variant which were coined to mean "automobil" and said to > be a compound translating quite literally the notion of "self-mover" (cf. > Llande's _Dictionaire...1926), at least that was how the word was explained > to me by Basque speakers many years back. But modern neologisms are of no historical relevance. > In addition, there are a number of bisyllabic and trisyllabic items that > appear to be compounds ending in a suffixing element in <-pil/-bil>, > () "wheel", "type of pastry; hinge", > (*?)"knot", whose meaning is not always entirely > clear. As explained above, the first two of these are transparent and regular. The third is obscure: very likely it does contain *, but its first element is opaque. > I'm quite certain that there a several other examples that simply > don't come to my mind right now, although Jon Patrick probably could pull > them up from his computerized list. The difficulties involved in retrieving > such items, compounds with a given suffix, is another reason that Azkue's > dictionary should be computerized in its entirety and without attempting to > modify the spelling of the entries in order to convert them all into Batua, > the written standard invented some thirty years ago. Yes, certainly. It is out of order to alter the recorded forms of words. Even so, the Aranist eccentricities of Azkue's notation could usefully be replaced by more conventional graphs. For example, Azkue's could be replaced by , and his by . > And following up on LT's comment about the meaning of , would "to go > about" be a better rendition of its meaning? Azkue translates it simply as > "andar". Furthermore, I would imagine that if LT once glossed the meaning > of "ibili" as "to go around", he probably meant by that to say the verb > often was used to mean "to go around/about (doing X or Y)." Yes. I'm about to reply to Ed Selleslagh's query about this. I was using 'go around' in its American sense of 'go about', 'go here and there'. Basque does not mean 'circle around', 'go around' as in 'go around an obstacle'. > Additionally, with respect to * giving rise to , there is > a curious aspect of Basque that might be related to the meanings cited > above for compounds such as and . I refer to the > fact that there is a certain amount of evidence that in Basque the notion > of "to turn into, transform (oneself)" is connected to the concept of > "twisted" but not from the point of view of our highly negative IE image > schemata which sets out "straightness" as a standard/base reality. Rather > "twisted" carries strong connotations of "resistance", of > "rolling up on itself/oneself" as a newly woven rope is prone to do, > twisting itself back into a series of loops, coiling itself up: when > pressure is applied it can be straightened out, but when the pressure/force > is removed it goes back to its "natural" shape, and curls itself back up." The original sense of the stem is hard to identify with confidence. I would cautiously suggest 'bent back upon itself', 'bent double' as the best guess, but it's only a guess. The stem and its derivatives have acquired such a broad range of senses in the modern language that we can hardly be sure of anything. Even in its earliest attestations, the stem has clearly negative senses like 'twisted', 'perverse', 'malignant'. > In Spanish for instance I believe that "twisted" implies that > force was applied to an object that was originally "straight" and that > produced its "twisted" appearance. In Basque the internal strength of being > is in , in the return to the rolled up or coiled up state in which > the being's innate energy is exercised and contained in the shape itself. > It would appear that in Basque the polarity of the gestalt is/was > fundamentally positive although certainly the resistance offered by the > rope, person or object to our will/desires can be problematic. Yet this > complex image schema that is at work here making it possible for > to mean "to twist up, coil up, curl up" as well as "to transform" ("to take > back its original shape" almost as if an inner force, as was the case with > the coiled rope, sets in motion the change). Keeping this in mind, it could > be argued that the meanings of * derive from or are in some > fashion related to this same gestalt. Debatable, since the earliest recorded senses of are negative. > Notice that in English we "bend someone to our will", implying that the > person's "resistance" is conceptualized or projected spatially as > "straightness" to which force is applied and in this way it will be > twisted/bend out of its original shape. The scene projected metaphorically > is one in which energy source comes from the outside and is then applied to > the object or person. Stated differently, there are two scenarios: 1) in > English when the object's resistance ("ego/individual will") is overcome, > the shape implied by the expression is "twisted" and when the external > force is removed, the object remains "bent" or "twisted" and 2) in Basque > while the external force iseing applied the object is offering resistance > to being "straightened out" by the will/force of the other and then once > the external force is removed the object is understood to immediately > spring back and recover its original shape. Also debatable, I think, but getting too abstract for me. > In short, generally speaking in English, as I mentioned above, > "straightness" is viewed as the "given", the natural state, and "twisted" > is what results from the application of an * external * force. Yes, but I know of no evidence that the case is different in Basque. > And a final aside. In the case of , certainly today we find it > used with negative connotations, much as it is in Spanish, but at the same > time it often carries a strong notion of "mischieviousness". Indeed, I've > heard Basque parents who when discussing the problem of > "educating/civilizing" their children, refer to this as a problem of > "domesticating" their off-spring. Yes, but this sense is modern, and seemingly not recorded in early texts. The case is perhaps comparable to that of English 'naughty'. This originally meant 'needy' (attested from 1377). It then became a common word for 'wicked', 'immoral' (attested from 1529, and for centuries afterward). Only from 1633 do we find the word applied to children in the sense of 'wayward', 'disobedient'. > Indeed, according to Azkue, the > abstraction refers to "caracter violento; indocil" which might > be rendered by the English term "wild(ness)" Again, I would emphasize that > in Basque the notion of "transformation" calls into play an image gestalt > or motion gestalt that doesn't appear to be present in Romance or English. Sorry; I'm not yet persuaded of this. > Actually is used today also to mean "to translate"). Yes; this derived verb has acquired the general sense of 'turn into' (tr. and intr.), and some associated more specific senses. > In summary, > I don't know of any general studies of this problem in IE languages, > especially diachronic ones since it is clear that the Basque data has > conceptual overlays that can be traced to the image schemata found in the > surrounding IE languages and firmly embedded in the metaphoric legacy of > Christianity, etc. Er -- "clear"? How? > And to conclude this perhaps already too lengthy discussion, I would > mention that in Mikel Morris's highly readable and well researched > Basque-English/English-Basque Dictionary (1998), we find that the English > word "coil" is translated by three terms containing the element : as > , and . Yes, but all three appear to be neologisms. So far as I can tell, none is recorded in this sense before the 20th century. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From stevegus at aye.net Mon Jan 24 12:52:27 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 07:52:27 -0500 Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: Ed Selleslagh writes: <> Hasn't Frisian also generalised a plural in -ar or -er, which also corresponds with what Norwegian and Swedish (and formerly Danish) did? -- Sella fictili sedeo Versiculos dum facio. From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Mon Jan 24 17:56:40 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 12:56:40 -0500 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 16 Jan 2000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > One of the criticisms that came up often when I asked some linguists to > comment on the tree was that it mixed apples and oranges. And cherries. > Syd Lamb wrote in a private message (repd w/permission) that lexical, > phonological and morphological items "are largely independent of one > another in how they are involved in change. ..." That's not true. For example, if a language inflects with suffixes and then undergoes phonological changes eliminating certain segments word-finally, this can result in the loss of morphological contrasts (thus, phonological and morphological change are not independent). Or to take another example, phonological change can help bring about lexical change; for example, "queen" and "quean" used to be pronounced differently, but after the ee/ea merger a few centuries ago, "quean" began to disappear from the language because of an unacceptable homonymy (thus, phonological and lexical change are not independent). Homonyms do exist, but languages seem to disprefer them. > "...Hence a tree constructed on > purely phonological grounds, for IE or Uto-Aztecan, or any complex > family, will come out quite different from one constructed on purely > lexical grounds, and both will differ from one constructed on purely > morphological grounds." The assumption you made was that lexical, morphological, and phonological change operate independently of one another _within_ a language. Here, you're talking about something else: you're talking about interaction _between_ languages. > There's no question that morphology can reflect different genetic > relationships than lexical or phonological items. I wouldn't use the term "reflect" here, since that indicates that we're talking about some reality here. A language has one genetic affiliation and not another. It's true that lexical items sometimes muddy the waters in determining this genetic affiliation. We can _usually_ detect loan words on the basis of sound changes which a word has or has not undergone. However, if a borrowing is early, it can sometimes chance that the sound changes in the donor and recipient languages have been such that a particular word would have the same outcome in both languages, in which case the loan is undetectable. This is a potential methodological pitfall which needs to be acknowledged. Acknowledging it is a very different thing from claiming that a _correct_ account can involve a language having one genetic affiliation for its lexicon and another for its morphology; that idea is simply incoherent. > This is precisely > what happened with Germanic in the UPenn exercise. It was pointed out > in another post that "there are a great many morphological and > constructional elements to be found in the earliest Indoeuropean texts > that are in opposition to apparent lexical similarities and > dissimilarities. One example is the accusative of specification > discussed by Hahn in 'Naming Constuctions in Indoeuropean languages' ... > This kind of morphology and syntax points in a very different direction > than mere homonyms." > It was also pointed out that the UPenn "outcome showed that their lexical > choices in German were older than their morphological choices,..." so that > it looks as if "the Germans got their words from Latin and Celtic first and > their syntax from Slavic later." Suggesting perhaps that the "problem is > trickier than it looks." This sounds like a somewhat mangled version of what Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor actually said. First of all, their study did not include syntactic characters; it included morphological, phonological, and lexical characters. The field of linguistics is not in a state of understanding historical change in syntax that syntactic characters could have been included. In any case, the team would most definitely not claim that "the Germans got...their syntax from Slavic"; I'm sure I'd be representing Don Ringe correctly to say that he'd vehemently disagree that syntax can be borrowed. What the team said up until recent versions of their work is that Germanic largely agrees with Balto-Slavic in terms of its morphology, but partially agrees with Italic and Celtic in terms of lexical characters. What they posited is that Germanic started out as a _genetic_ sister of Balto-Slavic, which accounts for the morphological characters on which they agree; but that it borrowed a number of lexical items from Italic and Celtic at such an early date that the words had not been detectable as loans on purely phonological grounds. However, in even more recent runs of the algorithm over the most recent version of the character table, the team found that the situation is worse than that: on different runs, Germanic pops up in different places in the tree. If you leave Germanic out, the same tree comes up over and over; but the placement of Germanic is simply a problem. This is something of a mystery at present. > Does all this reflect the possibility that an accurate and true morphological > IE tree would and should look different than an accurate and true lexical IE > tree? No, because a word is either borrowed or inherited. The borrowed words don't tell us anything about the genetic affiliation of a language, so we try to exclude them. The mismatch which sometimes occurs between trees computed over the two types of characters comes from the _methodological_ problem of not always being able to detect what's a loan word. > I was also given an example that I will try to repeat related to how > conservatism might affect the usable evidence of relatedness: > Two IE languages - possibly in contact - accidentially retain a feature from > PIE. All other IE languages lose that feature before any records exist. The > researcher would be forced to conclude that this feature is a shared > innovation, having NO WAY OF KNOWING of the PIE origins. He would have no > way of knowing that it should go in the "lost" category for the other > languages. On that basis, the two languages might have a common "character" > in the UPenn analysis and show evidence of relatedness. But in fact all that > is being measured is the relative conservatism of the two languages. Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor would code the other cases as "absent"; with a few exceptions, they generally don't make any claim as to whether this represents a loss. > (As far as non-borrowability of "syntactical morphology" goes, I was given > the example of the overwhelming and extensive use of the original Latinism > <-tion> in modern English. And the comment was that if that sort of thing > showed up in two ancient languages with no recorded history to explain how it > got there, "some historical linguists would probably say that it had to come > from the proto-language.") -tion is a _derivational_ affix; I have not seen the use of the term "syntactic[al] morphology". Derivational morphology can be borrowed, but borrowing of inflectional morphology (e.g. suffixes for verb tenses, noun case markers, etc.) is virtually unknown. It's for this reason that inflectional morphology is so valuable in determining the genetic affiliation of a language. The sort of case you bring up can be a problem, but it's not nearly as hopeless as you make it out to be. Even without any knowledge of the history, it's obvious that English has a huge stratum of words borrowed from Latin, because the words don't show the signs of having gone thru the Germanic sound changes. We can often detect this kind of borrowing even in ancient languages. > Which brings me back to the point of my original post. A language borrows > and innovates radically. To the point where let's say - to make the point > clear to the most obtuse degree - 99% of all lexical and morphological > features are not from the original parent. A large amount of borrowing can _obscure_ the genetic affiliation of a language, making it harder for the linguist to determine. This is a very different thing from saying that the genetic affiliation has changed. > This misses the point. The point is simply evidentiary. The radically > changing language could have little or no evidence left of its genetic > affilation. CRITICAL EVIDENCE OF THAT 'GENETIC' AFFILATION HAS BEEN LOST. > (And whether the borrowings happened before or after the sound changes is not > relevant here - the borrowings are the bulk of the language and all the > evidence you have.) > Saying that these attributes fall into the "lost" category on the UPenn grid > just won't do. And that's simply because there is no way of knowing if they > were lost or if they were ever there. Something that is "lost" looks and > acts exactly like something that was never there. > The UPenn tree uses some 300 features across all of IE and some 4000 years. > Is it possible that the absence of some of those features in some languages > is not due to recent innovations but losses in other languages? Is it > possible that things that are categorized as "lost" in the UPenn grid were > never there? It's for this reason that the team usually uses the neutral term "absent" rather than "lost". They do occasionally say "lost", but for the purposes of their methodology, it makes no practical difference. Either way, they code each language where an item is "absent" with a unique character. It's quite true that these absences (whether due to loss or due to original absence) represent noise in the data which make it harder to determine the correct tree. If you're trying to detemine the correct tree for a language family, this noise is something that you have to contend with, no matter what methodology you use. Despite the noise, the results are encouraging: a very coherent pattern arises (minus the problem with Germanic): multiple runs of the algorithm bring up the same tree again and again. > PS - Someone - I forget who - also wanted to know how the UPenn tree analysis > could claim to "confirm the Indo-Hittite hypothesize" when the actual > language used was Luwian. Ah- it was you who asked this. I already answered in a separate post, but here are the answers: 1) The team did use Hittite, not Luvian, to represent Anatolian. I don't know where the idea came from that they used Luvian. 2) It wouldn't matter anyway. Everyone agrees that Luvian and Hittite are members of the Anatolian branch of IE. Despite the misleading terminology, the "Indo-Hittite" hypothesis holds that the earliest branching in IE was between _Anatolian_ (not just Hittite) and Proto-Everything-Else. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Jan 24 18:40:10 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 19:40:10 +0100 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: <003e01bf650f$8492ef00$8401703e@edsel> Message-ID: "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >English Dutch >other ander >tooth tand: here the -n- has remained! >soft zacht: the ch (jota sound) - f correspondance is systematic: laugh lachen >(but English orthography is still witness of a similar pronunciation in times >past). With German:kraft kracht. These cases are not comparable. In English, there was a sound shift /x/ > /f/ (as well as /x/ > zero, cf. the split of the English interdental fricative into T ~ D). In Dutch, there was a sound shift /ft/ > /xt/. German mostly kept things as they were. So: sanft soft zacht < *samft- (Ingw. *sa~ft) Kraft craft kracht < *kraft- vs. lachen laugh lachen < *hlahhjan ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From gordonselway at gn.apc.org Mon Jan 24 14:11:50 2000 From: gordonselway at gn.apc.org (Gordon Selway) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 14:11:50 +0000 Subject: re PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: Some additional information: a) I'm not clear why telling us that 'balls' (sensu, testes) is 'rather transparently derived from the English word for "round object"' helps. Why should the derivation be that way round (except that it is more verbal than the visual image of a factory chimney being rapidly run up, then as quickly demolished, as I think in a sketch on BBC's celebrated "TW3" almost 40 years ago? An association made in 1200 BCE (or much earlier) is as likely as one made in 1200 CE (or more recently); b) the English 'bollocks', iirc, was earlier 'ballocks' (as passim in the verse of the Earl of Rochester, tempore Caroli secundi); c) Dennis King tells me that mod Ir Gaelic 'peil' ('peile' was my recollection of the spelling: it may be an alternative) probably comes from Latin 'pila', and confirms that he has no knowledge of any 'palla' at any stage in any form of Gaelic; d) Ga. 'ball' also means 'ball, globe' anglice - and 'ball-iomair' (ball-contest; Sc.) may also be used for 'football'. Gordon Selway From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Mon Jan 24 14:23:40 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 16:23:40 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 21 Jan 2000 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >> And how much support do such theories as e.g. Colin Renfrew's idea of the >> Anatolian origin of IE languages have? > -- very little, among linguists, because of the weird contortions in > linguistic development he assumes. I was in the (apparently false) belief that Renfrew had some support among linguists as well. > -- actually, early IE (and Indo-Iranian) loanwords in the Uralic languages > have been known for some time, and are commonly cited (eg., by Mallory). Yes, the fact that U languages possess relatively early IE / Aryan / Iranian loan words has been known among IE-ists for a long time, and Mallory correctly cites the Uralic loan word evidence in support for the Ukrainean original home. But what does not seem to be commonly known are the details of the IE loan word layers in Uralic. The picture has changed much during the last approx. 15 years and is still constantly changing. The details might shed light on the internal development / differentiation of IE (or, at least its northern branches) in the future. One thing worth noting is that dates have gone back conciderably. The Uralic expansion (for whatever reason it happened) may have been earlier than the IE one. Some descendant of proto-U (which would later evolve into Finnic and Saamic) was spoken in the Baltic Sea / Scandinavia area already 3200 bc, when the Indo-European battle axe culture arrived in southwestern Finland. There are some Finnic-Saamic loan words with proto-IE characteristics (e.g., laryngal reflexes) which are probably connected with the battle axe culture, such as Finnic-Saamic *kas´a- 'tip, end' < IE *Hak´-, *suki- 'family, kin' < IE *suH-. These words are unknown in U languages outside the Baltic Sea / Scandianavian area. There are also independent proto-IE loans in Saamic (e.g. *s´uki- 'sharpen' < IE *k´uH- 'pointed, sharp'), which possibly points towards a very early IE / pre-Saamic contact zone in mid-Scandinavia. At any rate, a uniform proto-U language cannot be assumed to have existed after 4000 bc, and 4500-5000 bc seems more likely. I am not sure how this correlates with IE dates - is 4000-5000 bc too early a date for proto-IE? A question that should be thoroughly researched is the possibility of U loan words in IE. Since there are massive amounts of IE loan words of varying age in the U languages, it seems overwhelmingly unlikely to me that there would be (almost) none in (proto-)IE. However, I know only two debatable cases that have been proposed, Germanic-Celtic *yeg- 'ice' < p-U *jäNi id. (N = velar nasal), and IE *(s)kwalo- '?whale, ?fish species' < p-U *kala 'fish' (the first case seems convincing enough to me). Has anyone written anything on this? Ante Aikio The Department of the Finnish and Saami Language and Logopedics University of Oulu, Finland anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Mon Jan 24 15:22:52 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 10:22:52 -0500 Subject: SV: Indo-Hittite In-Reply-To: <01BF64F1.E81A5900.lmfosse@online.no> Message-ID: I've lost track of the attribution, but someone on the list objected to saying that Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor had found confirmation of the Indo-Hittite hypothesis in their computational cladistic work. The objection was that the team used Luvian rather than Hittite to represent Anatolian. This isn't correct; in every version of the work I've seen, the team used Hittite to represent Anatolian. It wouldn't matter, anyway; despite the terminology, the Indo-Hittite hypothesis holds that the earliest branching in IE was between _Anatolian_ and what became the other IE languages. Sorry if the traditional terminology "Indo-Hittite" is misleading; it's one of those less-than-ideal terms which we're stuck with. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Jan 24 05:32:09 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 23:32:09 -0600 Subject: IE etymological dictionary In-Reply-To: Message-ID: with all the talent on this list, something much better than Pokorny could be created it could also be translated into several languages to make it more accessible It is legal to use data from copyrighted sources although you have to create an original format Sean's idea would be a tremendous boost for your profession and those of you in major universities would be wise to help him come up with grant money so he could farm out work to your grad students In the meantime, all of you can help by posting your papers and raw data online and working to get professional journals to republish their older editions online The geeks at computing services can make you free servers from obsolete computers and free Linux software, so you can post as much material as you want Those of you who work with endangered languages can post audio very easily with free downloadable software --although the files can be humongous and if you want real quality audio you do have to pay a couple of hundred dollars [snip] >Pokorny is still under copyright; the most recent edition is copyright >1959. It will be a great many years before that edition passes into the >public domain. The U.S. government keeps extending the term of copyright >longer and longer; they just bumped it up another 20 years a few years >ago. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Jan 24 18:25:47 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 19:25:47 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Sean Crist wrote: >> Further, remember that there are other "satem" branches, such as >> Armenian and Albanian. >That's not correct; Armenian underwent an independent set of consonant >changes which roughly resemble Grimm's Law in Germanic. Armenian did not >undergo the satem consonant shift. It did: *k^ > s tasn < *dek^m *g^ > c [ts] gorc < *werg^om *g^h > j [dz] jeRn < *g^hesr- Additionally, *uk > us even if the velar was not palatal in PIE. (Also, like the other satem lgs., Armenian underwent the ruki-rule, although that's a bit harder to recognize). >As for Albanian, I can't say much; it's so heavily mutated that it's not >of much use in reconstructing PIE, and I know next to nothing about the >sound changes it underwent. I can say that I've never heard anyone claim >that Albanian underwent the satem shift. Albanian is satem, or rather "thatem" (*k^ > th). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Mon Jan 24 18:45:05 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 13:45:05 -0500 Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter In-Reply-To: <96.5b1c2.25b2347c@aol.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 15 Jan 2000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > Sean Crist wrote: > *A forking in a language follows from a forking in the community of speakers, > typically because of migration leading to geographical separation. When the > original single group splits into two groups who wander off from each other, > the copies of the language information in the minds of the members of both > groups start out basically identical. Over time, however, the norms in the > two communities DRIFT IN DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS, since the two groups are no > longer in contact* > Which does not answer the question why the proper model is a forking rather > than a branching. The DEGREE OF DRIFT may vary between the two groups. A > RADICAL DEGREE OF DRIFT in one group and a SMALL CONSERVATIVE DRIFT in the > other would suggest a branching not a forking. What is important to my post > is: WOULD YOU HAVE CALLED THE SMALL CONSERVATIVE DRIFT A NEW LANGUAGE IF THE > SPLIT HAD NEVER OCCURED? > Methodologically, it appears that you are "reifying" a new language because a > split has occurred - NOT because of any quality of change in the language. > A splits into B and C. You would have continued to call A "A" if no split > occurred. But because of the split, you call it "B." > I hope you understand there is a bit of a problem here. It's apparently a problem for you. Linguists are well aware that there is no clear criterion for looking at two lects and saying "same language" vs. "different languages." It is purely a matter of convention what distinctions we want to draw and what names we want to use. For example, consider the following two cases: -Earlier Dutch forked into Dutch and Afrikaans. -Latin forked into Italian, Spanish, French, etc. In the former case, we continue to use the term for the parent language for one of the daughters. In the latter case, we don't. What we choose to call the daughters is _purely_ a matter of convention. Linguistically speaking, the two cases are examples of exactly the same thing; it doesn't matter whether we've arbitrarily chosen to use the name of the parent language as the name of one of the daughters. If we wanted, we could extend the term "Latin" to replace "Italian" as the term for "the dominant Romance language spoken in Italy today." Likewise, we could come up with a new name for present-day Dutch to reflect that the common ancestor of present-day Dutch and Afrikaans has forked and that it no longer exists in its earlier form. Swapping the terminology this way would make no difference whatever in the actual linguistic facts. "Dutch" means "the grouping of lects in space and time which we find it convenient to call 'Dutch'". You seem to be having an awful time getting your mind around this, because you've been beating this same drum since last summer. > I suspect that the difference between branching and forking are > terminological and operationally cannot tell us about the degree of drift in > both or either language. I never drew any distinction between branching and forking. I use the terms to mean exactly the same thing. > My question was something like - could Anatolian, after say innovating > away from "narrow PIE", borrow back features that it had lost? I was > looking for borrowings that imitated genetics. As I've said, you occasionally get cases where a loan word cannot be detected on purely phonological grounds, but you _never_ get the wholesale borrowing of an entire system of inflectional morphology. This is why inflectional morphology is so valuable in determining genetic affiliation. In very, very rare cases, a single inflectional morpheme might have been borrowed; it's been claimed that English 3sg. -s (replacing -eth) represents a Norse influence. But there is not one recorded case where a whole system of inflectional morphology has been borrowed; it just _doesn't_ happen. > E.g., Mencken noted > that after abandoning the "King's English", Americans rediscovered and > adopted it. I don't know what you're referring to here. > But the real question is I think - can we > mistake the influence of one daughter on another and mistakedly call it the > remains of the parent? E.g., -if Slavic loaned the word for wheel from Greek > - or vice versa - could we mistake it as being a gift to both from the > reified parent - PIE? If it were borrowed from just one branch into another, I'd be willing to entertain the idea that the loan was early enough for the crucial sound changes not to have taken place, so that we couldn't identify the borrowing. However, the PIE word for "wheel" is attested in most of the branches of IE. It is vanishingly improbable that the word could be a loan word in all of these branches without ever showing any telltale phonological signs of the borrowing in any of the branches. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Mon Jan 24 19:43:25 2000 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 13:43:25 -0600 Subject: NW vs. E Gmc Message-ID: Since I haven't been diligently reading the list recently, I may be repeating what others have said. But still: Sean Crist wrote: >I'd like to bring up a few points which were discussed in connection with >the distinction between NW and E Germanic: > ... >2. Marc Pierce mentioned gemination before *j. Actually, this is a >strictly WGmc innovation, and thus isn't evidence one way or the other for >the grouping of the three Gmc branches. Doesn't North Germanic geminate -kj- -gj- to -kkj- -ggj-? (I don't have my handbooks at hand.) >3. Marc Pierce mentioned that Gothic retains the old IE passive verbal >morphology. It's true that this is lost both NGmc and WGmc, but since the >loss of a morphological category is something which can readily occur >independently, we once again can't take this as evidence for a NWGmc >grouping (even tho there are other grounds for making such a grouping). 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_). Since even Gothic uses synthetic forms for the preterite passive, it is likely that the synthetic forms are already PGmc., at least in preterite function. >4. Pete Gray said "...East Germanic cannot be seen as an early form of >North Germanic - it shares too much with Allemanic and Bavarian, for a >start." There are some Gothic loan words into Old High German, but this >is an event which happened well after the Germanic languages were well >differentiated. The better reason is that the defining features of East Germanic -- funny vocalism, almost complete devoicing of final stops and fricatives, peculiar vocabulary -- are precisely *not* shared with North Germanic, which in all these points agrees better with West Germanic. Neither is the almost complete elimination of grammatischer Wechsel in strong verbs, clearly a Gothic innovation that was not extended to modal verbs. But Sean is right that the (probable) loans prove nothing. Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at memphis.edu University of Memphis From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Jan 24 20:26:32 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 15:26:32 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >And what makes you think they occurred immediately after PIE was disunited? -- because that's what _defines_ the PIE (linguistic) breakup. If the language hasn't changed, it's still PIE. From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Mon Jan 24 06:27:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 06:27:00 GMT Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: Kommentar zu P56826 at H in der Gruppe Persönliche S> S>"What if all the IE words like *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- , and Gr. trochos S>are older than the wheel/chariot/wagon, .. of cause the word is older: cf hebrew golgatha< gol-gol-tha 'place of scull', where the scull is named after its rounded form, or cf. the Ngoro-ngoro-crater in eastern Africa, where of cause n- is the Swaheli class-prefix, and again we get the word for 'circle' < 'round-round'. But: the use for wheel seems to be specific IE. Mit freundlichen Grüszen Hans J Holm - - et monere et moneri - - From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Jan 24 20:47:53 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 15:47:53 EST Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >This is an oversimplification. It depends on whether there *had* been any >relevant sound changes in the intervening period, and in general we can only >establish *relative* dates for sound changes, if we're lucky (many times not >even that). Sound changes can of course not be dated absolutely if there >are no written documents. -- you're quite right; that _was_ an oversimplification. From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Mon Jan 24 06:25:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 06:25:00 GMT Subject: IE etymological dictionary Message-ID: Kommentar zu P56820 at H in der Gruppe Persönliche Sorry, meanwile I have got the correct address to the Leiden IED-project 'managers' (Lubotzky/Beekes); but, anyway, perhaps there may be useful suggestions? Mit freundlichen Grüszen Hans J Holm - - et monere et moneri - - From alderson at netcom.com Tue Jan 25 00:00:42 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 16:00:42 -0800 Subject: Making IE materials available [was Re: IE etymological dictionary] In-Reply-To: (message from Sean Crist on Sat, 22 Jan 2000 00:57:18 -0500 (EST)) Message-ID: Sean Crist wrote: >It's for this reason that I'm interested in taking old IE-related materials >whose copyright has expired and placing them online for free, with the intent >that volunteer effort can work to bring the materials up to date. If >volunteer effort can produce a first-rate and entirely free operating system, >I'm sure it can produce a set of quality online IE-related materials; we >simply need to do it. A couple of years ago I floated past Eric Hamp and Brian Joseph the idea of putting Schleicher, Osthoff & Brugmann, Brugmann & Delbrueck, usw., on CDROM in searchable PDF format, to make these materials available to the Indo-European student linguist. Both were of the opinion that this might qualify for grant money from the (U.S.) National Endowment for the Humanities or similar agency. Such a project could provide the kernel around which a more general effort could grow. Anyone else interested? Rich Alderson From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Mon Jan 24 06:51:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 06:51:00 GMT Subject: Indo-Hittite Message-ID: LT> LT>In fact, precisely this odd last view is the one commonly presented in LT>those IE family trees that we see everywhere. But not many linguists LT>are happy with such a massive sudden-disintegration scenario. .. In the forthcoming 'Journal of quantitative linguistics' I will present a much more differentiated model of the disintegration of IE. And Hittite is not the first, but the last language to depart - from Tokharian. The first to split were Germanic and Greek, as already stated by Prof D.G. Kendall in Ross JRSS.B12/1950:49. It must be noticed that the starting point or so called 'root' in the Ringe/Warnow tree is /not/ calculated, but inserted by Ringe as outcome of traditional, mainstream views perhaps too much preoccupied by the only early documentation of Hittite. And the 3 print-documents on this model are incomplete to a degree not enabling us to verify it. Hans J Holm - - et monere et moneri - - From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Mon Jan 24 09:29:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 09:29:00 GMT Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: Kommentar zu P56314 at H in der Gruppe Persönliche SF>What's the obvious inference? That migrations do leave evidence. Depends on the circumstances. I suggest to take a look at well-known examples. They should make clear that there are different ways for the spread of languages: 1) Lang's can be taken over without any migration, merely by way of economical dependence or cultural difference. Examples: The Wedda in S- India, some Pygmy-tribes, the Jakutes in N-Siberia (originally Evenks, who switched to the Turcic Dialect). There is no archeological evidence. 2) Language switching can be caused by a relativlely small class of military rulers. Examples: The Hungrians switching from Getic/Slavic /Ants/Dialects to an Ob-Ugrian lang. But where is the archeological or racial evidence? 3) Of cause migrations can be found: Nobody claims the Indo-Aryans to be the original inhabitants of India. But there is no prove that /they/ destroyed e.g. the culture of Mohenjo Daro. After all, pastoral nomads leave very little archeological evidence, if at all. SF>IE-style burials are known .. It is still an assumption that burials are 'IE'. Such an assumption still needs to be specified and substantiated. Hans J Holm - - et monere et moneri - - From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Jan 24 17:55:25 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 17:55:25 -0000 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Xavier and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Xavier Delamarre" Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2000 6:41 PM > Rich Alderson wrote (answering Rick Mc Callister) >> Since then, it has been argued that PIE had either (1) palatals and velars, >> and labiovelars are a late development, or (2) plain velars and labiovelars, >> and palatals are a late development. Today's consensus view seems to be a >> third alternative, that PIE had palatals and labiovelars, and plain velars >> are an odd development of one or both. > This is not true at all. There is no consensus for a two-series system of > tectals (whatever the arrangement). > The consensus seems to be, contrary to what stated, in favor of three > tectals for IE, as posited more than one century ago by our dear > Neo-grammarians. Pat comments: Personally, I am committed to a three-tectal (I would prefer 'dorsal') arrangement for reasons that are broached in Miguel's interesting recent posting. However, the real crux here is not what you or I or Rich believe is true but what the majority of IEists believe. Well you may well be correct in your view of the consensus so may Rich also so long as no systematic survey of IEist opinion has been made and documented. Do you not agree? The articles you cited might have convinced you and many others but not had that affect on other readers. 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 Tue Jan 25 01:06:46 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 17:06:46 -0800 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: (message from Sean Crist on Sun, 23 Jan 2000 08:31:06 -0500 (EST)) Message-ID: Sean Crist wrote, in response to my statement that Albanian and Armenian are (counted as) "satem" languages: > That's not correct; Armenian underwent an independent set of consonant > changes which roughly resemble Grimm's Law in Germanic. Armenian did not > undergo the satem consonant shift. *k' > s, *g' > c [ts], *g'h > j [dz]; *k{^w} > k`, *g{^w} > k, *g{^w}h > g. The Grimm's Law-like shifts in Armenian are independent of the "satem" status of the language. > As for Albanian, I can't say much; it's so heavily mutated that it's not > of much use in reconstructing PIE, and I know next to nothing about the > sound changes it underwent. I can say that I've never heard anyone claim > that Albanian underwent the satem shift. I pulled a handful of handbooks off the shelf at home this morning. Here's what I found. Buck, _Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin_, 1933: Page 124 (sec. 144), Armenian and Albanian are included in the list of _satem_ languages. Sihler, _New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin_, 1995: Page 7 (sec. 11), Armenian and Albanian are included in the list of _satem_ languages. Beekes, _Comparative Indo-European Linguistics : An Introduction_, 1995: Page 30 (sec. 2.4), Armenian and Albanian are included in the list of _satem_ languages. Szemere'nyi, _Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics_, 1996: Page 58 (sec. 4.7.4 and 4.7.5), Armenian and Albanian are included in the list of _satem_ languages. Mr. Crist also wrote, regarding my statement of the "consensus view": >> Since then, it has been argued that PIE had either (1) palatals and velars, >> and labiovelars are a late development, or (2) plain velars and labiovelars, >> and palatals are a late development. Today's consensus view seems to be a >> third alternative, that PIE had palatals and labiovelars, and plain velars >> are an odd development of one or both. > The first view, which you attribute to the Neogrammarians, is the majority > view today. And Xavier Delamarre wrote on the same topic: > This is not true at all. There is no consensus for a two-series system of > tectals (whatever the arrangement). The doubts cast on a three-series system > (k', k, k^w) goes back to Meillet in his _Introduction ` la gramm. comp. > des langues IE_ (last ed.1937), repeated by Lehman in his _Phonology_ (1952), > and taken up since by a variety of scholars in France & US. Let this be a lesson to us all. Too frequently, the "consensus view" of an issue is the view we learned in graduate school if the issue was not one that interested us at the time. Since the textbooks for my first courses in IE linguistics were Meillet 1937, Szemerenyi 1970 (the first edition of the book cited above), and a little later Buck 1933, I will plead ignorance of develop- ments on the "centum"/"satem" issue of the last 25 years, and ask forgiveness of those I have unintentionally misled, and admit that I should just have kept my mouth shut. Finally, I see that while stating what I thought was the consensus, I neglected to state that I disagreed with all three positions outlined, and thought that the Neogrammarians had it right all along--a view unpopular with the faculty at the time such things mattered to me. My thanks to Mr. Crist and M. Delamarre for bringing me up to date. Rich Alderson From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Jan 25 05:53:06 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 00:53:06 EST Subject: Horses in War Message-ID: In a message dated 1/17/00 6:48:58 PM, sarima at friesen.net wrote: <> Well, that was my original point - that PIE was apparently not being spoken by charioteers in the 2d millenium BC Near East. The whole thing went AOWL with my statement about the horse not being "a major factor in either seige or decisive warfare" - which should have read "being decisive in seige or major warfare" I see. Oops, I think. This I think came from the West Point Military History series called something like "Ancient and Medieval Warfare." Two interesting commentary on this matter - as nothing more than an FYI - one from I'm not sure where and the other from Tom Clancy's non-fiction "Armored Cav". Neither mentions what I think was a major role for the chariot - jeeping around the top brass - the guys who the court poets gave the credit for the victory that was probably actually won by the slingers, archers and your basic grunts. (from Tom Clancy - who also mentions cavalry's superiority to chariotry:) "Cavalry has rarely been a decisive arm by itself. For one thing, the size of the horse gave cavalry troopers lower combat density than the infantry. The breadth of a horse's chest and the space needed to avoid crushing a rider's legs against his neighbor's mount meant that two or three infantrymen occupied the same frontage as a single horse and rider. Two or three spears, swords, or bows in the hands of foot soldiers confronted each warrior on horseback. Less appreciated is a horse's unwillingness to plunge headlong into a barrier it cannot see through. Though a horse might not be the smartest living thing on earth, only men will knowingly hurl away their lives. Third, a horse is not a machine. To operate and perform properly, it needs food, water, and rest. Denied those things, it dies; and all the spare parts in an Army inventory can't fix that. And so it was a rule of the AmeriCan West that on any long-distance trip of more than five days, an infantry company could outmarch a cavalry troop. A horse afforded a trooper a relatively high dash-speed, but only over fairly short distances. A man sitting on a horse also made an easy target, especially after the development of firearms. And yet, despite these drawbacks, the horse remained important in war for three millennia. More precisely, the horseman performed several crucial missions: find the enemy before your main force collides with his; harass his flanks and communications; pursue him in defeat; screen your own forces when you are forced to withdraw." Also: "The two wheeled type was used for command and communications. It had an axle well centered under the body to support the weight of the vehicle. Wheels so far forward meant poor maneuverability and serious danger of turning over. The Sumerians tried to remedy this last problem by extending the axle to twice the width of the chariot but the change was only a stopgap. A better design was needed. The warrior in the Sumerian chariot had a javelin and spear but no bow. The main use of the Sumerian chariot was shock action, like the modern tank. The spoked wheel was developed in the last half of the Third Millenium BC. At the same time the axle was moved toward the rear for greater mobility. When horses came to replace onagers true mobility could be achieved with the chariot. There is no record of the development that went on after Sumeria fell but it obviously occurred. The real impetus to chariot warfare came from the introduction of the two wheeled, light horse-drawn chariot. This was introduced from India by the Mitanni around 1600 BC, soon adopted by Hatti and Babylon and then became common throughout the Near East. There are records indicating that the Egyptians were familiar with the chariot prior to the Hyksos conquest but the chariot did not come into use in Egypt until then... The Egyptians used the chariot differently from the rest of the Near East in that while they too carried a javelin, they abandoned the spear and adopted the bow. Their javelins were carried in a quiver on the side of the chariot. By contrast, the other peoples in the area carried a spear mounted in a socket in the rear of the chariot, for use by the driver.... Other peoples used a three man crew but had a driver, warrior and shield bearer, the latter due to the effect enemy archers tended to have on such promising targets as chariot crews. The biggest Egyptian development in chariot warfare was giving the warrior a bow as his principal weapon. This gave him a major advantage over the spear-wielding armies, if only in terms of fire power. The peak of chariot warfare was reached at the end of the Second Millenium BC. The chariot was a highly refined vehicle and the true cavalry was not yet developed. The war chariots were found throughout the civilized world. They were used by the Mycenaean Greeks, as Homer recounts... They had a sword and two spears in their chariots. The bow was considered a cowardly weapon, probably because you didn't have to get nose-to-nose to use it.... At the same time,...the Assyrians molded their cavalry into a strong combat arm,... essentially making the chariot obsolete. Cavalry is inherently better than chariots since it is more mobile. >> Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jan 25 08:24:28 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 03:24:28 EST Subject: Horses Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl >But if Renfrew is right, and PIE did come from Anatolia, an *ek^wos (or >however it sounded at *that* time) meaning "donkey" would have trivially >drifted to "horse" in the horse-rich (donkey-poor) environment of Northern and >Eastern Europe. >> -- but it doesn't mean "donkey" in Anatolian, the earliest attested IE language of the area, and Armenian is intrusive there. From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu Tue Jan 25 08:41:44 2000 From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 02:41:44 -0600 Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: >The quote from the UT Austin web page in my last post should assure >you that the 3000BC-2200BC dates are still around and quite clearly, even >with the benefit of the doubt, they were intended to reflect the earliest and >latest possible dates - and are simply repeating old and dated information. >This is not an indictment of historical linguistics. It started as and is >nothing more than an observation that old ideas die hard. The coordinator of the UT Austin webpage would like to call attention to the fact that those dates are from a link and do not represent a position necessarily held by anyone in Austin! The IE Languages page has, however, been recently updated, not with any date, but with wording that I hope makes it clear that information is being pulled together here for further discussion, not as a claim to truth or even belief. I think that Steve Long took it in this spirit, but just in case, I have tried to make the new wording less ambiguous. Kerilyn Cole's elaborate collection of data on IE languages, particularly modern ones and their relatives, is the fullest that I know of and represents a perspective that nicely complements the link to the UPenn project and reference to Gamkrelidze and Ivanov and theoretical models. A big hole still is any real reference to Wolfgang Meid's Time - Space hypothesis, among other things. Other Links, by the way, are quite incomplete, two important Anatolian ones having been mislaid, for example. The intent is to provide useful information. In addition to publications lists which we are currently trying to design an extensible indexing scheme for (and font solutions), original text corpora, journals indexes, and online materials would be welcome links. Does anyone know, for example, if Die Sprache's Indogermanishes Chronik is online in any part? As Sean Crist pointed out, many useful sources often have copyright constraints. We are fortunate in being able to scan in Lehmann's 19th Century Reader because he holds the copyright and has given us permission. The work has slowed, however, because of the time involved in creating gifs for the special characters. We have begun experimenting with Adobe Acrobat files for entire text segments, but I understand that such picture files take longer to load and may not ultimately be searchable. We have not yet experimented with Unicode in Austin, because Deborah Anderson is working on that in California. If anyone out there would like to put up pieces of the Lehmann Reader that are still missing and let us link to it, please let me know. Also, if anyone has other useful texts that could be part of the Documentation Center, please let me know. It is important, though, that the format be as accessible to all the common platforms as possible and checked as carefully as possible. Typos and such that readers find would also be appreciated. Thanks to Steve Long for the comment, Carol Justus, IE Documentation Center Coordinator From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jan 25 08:29:34 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 03:29:34 EST Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: In a message dated 1/24/00 3:43:27 PM Mountain Standard Time, Stporfiri at cs.com writes: >It seems to me that cavalry is important for breaking up the ranks; they >seem to have had this value in most contexts, regardless of knives. -- this is an extremely complex technical matter; but to oversimplify, before the invention of stirrups (long after our period) the most effective cavalry used missile weapons. Shock action wasn't impossible, but it wasn't as common or as effective as it became with the development of proper saddles (Iron Age) and stirrups (post-300 CE). Where chariots were extensively employed on the battlefield, they always seem to have been primarily mobile missile platforms, usually for archers, sometimes for spear-throwers -- this is certainly the case in the classic Bronze Age chariot armies of the Near East, and for the contemporary users of the Chariot in Iran, India and China. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jan 25 08:42:29 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 03:42:29 EST Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Renfrew's neolithic hypothesis stretches the information but how does it >stretch the linguistic assumptions? -- it doesn't just stretch them, it does massive violence to them. If Renfrew is right, then comparative/historical linguistics is completely wrong, and vice versa. Furthermore, for Renfrew to be right, the mechanisms of linguistic evolution must have been completely different in prehistoric times from anything observed since. Eg., for Renfrew's hypothesis to be true, proto-Celtic would have had to remain totally uniform over an area stretching from Central Europe to Ireland for 4,000 years, and then start changing rapidly as soon as we look at it. Is this likely? No. >Is it enough to simply say that the earliest possible date of PIE dispersal >is now 3300BC? Or is there something that now goes on with the linguistic >analysis that might alter other assumptions or conclusions? -- the data indicate that the period of PIE unity can't have been much earlier than that; the earliest attested IE languages are just too similar. Not to mention, again, the technological vocabulary. >You use the phrase assumptions that historical linguistics "is built upon." >And that is perhaps an issue I am running into. Is historical linguistics >finished being built? -- in detail, no. In broad outline, yes, as far as Indo-European is concerned. From edsel at glo.be Tue Jan 25 10:44:02 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 11:44:02 +0100 Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stanley Friesen" Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2000 7:20 AM > At 12:55 AM 12/22/99 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >> The point was, e.g., the Russians do not speak Mongul, Turkic, Gothic, Greek >> or Scandinavian - although all of these arguably represented the languages >> of various "dominant elite" - these speakers all seem to have been >> assimilated by Russian. > On the other hand Romania speaks Romanian, a derivative of the language of > a dominant elite that only ruled *there* for a short time. > Persistance of one language or another in a multilingual community is often > hard to predict. [Ed Selleslagh] Indeed it is: If one had visited Belgium in the third quarter of the 19th century, one could have predicted reasonably that Dutch would disappear there in the early 20th century, except for a few isolated rural pockets (Cf. Breton etc.). In fact, all the elites and their environment spoke French, and no education past primary school was available in Dutch. What did happen? Dutch had a come back and is now the only official (and actually spoken) language of the state of Flanders (60% of the Belgian population), and of 15% of the inhabitants of the bilingual Brussels-Capital Region (10%). While knowledge of French in Flanders, which was once pretty general except among the very lowest social classes, is fading fast, and being replaced by English. > -------------- > May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com Ed. From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Tue Jan 25 18:05:10 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 13:05:10 -0500 Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000122221116.0099a800@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 22 Jan 2000, Stanley Friesen wrote: > On the other hand Romania speaks Romanian, a derivative of the language of > a dominant elite that only ruled *there* for a short time. Actually, it doesn't appear that there's a continual Romance presence in what's now Romania from Roman times down to the present. There's a book by a Romanian scholar who claims that the area was underpopulated in early medieval times, and that two leaders from a Romance-speaking area near what is now Albania got permission from the Emporer to settle their people in this land. The names of the leaders happen to Romanian names. The author had to publish under a pseudonym, because this claim could be considered seditious by the Romanian government. There is a substantial Hungarian minority in Transylvania, and if this minority wanted to separate from Romania, this author's book would allow the ethnic Hungarians to claim that they were in the land first. The linguistic evidence seems to be consistent with this picture as well; there was a very dense and diverse set of Romance languages, including Dalmatian, etc. in the western Balkan area where the early Romanians are believed to have migrated from; but in the larger Romanian-speaking area to the east, there is much more uniformity. It's much like the case of British vs. American English; you get a tremendous and very dense diversity of local dialects within Britain, but a much greater uniformity in the huge area of America which the speakers of the language conquered. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From jer at cphling.dk Tue Jan 25 15:47:47 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 16:47:47 +0100 Subject: NW vs. E Gmc In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 22 Jan 2000, Sean Crist wrote: > I'd like to bring up a few points which were discussed in connection with > the distinction between NW and E Germanic: > 1. Both Marc Pierce and Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen cited *z > r as an > example of a shared innovation in NWGmc. It's true that a sound change > along these lines operated in both WGmc and NGmc, but it can be shown that > this is a parallel change which operated after the two dialects had > separated. The evidence is that there are rules both in WGmc and in NGmc > which are sensitive to the *z/*r distinction; the merger of the two > categories must have happened _after_ the two dialects had developed > separately for a while. I know that, but still there is also an s/z distinction in the rules, so the "/z/" phoneme appears to be in the process of turning into something else; that's why I wrote "is developed in the direction of /r/" - so, as far as it goes, this _is_ a point of agreement between North and West Germanic. Jens From jer at cphling.dk Tue Jan 25 16:04:27 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 17:04:27 +0100 Subject: NW vs E Germanic In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 22 Jan 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> That spells unity for Norse and West Germanic. However, then there is >> the Verschaerfung problem which seemingly combines Norse and Gothic >> to the exclusion of West Germanic. On balance I believe one must see >> this as secondary disappearance of (at least some) Verschaerfung in >> West Germ., so that the events that produced Versch. operated in the >> common prehistory of ALL the Germanic we know. > Excuse my ignorance. Can you explain Verschaerfung? Oh yes, but not any better than already done by Jasanoff (in the MSS back in 1978: A verb like *haww-i/a- was *kawH-e/o- (acut in Lith. ka'uti 'hammer, forge'), the loss of the laryngeal yielded hiatus in *hau.e/a- which was filled by a replica of the preceding glide, the result being *hauw-i/a-; likewise for, say, *woiH-es 'walls' > *wai.iz > *waijiz > *wajj-iz, root stem in ON veggr, secondary u-stem in Goth -waddjus. >>> Is there any merit to the idea that there was a separate branch of >>> Germanic including Anglian, Jutish and pre-Frisian, intermediate between N >>> & W Germanic, andf that modern English and Frisian are the result of a >>> fusion between this and W Lowland Germanic? [...] >> I would like to know what linguistic facts that idea is based on. > Me too :> > Seriously, the idea of an Ingwaeonic branch is something I've read > in passing in various places without any real elaboration. > I suppose they have in mind such things as retention of initial > /s-/, /_th_/ & /_dh_/ in English Oh, if you mean Ingwaeonic, that IS a fact you have to accept, note (1) the unit plural (old 3pl used of 1pl and 2pl also); (2) loss of nasal before voiceless spirants (Eng. mouth, goose). At least these are shared by Old Saxon, Old English and Frisian to the exclusion of OHG. You could perhaps add monophthongization of *ai (OS e:, OE a:, OFr. both) if this is not too trivial. My expression of amazement was prompted by the word "Jutish" which I take to denote a Danish dialect group; but if the old Jutes went to England they may well have been (or become) Ingwaeones. Jens From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jan 25 08:53:30 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 03:53:30 EST Subject: Northwest IE attributes Message-ID: Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >Not *so* unlikely, after all. Palatalizations are, so to speak, the >garden-variety of sound-changes. -- yes, but the same one in two adjacent groups for different reasons? This violates explicatory parsimony. And as you point out, this particular change is _not_ common in the IE languages. Only Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic show it with any degree of consistency (Armenian possibly too). From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Tue Jan 25 17:51:41 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 12:51:41 -0500 Subject: Northwest IE attributes In-Reply-To: <005f01bf6382$b07acf40$239001d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Thu, 20 Jan 2000, petegray wrote: > As I understand the debate about NW attributes, it has reduced to an > either-or which I believe is misleading. People appear to be arguing > either that the NW group split off early, in which case satemisation is a > problem, or that the language groups concerned remained in contact with I-I, > in which case we cannot say there is a NW group. > I think, on the contrary, that we can talk of a group even within a > spectrum. We can talk of the three colours at the red end of the rainbow > as a "group" in a meaningful sense (they are the "warm" colours, etc); we > can talk of the three "blue" colours at the other end as another group. > Likewise, I see no problem in talking of a group within a spectrum of > languages. Within the Romance spectrum from Portugal to the toe of Italy, > we could talk meaningfully of a group from Catalan to Piedmont, or a > Galician-portuguese group, or a Southern Italian group. > Therefore I think the debate is misguided. To talk of a "NW group" does > not imply that these languages must have split off early from the other IE > dialects. The boundaries can also remain fuzzy: Celtic and Germanic can > be seen as central to the group, with Baltic and Slavonic on the one hand, > and Italic on the other, sharing some characteristics but not others. This is the old debate between "Stammbaumtheorie" and "Wellentheorie" (tree theory vs. wave theory): should our representations of the relations between the IE branches look like a tree, or like a a group of overlapping set boundaries? Notice that the set of possible trees is a fairly small _proper subset_ of the set of possible wave models. You can represent any tree using a wave model, but not vice versa. The wave representation of a tree will have the special property that all of the set boundaries will be nested: you won't get any overlapping lines. Wave models in general do allow overlapping lines; we can define trees as that subset of wave models where there are no overlapping lines. 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. So now a further question arises: what does it mean for the data to "allow" a tree representation? We've discussed this on the list before, so I'll just make reference to the page http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~histling/home.html , where you can click on "A short course in Phylogeny". An algorithm was recently developed to get around the NP-completeness problem of computing the optimal phylogeny over a set of character-based data. As we've discussed at length on this list, 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. So, what I'm saying is that the IE family is such that a tree representation of the family is possible; and since this is the more restructive formalism, it is the one we should choose. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jan 25 09:05:16 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 04:05:16 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >But remember both the horse and the wagon are now pretty much "neolithic" in >Europe. -- late neolithic, early Copper Age. After 4000 BCE for the horse, considerably after that for the spread of horse domestication. >Is it possible that language did not come along with or follow those >innovations, but instead made their quick diffusion possible? -- here we run up against the time-depth problems again. The technological vocabulary dates from the period of unity of the PIE language. There's just no getting around this. >Homer's "winged words" outrun traders and armies and chariots and >bookeepers, so that the idea of wheel (along with maybe those wheeled models >we call toys) gets to Europe before any physical wheels get there? -- changing languages in a preliterate setting requires close, prolonged contact with native speakers of the tongue to be adopted. There's no way to transport languages in such a setting except inside heads. And one language does not replace another easily, or without very good reason. For adults to learn another language is _hard_. >Transferred along various dialects of PIE that maintain their mutual >intelligibility because they are the language of new ideas and new material >goods? -- languages spread over a large area develop dialects and then eventually split into separate, related languages. This is one of the fundamentals. And we are speaking of a time before literacy or "standard" languages, as well. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jan 25 20:11:10 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 15:11:10 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: In a message dated 1/25/00 12:42:18 PM Mountain Standard Time, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: << Where specifically do you find this? And I mean in Renfrew. >> -- Renfrew (in Language and Archaeology) says that the pre-Celtic IE language reached Ireland with the first farmers -- that's 4000 BCE, roughly -- and that the Celtic languages developed _in situ_ all across their historic range, except for some outliers (Italy, Anatolia). Yet when the Celts are first observed, in the last couple of centuries BCE, their languages are quite strikingly uniform, all the way from Ireland to the Danube Valley. Eg., take the Ogham (early Irish, 4th-7th centuries CE) inscription verstion of "the women" -- 'indas mnas'. This is _precisely_ the same as a Gallic form of 100 CE. 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). This requires either no change, or perfectly synchronized change, in pre-Celtic across thousands of miles, for 4000 years. Which is in blatant violation of everything we know about languages and how they develop. Then the Celtic languages -- once we can "look" at them through literate observers -- start changing quite rapidly; the restructuring of Insular Celtic between the 300's CE and early medieval times, for example, which transformed a perfectly standard early IE language not unlike Latin in its grammatical structure into something quite different. The usual explanation for the uniformity of early Celtic is that the Celtic language(s) had spread recently from a relatively small area. This fits much better with the observed data. From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Tue Jan 25 16:51:34 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 11:51:34 -0500 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <388dad6f.239131022@mail.chello.nl> Message-ID: On Thu, 20 Jan 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > "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) > Only ON hwel < *kwelo-. The English and Dutch vowels can only > derive from *ew. The development was: *kwekwlo- > *hwegwlo ~ > *hweGwlo > *hwewlo > { OE hwe:ol > wheel | ODu. *hwi at l > wiel }. > Curiously, the loss of -g- here is only semi-regular (or we > wouldn't have OE hweogul), which makes me wonder why Szemere'nyi, > in his "Introduction", chose this example to illustrate the > regularity of sound laws in general Looks like a Verner's Law variant to me, tho I'd have to hit the books to see if it actually checks out. In Proto-Germanic, you could very well get a *g/*h alternation within a noun paradigm because of Verner's Law (the *h, of course, was deleted between two vowels in OE, so that something like *hweohul > *hwe:ol). Most cases of Verner's Law variation within noun paradigms were destroyed by analogy, but there wouldn't be anything surprising about both variants managing to survive into historical times. Another case is point is the word for "tooth"; both Verner's Law variants survived into Gothic. One of the variants got fossilized as the second element of the compound name of some kind of flower. (Sorry not to be more specific; I don't have time to dig out the actual forms at the moment.) What I'd need to check is whether the Pre-PGmc word for "wheel" belonged to one of the paradigms with shifting stress; if it did, I'd attribute hwe:ol/hweogul to Verner's Law. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Jan 25 21:49:29 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 16:49:29 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 1/25/00 3:49:28 PM, mclasutt at brigham.net wrote: <> Forgive me, but I'm having trouble seeing why you say this. Doesn't the word follow (or even preceed) the object? Are you saying that as the word was traded or communicated along the way there would have been some other sound changes than the expected ones? The assumption here of course is that the word wheel is introduced before the regular sound changes occur. I just read another post on this: In a message dated 1/24/00 3:18:16 PM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <<[with regard to the wheel]The sound-changes would reveal the date of the borrowing.>> <> You wrote: <> Well the wheel is one way, isn't it? I mean the actual wheel. Like the computer or the telephone or the automobile. That would account for the word being so widespread, wouldn't it? I certainly don't see any geographic or other necessity that would make it difficult. As far as the roots, well you have these archaeologists a year ago arguing with some strong data that the thing was actually invented maybe up in Germany or Poland about 3500BC. So the roots went with the package, maybe. But does this throw everything off so badly? I mean you get a bigger spread of the language when the wheel hits, but it doesn't seem to be breaking any linguistic rules (of course, I may be wrong about that.) But is the outcome that different? The dates don't go ballistic. It's not like saying that word for wheel was introduced into French in 1957 - we are still dealing with the dawn of the languages. And I'm still pretty sure the word for wheel in Greek was trochos , so it gives a little leeway for "semantic drift" or an earlier borrowing in some places. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Jan 26 14:39:31 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 09:39:31 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote (1/22/00 12:12:34 AM): <> I wrote: <<...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?>> (caps mine.) JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote (1/22/00 12:12:34 AM): <<-- because that's what _defines_ the PIE (linguistic) breakup. If the language hasn't changed, it's still PIE.>> Even I know that the sound changes after PIE split up DID NOT happen all at once. And even I know that the SPECIFIC CHANGES observed in "wheel" words may not have occured until the IE dispersal was well on its way. Even I know that if "the language has changed" and is no longer PIE, the SPECIFIC sound changes in *kwelo, etc., may not have happened until later. Those changes may NOT be the ones that defined "PIE (linguistic) breakup." But my question was not really rhetorical. What ARE the SPECIFIC SOUND changes identified in early 'wheel' words and what suggests that they are even exceptionally early? I would value anything you might offer regarding this. Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote something arresting with regard to the "other" word for wheel that fills the "semantic slot" in many IE languages (Latin, rota; Lith, ratas; OHG, rod; Ir, roth - cf. Skt, ratha). <<...I wonder, though, whether another word for wheel, *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 X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Jan 26 14:55:07 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 09:55:07 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 1/26/00 8:53:39 AM, Hans J Holm wrote: <> And that is an oddity in itself, isn't it. Everything from skulls to craters to a circle of elders (in Homer) - one would think that the application of the circle/round word to the wheel would be very direct and expected in other languages. If in fact the wheel did first come out of northern Europe (not advocating, just hypothesizing) then how would that word have passed into non-IE Near East languages? Would borrowing from IE explain the glaring non-use of native round/circle words in those non-IE languages? Regards, Steve Long From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Jan 26 18:56:12 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 19:56:12 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <200001240827.p65329@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) wrote: >S>"What if all the IE words like *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- , and Gr. trochos >S>are older than the wheel/chariot/wagon, >.. >of cause the word is older: cf hebrew golgatha< gol-gol-tha 'place of >scull', where the scull is named after its rounded form, or cf. the >Ngoro-ngoro-crater in eastern Africa, where of cause n- is the Swaheli >class-prefix, and again we get the word for 'circle' < 'round-round'. >But: the use for wheel seems to be specific IE. Not really. Gamqrelidze and Ivanov quote Sumerian gigir, Hebrew gilga:l, galgal, Georgian borbal, gorgal, "wheel" or "chariot". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jan 25 09:09:38 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 04:09:38 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Betraying my ignorance, I must once again ask why this exchange must have >happened with PIE and not with an early daughter. -- because if it was early enough for these word forms, it would BE the PIE language. >PIE originates just south of where Uralic originates? -- yes. >So that Uralic did not expand south because PIE speakers were already there? -- the Uralic languages were, and mostly remained, languages of the forest zone north of the steppe and forest-steppe of the Pontic zone. They remained predominant there until historic times, when Slavic replaced them. >Or is the assertion that they were all once one language and perhaps >this wasn't borrowing at all. -- no. They're very distinct languages. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jan 25 09:25:09 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 04:25:09 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >What are the ideological reasons which lead people to what you call extreme >anti-diffusionism and anti-migrationism ? -- As Martin Luther once said, humanity in general behaves like a drunken peasant trying to ride a horse; it falls off on one side, gets back on, then falls off on the other. Prior to the 1960's, and especially prior to WWII, it was fashionable among archaeologists and prehistorians to attribute every cultural change or new style of pot to the in-migration of a new ethnic group, and to assume that nothing was ever invented more than once and necessarily spread from that center. That was the way to get published. (Coon, for example, sometimes went overboard that way, although he's a giant compared to some of the pygmies who've attacked his work.) Since then, in the English-speaking world, they've swung to the opposite extreme and there's been a systematic down-playing of evidence for population movements. Until recently (there are signs of a welcome swing of the pendulum) _that_ has been the way to get published. Renfrew's an example, trying to rule out migration/diffusion explanations unless there is the most exhaustive and unambiguous sort of archaeological evidence for them -- hence he attributes the spread of Indo-European to something that _can_ be directly traced in the physical record, namely the spread of agriculture in the early Neolithic, claiming there must be some grand technological innovation to account for it. Even though there are historically attested migrations (the Scotii to Scotland, for instance) which _did_ result in language change but which did _not_ leave much stones-and-bones trace. He does leave an "out" for cases of "elite dominance", although unfortunately in his first article on that (which I read in Scientific American) he used an example (the Mongol conquests) which did _not_ result in the spread of the conqueror's language. A critic of Renfrew's once remarked that if it weren't for the written records, Renfrew would confidently assert that the site of Jamestown in Virginia was the result of indigenous developments in Pohwatan Indian culture, with at most the arrival of a "cult-package" or some intermarriage from abroad. "British Archaeology" published an editorial not long ago predicting that soon some graduate student would write a paper "proving" that the first human beings in the British Isles were not immigrants, but instead purely indigenous, symbolically transformed reindeer. The reasons are both ideological and methodological. Migration often implies conflict, which many archaeologists have attempted to read out of the record because of a distaste for the idea of war. It was also associated peripherally with racist explanations of change in the past, which gave it a political "taint". Migration also presents very serious methodological problems for archaeologists who are trying to focus on long, continuous sequences of indigenous change. If a migration can come in from outside their area of study and "reformat" the local culture, and also do so without leaving much in the way of an unambiguous physical trace, then the long sequences of culture-change they delight in mapping out become meaningless. This would require a much higher degree of modesty on the part of prehistoric archaeologists... 8-). 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. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jan 25 09:32:15 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 04:32:15 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >jer at cphling.dk writes: >If the Uralic Urheimat is placed for independent reasons somewhere in >Central Ukraine and the IE ditto has been put in the southern part of the >Ukraine, the two protolanguages were in fact once contiguous and the old >loan relations stem from some period within that contact. -- as far as I know, the Uralic Urheimat is generally placed around the Ural mountains (hence the name). A bit further east than the central Ukraine, although not much further. Subsequent spread was to the west _and_ east; hence Uralic (or Finno-Ugric) languages are found from Siberia all the way west to Finland (further, counting Sammi). >As for the position of Anatolian, there are very few things that >distinguish Proto-IE as it was before the break-off of pre-Anatolian from >what it became during the time up to its next split when the second branch >(Tocharian?) left the remaining stock. Consequently, we cannot tell from >the form of an IE loanword in Uralic whether it was borrowed before or >after the separation of Anatolian from the rest. -- that, I think, is a fair statement. >That being so, we cannot quite exclude that the IE homeland was in Anatolia >and that the rest had moved to the north of the Black Sea and there met the >(pre-)Proto-Urals and handed them a bag of loanwords. -- true, but this requires all the other languages to derive from a _single_ movement northwards from Anatolia. There's also the matter of the strong evidence that the Anatolian IE languages were intrusive in the areas they were occupying when the first records are written. Eg., the very large stock of Hattic loanwords in Hittite, for instance. >there are enough laryngeal-sensitive phonetic changes >in the individual branches to guarantee that laryngeals survived as >segmental units well into the separate lifelines of the other >subbranches also. -- I think that's fair. The survival of the laryngeals in Hittite and Luvian is, I think, at least partly an artifact of the very early date at which the written records of those languages begin. If we had written records in Balto-Slavic from the early 2nd millenium BCE, who knows what archaic features might be found? From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Tue Jan 25 15:07:52 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 17:07:52 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 23 Jan 2000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > Betraying my ignorance, I must once again ask why this exchange [of > words between proto-Uralic and IE] must have happened with PIE and not > with an early daughter. In principle, it could have - providing that the early daughter of p-IE still had laryngals. But the wide distribution of the loan words in Uralic speaks against this, since proto-U must be dated 4000 bc or before. Unless one accepts that p-IE had already differentiated to several daughter languages by then, the loans must be proto-IE. There are also IE loan words with a narrower distribution within Uralic, which actually seem to derive from "early daughter languages" which still had laryngals (see my previous mail to the list). The example words I put forward in my first mail must be older loans, since they go back to proto-U. > I MUST also find out someday why Uralic would need to borrow words for water, > move, bring and wash from IE. Words can be borrowed for many reasons, not only because there is a "need" for them. If the contact is intensive enough and/or the prestige great enough, basic vocabulary can be borrowed. I see no reason why proto-U could not have borrowed these words from Indo-Europeans. Similarly, Finnish has borrowed words for e.g. 'mother' and 'food' from Germanic, and 'tooth' and 'neck' from Baltic, and North Saami has borrowed words for e.g. 'son', 'meat', 'man' and 'moon' from proto-Scandinavian. These examples are not exhaustive; there are lots of relatively late "basic vocabulary" loans from IE languages in Finnic and Saamic. Furthermore, there is internal evidence in Uralic supporting the loan origin of p-U *weti 'water'. This item does not have cognates in Saamic and Khanty. Instead, these two languages share a lexeme p-U *s´äcä, whose reflexes mean 'water' in Saamic and 'flood water' in Khanty. This was probably the original U word for 'water', which was replaced in the other languages by the IE loan word *weti. The word *s´äcä has no cognates in languages that show reflexes of *weti. (The Khanty meaning 'flood water' is probably secondary, since the Khanty word for 'water' derives from the p-U word for 'ice'). > anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fiwrote: > < Europe north of the Black Sea. This area is just about south from area where > current research usually places the center of the Uralic expansion.>> > PIE originates just south of where Uralic originates? So that Uralic did not > expand south because PIE speakers were already there? Or did somebody move > in? Or is the assertion that they were all once one language and perhaps > this wasn't borrowing at all. I am not sure if understood the question correctly. But yes, p-IE probably originated south of p-U, and Uralic has probably never expanded south (with the exception of Hungarian in approx. 900 ad), for the reason stated above. On the contrary, IE has expanded north at the cost of U languages. This process is partially traceable through historical records. As for the assumption of "Urverwandtschaft" between U and IE, we are obviously dealing with loaning here. The loan explanation has more explanatory power: the proto-U forms of the loan words are (largely) predictable from the proto-IE ones and they conform to phonetically natural sound substitution patterns. This is not the case if one assumes common genetic origin: it is not possible do demonstrate regular sound correspondences between the items. There have been no convincing attempts to link IE and U genetically. These language families also differ typologically radically from each other, which makes demonstratable genetic connection highly unlikely. Ante Aikio anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Jan 25 07:59:12 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 01:59:12 -0600 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Is it possible to tell whether these are loanwords or cognates from Nostratic? Why? Why not? Examples? [to be continued on Nostratic list --if the discussion goes that way] >In his mail of Tue, 18 Jan 2000, Ante Aikio speaks, I believe, a word of >common sense. > If there are pan-Uralic words of IE origin that look as old as our >reconstructions, they may very well be loanwords from Proto-IE into >Proto-Uralic or one of its prestages. They may of course also be older >than PIE; since it is apparently only lexical material, there is little to >tell us anything about the time depth of the donor forms. Therefore, it is >not absolutely compelling to draw the conclusion that the two >protolanguages were contiguous, but it is still one very fair possibility. >It is also a quite strong argument that, if the Uralic Urheimat is placed >for independent reasons somewhere in Central Ukraine and the IE ditto has >been put in the southern part of the Ukraine, the two protolanguages were >in fact once contiguous and the old loan relations stem from some period >within that contact. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Jan 26 03:31:37 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 22:31:37 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: In a message dated 1/25/00 7:57:07 PM Mountain Standard Time, anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi writes: << There are some Finnic-Saamic loan words with proto-IE >characteristics (e.g., laryngal reflexes) which are probably connected >with the battle axe culture, such as Finnic-Saamic *kas�a- 'tip, end' < IE >*Hak�-, *suki- 'family, kin' < IE *suH-. These words are unknown in U >languages outside the Baltic Sea / Scandianavian area. -- now, that's interesting. Are they present in Estonian as well? >is 4000-5000 bc too early a date for proto-IE? -- that's a matter of debate. Post-4000 BCE is generally considered the most credible range. From ECOLING at aol.com Wed Jan 26 15:05:29 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 10:05:29 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: Ante Aikio Kiitoksia! (No, I don't speak Finnish, just visited once, can count to ten, did my dissertation on Finnish vowel harmony.) But seriously, thank you very much for the info on the current status of IE-Uralic interactions. Is there a bibliography of the last 15 years of work on this anywhere? Care to produce one? I remember reading Collinder's proposals for laryngeal matches many years ago, wonder whether any of them still hold up? Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Tue Jan 25 17:55:05 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 12:55:05 -0500 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: <003e01bf650f$8492ef00$8401703e@edsel> Message-ID: On Sat, 22 Jan 2000, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: > Somehow, Dutch (21 million native speakers) (including S. Dutch, also > called Flemish, my mother tongue: my name means that my ancestors were > from a 'gens Salica'), and even non-Saxon Low German, is strangely > missing from this picture. Where does it fit in your schematic picture? No comment. I've heard that Dutch represents a mixture of more than one northern West Germanic dialect, but I don't know the details and can't give any evaluation of this claim. I understand that this mixture is a late medieval development; this is a good bit later than the stuff I work on myself. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Jan 25 19:15:41 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 14:15:41 EST Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: In a message dated 1/22/00 3:22:22 AM, mclasutt at brigham.net wrote: <> My purpose in giving extreme examples was to get at some sense of the basic mechanics that are going on. (E.g., you can't detect gravity's democratic effect on some objects unless you test them in a vacuum. A feather and a cannonball will fall at drastically different rates under normal circumstances.) My original post was meant to apply to the Upenn tree's methodology. Without repeating what I wrote in prior posts, my fundamental questions don't change, I think, despite the very impressive processes you described in your post. Relatedness to *PIE is one thing. The relatedness between the daughter IE languages is another. And that difference is because PIE is reconstructed and its relatedness is entirely based on the evidence given by its daughter languages. There therefore should in theory be no "conflicting indicia of relatedness" in *PIE. In terms of relatedness between IE daughter languages, you can and do find conflicting indicia of relatedness. (The recent posts regarding the Germanic family tree illustrate how you can read shared attributes both ways. I think there is a map in Larry Trask's textbook of shared characteristics in Germanic (p.186) and I swear you it is positively maddening when you try to follow the enclosing circle lines as they criss-cross each other.) The same thing happens very often in biology, geology and even particle physics. This is what the kind of methodology used in the UPenn tree is really meant to tackle. There are a number of problems that arise when one decides how to handle conflicting indicia of relatedness. For the sake of space, let me give but one. What if five lexical attributes appear as shared innovations between IE languages A and B and therefore evidence a greater relatedness between the two than a language C - which has none of them. What if however Language C shares a totally valid morphological innovation with B not found in Language A? How is this reconciled? Hidden within this problem are the questions of loss (loss in A can reconcile the dilemma, but loss itself may be "an innovation") and whether retained characteristics versus pure innovations should be used in a true cladistic model - i.e., whether shared attributes descended from PIE are proper in this sort of analysis. There is also the "count" problem - do five lexicals beat one morphological? I've tried to mention these in other posts. But let me here just make this one point - different solutions shape the tree differently. One alternative in the example above is to give each language an independent branch on the tree - very unsatisfactory as a showcase tree but accurate in terms of the uncertainty created by the data. This is a very common solution in paleobiology. But the dilemma mentioned above can also be reconciled if the inconsistent attribute is eliminated. You can do that accidentially if you limit your sampling to attributes that cause less problems - e.g., where the "etymology is certain." This is far easier to do if you limit yourself to 300-400 attributes across 12 language families over 3000-4000 years - most of them apparently lexical. Some cladists will tell you that Deep Time is never a matter of years, but a matter of unrecoverable information. Time of course is relative - change accelerates the effects of time. In fact, time theory says it is possible that the conflicting indicia of relatedness between A, B and C may not be resolvable by human means - like "deep time" events that happen every day when viruses reproduce in a petri dish. And that was one problem I was addressing in my original post - the degree of uncertainty that varying rates of change in language MUST create. The accepted thinking in other fields is that you deal with uncertainty with MORE data, not less. If you are going to assure me that all such conflicting indicia of relatedness are resolvable by internal reconstruction, then perhaps this is a non-problem. But if that's not the case - then one problem with the UPenn may be its way of handling varying rates of change in the IE daughter languages - precisely because varying rates of change SHOULD produce different levels of loss and unknowability among related languages. And that would mean that one may not be measuring filial relatedness with those 300-400 attributes, but rather an artifact - one may be measuring nothing more than the varying rates of internal change among those languages. Regards, Steve Long From edsel at glo.be Wed Jan 26 11:03:05 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 12:03:05 +0100 Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" Sent: Monday, January 24, 2000 7:40 PM > "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >> English Dutch >> other ander >> tooth tand: here the -n- has remained! >> soft zacht: the ch (jota sound) - f correspondance is systematic: laugh >> lachen (but English orthography is still witness of a similar pronunciation >> in times past). With German:kraft kracht. > These cases are not comparable. In English, there was a sound > shift /x/ > /f/ (as well as /x/ > zero, cf. the split of the > English interdental fricative into T ~ D). In Dutch, there was a > sound shift /ft/ > /xt/. German mostly kept things as they were. > So: > sanft soft zacht < *samft- (Ingw. *sa~ft) > Kraft craft kracht < *kraft- > vs. > lachen laugh lachen < *hlahhjan > Miguel Carrasquer Vidal > mcv at wxs.nl [Ed] My remark about f - ch was actually about ft - cht. I should have said so. Anyway, it was a side remark, not related to the subject at hand (-n- > zero). The comparison with -gh > f was unjustified. Ed. From edsel at glo.be Wed Jan 26 21:34:38 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 22:34:38 +0100 Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: [Ed Selleslagh] [ snip message addressed to moderator ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Gustafson" Sent: Monday, January 24, 2000 1:52 PM > Ed Selleslagh writes: > < characteristics of NGmc., like the preservation of -isk (Eng. -ish, Du. > -is(ch), pronounced -is) and similar Danish (Jutish?) sounding features. I > think that the idea that Ingwaeonic is halfway between N and WGmc is due to > the different use of the term (namely coastal continental WGmc). >> > Hasn't Frisian also generalised a plural in -ar or -er, which also > corresponds with what Norwegian and Swedish (and formerly Danish) did? [Ed] I'm anything but a specialist in Frisian, but I hear and read some from time to time. Many (most) plurals of diminutives - which are used frequently - are in -(e)s, but I don't know if there are any other or irregular ones in -er (cf. German rad - raeder). But one should take into account that it has been strongly influenced by Dutch: there are no (and haven't been for quite some time) monolingual Frisians. All local lects in Holland are under immense leveling pressure from the 'Randstad' (i.e. the large western conurbation of Rotterdam, Amsterdam etc.), although there is a movement to preserve Frisian (even a kind of autonomy movement for a Fryske Frystaet [Frisian Free State], but that isn't really taken seriously - I don't know if it is still alive). There is a very limited programming in Frisian on Dutch TV (we have it on cable TV in Flanders). With 'external characteristics' I only meant 'what it looks and sounds like' to the more or less (un)trained observer. I don't have any other reliable information. Ed. From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Jan 27 00:58:50 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 19:58:50 EST Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: I quoted Syd Lamb: > One of the criticisms that came up often when I asked some linguists to > comment on the tree was that it mixed apples and oranges. And cherries. > Syd Lamb wrote in a private message (repd w/permission) that lexical, > phonological and morphological items "are largely independent of one > another in how they are involved in change. ..." In a message dated 1/25/00 8:44:27 PM, Sean Crist replied: **That's not true. For example, if a language inflects with suffixes and then undergoes phonological changes eliminating certain segments word-finally, this can result in the loss of morphological contrasts (thus, phonological and morphological change are not independent).** Sean Crist returned to Prof. Lamb's quote: > "...Hence a tree constructed on purely phonological grounds, for IE or > Uto-Aztecan, or any complex family, will come out quite different from one > constructed on purely lexical grounds, and both will differ from one > constructed on purely morphological grounds." Then Sean Crist replied: **The assumption you made was that lexical, morphological, and phonological change operate independently of one another _within_ a language. Here, you're talking about something else: you're talking about interaction _between_ languages.** I'll forward your post to Prof Lamb and perhaps he'll want to reply. But I have every reason to believe the two quotes above were connected since 1) they are connected and 2) as I said in the post this is Lamb's reaction to the UPenn tree - not an individual language. In fact, I believe if you had read the two parts together as they were posted, that would have been clear to you. I do also want to point out that the division between phonological, lexical and morpological come out of the UPenn report and treats them as separate pieces of evidence with different ramifications as to their value as genetic proof. I believe I was qouting someone else here: > There's no question that morphology can reflect different genetic > relationships than lexical or phonological items. **I wouldn't use the term "reflect" here, since that indicates that we're talking about some reality here. A language has one genetic affiliation and not another.** And of course, since linguistic analysis first began, some of those "genetic affilations" have sometimes changed. That's because genetic affilation among languages is not something we can see first hand. It is always inferred. It is always dependent on secondary evidence. The items of lexical, etc., evidence I mentioned above are not THE genetic relationship between whole languages. They are pieces of evidence accumulated to show that relationship. If one lexical or morphological item alone were enough to show a genetic relationship, that would be different - but obviously it's not, based on the UPenn tree. So you can use any term you prefer, but "refects" is fine with me - physicists use it to talk about evidence "reflecting" the presence of gravity. No affront should be taken. <> I don't even know if this has been ever been tested in any way but... if the UPenn tree methodology were conducted in this manner (lexical separately, etc.) and the evidence actually was that these languages showed "one genetic affiliation for its lexicon and another for its morphology" - then you are faced with some alternatives. One is saying you believe the opposite is true but you have no proof of it. Or perhaps saying that there is some problem with the UPenn methodology - since it should show the same affilation for all three? Or you can simply disregard it because it doesn't fit preconceived notions. But that would NOT be "the right way to think"? Right? That's always the biggest problem with objective evidence. It doesn't always do what we expect - or want - it to. I'll pass your comments on to Prof Lamb and see if he has any response. Regards, Steve Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jan 25 19:18:50 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 19:18:50 -0000 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: Dear Miguel and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2000 1:53 AM [ moderator snip ] [MC] > It is clear that a system with both palatalization and > labialization, as I advocate for (Pre-)PIE, is not stable. [PR] What makes that so "clear"? [MC continued] > Old > Irish (as the result of a much later and independent development) > had both i-coloured (palatalized, slender) and u-coloured > consonants, but the u-colouring quickly became marginal and was > lost before Middle Irish. The loss of jers in Slavic has led to a > full series of palatalized consonants, but not to a parallel set > of labialized/velarized consonants (not at the phonological level > at least). By the time of common PIE, the plain-palatalized- > labialized distinction had only been retained in the velar stops, [PR] I prefer the explanation of the odd circumstance of many roots of apparently identical form with apparently unrelated meanings in IE as an evidence that palatalizated and velarized as well as plain consonants allowed them to be distinguished until root extensions began to fulfil the same function. [MC continued] > and there too the system was in the process of breaking down, > with confusions between palatalized-plain or plain-labialized, > which account for the hesitations we find even among the ranks of > the two main blocks ("satem" and "centum"). The generalization > of front *e as the "default" vowel may have favoured the > palatals, while certain positions may have had specific effects > (e.g. de-palatalization before *r [*k^r > *kr], or > de-labiaization before *u [*kwu > *ku]). But that still leaves > plenty of non-palatal, non-labiovelar "plain velars" which cannot > be explained away. [PR] I heartily subscribe to this conclusion. My reconstructions are based on an earlier system of Ce/Ca/Co breaking down in C{y}V, CV, and C{w}V, with subsequent loss of the glides. 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 georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Thu Jan 27 14:57:20 2000 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 09:57:20 -0500 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >>That's not correct; Armenian underwent an independent set of consonant >>changes which roughly resemble Grimm's Law in Germanic. Armenian did not >>undergo the satem consonant shift. >It did: >*k^ > s tasn < *dek^m >*g^ > c [ts] gorc < *werg^om >*g^h > j [dz] jeRn < *g^hesr- Not quite, Miguel; this is the palatalization/assibilation part of the satem-story. The whole story, however, envolves a merger of velars and labiovelars. Is this the case in Armenian ? chem xossum. >Albanian is satem, or rather "thatem" (*k^ > th). See above, Albanian also has evaded the required merger. 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 Jan 26 11:48:52 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 12:48:52 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" Sent: Monday, January 24, 2000 7:25 PM >> Sean Crist wrote: >> As for Albanian, I can't say much; it's so heavily mutated that it's not >> of much use in reconstructing PIE, and I know next to nothing about the >> sound changes it underwent. I can say that I've never heard anyone claim >> that Albanian underwent the satem shift. > Albanian is satem, or rather "thatem" (*k^ > th). > Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl [Ed Selleslagh] Miguel, Forgive me my ignorance, but could you elaborate on the relationship (or not) of this phenomenon with a similar one in Greek, at least in some positions or cases: thermos, -te, etc.? Another note on Albanian: Yesterday I saw a picture in the newspaper showing a woman (in Prishtinë) waving a poster with the picture of some loved one and the caption "Ku është? [Ku e/¨shte/¨] Where is he?". Isn't it remarkable that such an extremely short text (2 words) could reveal so much about the kind of language it is in, if e.g. Albanian had died out and only this text had been found. BTW, in this case apparently *k^ > k, correct me if I'm wrong, not unlike Greek in some cases (even though in this particular case it would have been 'pou'), cf. *kwekwlos > kyklos. Ed. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jan 26 06:44:18 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 00:44:18 -0600 Subject: Albanian [was: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions"] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Given that Albanian's unique status: the only member of its branch; i.e. a relic location in an area with no recorded pre-IE substrate languages located not too far from the more likely proposed IE homelands It would that Albanian would be one of the most valuable languages in reconstructing IE True, it's said to have a very high percentage of loanwords and outside influence. But wouldn't that make it a tool for double checking phenomena in the neighboring languages? So, I'm curious why it's not considered more often Is it more to do with its inaccessibility? Is there a fundamental lack of investigation? Can someone offer more details about its "mutiliation"? [ moderator snip ] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Jan 26 05:40:49 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 00:40:49 EST Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter Message-ID: In a message dated 1/25/00 11:20:10 PM, Sean Crist wrote: **It's apparently a problem for you.... I never drew any distinction between branching and forking. I use the terms to mean exactly the same thing.** The problem is yours. You do not seem to even keep track of what you yourself are writing. You just wrote: **I never drew any distinction between branching and forking. I use the terms to mean exactly the same thing.** HOWEVER, in a message dated 1/11/00 12:05:57 AM, you wrote: **A forking in a language follows from a forking in the community of speakers,... In this post and in others, you've conceived of language branching as a main trunk which continues, and a daughter which separates off of this trunk and goes its own way (e.g., when you use the phrase "...a daughter branches off"). I'd argue that this is not looking at things the right way. THERE ARE ONLY FORKINGS. IT'S NOT POSSIBLE FOR JUST ONE DAUGHTER TO BRANCH OFF; if there's been a forking, then you have two daughters.** (Caps are mine.) You further wrote: **You seem to be having an awful time getting your mind around this, because you've been beating this same drum since last summer....** Let me respond that I think it may be you who are having "an awful time" with it. Read the quote above and look back at your posts. You are switching positions and are now suggesting the two ways of looking at this matter are merely terminological - which of course was the point I made in my post. It is not what you were saying in your prior posts. Let's just say that the statement about a parent co-existing with a parent merely involves terminology - something I suggested when it was first brought up -- and end it there. Regards, Steve Long [ Moderator's note: I think that is a very good suggestion. Any further discussion of this topic should be taken to private e-mail. --rma ] From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Thu Jan 27 17:37:00 2000 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 12:37:00 -0500 Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >In very, very rare cases, a single inflectional morpheme might have been >borrowed; it's been claimed that English 3sg. -s (replacing -eth) >represents a Norse influence. But there is not one recorded case where a >whole system of inflectional morphology has been borrowed; it just >_doesn't_ happen. Oh, it *does* happen; not so tremendously often, actually, but it does. I was raised myself in lx. believing that there's no such thing as a "mixed language", but there are such things. The most famous cases which have been brought to attention in the last decades are the Aleut variant spoken on Mednyj Ostrov (which remained lexically basically Aleut and glued Russian verbal inflections to its roots); other examples include the notorious Inner Ma'a/Mbugu of Kenya (Cushitic/Bantu lexical-morphological mix) and some others, now prominently described in the literature. In fact, a lot of others. The moribund Moghol language of Afghanistan (Mongolian lg. family) shows many morphological borrowings from Persian/Tadzhik, inflectional elements among them; the same holds for the more northerly dialects of Tadzhik, which seem very prone to adopt Uzbek morphology into their systems. A.P. Volodin and yours truly may or may not be right in claiming that most of the inflectional verbal morphology of Itelmen is borrowed from neighbouring Chukchi-Koryak languages. I wholeheartedly agree that the role of morphology in the determination of language relationship can hardly be overemphasized. Sadly enough, this is not recognized everywhere, with some comparativist schools even explicitly downplaying this role ("morpho-what ?"). But it is equally incorrect to say that morphological borrowing doesn't happen. It does. 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 X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Jan 26 05:52:25 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 00:52:25 EST Subject: Wheel as an early loan. Message-ID: In a message dated 1/25/00 11:20:10 PM, Sean Crist wrote: **If it were borrowed from just one branch into another, I'd be willing to entertain the idea that the loan was early enough for the crucial sound changes not to have taken place, so that we couldn't identify the borrowing. However, the PIE word for "wheel" is attested in most of the branches of IE. It is vanishingly improbable that the word could be a loan word in all of these branches without ever showing any telltale phonological signs of the borrowing in any of the branches.** If the loan was "early enough for crucial sound changes not to have taken place," then what "telltale phonological signs of borrowing" would you expect? Perhaps if we identified them, they can be looked for. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Jan 26 05:57:02 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 00:57:02 EST Subject: SV: Indo-Hittite Message-ID: In a message dated 1/25/00 10:15:53 PM, Sean Crist wrote: <> It was me. Let me apologize. The paper was on the screen in front of me and the authors clearly say in a number of places that Hittite represents Anatolian. My statement was inexcusably incorrect. Regrets, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Jan 26 17:01:00 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 12:01:00 EST Subject: Indo-Hittite Message-ID: In a message dated 1/26/00 11:23:23 AM, Hans J Holm wrote: <> Since it is mainly based on prior scholarship and selected PIE reconstructions, I suspect there is nothing particularly novel about the UPenn tree findings. It's clear that the methodology is originally designed to find the best possible internal consistency for particular theories, rather than testing the theories themselves. As you say, adjustments were made in the data to give a relative chronology to the tree afterwards. Some of these adjustments were geographical and relate to presumed contact or lack of it. Specific adjustments made to date Hittite are not clear in the texts I have. There is no indication that the UPenn group ever hypothesized or attempted to execute a tree where Hittite and PIE were hypothesized to be sisters decended from a common ancestor to see if it was also consistent with the data. Such a procedure might have been methodologically necessary to properly 'test' the IndoHittite hypothesis. These findings also might have carried assumptions that Hittite was a descendent of PIE (e.g., some of the established reconstructed PIE that Ringe, et al used to identify cognates for co-categorization presumably were reconstructed with Hittite included in the comparative data) and the computer confirmed that this was not inconsistent - a finding that could have also possibly come out of hypothesizing Hittite as being a sister language. I'm not saying anything here of course about the correctness of the Indo-Hittite hypothesis. Regards, Steve Long From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Thu Jan 27 19:49:05 2000 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 14:49:05 -0500 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) In-Reply-To: <200001241129.p65346@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: >Depends on the circumstances. >I suggest to take a look at well-known examples. They should make clear >that there are different ways for the spread of languages: >1) Lang's can be taken over without any migration, merely by way of > economical dependence or cultural difference. Examples: The Wedda in S- > India, some Pygmy-tribes, the Jakutes in N-Siberia (originally Evenks, > who switched to the Turcic Dialect). There is no archeological evidence. The case of the Yakuts is mere speculation, I'm afraid. It is next to impossible that the spread of Turkic to the lower Lena was not at least, say, accompanied by some movement in space of some people, to put it mildly. To put it less mildly, the assumption in the paragraph above is simply wrong. Yakut oral traditions have never forgotten about their earlier more southerly homes, and that their adventure in the North was not even a smooth and peaceful one is equally well-recorded by Yakut reminiscences of wars with the Ewenks. The very distance of Yakut to the their Turkic next-of-kin in Southern Siberia with no trace of the missing links between Lake Bajkal and the Upper Lena bespeaks the migratory nature of their northward movement. It is equally mere conjecture that the Yakuts are "originally Ewenks". Yakut and Ewenk do show clear signs of areal convergence, but nothing which would make the assumption of language-switch Ew. ---> Yak. necessary or even likely. This does of course not preclude that some Yakut clans were originally Ewenki (or, more likely, Yukaghir) clans who *have* actually switched their language. If I miss something, I'd like to learn about it. Of course, it is correct that language switch does not necessarily involve large-scale migration, but the gradual shift of economical, political, cultural and finally linguistic balance you seem to have in mind presupposes that the populations in question have been neighbours for a long time, participating in essentially the same (or two mostly overlapping) social networks. However, the Yakut migration to the north, beginning roughly in the 12th/13th centuries, was a rather sudden event. The Wedda and Pygmy-examples are more interesting, but here also I find it hard to operate without some kind of movement of people. It seems hard to imagine how the Indo-Aryan language reached the island of beautiful Lanka without at least some speakers accompanying it and settling down on the island. Of course, one doesn't have to have in mind the rather naive picture of a "migration" which consists of "the people" following Moses in ordered columns. But the renfrewian alternative, the "wave-of-advance-model" (which is very interesting and should not be thrown out with the washwater, just because the whole of the Renfrew theory meets with considerable difficulties; it is more than likely that it may provide explanations for *some* dislocations of people/cultures/languages in the Old World. Only which ones is the question), this renfrewian alternative, though different in detail, *does* involve a movement of concrete people in space and time, n'est-ce pas ? >2) Language switching can be caused by a relativlely small class of > military rulers. Examples: The Hungrians switching from Getic/Slavic > /Ants/Dialects to an Ob-Ugrian lang. But where is the archeological or > racial evidence? The residents of Pannonia switched to a *Ugric* language, the Ob'-Ugric languages being those the people of Pannonia had no opportunity to switch to, because the ancestors of today's Khants and Mansis decided to try their luck further east (which is why the world missed the chance to have an Austrian empress talking in Ostyak to her servants). >3) Of cause migrations can be found: Nobody claims the Indo-Aryans to be > the original inhabitants of India. Oh yes, some people do. There is a linguistic/cultural historical school in India, which, following the teachings of Sri Aurobindo, does exactly say that. And that Indo-Aryans and Dravidians are the same. St. G. PS: I'm not one of them. 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 Jan 25 15:26:12 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 15:26:12 +0000 Subject: "is the same as" Message-ID: Stanley Friesen writes: [snip account of ring species among salamanders] > It seems absurd to say that just because the end-points are clearly > distinct that each of the intermediate steps must *also* be held to be > distinct! Ergo, I must use "same" to refer to a purely "local" state of > affairs - any two *specific* populations are either the same or not, > irregardless of the situation with other pairs of populations in the same > series. Why "absurd"? 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? > The same sort of situation can, and *does* hold for languages. The West > Romance area is a dialect continuum, with chains of locally similar > dialects connecting all of the separate "languages" in West Romance. So, > does one treat all of West Romance as one language? It seems silly to call > French and Portugese the same language, does it not. Yet they are connected > by a series of pairwise similar dialects. 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. [LT, earlier] >> But, if we agree to a fuzzy interpretation of 'is the same as', and hence to >> its negation 'is not the same as', then we can no longer manipulate these >> relations as though they had non-fuzzy interpretations, and draw non-fuzzy >> conclusions -- which I think is the practice I was objecting to in the first >> place. > I am a little confused here. I do not remember ever actually applying > "sameness" in a non-fuzzy manner in this discussion. (Of course, given the > time lags, my memory is a little fuzzy itself). As far as I can recall now, the objections of which I speak were not to Stanley Friesen's postings, but rather to somebody else's. But it's been a while. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jan 25 16:15:12 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 16:15:12 +0000 Subject: Re Personal pronouns Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Pat Ryan writes: > I have no problem with Larry's definition of 'determiner' as recorded in his > dictionary; and I have no problem acknowledging the usefulness of > categorizing several different kinds of words > ("articles...demonstratives...quantifiers...", etal.) as 'determiners'. > But Larry seems to me to be denying the validity and usefulness of the term > 'possessive pronoun' altogether though, of course, "possessive" is included > as one of the various categories of 'determiners'. > Larry's definition of pronoun contains all the classses traditionally > considered pronouns *except* possessive pronouns though it seems odd in the > extreme that, in spite of the rejection of possessive pronouns, > demonstrative pronouns are included *as well as* being listed under > 'determiner' as "demonstrative". > Perhaps you could explain to me why you think "demonstrative" may occur in > both classifications but "possesive" may not. OK; I'll have a shot. The labels 'pronoun' and 'determiner' denote *syntactic* categories -- that is, categories established on the basis of grammatical behavior, such as distribution and inflection. Such categories are set up without regard for the meanings or functions of their members. But the labels 'possessive' and 'demonstrative' are quite different. These are not syntactic categories at all, but rather semantico-functional categories, set up on the basis of the meanings or functions of their members, regardless of their grammatical behavior. Now, there is no requirement that any syntactic category should exactly correspond to any semantico-functional category. Often, of course, we observe a high degree of overlap, but perhaps never perfect overlap, and sometimes the match is not good at all. Now, in English, we can set up the syntactic categories 'pronoun' and 'determiner' by the usual grammatical criteria. When we do this, we find that the class of pronouns includes, among others, the items 'she', 'mine' and 'this'. And we find that the class of determiners includes, among others, 'the', 'my' and 'this'. Simple test for pronouns: ___ is nice. Simple test for determiners: ___ book is nice. So that's that: 'my' is strictly a determiner, while 'mine' is strictly a pronoun, and 'this' can be either a pronoun or a determiner. Now to the semantico-functional categories. We can set up a class of 'demonstratives' on the basis of deictic properties, and we find that both determiner 'this' and pronoun 'this' must be included in the demonstratives. And we can perhaps set up a class of 'possessives' on some basis or other (this is not so easy), and find that both determiner 'my' and pronoun 'mine' deserve to be included in this possessive class. But the two very different types of class are independent in nature and independent in membership. The observation that the pronoun 'mine' is a pronoun does not entail that the determiner 'my' is also a pronoun, merely because both are possessives -- just as noting that 'my' is a determiner does not make 'mine' a determiner. In the same way, the observation that the event-word 'destruction' belongs to the syntactic category 'noun' does not entail that the event-word 'destroy' must also be a noun. Syntactic categories are independent of semantico-functional categories. That's just the way languages are. > Finally, I think it useful to retain the term "possessive pronoun" because > it overtly identifies the fact that the pronoun stands for a noun in the > possessive --- in addition to its function of deteremination. No; I'm afraid I can't agree. Whatever the intended meaning of "stands for" might be, a pronoun does not "stand for" a noun. A pronoun doesn't even belong to the category 'noun'. Instead, it belongs to the category 'noun phrase', and, in many cases, it takes its reference from another noun phrase overtly present in the discourse. Example: Q: "Where's the woman we're supposed to meet?" A: "She's over there." And *not*: * "The she we're supposed to meet is over there." A pronoun does *not* "stand for" a noun in any coherent sense. Now, of course, 'my' is somehow related to 'I', at least semantically. Depending on your theoretical tastes, you might like to state a rule -- say, a lexical rule -- of the following approximate form: [I] + [Poss] --> [my] This rule is comparable to other conceivable lexical rules; for example: [arrive] + [-al] --> [arrival] But 'arrival' is not a verb because 'arrive' is a verb: it's a noun, as shown by its grammatical behavior. Likewise, 'my' is not a pronoun because 'I' is a pronoun: it's a determiner, as shown by its grammatical behavior. Finally, I might add that 'possessive' is a rather elusive category anyway. Whatever 'possessive' might mean -- and this is far from being a trivial question -- it has no uniform grammatical expression in English. In fact, English has *at least five* different sets of forms and constructions for expressing relations we might reasonably call 'possessive': (1) Determiners ('my', 'your', 'their') (2) Pronouns ('mine', 'yours', 'theirs') (3) The Saxon genitive: NP + 's ('Bill Clinton's affairs) (4) Prepositions ('the capital of France', 'the man with the gun') (5) Juxtaposition ('the Microsoft story') These highly varied forms and constructions have nothing in common syntactically, and they cannot be coherently squeezed into any single syntactic category -- even though we *might* like to say that they all express possession, whatever that is. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Jan 25 19:49:12 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 14:49:12 EST Subject: Drift vs. common innovations; satem Message-ID: Edward Sapir had the very useful concept of "drift". The concept simply acknowledges that there can be causes for shifts, and that changes may happen by stages, in degrees, a language can move a part of the way towards a shift. This can be the case as a matter of fact, without our necessarily being able to know all the details. It is a useful way of thinking. (I am of course *not* suggesting that we posit things for which we have no evidence, simply that we do not rule out hypotheses consistent with a small amount of data available to us, posited developments for which we have actual known parallels.) I believe the concept of "drift" helps to synthesize the two views, that of family tree and that of dialect area, which we find so often debating each other, each having a part of the truth in view. (I strictly distinguish "dialect area" in my thinking from the concept of "Sprachbund" or areal effects, which is appropriate when the languages involved are unrelated, or when the effects are demonstrably after a period of separation and return to contact so the results are different for reasons of intervening changes. The mere overlap of waves of innovation across a persisting dialect network are somewhere in between?) Consider the obvious possibility that there were several *stages* in developments *towards* a satem-shift (NOTE THAT WORD *towards*). (In what follows I am neglecting Tocharian and the obvious other small details. Do not misunderstand the simple terminology used merely to explain the concept.) If some of the exact details can be improved, someone else please do so, and then critique the best version you can create. *** Common innovation: stage 1 of satem drift the entire area of the eastern IndoEuropean shared a portion of the drift, including even Baltic and Greek. Did not go far enough to be manifested in Greek (at all?). *** Common innovation: stage 2 of satem drift Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian shared this stage of the drift *** Common innovation: stage 3 of satem drift Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian shared this stage of the drift *** Common innovation: stage 4 of satem drift Slavic and Indo-Iranian shared this stage of the drift *** Common innovation: stage 5 of satem drift Indo-Iranian shared this stage of the drift *** Even possibly stage 6 of satem drift Did Iranian go farther than Indic? *********************************************** I always try to think in concrete terms, not to resolve real questions via strict definitions (where the definitions answer the question and therefore make the question less an empirical one). So the following does make more precise wherein certain languages differ, but does not satisfy me fully. >When the issue of satemization is defined very strictly, it consists - not >of the assibilations and spirantizations - but of the merger of velars and >labiovelars (with the old palatals showing distinct reflexes), as opposed >to kentum lgs., where palatals and velars merged and labiovelars show >autonomous reflexes. If this definition is fololwed strictly, Armenian and >Albanian are out (no merger at all); Baltic and Slavic are mostly in (but >not entirely, because of the sizable number not-at-all satemized elements). >Which leaves us with Indo-Iranian as the only real and true-blue satem >branch (and if we look at the remnants of labiovelars there, even that is >not entirely sure). From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Jan 25 22:53:07 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 17:53:07 EST Subject: Peripheral promotes "common innovation" ? Message-ID: [Sent to IE list on 25 January, 2000] I have quite a number of questions regarding what may be relatively unquestioned assumptions underlying decisons about what qualify as "common innovations". *** One of these questions I raised in a separate message sent today on what Sapir's concept of "Drift" does for us, if major changes are taken as going through a number of stages in the process of "drift". Can we distinguish clearly between dialect areas and branches in family trees (not confusing dialect areas which have been constantly contiguous with Sprachb�nde which result from later contact, or contact of languages not closely related). As a consequence of that perspective... Is it perhaps the case that innovations which are restricted to a very narrow dialect area are more likely to be considered common innovations justifying a branch on a family tree, while innovations which covered a much wider area, and are perhaps much more fundamental (!), *BECAUSE WE CAN DETECT THE TIME THEY TAKE FROM THEIR ORIGIN AT THEIR CORE UNTIL THEY REACH THEIR FARTHEST EXTENTS* will be classed as borrowings of tendencies between related neighboring languages, and thus excluded from consideration for family-tree groupings? *** Another has to do with how geographic position, central vs. peripheral in a dialect-area network, may possibly affect judgements about common innovations. I'm wondering whether, methodologically, the effects of contiguity in dialect areas tend to bias the Penn. approach, and perhaps many others, to indicating an early separation (separate branches) of the dialect groups which are at the geographical extremes of the total composite dialect space? (Thinking perhaps of Italic & Celtic.) That is, because the groups at the edges do not have genetically related dialects on all sides of them, matters which were really dialect-area phenomena, interpreted as common innovations on nodes on a tree, will tend to segment off the outermost areas first? That is not necessarily a wrong result, from some point of view, but it may be a much too discrete result, as opposed to a more accurate result which might have to be gradient. More generally, I would love to receive references to the most recent productive thinking on how to combine dialect-area perspectives with branching-tree perspectives. To me, branching is most fully secure only when LATER borrowings clearly postdate some internal change, and do not show the effect of that change. That is asking more of the evidence than merely common innovation, I think, but not sure how to state this with absolute precision. *** I think these are each important questions of how method interacts with the content which the method is applied to. (In statistics, at least, it is known that all methods are appropriate or inappropriate depending on the structure of the data they are applied to, etc. etc., that they may give wrong results when applied to the wrong kind of data.) *** Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Jan 25 23:07:41 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 18:07:41 EST Subject: early IE dialect areas diagram Message-ID: I use visual aids to help my thinking. The following dialect map I did recently, and was assisted by conversations with Joat Simeon during the process. It is in a Monospaced font, using only spaces not tabs, so after you receive it, convert it into a Monospace font (like Courier on the Macintosh). The horizontal positions should then align nicely. Rotate it 45 degrees or so counterclockwise, to get the right results. You should have a dialect chain from Indo-Iranian to Armenian to Phrygian-Thracian-Illyrian-Albanian to Greek, and another from Indic to Indo-Iranian to Slavic & Baltic to Germanic etc. Different time periods are shown, so the separation of Anatolian is much earlier, and it can be excluded when considering later isoglosses. Finno-Ugric has loans from Indo-Iranian (though not many from PIE), and Finnish has loans from German. They were placed off to the sides in the appropriate relative positions as reminders of this. In a map of dialect areas which is done correctly, it should be possible to draw most isoglosses as convex ovoids with no concave portions (within the limitations that a single two-dimensional positioning cannot represent a history of different contacts during migrations, first with one group, then with another). See whether you think this one helps the deliberations. It is designed to reflect the possibility that the Armenian-to-Greek dialect chain, and the IndoIranian-to-Indic dialect chain, both migrated southwards at about the same times. If anyone can suggest the scenario for the positions of Celtic and Italic especially at the very ealiest stages, and whether their neighbors changed very much during the expansion of IE dialects westwards, I would be grateful for any help with thinking. Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics Celtic Italic Germanic Finnish Baltic Greek Slavic Albanian (Illyrian- [Ukraine Thracian Homeland of PIE] Phyrgian Armenian (Anatolian Isolated) Indo-Iranian Finno-Ugric Iranian Indic From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Jan 25 23:31:10 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 18:31:10 EST Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? Message-ID: I was just recently contemplating the augment *e- which precedes certain completed-action verbs in Indic and in Greek, and which, I gather from one correspondent, is usually taken as an inheritance from some common stage, one of several manifestations of a close Greek-Vedic relationship. If one takes that point of view, then it implies a Greek-Indic common innovation compared with PIE. Is that branch on a tree supportable? (differs from UPenn, right?) If not, then must one take it as an inheritance from PIE, lost elsewhere? it occurs to me to wonder about German ge- of past participles, which (with loss of /g-/) shows up also in the "e" of the English form "enough", related to German "genug", from o-grade of a verb *nek- 'to reach, attain'. What is the origin of that prefix in German? Is it just barely conceivable that it might be related to the Sanskrit and Greek augment, and that it began with a laryngeal? (I am fully aware that affixes do not always follow the same sound changes as do roots - but also very hesitant to posit an otherwise unproven irregularity of sound change, so would want some pretty good demonstrations of cognate functions, at least ones which could develop from a common origin. I think the functions of German and of the Greek and Sanskrit augment, in completive contexts, are highly similar. Could the origin have been something like this? (or with a different vowel, reduced to /e/ as for many other German unstressed verbal prefixes, then generalized ...?) *He- ?? Pardon, I am not a Germanicist and have no immediate access to something that would tell me. Pokorny's Comparative Germanic Grammar pp.205-206 states a relation to Latin co(m)-, but such a hypothesis is to me much more improbable on semantic grounds. In this view, I would assume, the /gV-/ prefixes gradually spread from their point of origin at the expense of other prefixes. Perfectly possible. Was that hypothesis posited long ago for simply for lack of anything better, or because shows up only in some of the western Germanic languages (OHG, English, etc.)? Or is there substantial support behind it, such as details of the gradual stages of infiltration from Latin? Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From ECOLING at aol.com Wed Jan 26 15:05:31 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 10:05:31 EST Subject: Refining what trees show Message-ID: We often make much too little use of the capabilities of visual diagrams. Choices in these do have strong implications for our thinking. Sean Crist responded to Steve Long on questions of parts of one language changing substantially, while other parts do not. (still under the title "When a mother becomes a daughter" - small excerpt quoted below) I agree completely with Crist that the matter is in many cases purely a matter of terminological convention. Italian might still be called Latin, just as modern Dutch still is called that. One branch retains the name. Steve Long, incidentally, also said that the debate may be purely terminological. However, Steve is also pointing to situations which are not purely terminological, where in standard treatment we would say that one branch innovated *a lot*, and the other innovated *very little*. Never mind that "a lot" and "a little" are not absolute or discretely different. There can be cases in which they are different enough to be highly significant. I am fully aware of the view that the tree diagrams are also purely conventional, that even where there is a continuing "stem" shown, there are also innovations on that stem, so it is equal to the branch. Differences don't matter. But taken as a matter of degree, not of absolutes, there is still some considerable sense in what Steve is pointing to on this issue. It may sometimes be useful to indicate large differences of degree by a more subtle use of our family trees and other diagrams. *** Family trees need not always divorce themselves completely from real geography, showing the innovating branches off to one side, and what appears as a continuing smooth flow of the remainder to the other side (witness Italo-Celtic branching to the East in the UPenn trees I have seen pictured). Rather, they can also incorporate some hints to geography, showing innovating branches in different directions. This is not merely formal, as it makes it more possible by one degree to think in terms of both dialect areas and family trees at the same time, or in terms of migrations and family trees at the same time. Personally I usually prefer a map of dialect areas on which a tree is superimposed, as to me more *practically* useful, there may be quite a number of mixtures which can be useful in visual diagramming. Each will of course be conventional and cannot show infinite detail. As mentioned long ago, noting some salient innovations on branches, or using convex ovals for innovating dialect areas, or both, are very useful tools in aiding understanding. Many devices which incorporate some notations for actual data into diagrams which show the overall patterning of that data can be useful, by allowing us to focus easily on EITHER THE TREES OR THE FOREST, by showing (some of) both at the same time. *** It can be useful, in cases of a tree in which there are indeed large differences in degree of innovation, many innovations of one branch clearly branching off, and few innovations on the remaining core, to show a vertical with a branch, rather than a forking which visually conveys equality. (And yes, there will be intermediate cases where we cannot easily choose between these two representations - that in no way suggests that the distinction is not most often quite useful.) Footnotes can be added to anything, to add to, limit, or clarify what is or is not signaled by a diagram. That is we CAN do both /\ / \ / \ / \ and |\ | \ | \ | \ /| \ / | \ / | \ and have that visual distinction aid us. We tend to greatly UNDERUTILIZE the facilities of even two-dimensional paper. Sincerely, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics >It's apparently a problem for you. Linguists are well aware that there is no >clear criterion for looking at two lects and saying "same language" vs. >"different languages." It is purely a matter of convention what distinctions >we want to draw and what names we want to use. >For example, consider the following two cases: > -Earlier Dutch forked into Dutch and Afrikaans. > -Latin forked into Italian, Spanish, French, etc. >In the former case, we continue to use the term for the parent language for >one of the daughters. In the latter case, we don't. What we choose to call >the daughters is _purely_ a matter of convention. Linguistically speaking, >the two cases are examples of exactly the same thing; it doesn't matter >whether we've arbitrarily chosen to use the name of the parent language as the >name of one of the daughters. From gwhitta at gwdg.de Wed Jan 26 17:43:15 2000 From: gwhitta at gwdg.de (Gordon Whittaker) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 17:43:15 -0000 Subject: Hawk /siiiii/ ! Message-ID: What "bird names in Sumerian are the same as in the present day"?! What could you be thinking of? What possible source could validate this comment? Please provide some specifics, if you have any. Gordon Whittaker Institut f|r Ethnologie Theaterplatz 15 37073 Gvttingen Germany -----Urspr|ngliche Nachricht----- Von: ECOLING at aol.com An: Indo-European at xkl.com Datum: 21 January 2000 05:10 Betreff: Hawk /siiiii/ ! [ moderator snip ] >For *kukurru*, *miaou*, *mu*, *me*, the case is a rather easy one. >For many other bird names equally so (though it is not to be sneezed >at that some bird names were the same in Sumerian as in the present >day, there can also be historical influences at work simultaneously). [ moderator snip ] From rohan.oberoi at cornell.edu Thu Jan 27 06:11:50 2000 From: rohan.oberoi at cornell.edu (rohan.oberoi at cornell.edu) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 01:11:50 -0500 Subject: Origins of Indo-Aryan Message-ID: To the list: I've been following and am writing an article about the somewhat strange fact that the origin of old Indo-Aryan has become a "hot-button" political issue in India. Briefly put: the politically popular theory in India is apparently that Vedic culture is indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, and that the civilisation that built the Indus Valley Civilisation (ca. 2800-1800 BC) was the one that wrote the Rig Veda (otherwise normally dated to 1500 BC, I believe). There has been a spate of books in the last ten years from people without backgrounds in history or linguistics arguing this point. They generally refer to the standard understanding of the arrival of Indo-Aryan as "the debunked Aryan Invasion Theory". The party now in power in India, the BJP, strongly supports this view and I understand that it is being pushed along with other educational changes the party wants to introduce. I've already sounded out a few people on the list with questions. I wonder if I could ask anyone who has taken an interest to consider this and provide any information or references they think would be of interest. 1. This theory, it seems obvious to me, would require PIE to be located in India or thereabouts, which runs into at least three problems I can think of: 1. PIE connections to Finno-Ugric; 2. No PIE connections to Dravidian; 3. Horses not securely established in India till end of second mill. BC. 2. Is anything along these lines taken seriously in IE studies? Are there recent papers that have considered the problem one way or another? Obviously, I am familiar with Mallory's (1989) summation of the consensus as finding IE generally intrusive in Asia. Thoughts welcome (indeed, solicited). Regards, Rohan. From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Thu Jan 27 08:27:45 2000 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 09:27:45 +0100 Subject: Northwest IE attributes In-Reply-To: <34.97a598.25bebe8a@aol.com> Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >>Not *so* unlikely, after all. Palatalizations are, so to speak, the >>garden-variety of sound-changes. >-- yes, but the same one in two adjacent groups for different reasons? This >violates explicatory parsimony. Only with less-than-natural sound changes. This one is quite natural. >And as you point out, this particular change is _not_ common in the IE >languages. Only Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic show it with any degree of >consistency (Armenian possibly too). Albanian, Romance, Modern Cretan, Swedish aso. But, then, I'm not arguing against an areal explanation of some phenomena (among them palatalization and assibilation of palatal stops) in Baltic, Slavic and Indo-Iranian. Only against viewing satemisation as a shared innovation of a "satem" node in IE. 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 mcv at wxs.nl Thu Jan 27 23:38:55 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 00:38:55 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <007b01bf6769$037094c0$be9f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >[MC] >> It is clear that a system with both palatalization and >> labialization, as I advocate for (Pre-)PIE, is not stable. >[PR] >What makes that so "clear"? There aren't (to my knowledge) many languages around which maintain a full set of labialized and palatalized and plain consonants (I forgot to mention the plains). Ubykh? Centum/satem reflect two ways of simplifying this situation (merger of plain-palatalized or labialized-plain). Slavic did not create a separate labialized series, Old Irish lost the u-coloured consonants. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Jan 28 00:10:34 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 01:10:34 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <006b01bf67f3$6ff36840$0801703e@edsel> Message-ID: "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" >Sent: Monday, January 24, 2000 7:25 PM >> Albanian is satem, or rather "thatem" (*k^ > th). [ moderator snip ] >Forgive me my ignorance, but could you elaborate on the relationship (or not) >of this phenomenon with a similar one in Greek, at least in some positions or >cases: thermos, -te, etc.? Albanian is an inderdental fricative, presumably from /c/ (/ts/) from *k^. Cf. (Northern) Spanish. Palatalized consonants tend to develop into affricates /c/ or /c^/, which in turn tend to the fricatives /T/ (< /c/), /s^/ (< /c^/) or /s/ ( < either). Greek t/th/d < *kw, *gwh, *gw (before e/i) is an entirely different phenomenon (and a rare one, as far as I know). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Thu Jan 27 08:30:26 2000 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 09:30:26 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) wrote: >>S>"What if all the IE words like *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- , and Gr. trochos >>S>are older than the wheel/chariot/wagon, >>.. >>of cause the word is older: cf hebrew golgatha< gol-gol-tha 'place of >>scull', where the scull is named after its rounded form, or cf. the >>Ngoro-ngoro-crater in eastern Africa, where of cause n- is the Swaheli >>class-prefix, and again we get the word for 'circle' < 'round-round'. >>But: the use for wheel seems to be specific IE. >Not really. Gamqrelidze and Ivanov quote Sumerian gigir, Hebrew >gilga:l, galgal, Georgian borbal, gorgal, "wheel" or "chariot". And there's Sino-Tibetan *golo. 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 [ Moderator's comment: We could certainly magnify the list of coincidences as is common sport on the sci.lang newsgroup, but I think the point is made. Those who wish to pursue the real possibilities of long-range comparisons should move the discussion to the Nostratic list. --rma ] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Jan 27 09:19:14 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 04:19:14 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >You wrote: <>branch of Indo-European (Indo-Iranian, Hellenic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, >>Italic, and Tocharian)is that the word was borrowed when PIE was still a >>unity. Unless the word was borrowed when PIE was a unity, then there is no >>other way to account for this widespread occurrence in the family.>> >Well the wheel is one way, isn't it? I mean the actual wheel. Like the >computer or the telephone or the automobile. That would account for the word >being so widespread, wouldn't it? I certainly don't see any geographic or >other necessity that would make it difficult. -- we're talking about the WORD. If the word was borrowed or invented _before_ PIE split up, it would develop according to the usual sound laws for each of the daughter languages. If introduced afterwards, it would not. What is difficult about this? In point of fact, there's no question that the first eventuality -- the word for "wheel" being present before the dispersal of PIE -- is what actually happened. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Jan 27 09:38:22 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 04:38:22 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Even I know that if "the language has changed" and is no longer PIE, the >SPECIFIC sound changes in *kwelo, etc., may not have happened until later. >Those changes may NOT be the ones that defined "PIE (linguistic) breakup." -- those changes were not confined to those words, of course. Eg., the PIE *k ==> Germanic 'h' transition is characteristic. Hence *kmtom (100) ==> hundrad (100), or many other transitions of this kind. >What ARE the SPECIFIC SOUND changes identified in early 'wheel' words and >what suggests that they are even exceptionally early? I would value anything you >might offer regarding this. -- PIE *kwekwlom (pl. kwekwleha) -- wheel >From which: Old English: hweogol (note characteristic Germanic *k ==> h) Sanskrit: cakra Greek: kuklo Tocharian: kukal ('wagon') etc. PIE *hwergh -- wheel Hittite: hurki Tocharian: yerkwanto PIE *dhroghos -- wheel Old Irish: droch Armenian: durgn Greek: (I forget, but something similar) PIE *rotho -- wheel Old Irish: roth Latin: rota OHG: rad Lith. ratas Albanian: rreth Avestan: ratha (chariot) Sanskrit: ratha (chariot) Plus, of course, PIE *ueghnos, 'wagon', *uoghos, 'wagon' and the related *ueghitlom, 'vehicle', which produce: Old Irish: fen Welsh: gwain Tocharian wkam Mycenaean: wokas (chariot, from a related form *uoghos) OHG: wagan Latin: vehiculum Sanskrit vahitram From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jan 27 09:57:53 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 03:57:53 -0600 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: It's certainly possible for a word to be borrowed into all the IE languages; especially if it represents a radically new technology or trendy commodity. International words still crop up from time to time and enter most if not all branches of IE [and other families]; e.g. banana, coffee, tobacco, computer, telephone, tea [cha/chai/chay is cognate, of course] I agree that if there are regular reflexes, then the word would have borrowed either during a period of unity OR during a period of adjacent dialects in the same sense that Romance is [or recently was --due to standardization] This begs the question of how long IE languages existed as a chain of dialects. If Romance could have persisted for roughly 2000 years as a chain of dialects, how long could IE have remained in that state? [snip] >Absolutely not. If PIE had already dispersed into separate languages or >speech areas, then there is absolutely no reason to assume that a word >borrowed into one end of the Indo-European region into one dialect/language >would necessarily spread throughout all the languages in the family. The >ONLY way to account for the very existence of the word in nearly every >branch of Indo-European (Indo-Iranian, Hellenic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, >Italic, and Tocharian) is that the word was borrowed when PIE was still a >unity. Unless the word was borrowed when PIE was a unity, then there is no >other way to account for this widespread occurrence in the family, whether >or not specific sound changes had or had not occurred yet. If the word only >existed in, say, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, and Tocharian, then the borrowing >is quite likely one that only penetrated the eastern end of PIE. The same >would be true on the western end of PIE if the word only existed in Celtic, >Germanic and Italic. However, since *kwelos has reflexes throughout >Indo-European, and the sound changes that have affected it in each of the >daughters are completely regular, the only logical assumption that we can >make is that the word was borrowed when PIE was still a unity. Any other >assumption requires a leap of faith and violates the principle of Occam's >Razor. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Jan 27 23:59:47 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 00:59:47 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Sean Crist wrote: >On Thu, 20 Jan 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> The development was: *kwekwlo- > *hwegwlo ~ >> *hweGwlo > *hwewlo > { OE hwe:ol > wheel | ODu. *hwi at l > wiel }. >> Curiously, the loss of -g- here is only semi-regular (or we >> wouldn't have OE hweogul), which makes me wonder why Szemere'nyi, >> in his "Introduction", chose this example to illustrate the >> regularity of sound laws in general >Looks like a Verner's Law variant to me, tho I'd have to hit the books to >see if it actually checks out. The -gw- is Verner's law allright, but there is no Vernerless variant with *h(w). It's just that PIE *gwh (+ Verner *kw) have no stable reflexes in Germanic (/g(w)/ or /w/). >What I'd need to check is whether the Pre-PGmc word for "wheel" belonged >to one of the paradigms with shifting stress; It's an o-stem (fixed stress). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Jan 27 09:37:11 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 04:37:11 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: I wrote: << Where specifically do you find this? And I mean in Renfrew. Where specifically do you find this? And I mean in Renfrew. What book? What page?>> In a message dated 1/26/00 11:19:04 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: <<-- Renfrew (in Language and Archaeology) says that the pre-Celtic IE language reached Ireland with the first farmers -- that's 4000 BCE, roughly -- and that the Celtic languages developed _in situ_ all across their historic range, except for some outliers (Italy, Anatolia).>> I've looked through Renfrew and I do not find any reference to either "Celtic" or "pre-Celtic" reaching these areas at that time. I do find him saying the precise same thing about "an early Indoeuropean language." I suspect the difference is critical. <> I can only ask here what these Celtic language sources from BCE are. Once again I mean what specifically? I do not believe you will find this kind of evidence in the period you are speaking of in the Danube area. This despite the fact that Celtic migrations out of Gaul into the Danube area are attested to by the Romans (so that you would expect some uniformity.) Nor will you find it in Ireland (where there is history, folk memories and other evidence of a series of migrations from the continent ABOUT OR AFTER this time. - and therefore you also might expect some uniformity - if there was any such evidence.) I am willing to be corrected. I believe we have fragmentary evidence of Gallic Celtic, Lepontic and Celtiberian and many centuries later we have the more substantial evidence of the Celtic of the British Isles. I do not believe either Lepontic or Celtiberian demonstrate what anyone has called "striking uniformity." Gallic is specifically limited to only a third of Gaul by Caesar and I am not aware of actual evidence of it being found anywhere else - with the possible exception of an accountable presence in the British Isles. Once again I may be wrong, but I do hope there is specific evidence that I can look to. <> You are saying that here is Celtic was unchanging for 700 years. But then Celtic changes very quickly in the eyes of literate observers. Well perhaps literate observers would have observed the same rate of change earlier, but they weren't there and we have no record of them. (And of course the Galatians were identified by both the Greeks and by Cicero as being Volcae and from the tribe of the Gallic Volcae - and I believe the observer, mentioned in Renfrew, did not know Celtic and merely said they sounded the same. And the ogham use of a word for women - what about the rest of the words in ogham? is "the women" the only match? - does not prove a lot geographically and I'm not sure it is particularly strong proof of 'striking uniformity from Ireland to the Danube.") <> You have demonstrated 700 years of very little change with two pieces of rather circumstantial evidence. The evidence of Celtic in the BC years is very small indeed and comes from a very limited number of sources. (Once again I'm ready to be proved wrong but I would like to know of specific evidence -especially real textual evidence. I don't believe Lapontic or Celtiberian supports your claim based on the difficulty in deciphering them. And I don't believe there is much else evidence besides Gallic - and not much of it.) I don't know if I agree with Renfrew but it is not hard to see that a lot could have gone on between "an early Indoeuropean language" and pre-Celtic. The intervening period could have witnessed all sorts of changes that would eventually lead to a lot of different dialects, one or some of which became dominant or more universal through trade in the early Iron Age. On the other hand many dialects may have persisted into the Roman period and simply been unrecorded, after all - we know at some point some Celts acquired a taboo against writing. And of course Celtic had to turn into Celtic somewhere - what is the difference between IE>Celtic in the Danube or in France? Any expansion - wherever it happened - could have been at the expense of other dialects or IE languages wherever Celt started. And 4000 years versus 3000 years or even 2000 years would not seem to solve the problem of the this telling striking uniformity in 275BC, would it? The scenario Renfrew describes certainly seems adjustable to linguistic processes. The problem of the evidence of what happened during those 4000 years is precisely the problem you face anywhere you don't find written records. Myceanean records are after all just over 3000 years old but there are plenty of folk comfortable calling it not pre-Greek, but Greek. If we had no intervening evidence of Greek until modern Greek in the year1999AD in the same location - what would we make of the difference between the two languages? Why is "an early indoeuropean language" turning into the Celtic languages with no record of the intervening years expected to perform so differently - if an early indoeuropean language analogous to Mycenaean existed in 4000BC? I think all this may appear to be a bigger problem than it really is. Once again, I may be wrong. However, I would like to have some substantiation of the uniformity that you speak of in Celtic from Ireland to the Danube in the pre-Christian era. Regards, Steve Long From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jan 27 07:59:05 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 01:59:05 -0600 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I don't claim any knowledge of Old Irish but something has to be responsible for the radically different look of Gaelic as compared to other IE languages So keep in mind that my questions are rooted in ignorance What exactly are we looking at when we see Old Irish? How do we account for what seems to be a radical change in the language? Are we looking at an elite language of a recently arrived group? --perhaps later radically changed by the influence of earlier languages as their speakers/former speakers entered the elite group? Are we looking at a stylized orthography that ignored lenition and mutations? Was there a deliberate attempt by clerics to make the language look more latinate? Gaelic has to be the strangest language I've ever sat down and looked. As you all know, I'm not a linguist although I teach Spanish and have studied [long ago] other Romance languages, Arabic, Ixil and Swahili --all of which were very easy to get a handle on compared to Gaelic What weirds me out most are A. declarative [is this the right term?] negative, interrogative, negative interrogative and dependent forms of verbs; e.g. is, ni/, an, nach, gur for "to be --characteristics; present tense"; and bi/ for present habitual ta/, ni/l, an bhfuil & bhfuil for "to be --conditions/location; present tense"; and bi/onn for present habitual [question: Is ni/l < ni/ + bhfuil ?] B. conjugated prepositions and the multitude of verb-like uses for them C. the multitude of rules for lenition and initial mutation --although these can be explained D. the initial mutations/lenitions associated with numbers E. as per TYI, a seeming dearth of individual verb forms [as in English] except for conditional and 1st person present There are many other things as well but they're hard to get a handle on from just reading TYI Any explanations, expansion, etc. welcome! [ moderator snip ] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Jan 27 09:41:09 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 04:41:09 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: In a message dated 1/27/00 2:21:06 AM, you wrote: <<>Betraying my ignorance, I must once again ask why this exchange must have >happened with PIE and not with an early daughter. -- because if it was early enough for these word forms, it would BE the PIE language.>> I must ask you how you know that. How specifically do you know the word forms given do not belong to a daughter? How would these specific word forms be different if they belonged to a daughter? I'm looking forward to your reply. Steve Long From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Thu Jan 27 10:45:51 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 12:45:51 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <6a.51fac4.25bfc499@aol.com> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >> There are some Finnic-Saamic loan words with proto-IE characteristics (e.g., >> laryngal reflexes) which are probably connected with the battle axe culture, >> such as Finnic-Saamic *kas´a- 'tip, end' < IE *Hak´-, *suki- 'family, >> kin' < IE *suH-. These words are unknown in U languages outside the Baltic >> Sea / Scandianavian area. > -- now, that's interesting. Are they present in Estonian as well? Yes, they are: Finnic-Saamic *kas´a- > Estonian (Southern Dialect) kadsa 'corner of the back of an axe blade' Finnic-Saamic *suki- > Estonian sugema 'arise, develop, be born etc.', sugu 'family, kin' From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Thu Jan 27 11:58:08 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 13:58:08 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > As for the position of Anatolian, there are very few things that > distinguish Proto-IE as it was before the break-off of pre-Anatolian from > what it became during the time up to its next split when the second branch > (Tocharian?) left the remaining stock. Consequently, we cannot tell from > the form of an IE loanword in Uralic whether it was borrowed before or > after the separation of Anatolian from the rest. That being so, we cannot > quite exclude that the IE homeland was in Anatolia and that the rest had > moved to the north of the Black Sea and there met the (pre-)Proto-Urals > and handed them a bag of loanwords. Note that laryngeals are not retained > only in Anatolian; there are enough laryngeal-sensitive phonetic changes > in the individual branches to guarantee that laryngeals survived as > segmental units well into the separate lifelines of the other subbranches > also. This is an interesting point of view. Is there strong evidence for the claim that the first split in IE was between Anatolian and the rest? If only very few things distinguish P-IE before and after the break-off of Anatolian, are these differences substantial enough to warrant the reconstruction of a separate, intermediate proto-language for the rest of the IE branches? > 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 (the words > for "earth", "bear" or "fire" would be interesting) It appears that these words were not borrowed to Proto-Uralic: P-U has *myxi- 'earth', *tuli- 'fire', *elä- 'carry, lift' and *kan-ta- 'carry', which appear to be native Uralic words. The last one is actually a causative derivative of P-U *kani- 'go'. There are some later loans, however. Samoyedic has *pura- 'burn' < IE *pur- 'fire', and Hungarian and Ob-Ugric have replaced P-U *tuli- 'fire' with *tüwV-s (perhaps from IE *dhew-, although the vowel causes some difficulties). > Flaunting my ignorance, I may perhaps ask the silly question: How can > you exclude that the Uralic homeland had a prehistory south of the Black > Sea? If Proto-Uralic was only one language when it split into the many > that have become known, can one really exclude that the speakers of that > language had earlier lived somewhere else? I'm not advocating that one > should make up all sorts of fanciful scenarios, far from it, but it just > could be playing a trick on us. In principle, it cannot be totally excluded. However, the idea of a P-U homeland south of the Black Sea would not be a very fruitful hypothesis, since it would only create a new, very difficult question to answer: why and how would the P-U speakers have migrated north to become hunter-gatherers in the taiga/tundra zone of northern Eurasia? There is no evidence suggesting that the P-U Urheimat would have been -outside- the area where U languages are spoken today. - Ante Aikio From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Thu Jan 27 12:14:44 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 14:14:44 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <63.cc6d89.25bec79f@aol.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 25 Jan 2000 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > -- as far as I know, the Uralic Urheimat is generally placed around the Ural > mountains (hence the name). A bit further east than the central Ukraine, > although not much further. Subsequent spread was to the west _and_ east; To be more precise: the region between Volga and Urals is the usual theory these days, although some suggest more fanciful scenarios. Lexical substrate suggests that the Siberian U languages (Khanty, Manysi, Samoyedic) have moved to the current areas from Europe (e.g., roughly 75% (!) of the proto-Samoyedic lexicon is without a credible etymology). A strong lexical substrate from an unknown language seems to exist in Saamic too; as for Finnic, the case is not as clear. > hence Uralic (or Finno-Ugric) languages are found from Siberia all the way > west to Finland (further, counting Sammi). Saami must of course also be taken into account, since it as much a Uralic language as all the others. Thus, in 1800's Uralic languages were spoken from mid-Scandianavia (South Saami) to Baikal (Mator Samoyed, which is now extinct). - Ante Aikio From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Thu Jan 27 07:25:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 07:25:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: "Loans"? That appears as an extremely narrowed view. Of cause, resemblances between two langs/Protolangs alone do not prove borrowing, let alone any direction of of it. Steve Long is quite right in asking "I MUST also find out someday why Uralic would need to borrow words for water, move, bring and wash from IE." But of cause the question is rhetorical... Additionally to the possibility of loans it must be found out wether the resemblances could be due to - only chance (about 2 to 8 %, decreasing e.g. with word-length), - common origin. Mit freundlichen Grüszen Hans J Holm - - et monere et moneri - - From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Jan 27 10:56:53 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 05:56:53 EST Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >What if five lexical attributes appear as shared innovations between IE >languages A and B and therefore evidence a greater relatedness between the two >than a language C - which has none of them. What if however Language C shares >a totally valid morphological innovation with B not found in Language A? -- these are known as isogloss boundaries, and present no fundamental problems. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jan 27 05:51:23 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 23:51:23 -0600 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: <005101bf6669$df0f8a00$57c407c6@oemcomputer> Message-ID: >Ed Selleslagh writes: [ moderator snip ] >Hasn't Frisian also generalised a plural in -ar or -er, which also >corresponds with what Norwegian and Swedish (and formerly Danish) did? Can you elaborate a bit more on the -ar/-er plural? While the English strong plural was -en, there seems to be some relic forms with -r-; actually -ren e.g. child-r-en, eyren Middle English dialect plural for [unless the -r- of eyren was part of the singular stem and perhaps lost in the presumed singular ] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Thu Jan 27 11:47:24 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 11:47:24 GMT Subject: Horses in War Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:- > ... At the same time,...the Assyrians molded their cavalry into a strong > combat arm,... essentially making the chariot obsolete. Cavalry is inherently > better than chariots since it is more mobile. Likely the war chariot gradually went out as horses were gradually bred to be bigger. I am reminded here of a children's book about ponies that I read:- > ... [the pony is descended from] the wild pony ... Those who were careless > enough to let their children get bigger until they became what are now > known as horses got what they deserved, namely a lot of hard work. ... Whereabouts in the modern scale of horse sizes and types (pony, hack, charger, etc) do wild horse skeletons come which died before the wild stock could have been mixed genetically with escaped domestic horses? From HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu Thu Jan 27 15:13:57 2000 From: HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu (Herb Stahlke) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 10:13:57 -0500 Subject: NW vs. E Gmc Message-ID: On Sat, 22 Jan 2000, Sean Crist wrote: > I'd like to bring up a few points which were discussed in connection with > the distinction between NW and E Germanic: > 1. Both Marc Pierce and Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen cited *z > r as an > example of a shared innovation in NWGmc. It's true that a sound change > along these lines operated in both WGmc and NGmc, but it can be shown that > this is a parallel change which operated after the two dialects had > separated. The evidence is that there are rules both in WGmc and in NGmc > which are sensitive to the *z/*r distinction; the merger of the two > categories must have happened _after_ the two dialects had developed > separately for a while. As one only generally familiar with linguistic issues of early Germanic, I'm puzzled by Sean's clause "after the two dialects had separated". I've rather gotten the impression from sources like Orrin Robinson's Old English and its Closest Relatives and Hans Frede Nielsen's The Germanic Languages: Origins and Early Dialectal Interrelations that Sean's presupposition is something of an oversimplification. Rather, I've gathered, early Germanic, even after the Gothic migration, had very much the characteristics of a dialect continuum. Certainly, one can distinguish EGmc as a separate group earlier than N or W, but N and W don't become clearly distinct branches, rather than extremes on a continuum, until quite late, perhaps after the continental period. Or is Sean simply using a convenient shorthand that I'm being overly critical of? Herb Stahlke From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jan 27 06:09:11 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 00:09:11 -0600 Subject: NW vs E Germanic In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I read somewhere, I believe in a post on this list, that Ingwaeonic speakers once occupied mainland Denmark and either migrated SW along the North Sea coast or were pushed out of the area by North Germanic speakers. I also seem to remember seeing somewhere that the area even included present S. Sweden --although I wonder if that could be based on an identification of the Jutes with the Geats from Beowulf and presuming them to have been Ingwaeonic speakers. In general, I've seen a great deal of contradictory opinions in non-linguistic works on the Jutes relating them to Geats, Goths and even claiming they never even existed as a group. Is it a case of them being not much more than a historical name? [snip] >Oh, if you mean Ingwaeonic, that IS a fact you have to accept, note >(1) the unit plural (old 3pl used of 1pl and 2pl also); (2) loss of nasal >before voiceless spirants (Eng. mouth, goose). At least these are shared >by Old Saxon, Old English and Frisian to the exclusion of OHG. You could >perhaps add monophthongization of *ai (OS e:, OE a:, OFr. both) if this is >not too trivial. My expression of amazement was prompted by the word >"Jutish" which I take to denote a Danish dialect group; but if the old >Jutes went to England they may well have been (or become) Ingwaeones. >Jens Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From ECOLING at aol.com Thu Jan 27 18:16:07 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 13:16:07 EST Subject: Is "satem" a gradient? Message-ID: "Satem" may be defined in a number of different ways, and which languages are fully or partly included will be determined by how one defineds it. Merger of palatals and velars is *one* way of defining it. Shift of palatals to /s, ts, dz/ and the like is another way of defining it. Each has validity, and using a combination of varying ways of defining "satem" should yield a *gradient* list of languages included, which may be a *much more realistic* answer than trying to raise a giant wall and arguing till doomsday over whether a language is included or not. >From one perspective, a language may be included, from another, not. "Satem" may very well be a gradient concept, with fuzzy edges. If so, no amount of "defining" can remove the fact of the gradient. All it can do is reveal that using that definition (from among various ones possible) yiels such-and-such results. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jan 27 06:22:23 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 00:22:23 -0600 Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords In-Reply-To: Message-ID: There's a also a very much ballyhooed list of cognate substrate in Albanian and Rumanian, as well as the presence of Rumanian dialects [or extinct dialects] in the W & S Balkans: Istro-Rumanian [is it still around?], Megleno-Rumanian, Aromanian and the extinct Vegliot/Dalmatian, as well as some disputed [moribund] Istro-Romance language [evidently different from Istro-Rumanian from posts I've read] [ Moderator's note: The material quoted below is from a posting by Sean Crist. --rma ] >Actually, it doesn't appear that there's a continual Romance presence in >what's now Romania from Roman times down to the present. There's a book >by a Romanian scholar who claims that the area was underpopulated in early >medieval times, and that two leaders from a Romance-speaking area near >what is now Albania got permission from the Emporer to settle their people >in this land. The names of the leaders happen to Romanian names. >The author had to publish under a pseudonym, because this claim could be >considered seditious by the Romanian government. There is a substantial >Hungarian minority in Transylvania, and if this minority wanted to >separate from Romania, this author's book would allow the ethnic >Hungarians to claim that they were in the land first. >The linguistic evidence seems to be consistent with this picture as well; >there was a very dense and diverse set of Romance languages, including >Dalmatian, etc. in the western Balkan area where the early Romanians are >believed to have migrated from; but in the larger Romanian-speaking area >to the east, there is much more uniformity. It's much like the case of >British vs. American English; you get a tremendous and very dense >diversity of local dialects within Britain, but a much greater uniformity >in the huge area of America which the speakers of the language conquered. [ moderator snip ] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Thu Jan 27 06:08:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 06:08:00 GMT Subject: IE etymological dictionary Message-ID: SC>Pokorny is still under copyright; ... if the publisher (Bern: Franke) SC>wanted to release the dictionary on CD ... The Copyright is now owned by Narr-Verlag, Tuebingen; and of cause I have contacted them before posting. They are interested, if there is not too much work to do for them. What we need are two or more versions to compare and a Font (perhaps of the TITUS-series) to be furnished with it. Hans J Holm - - et monere et moneri - - From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Jan 27 21:24:27 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 16:24:27 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: In a message dated 1/27/00 2:55:47 PM, georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl wrote: << But the renfrewian alternative, the "wave-of-advance-model" (which is very interesting and should not be thrown out with the washwater, just because the whole of the Renfrew theory meets with considerable difficulties; it is more than likely that it may provide explanations for *some* dislocations of people/cultures/languages in the Old World. Only which ones is the question), this renfrewian alternative, though different in detail, *does* involve a movement of concrete people in space and time, n'est-ce pas ?>> Just what thoes considerable difficulties are is still something I am trying to get at. The wave of advance model of course is a slow migration model and does not exclude language transfer the quicker way - someone close enough to this matter said he was 'pretty darn sure' that Renfrew would not argue that Turkish in Asia Minor was the result of a 4000 year wave. He also reminded me that Renfrew's book was not "the Bible." I have to remember that, as even Mallory points out, what Renfrew was after was a start, despite the way his work is *sometimes* portrayed on this list. Actually if you read A&L you can see that what Renfrew was first of all doing was chastising archaeologists for accepting presumptive dates based on linguistics - which he points out were often based on old archaeology. (He was in a particularly good position to do that because of his role in the C-14 revolution.) Where once linguistics had old archaeological data to hang its hat on - old evidence of migrations, especially - that evidence had disappeared, but archaeologists were still dating their findings as if it were still there - and wondering why the C-14 dates were so early. The migrations hadn't happened yet! So that even in the early 50's - before Linear B had been worked out - some archaeologists were still dating anything presumed IE at the old 1250BC date - and saying that there must be some problem over at the Cambridge lab because the base brackets with C-14 had become + or - 1000 years. The next backdate was 1600BC for the IE invasion. And then that wouldn't hold up. It took a while to get the idea that the data might not supply a migration date anytime during that period. Some archaeologists think Renfrew should have never got involved in the language/ethnic thing at all - the strict Brit archs refuse to talk about language or ethnic affilations at all. Others think it was a good thing to cut the Gordian knot - even if it would take a little talk between linguists and archaeologists to fix it and make things right again. So let's see if we in some small way can start making it right again - what considerable difficulties do you find in Renfrew's (not the Bible) hypothesis? "I think we got a can-do situation here" (- old US Marine expression of optimism in somewhat difficult circumstances.) Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jan 25 10:03:43 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 10:03:43 +0000 Subject: Basque butterflies again Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Roz Frank writes: [on Basque 'alive' and its likely derivative ~ 'pretty', 'pretty little thing', 'jewel'] > I would note that there are other words based on the same root-stem that > mean "small, tiny", e.g., "little, little bit" and > from < pixka-kin> "little sticks of wood as well as others > in where there <-tx-> appears to have been replaced with a > palatalized /tt/. The latter term is used to refer not just to "little, > tiny" in general but also to one's "little finger". Again the replacement > in question is not unusual in Basque, e.g. "little" with > palatalization turns into . Actually, I don't think these words have anything to do with or ~ . Their source is quite different. Basque has a stem , of expressive origin, meaning roughly 'tiny little thing', 'tiny amount'. This stem is shared with Romance and may be of Romance origin. All this is discussed in Corominas, but I don't have that book handy. This stem appears in the Roncalese dialect as an independent word , meaning 'crumb', 'mote', 'spot', and the like. There it commonly occurs in the negative as 'not a bean', 'nothing at all'. Elsewhere, is commonly encountered as a stem with some kind of expressive extension added to it. Examples include , and , all of which mean 'tiny thing' or 'tiny amount' in various dialects. However, Basque words intrinsically denoting smallness almost invariably undergo expressive palatalization. In the case of /t/, this segment palatalizes either to (a palatal plosive) or to (like English ). On the whole, eastern varieties favour , but also exhibit , while western varieties use only . Hence palatalization of yields either or . Both of these are derived directly from , and neither is derived from the either. It is these palatalized stems and which are generally the sources of the numerous derivatives of the type cited above, like 'small amount', from + <-ka>, and 'scraps of wood'. In some cases, though, we may have palatalization directly from an extended form. For example, since both and exist (and also ), it may be that the last two derive directly from by palatalization. We cannot tell, but I doubt that the issue is of any significance anyway. All that matters is that the expressive stem , commonly in its palatalized forms and , is used to construct a range of items with senses centering on 'tiny thing', 'tiny amount'. There are quite a few of these, and I can't resist citing my own favorite: the Bizkaian nursery word 'penis' -- though I suppose I can't be certain that this word is derived from the same stem as the others. Bet it is, though. As for the adjective meaning 'small', 'little', this is interesting. The base form appears as both and . In both variants, this word has a truly extraordinary form for a native word, and it is unquestionably of expressive origin, like English 'teeny' and 'teensy'. The regional /p/ ~ /k/ variation is also unique to this word, as far as I can think. In our earliest texts, is much the more widespread form. Today, on the whole, we find in the east but in the west. And everywhere the word almost invariably undergoes the usual expressive palatalization, leading to the observed eastern but western . This east-west distinction is pervasive. For example, the word 'few, little, not many, not much' is commonly palatalized to in the east but to in the west. And the ancient diminutive suffix <-to>, which still survives as such in a few fossilized formations like 'little girl' ( 'girl'), is commonly palatalized to <-tto> in the east but to <-txo> (Bizkaian <-txu>) in the west. So, for example, from 'mountain', the diminutive 'little mountain' is usually in the east but or in the west. However, I do agree that it can sometimes be difficult to disentangle the words from the ~ words. For example, the common Bizkaian endearment , extended form , is probably derived from , but we perhaps can't be quite certain of this. Contamination between and is highly likely, and I suspect that even native speakers are not always sure of the source of a particular word. Not that they should care anyway, of course. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jan 25 10:47:51 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 10:47:51 +0000 Subject: Basque butterflies again (again) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Roz Frank writes: > I would note that in addition to its meaning of "butterfly", Azkue (I:173) > lists (B) with the meaning of "daisy" ("margarita de los > prados") while refers simultaneously to the following three > objects: a butterfly, a daisy and a poppy. Yes. A point I refrained from making in my earlier postings is this: a single Basque expressive formation often has a rather startling array of quite different senses, sometimes in a single variety, but more commonly, perhaps, in different varieties. This is yet another characteristic which distinguishes expressive formations, even if not entirely sharply, from ordinary lexical items, which on the whole do not exhibit such a range of unrelated meanings. The interpretation I place upon this observation is the following. Basque-speakers favor certain stems and certain patterns of formation for constructing expressive words. As a consequence, identical or similar formations are frequently coined independently and applied to a diverse array of referents. This view is entirely in line with my general position that expressive words in Basque have been subject to ceaseless renewal and replacement for many centuries, and that any given expressive formation is most unlikely to be of any great antiquity in the language. > In what are now non-Basque speaking zones of Navarre we find evidence for > the prior existence in the Basque of the zone for > (<*bitxi/pitxi(n)-gorri> from "red"). Jose Maria Iribarren (1984) > records this expression, spelling it as and listing its > meaning as "poppy". The compound might be glossed as "pretty little red > thing". Indeed. I didn't know this particular word, but it is entirely in line with the usual Basque patterns of expressive coinages. Azkue's dictionary records many hundreds, probably even thousands, of localized expressive formations, but even the indefatigable Azkue couldn't manage to pick up all the ones in use in his own day, and moreover it is clear that further instances have been coined since his day. There are doubtless many more of these things, living and extinct, littering the Basque linguistic landscape, and often recorded by nobody. But the lesson I draw is again that these formations are, in general, neither ancient nor long-lived, nor even stable in form and meaning. Hence they are of no relevance to the reconstruction of Pre-Basque, a task which must be performed by using words for which there is a strong case for considerable antiquity. [snip 'butterfly' words] > Finally, based on the implications of the data sets discussed above, I'm > not convinced that LT's closing remark, cited below, fully reflects the > semantic realities (and complexities) of the situation: > [LT] >> I therefore conclude that Lloyd's efforts at linking some of the Basque >> words to words in other languages (and also to one another) are without >> foundation. The Basque 'butterfly' words are numerous and severely >> localized; they conform strongly to observed patterns for coining >> expressive formations; and they can scarcely be of any antiquity. Well, I stand by these words, and I think the point raised above by Roz (multiple unrelated senses for individual formations) constitutes evidence in favor of my position. Anyway, I can't really see that the issues here are primarily or largely "semantic". Rather, the central issues are phonological and morphological. Expressive formations in Basque do indeed tend to fall into certain semantic domains, but what really sets them apart from other words is their highly distinctive and highly variable phonology, together with their peculiar morphology -- or, I might almost say, their lack of morphology. Expressive formations often contain familiar stems, but they also often contain unidentifiable, and essentially non-morphological, stretches of phonological material, material seemingly selected for its agreeable sound, but representing no Basque morpheme. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jan 25 15:39:46 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 15:39:46 +0000 Subject: Basque butterflies again (final) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Roz Frank writes: > Returning now to the discussion concerning the possible relationship > between the Basque and Spanish (Castilian) items. First we should note that > it is well known that Moliner (1966:I, 373) and others (I don't have > Corominas at hand) derive from Vulgar Latin and Clas. > Lat. . Yet there does seem to be room to question whether the > Basque term might not have played some role also, in the > development of the Romance item. Possible, certainly, but doubtful. The problem, as always, is that Romance influence upon Basque has been immense, while influences in the other direction are few and mostly confined to local Romance varieties in direct contact with Basque. There is another point that needs to be made clear. Like Basque, Romance has its own expressive formations, including its own expressive stems and its own patterns of expressive formation. Some of these are clearly shared with Basque. In most cases, this arises because Romance forms and patterns have diffused into Basque. A good example is the Romance stem , meaning something like 'large round object', which occurs in a number of formations and is even present in the source of our own 'coconut'. This stem has diffused into Basque, where it serves to derive several terms pertaining to the head. When Basque shares something with Romance, we must always take Romance influence on Basque as the default view, and we can only consider the reverse direction when there is good evidence for it. That's just reality. > Indeed, when I learned Spanish, my > understanding of was that it referred to any sort of (small) > flying/creeping insect. It was used by metaphoric (ironic) extension, in my > opinion, to apply to large animals, e.g., a horse or cow. Again, I > emphasize that that was the way that I learned the expression from those > around me. Sure, but Basque does not have anything to do with creepy-crawlies. > Furthermore, the extension of a word meaning "butterfly" to a class of > "flying insects" or to some other kind of flying objects that look like > more or less like butterflies would not be unusual, particularly if > speakers were no longer able to disambiguate the components of the compound > in question. But I know of no evidence for such a semantic development in Basque, and I don't know of much evidence for it in Romance, either. As for the alleged compounds, I stress again that the Basque words are *not* compounds, and indeed have no identifiable morphological structure at all. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Jan 25 19:49:05 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 14:49:05 EST Subject: Basque butterflies live! Message-ID: I am very happy to see the continued discussion of various Basque words for 'butterfly'. I intend to prepare an integrated treatment of where the evidence and the discussion have led, as far as I understand, but that will have to wait for late in February. Here I will merely mention some salient points which bear on the lines of reasoning, without citing again the Basque forms which we all have in our archives of these messages. And to clarify at the outset, Larry Trask's goal at the moment is something he defines very narrowly and precisely, as looking for native monomorphemic lexical items which are the best candidates to have been present in pre-Basque or ancient Basque (I don't remember which term to use here), approximately 2000 to 1700 years ago, a time at which one can distinguish at least many loans from Latin or Romance. That excludes all verbal roots, for example. The way Trask implements those goals, his (to me excessively strict) notions of evidence, not preponderance but restricted to certain kinds of evidence, lead him to exclude much relevant data. My goals are (as concerns Basque) to encourage explorations of its early stages, using careful linguistic techniques and archaeological etc. techniques as guides. My goals are (as concerns words for 'butterfly') to use the knowledge I have of these combined with what Trask has so generously provided us to provide a "best estimate" of which of those forms might with high probability go back to earlier Basque forms, whether those earlier Basque forms were ultimately borrowed or not. Here are the contributions to the topic that stand out for me: *** 1. Roz Frank just pointed to Basque scholarship which differs with Trask's view, in that words with initial /p-/ are not thereby automatically excluded from being considered as possibly ancient Basque. *** 2. I have noted in some of the extensive private communications Larry and I have had on 'butterfly' that Japanese permits expressive words with initial /p-/ such as /parapara/, while not allowing it in ordinary vocabulary and I think not in earlier loans from Chinese, for example. *** 3. Larry points to the tendencies of the L. dialect of Basque to have forms with initial /pin-/ or /pan-/ plus labial, as indicating that L. dialect forms for 'butterfly' must be innovated there because different in that dialect. Linguistic method does not require that conclusion. All we can say, much more conservatively, is that the ASPECT of the L. words for butterfly which begin with initial /pin-/ or /pan-/ plus labial may not be old, it could easily be innovated within L. dialects in accordance with their general tendencies. So it is quite legitimate to project backwards to possible (ONLY possible) earlier forms which lacked one or another of these characteristics. The fact that certain aspects COULD have been innovated within L. dialects does not prove they all were. Perhaps some partial resemblance of an earlier word for 'butterfly' to such L. dialect preferred templates led to their attraction all the way into the core of the template. So it is perfectly possible (though not provable) that L. dialect pinpirin < *pitil... (taking the rule backwards by removing the /n...n/ and by removing the reduplicated /p/; on /l/ and /r/ please see below). *** 4. Larry pointed out in private communication that ancient Basque *l became /r/, so he argues forms with /l/ cannot be ancient. On further questioning, he noted that some Basque /l/ does derive from some other kind of *l which might have been geminated or something (I am not quoting in any of this, simply repeating from memory, and some of this was in private communication so Larry would have to state this publicly in whatever words he finds most precise, I cannot do it for him.) If that is the case, then we could have the /r/ of the L. dialects going back to earlier simple /l/. That does not solve all of our problems, I mention this only to make it clear that the reasoning is, as so often, very complex, and conclusions not at all cut-and-dried, not even with the best linguistic techniques. All rediscovery of the past shares such dilemmas. *** 5. Larry pointed out in a recent public message that *t > Basque /tx/ is quite normal. This rather strongly supports the possibility at least that the quite prominent forms for 'butterfly' with /tx/ might once have had *t. (Larry did not mention this in our private communications, so far as I remember.) So we can consider the following not unreasonable as a tentative hypothesis for projecting backwards at least one sound change. pitxilota < *pitilota *** 6. Larry pointed to /txitxi/ 'chick' (again citing from memory, pardon if I got the form slightly wrong) as an exceptional item, standing out by a mile, not merely by being one of the few words for young of animals not formed with a derivational suffix, but also with its double voiceless stops, not fitting what Larry believes is the canonical form for earlier Basque. If however these supposed "exceptions" are gathered together, then /txitxi/ and /pitilota/ or /pitxilota/ may both be part of a group of expressives, which *did* allow exactly that canonical form. By not attempting to exclude so much, but attempting to find multiple clusters of similarly structured forms which may have been in earlier Basque, we at least avoid the risk of excluding that which truly *was* in earlier Basque. To be fair to Larry, it must be pointed out that he gives evidence that earlier Latin etc. loanwords with two voiceless stops in initial positions underwent changes, did not preserve them when brought in as loanwords. If this were shown also generally for loanwords which were expressives, I would concede that it would be a strong argument against assuming an ancient Basque *pitilota loanword. Hence the relevance of the items under 1. and 2. above. *** 7. Larry recently noted that quite a number of words, perhaps he was talking mostly about the 'butterfly' words, did not have identifiable morphemic components, that the suffixes were not early Basque, etc. etc. There has I think been some more discussion on some of these. But assuming Larry is correct about this, it then follows that the 'butterfly' words may be mostly monomorphemic, so on that criterion he cannot exclude them even from his own much more limited set of data which his own goals are seeking. (If monomorphemic, this would be fitting for loanwords whose internal morphology may not be transparent to speakers of a borrowing language.). *** 8. While my estimate is that indeed Greek *ptilota (Thanks to Steve Long for bringing this to our attention) is a very good candidate for the origin in an earlier stage of Basque of modern-day /pitxilota/ and many forms similar to it, I do not claim evidence for that, only lots of evidence which would be consistent with that. Quite a different matter altogether. Not a hypothesis to be discarded recklessly. *** 9. There is a great underestimation, among those who want sound laws to be exceptionless and want evidence always to be completely conclusive, of the degree of unexplained changes (called sometimes "irregular", but that usually means we simply don't yet know the rules). In my first message attempting a partial analysis of the Basque 'butterfly' words, I mentioned the fact that we cannot project backwards from modern English "sparrowgrass" to its actual origin "asparagus" because the word has been reformed. Note that it is a loanword which does not fit English morphology which has been reformed in this way. If we allow that among the Basque words for 'butterfly' many might have been reformed (including some in ways fully in accord with the preferences such as Larry Trask notes for L. dialects with /pinp-/ and /panp-/), then we certainly cannot exclude the possibility of reconstructing earlier Basque forms as the common origin of quite a range of modern Basque forms, if we are lucky enough to have a wide enough range of sources of evidence. Larry's enormous collection of Basque words for 'butterfly' gives us the chance of having such a wide enough range of evidence, and I hope we fully use it. Words for 'butterfly' in neighboring language families are also potentially relevant, whether or not the word is borrowed, and cannot be excluded a priori. Just so, we cannot by regular sound laws reconstruct both "asparagus" and "sparrowgrass" back to a common original form. But we can reconstruct them back to a common original form. In this case we have enough information to do so. In Basque we lack written records in sufficient quantity, but linguistic techniques should allow us to make some progress at least towards plausible hypotheses. *** 10. As yet another example of just how very different the numerous descendants of a *single original* may at first sight appear to be, I cite the various forms of the nursery rhyme which English children use: For the first half of the first line, the following: 1) Eine meine mine me 2) Eenie meenie minie mo 3) Meeny meeny miney mo 4) One-erzoll, two-erzoll, zickerzoll zan 5) 1-ery, 2-ery, ickery Ann 6) Hana mana mona mike 7) Ene tene mone mei 8) Yan tan tehtera pethera For the second half of the first line, the following (numbers match), with translations given where appropriate. As you can readily see, just as with "sparrowgrass", there need be no relation of meaning, the reformation is based on sound. 1) Und draust bist du (and you're out) 2) Catch a rooster by the toe 3) Cache ton poing derierre ton do (hide your thumb behind your back) 4) Bob-tail vinegar little tall tan 5) Fillisin follasy Nicholas John 6) Barcelona bona strike 7) Pastor lone bone strei (this is German, "pastor") 8) Pimp sethera lethera hovera dovera dick. The last line contains the Celtic Lake-district sheep-scoring numerals, argued by some to be the origin of all of the other versions. In Yarmouth, the last three are: "cothra hothra dic". Given this known example of actual historical descent, and similar examples on a smaller scale can be multiplied almost without limit in the annals of historical linguistics, it seems absurd to me to argue that the much more similar dialect variations in Basque words for 'butterfly' are absolutely not derivable from a much smaller number of common origins (i.e. much smaller than the 9 groupings in which Larry Trask supplied them to us). Not that they necessarily *do* go back to a small number of origins (perhaps in the extreme case seven groups of forms all going back to one origin, excluding the two obvious items derived from non-expressive vocabulary). But simply that this kind of change cannot be excluded absolutely, based on the kind of reasoning we have had presented to us. We cannot reject as possibilities of historical descent the kind of historical descent which we know *does* occur. So I hold out great hope that we will be able to reconstruct one or a few ancient Basque words for 'butterfly'. With a high level of justified confidence in our answer, though not absolute confidence. Sincerely, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jan 26 06:18:29 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 00:18:29 -0600 Subject: Basque butterflies In-Reply-To: <15092768341801@m-w.com> Message-ID: So then the American English spelling schmuck is a folk etymology? What are the proposed origins, then? [ moderator snip ] >The actual origin of Eastern Yiddish , a vulgar word for >"penis," has been much debated. >Jim Rader [ moderator snip ] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jan 25 18:40:03 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 18:40:03 -0000 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stefan Georg" Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2000 9:06 AM [PR previously] >>It is my understanding that oral consonants are articulated by children >>before nasal consonants. Is this incorrect in your view? [SG] >Yes, this is incorrect in my view. You will not repeat that keeping your >moputh shut and simply turn on your vocal cords ("/mmm/") is such a >difficult thing that it invariable comes after, say, /p/, /ts/ or /r/, will >you ? [PR asks] Aside from the idea that /mmmm/ is not a traditional syllable, is this, in fact, what studies of early childhood speech learning have documented? [SG] >A different question is, however, whether this very simple, let's >call it an "articulatory gesture", is really a "consonant". It might be >sensible to reserve this technical term for non-vocalic articulatory >gestures *when they form part of linguistically meaningful items*, which is >certainly not the case for infants who first try out their articulatory >tracts. >So, again, the nasal /m/ is articulated *very* early, and it's association >with whatever semantic content - done by the parents, of course - is an >artefact of adults fancying that the child is actually speaking to them. [PR] All well and good. But if we assume --- as we need to for this argument to cohere --- that the FIRST syllable produced by the child should be the one which the mother assigns to herself, then "*very* early" is just not early enough. [SG] >At this stage, the child is certainly *not* "using" "language"; it's babbling. >Babbling-research has established that, in phonetic terms, the sounds produced >by infants vary greatly in frequency: at the top of the list are /m/ and /b/ >alike, with the same frequency, followed by, in this order, /p/, /d/, /h/, >/n/, /t/, /g/, /k/, /j/, /w/, /s/, aso. (Locke, J.L.: Phonological >Acquisition and Change, NY: AP 1983). [PR] Where is the glottal stop in this list? [PR previously] >>All you have written is, of course, very plausible. [SG] >Yes, it very obviously is ;-) [PR previously] >>But --- and there is always a but, is there not? --- this does not really >>address my argument, I do not think. >>I am *not* maintaining that *mama is the early term for 'mother' but rather >>*ama. [SG] >Some societies conventionalize the fully reduplicated form /mama/, some >don't. Some languages do know initial labials, some don't (and among these, >some may allow for such a thing in a marked nursery term, some won't). Some >cultures chose to conventionalize /deda/ for "mother", reserving /mama/ for >"father". Some will conventionalize a one-syllable /ma/, some won't. When >it comes to the act of conventionalizing, which is to be kept sharply apart >from the "pre-speech-act" of babbling, the phonotactic rules of the >language the poor child is about to learn from now on, do play a role >(after all, the happy parents of a Tlinkit child do of course think that >their napper is talking Tlinkit to them, and not Abkhaz, so even when the >little one constantly babbles /mama/ they'll assume for convenience' sake >that it actually wanted to say /ama/ [for argument's sake I assume that >Tlinkit is one of the labialless languages of the American NW,. and that >/ama/ is "mother" there; if this is not the case, take any language, where >it is, and replace this example]). There may be other reasons, apart from >phonotactics, and in some individual cases they may be hard to tell. So >what ? [PR] Frankly, you are not too bad at childish babbling yourself! (:-O) Languages lacking initial labials are fairly rare. And while your proposal might be of some interest in connection with them, IE does *not* lack initial labials; and we find the word *Hama. Would you propose that *Hama is a loanword into IE from a language lacking (initial) labials? [PR previously] >>Larry brushes by this difference but I am hoping you will not. [SG] >This is not brushing by. The word is "linguistics" (;-). [PR] Excuse. The phrase is "Ralf-Stefan's understanding of the application of linguistic principles to this problem". [PR previously] >>While *mama may be a perfectly plausible child's word for 'mother', the >>frequently found form *?ama can, with an implausible level of difficulty, >>be derived from it. Do you not agree? [SG] >Of course, such words may change, once they have become conventionalized >items of a language, they may be subject to any systematic change of the >sound structure of this language. They may, however, and this is the point, >why such terms shouldn't be allowed to play a decisive role in any >classificatory work, escape this, either remaining stable in spite of >sound-changes in other parts of the lexicon, or be innovated over and over >again to maintain their emotional connotations (or, for that matter, in the >case of imitative words, their iconicity). [PR] Just when do you believe *?ama was "conventionalized"? [SG] >PS: Shoot, "mother" is /tla/ in Tlinkit, so think up a different example ... [PR] Of course, this fact is completely immaterial to the discussion. 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 Jan 25 18:49:51 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 18:49:51 -0000 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stefan Georg" Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2000 9:17 AM [PR previously] >>Unless you are arguing that *mama almost invariably is produced *first*, >>and that the mother is inclined to accept the baby's *first* "word" as >>referring to herself, then it is equally likely that the mother will >>reinforce *baba or *papa as a self-designation --- a very rare occurrence. [SG] >No, Pat, this is independent of what a given child utters "first" to its >given mother. [PR] This is truly a Grimm explanation. *What* child babbled /ma/ first so that its pristine syllable could be adopted by its mother as a self-designation, and with what authority did she insist (conventionalize) the syllable so that all subsequent mothers had to accept her choice? [SG] >Language is social convention, and even if in Arkansas >children are so linguistically gifted that they utter /tata/ or /kaka/ long >before they manage to produce the enormously difficult nasals, their >parents won't have the power to change the *conventionalization* of /mama/ >= "mother" all on their own. They may well tell everyone that their child >"said" /takata/ long before /mama/, and they may even decide that in their >family from now on, /takata/ "means" "mother". Why not ? But it won't have >any consequences for the speech-community on the whole, which has >conventionalized "mummy" and the like long ago. [PR] I was not born in Arkansas, educated here, or have I lived most of my life here, so gentle gibes against Arkansas and Arkansans are absolutely without interest to me. 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 Jan 26 06:01:11 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 07:01:11 +0100 Subject: Basque In-Reply-To: Message-ID: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote: > 'cartwheel', 'wheel' >This is from 'cart' + *. The phonology is absolutely regular: >* --> * --> * --> * -> . > 'small round bread roll or pastry' >This is from 'bread', and again the phonology is perfect: >* --> * --> * --> * --> . 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 ? Of course, -b(i) [?], -d(i), -g(i) compounded before initial vowel give -t, which then becomes harder to explain. Maybe an initial vowel was formerly preceded by a glottal stop in Basque (which isn't the case now), and we might suppose that the fortis variant of /?/ became /t/: begi + *?ile > beg?ile > be??ile > betile ardi + *?ile > ard?ile > ar??ile > artile. > 'fist' >This is from the archaic 'forearm', recorded in Oihenart in the 17th >century, and again the phonology is perfect: > * --> (In old compounds -i and (usually) -u are dropped, while -a/-o/-e become -a-). I wonder about the motivation for that last change. Could it have gone through a stage */@/ (schwa), which later became Basque /a/? So, in this case: uko [*uggo] + bil > uk at bil > ukabil. >Now, the common word 'round' looks like a reduplication. Certainly >an original * would develop regularly to , since /l/ > /r/ >between vowels is a regular change. Although not necessarily between i..i, where it might have been expected to remain as palatal /l^/. >But this admittedly leaves that medial >/i/ unaccounted for, and opinion is divided here. Some posit an original >*, with an interfix for phonological or expressive reasons. >Others favor a purely expressive formation, consisting of an arbitrary >sequence plus *. A third possibility would be that the item was originally *bili (redup. *bili-bili), and the final vowel was lost. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From edsel at glo.be Wed Jan 26 11:31:59 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 12:31:59 +0100 Subject: Basque Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Monday, January 24, 2000 12:51 PM > Roz Frank writes: >> (*?)"knot", whose meaning is not always entirely >> clear. > As explained above, the first two of these are transparent and regular. The > third is obscure: very likely it does contain *, but its first element > is opaque. [Ed] What about *gorda-bil, where the first element could be a Romance loan (< corde, cuerda), i.e. coiled up rope? Ed. From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Thu Jan 27 08:29:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 08:29:00 GMT Subject: Basque Message-ID: In a nutshell: What about being 'bili' a loan from Gaulish? PIE *kwel- > Cel *kwi:l- > Gaul *pi:l >!> bask. pil/bil cf PIE *penque > Cel *kwinkwe > Gaul *pimpetos (ordinal) Mit freundlichen Grüßen Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover. From ALDERSON at mathom.xkl.com Fri Jan 28 23:46:50 2000 From: ALDERSON at mathom.xkl.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 15:46:50 -0800 Subject: Origins of Indo-Aryan Message-ID: Dear Readers, Yesterday evening I sent out a message with the subject line "Origins of Indo-Aryan" which, in retrospect, I ought not to have allowed on the list. We are not here for the purpose of political or religious commentary, and I apologize for exposing our list to the temptation. I have already received a few responses to this posting; I will forward them to the original author. Those who are interested in pursuing this topic should find a different forum than the Indo-European list. My apologies to all concerned. Rich Alderson list owner and moderator From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Sat Jan 29 00:43:31 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 19:43:31 -0500 Subject: Goodbye for now In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear all, I want to thank everyone for the conversation. I regret that I'm going to have to unsubscribe; I'm finding that I am taking too much time out from my dissertation to respond to messages on this list. The temptation is just too great. I'll probably resubscribe again when I'm ready to start organizing some volunteer efforts to put expired-copyright texts about the IE languages online (hopefully this coming summer, with any luck at all). If you decide to work on something like this and you're needing web space to post stuff, drop me an email. I still have a few posts which haven't made it to the list yet; if you want to respond to me personally about those posts, it's OK with me if you do so thru private email. Bye for now, --Sean \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From maxdashu at LanMinds.Com Fri Jan 28 02:18:47 2000 From: maxdashu at LanMinds.Com (Max Dashu) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 18:18:47 -0800 Subject: Frisian In-Reply-To: <003001bf6845$40ffc7c0$0803703e@edsel> Message-ID: 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. Max Dashu From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Jan 28 02:44:30 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 21:44:30 EST Subject: Sumerian bird names Message-ID: A sumerologist who lived and fished for six months in the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates told me in personal communication. If you want to follow up on it, remind me the last week in February, I'm gone on vacation tomorrow morning. Lloyd Anderson >What "bird names in Sumerian are the same as in the present day"?! What >could you be thinking of? What possible source could validate this comment? >Please provide some specifics, if you have any. >Gordon Whittaker >Institut f|r Ethnologie >Theaterplatz 15 >37073 Gvttingen >Germany From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Jan 28 02:44:25 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 21:44:25 EST Subject: "is the same as" Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Larry Trask writes: >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. Why? Because that is what most of us do in ordinary life, and as was established long ago in these discussions, it is what Trask himself does (or did). Direct quotations of his writings demonstrated that. Because people do, perfectly normally, and readily understood by each other, apply the "same" language name to varieties which of necessity do differ. But past a certain degree of difference, OR when certain cultural-political factors intervene, they usually insist that two varieties are not the same language. It is simply what people in fact do. Therefore what they mean by "is the same language" is in fact not a transitive relation. As linguists, we normally are not supposed to be prescriptive. We cannot change the fact that people use this as a non-transitive relation. It *might* be "better" not to (in Trask's view, explicitly), but we might give up much of the flexibility and usefulness of language if we tried to insist on definitions made by logicians, instead of definitions made in practice in the real world. Just as with the biological circles (ring species) mentioned by Stanley Friesen, where neighbors interbreed but the ends of the circle, though in contact, do not, which seems a paradox, so there are paradoxes in using the terms "is the same language as". That is no argument against the usefulness of either "is the same species as" or "is the same language as", as these are *actually* used. The paradoxes are rare, and we deal with them as special cases, sometimes we learn from them that they are more normal and less special than we had thought... What one person thinks is "better" is also not necessarily what one's interlocutors may be saying, nor can they be refuted by attacking something which they did not say, as was attempted to exceeding lengths on this list earlier. We should really stop discussing this, and accept that Trask does not want others to use the term "is the same language" in a gradient-edge and non-transitive sense, and that others do use the term that way and will most likely continue to do so (they may find it useful to do so, without thereby committing any fallacies whatsoever). Discussions tend to be fruitless if one tries to reply to someone while using the *same* term they used in a different sense than they used it, because then the propositions being analyzed by the conversation partners are not even the same propositions, and pretending that they are the same propositions can only misrepresent the conversation partner. Lloyd Anderson [ Moderator's note: I think this topic is thoroughly argued out now. I will accept no further postings on it. --rma ] From stevegus at aye.net Fri Jan 28 03:53:37 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 22:53:37 -0500 Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? Message-ID: ECOLING at aol.com writes: > I was just recently contemplating the augment *e- > which precedes certain completed-action verbs in > Indic and in Greek, Weeeell, you shouldna' be a-doin' that. It's dangerous, y'hear? > If not, then must one take it as an inheritance from PIE, > lost elsewhere? > it occurs to me to wonder about German > ge- of past participles, > which (with loss of /g-/) shows up also in the "e" of the English form > "enough", related to German "genug", > from o-grade of a verb *nek- 'to reach, attain'. > What is the origin of that prefix in German? That the g- in that prefix is truly g- and not, say, an originally Anglo-Saxon way of writing initial /y/, is shown by the German dialect versions -kenuch- of the same word. The conventional wisdom is that ge- (and that lingering feature of American English, a prefixed a- before a present participle) represents *kom, meaning -with- or -together-, here weakened in meaning to a merely intensive role. It does seem to be a West Germanic feature that was mostly lost in Norse, though common enough in Anglo-Saxon and German. It would seem to be an unlikely counterpart to the Greek and Sanskrit augment, since that augment attaches itself to conjugated forms, not participles. It can, however, appear in the Gothic inflected -passive- verbs, e.g. -gabairada- (was born) from -bairan-; but the Gothic passive at least resembles the weak past participle, so this may not be significant. -- Sella fictili sedeo Versiculos dum facio. From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Fri Jan 28 05:51:07 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 00:51:07 -0500 Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? In-Reply-To: <7d.50441d.25bf8c3e@aol.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 25 Jan 2000 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > I was just recently contemplating the augment *e- which precedes > certain completed-action verbs in Indic and in Greek, and which, I > gather from one correspondent, is usually taken as an inheritance from > some common stage, one of several manifestations of a close > Greek-Vedic relationship. > If one takes that point of view, then it implies a Greek-Indic common > innovation compared with PIE. Is that branch on a tree supportable? > (differs from UPenn, right?) > If not, then must one take it as an inheritance from PIE, lost elsewhere? Represented in a flattened form, the tree computed by Ringe, Warnow and Taylor is as follows: (Anat (Toch ((Ital Celt) {(Gk Arm) (BS IIr)}))) (Notice that I've left Gmc out in this version; in earlier versions it was grouped with BS and IIr, but the placement of Gmc has turned out be a bigger problem tham expected.) The augment is found in Greek, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian (and Phrygian, which wasn't included in the tree). There is no evidence for the augment prefix outside of the grouping which I have enclosed in the curled brackets. Thus, the augment could have been innovation in proto-Gk-Arm-BS-IIr, and then have been lost in Balto-Slavic. A morphological loss of this kind is not surprising. > it occurs to me to wonder about German ge- of past participles, which > (with loss of /g-/) shows up also in the "e" of the English form > "enough", related to German "genug", from o-grade of a verb *nek- 'to > reach, attain'. What is the origin of that prefix in German? > Is it just barely conceivable that it might be related to the Sanskrit > and Greek augment, and that it began with a laryngeal? (I am fully > aware that affixes do not always follow the same sound changes as do > roots - but also very hesitant to posit an otherwise unproven > irregularity of sound change, so would want some pretty good > demonstrations of cognate functions, at least ones which could develop > from a common origin. I think the functions of German and of the > Greek and Sanskrit augment, in completive contexts, are highly > similar. > Could the origin have been something like this? (or with a different > vowel, reduced to /e/ as for many other German unstressed verbal > prefixes, then generalized ...?) > *He- > ?? > Pardon, I am not a Germanicist and have no immediate access to > something that would tell me. Pokorny's Comparative Germanic Grammar > pp.205-206 states a relation to Latin co(m)-, but such a hypothesis is > to me much more improbable on semantic grounds. In this view, I would > assume, the /gV-/ prefixes gradually spread from their point of origin > at the expense of other prefixes. Perfectly possible. Was that > hypothesis posited long ago for simply for lack of anything better, or > because shows up only in some of the western Germanic languages > (OHG, English, etc.)? Or is there substantial support behind it, such > as details of the gradual stages of infiltration from Latin? Your speculation that there might be a connection between the augment and Germanic ge- is a natural thing to wonder. I know because I wondered this myself, but when I asked Don Ringe about it, he said that there is no connection. Actually, you are in luck, because I can quote the email he sent to me on 27 May 1997 (I'm sure he wouldn't mind me quoting this private email): (I asked something like, "I guess there no connection between Gmc. ge- and the augment?") > Sean-- Right, none whatever. The "augment" (= marker of past tenses) > has clear cognates in Indo-Iranian, Armenian, and Phrygian, but not > elsewhere. The fact that there are no clear cognates in Anatolian or > Tocharian (or Italic or Celtic, for that matter) could mean that it > isn't PIE and was just an innovation of the central group; that would > still mean that pre-Germanic once had it, though, and lost it. > German ge- is < PGmc. *ga- (cf. Gothic ga-); actually appears to be > cognate with Latin com-/con-/co-, to judge from equations like Goth. > gamains = Lat. commu:nis (and it *was* an i-stem in PGmc.: note > *gamainiz --> pre- OE *gamainijaz > *gaema:ni: (where "ae" is the low > front vowel) > OE gemae:ne, with umlaut) and loan-translations like late > Lat. compa:nio: --> Goth. gahlaiba (pa:nis = hlaifs 'bread'). The > phonology is screwed up, though; in particular, it looks like Verner's > Law has applied to a word- initial unstressed syllable, which is frankly > weird. 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. -Also, if there were a laryngeal, it would make its presence felt in Greek and Indo-Iranian. It's too late in the evening for me to go digging thru my notes, but a laryngeal would affect the vowel quality in Greek, and if I remember right, a larygeal usually comes out at *a in Indo-Iranian. I'm not sure what happens to a word-initial larygeal before a vowel in IIr (I do seem to remember that word-initial augment + HC- > a:C, i.e. where the laryngeal belongs to the stem; but I'm not sure if HaC- would give aC- or a:C-). -As Don alludes to, the meaning of *ga- in Germanic has changed over time (consider the German nouns _Gebirge_, _Geschirr_, etc., where the meaning of ge- is "collective", not "perfective"). . It appears that an early meaning was very much like that of Latin co(m)-, roughly "together". If you want to claim that *ga- and co(m)- are cognate, the semantics at least will work out. However, as Don points out, the ordinary phonology doesn't work out for co(m)- to be cognate with *ga- (PIE short *o _would_ give PGmc *a, so the vowel checks out; but the consonant doesn't work.) I'm a little surprised that Don accepts the suggestion that co(m)- might be cognate with *ga-; the claim looks weak to me. It's true that *ga- is often used in forming calques from Latin words with co(m)-; but this doesn't strike me as a particularly good argument that the two are cognate. You can certainly use a word or affix in forming a calque without the word or affix being cognate with anything in the language that you're calquing on. Personally, I think we need to say that we just don't know where Gmc. ge- comes from. In any case, it definitely can't be cognate with the augment, because there would be much worse phonological problems with that claim than with the claim that Gmc. *ga- is cognate with com-. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From edsel at glo.be Fri Jan 28 17:24:03 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 18:24:03 +0100 Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2000 12:31 AM > I was just recently contemplating the augment *e- > which precedes certain completed-action verbs in > Indic and in Greek, and which, I gather from one > correspondent, is usually taken as an inheritance from > some common stage, one of several manifestations > of a close Greek-Vedic relationship. [Ed Selleslagh] I am no specialist in this matter, but I'm also wondering about the following: 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? > If one takes that point of view, then it implies a Greek-Indic > common innovation compared with PIE. > Is that branch on a tree supportable? (differs from UPenn, right?) > If not, then must one take it as an inheritance from PIE, > lost elsewhere? > It occurs to me to wonder about German > ge- of past participles, > which (with loss of /g-/) shows up also in the "e" of the English form > "enough", related to German "genug", > from o-grade of a verb *nek- 'to reach, attain'. > What is the origin of that prefix in German? [Ed] And in Dutch, Afrikaans and Low-German (and Old English). On the other hand, Dutch Saxon dialects don't use it (or lost it? - like English). BTW, if the verb begins with certain prefixes (be-, ver-, ont-/ent-, zer-....) there is no ge-prefix in any of these lgs. > Is it just barely conceivable that it might be related to > the Sanskrit and Greek augment, > and that it began with a laryngeal? > (I am fully aware that affixes do not always follow > the same sound changes as do roots - but also very > hesitant to posit an otherwise unproven irregularity > of sound change, so would want some pretty good > demonstrations of cognate functions, at least ones > which could develop from a common origin. > I think the functions of German and of the > Greek and Sanskrit augment, in completive contexts, > are highly similar. > Could the origin have been something like this? > (or with a different vowel, reduced to /e/ as for > many other German unstressed verbal prefixes, > then generalized ...?) > *He- [Ed] Note also the e- verbal prefix in Basque (the 'infinitives' are actually participles, like - vice versa however - in Modern Greek). Phonetically, the evolution ke > he > e is perfectly possible and normal in Basque. There is still some discussion whether initial k or similar existed in PB, but it isn't totally excluded any longer. This makes the question all the more interesting, doesn't it? > ?? > Pardon, I am not a Germanicist and have > no immediate access to something that would tell me. > Pokorny's Comparative Germanic Grammar > pp.205-206 states a relation to Latin co(m)-, > but such a hypothesis is to me much more improbable on > semantic grounds. In this view, I would assume, > the /gV-/ prefixes gradually spread from their point of > origin at the expense of other prefixes. Perfectly possible. > Was that hypothesis posited long ago for simply for > lack of anything better, or because shows up only in some > of the western Germanic languages (OHG, English, etc.)? > Or is there substantial support behind it, > such as details of the gradual stages of infiltration from Latin? [Ed] That 'Latin explanation' looks like the result of the lack of a better idea. Isn't the ge- prefix likely to be much older than the contact with Latin? Anyway, this problem is extremely intriguing to me. > Best wishes, > Lloyd Anderson Ed. Selleslagh. From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Jan 28 04:04:24 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 23:04:24 EST Subject: PIE and Uralic (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) Message-ID: In a message dated 1/27/00 3:26:03 AM, anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi wrote: <> Now I have somewhat earlier dates here for the existence of proto-Uralic (Dolukhanov 1996) -- 10,000 - 7,000BP -- citing (Hajdu 1975). I also have it extending all the way to the Black Sea and eastern Caucasus to the Urals. Do you have newer data? It appear here that they are giving a 5000BC date (consistent with your 4000BC OR EARLIER). 5000BC is a very early date for PIE in this area - even for Renfrew. I wrote: <> anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi also replied: <> Without advocating too much, let me suggest that you might want to familarize yourself with the thinking that says that the first (but not the last) expansion of PIE was connected to the spread of agriculture. (This view at least at this early date is neither anti-migratory nor anti-diffusionist - quite the contrary.) This view would have a very early IE language hitting the Dnieter, Bug and Dneiper between 4500 and 4000BC. Since under this hypothesis, the time of the sound changes in early IE is relative (I guess they are 'relative' in any view) it might be possible your largynals can still be present. You wrote: <> Well, I don't know that the earliest daughters of PIE have been identified or dated to the degree that you should automatically rule them out. The evidence that I've seen so far woulds suggest there is some leeway in the dating - although much earlier than 4000BC would be quite tricky. You wrote: <> How you identify the difference between PIE and the IE daughters in this region - I think - would be interesting. The specific attributes of daughters in that region might be of value to IEists, especially if they retain laryngals. I am not sure what IE daughter language is supposed to have been spoken in the Ukraine at such an early time. <> The vocabulary you mention is both quite basic (it would be at 4000+BC) and I believe you said quite extensive - I forget, hundreds of words? Consider that the retained presence of hundreds of basic cognates from PIE in a language that was attested when? - well, for 6000+ years would probably entitle Uralic to a special place on the Swadesh chart - possibly better than some IE languages. Perhaps more importantly, it would seem like Uralic might have been in the process of being Indo-Europeanized. The neolithic hypothesis needs to include the idea that many pre-existing mesolithic cultures were assimilated, often over a long period of time - the archaeology demands this. I can't think of a better way to start than by a transfer of hundreds of basic vocabulary items. So perhaps it was not simply contact or prestige, but the appeal of the neolithic or some of its products that encouraged the borrowings you find. I wrote: << PIE originates just south of where Uralic originates? So that Uralic did not expand south because PIE speakers were already there? Or did somebody move in? >> anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi replied: << But yes, p-IE probably originated south of p-U, and Uralic has probably never expanded south... >> Is there any reason why this borrowing could not have been done west-east? >From the direction of the Balkans, the Danube or of Poland? I mean are you presuming IE speakers at this point could only make contact with PIE or early IE in the south? Renfrew already has early IE at the Danube and moving north and east at this point. What or who would have come between the two regions at that point in time? You wrote: <> Okay, so please follow me here. If p-U and PIE are both at their place of origin "4000BC or before" one just north or south of the other - one would think they would have been in some way related or there would have been contact between the parents of these two unrelated languages - suggesting that perhaps one was intrusive. (Can a language be intrusive in its own homeland?) Since you find these PIE elements as definite loans happening at a definite time - might that not suggest that PIE entered the area - or the loans would have happened earlier - in the proto-proto-period? As Jens mentioned in his elegantly fair message: <> If the date maybe in fact be 5000BC, then another question comes to mind. I remember very early dates for agricultural evidence along the Caucasus. What is the archaeological evidence regarding the earliest dirt farming or domestication in its proto-region or after its proto-period? Regards, Steve Long From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Fri Jan 28 10:14:43 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 10:14:43 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de wrote:- > Of cause, resemblances between two langs/Protolangs alone do not prove > borrowing, let alone any direction of of it. Steve Long is quite right in > asking "I MUST also find out someday why Uralic would need to borrow words > for water, move, bring and wash from IE." If a language has been through a period of the type of phonetic change that causes an excessive homophone load, then its speakers will be tempted to take just about any word with just about any meaning from neigbors' languages to avoid ambiguity in speech. E.g. Persian took the word {wa} = and" from Arabic. From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Fri Jan 28 11:12:03 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 13:12:03 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <200001270925.p53@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, Hans Holm wrote: > "Loans"? That appears as an extremely narrowed view. > Of cause, resemblances between two langs/Protolangs alone do not prove > borrowing, let alone any direction of of it. There is a misunderstanding here. We are -not- dealing with random phono-semantic look-alikes between Proto-U and Proto-IE. Instead, there is a substantial amount of thoroughly argumented loan etymologies (for details, one should refer to the publications of Jorma Koivulehto). Besides, the etymologies precisely -prove- that the direction of loaning was IE > U and not vice versa. This is because the Proto-U form is predictable from the Proto-IE form, but not the other way round. Given the phonological structure of P-U (which differed radically from P-IE), it is predictable that e.g. P-IE *kwelH- was nativized as P-U *kulki- and P-IE *wed- as P-U *weti. But there is no reason why e.g. P-U *kulki- would become P-IE *kwelH- (and not *kulk- or something like that). > Additionally to the possibility of loans it must be found out wether the > resemblances could be due to > - only chance (about 2 to 8 %, decreasing e.g. with word-length), > - common origin. It has already been found out. As for common origin, it is not possible to discredit semantically and phonologically natural loan etymologies by replacing them with Nostratic speculations. There have been multiple attempts to relate IE and U genetically, and all of them have failed. Of course, it is impossible to -prove- (in the strict sense of the word) that the lexical similarities are not due to common genetic origin. But then, it is impossible to disprove -any- proposed genetic relationship. 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. Chance correspondeces are naturally another matter. However, given that there are only about 300 semantically and phonologically credible P-U etymologies, and these contain at least 30 proto-IE loans, I'd say that chance correspondence is ruled out. One also has to bear in mind that the U languages contain substantial amounts of later loan words of varying age (eg. proto-/pre-Baltic, proto/pre-Germanic, proto/pre-Aryan, proto-Iranian); this makes it natural to assume that contacts between U and IE were possible at a still earlier date (i.e., when at least the former still was a proto-language). - Ante Aikio From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Jan 28 06:51:03 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 00:51:03 -0600 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Is there any lexical substrate (from an unknown source) common to Uralic and any IE languages? e.g. between Uralic (or its branches) and Germanic/Balto-Slavic (ot their sub-branches)? What was the farther western boundary of Uralic speakers? Does it correspond to historically known boundaries between Saami and Scandinavian, & Estonian et al. and Baltic languages? Or was Uralic once spoken in S. Scandinavian and farther west along the southern Baltic? [ moderator snip ] >To be more precise: the region between Volga and Urals is the usual >theory these days, although some suggest more fanciful >scenarios. Lexical substrate suggests that the Siberian U languages >(Khanty, Manysi, Samoyedic) have moved to the current areas from Europe >(e.g., roughly 75% (!) of the proto-Samoyedic lexicon is without >a credible etymology). A strong lexical substrate from an unknown language >seems to exist in Saamic too; as for Finnic, the case is not as clear. [ moderator snip ] > - Ante Aikio Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Fri Jan 28 12:00:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 12:00:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: 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! Mit freundlichen Grüszen Hans J Holm - - et monere et moneri - - From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Fri Jan 28 11:59:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 11:59:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >Consequently, we cannot tell from the form of an IE loanword in Uralic >whether it was borrowed before or after the separation of Anatolian >from the rest. >-- that, I think, is a fair statement. .. I agree; but I think it would be helpful in this discussion to read Austerlitz and all the following literature on this topic. Or, just to start with, the citations in Anttila 89:164. Mit freundlichen Grüszen Hans J Holm - - et monere et moneri - - From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Jan 28 04:37:14 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 23:37:14 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 1/27/00 10:56:07 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- we're talking about the WORD. If the word was borrowed or invented _before_ PIE split up, it would develop according to the usual sound laws for each of the daughter languages. If introduced afterwards, it would not. What is difficult about this?>> What is difficult is that you continue to avoid my question. I'll ask it again: How do you know that the SPECIFIC sound changes in the wheel word happened at the time of dispersal? How do you know that those changes didn't happen some time well after dispersal? And how do you know the wheel was not introduced in the intervening period? So far I've gotten no answer from you that justifies saying that the wheel word HAD to be introduced before dispersal. Here's someone elsewith more credibility than I have saying it : "It depends on whether there *had* been any relevant sound changes in the intervening period, and in general we can only establish *relative* dates for sound changes, if we're lucky (many times not even that)." Here's the chronology. PIE disperses. The sound changes you see in the wheel word have not occurred yet. The wheel word is introduced to most of the daughters. Then afterwards the sound changes occur. I'm not saying this is right. But you haven't yet given me a reason why it is wrong. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Jan 28 04:58:44 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 23:58:44 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 1/27/00 11:19:14 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote wrote: <<-- those changes were not confined to those words, of course. Eg., the PIE *k ==> Germanic 'h' transition is characteristic. Hence *kmtom (100) ==> hundrad (100), or many other transitions of this kind.>> 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 PIE dispersal. Also with regard to the sound changes in the other group of wheel words (Latin, rota; Lith, ratas; OHG, rod; Ir, roth - cf. Skt, ratha) consider what Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote -if you might have missed it: <<...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.>> Consider that this is at least some evidence that the wheel word is not PIE but pre-Celt - BASED on the sound changes suggested above. So once again what you've said so far does not force the conclusion that the wheel word was introduced before PIE dispersed. Regards, Steve Long From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Jan 28 06:36:20 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 00:36:20 -0600 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <17.100fef8.25c16c0e@aol.com> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] I get the impression that the word goes back to a root meaning "round", giving rise to a set of secondary roots *ker-, (s)ker- "to bend", root of "circle" [cw] *kwel- "to revolve", root of "cycle", "wheel" [cw] *bhel- listed as "to blow, inflate, puff up" --which makes sense-- but why not influeced by *kwel- in derivatives such as ball In any case, all of these roots, with the possible exception of *wegh-, would seem to go back before the invention of the wheel [snip] >-- PIE *kwekwlom (pl. kwekwleha) -- wheel >>From which: >Old English: hweogol (note characteristic Germanic *k ==> h) >Sanskrit: cakra >Greek: kuklo >Tocharian: kukal ('wagon') >etc. >PIE *hwergh -- wheel >Hittite: hurki >Tocharian: yerkwanto this looks as if it could be cognate with *kwekwl-o- "circle" [cw], if /kw/ > /hw/ & /l/ > /r/ >PIE *rotho -- wheel Watkins gives *ret- "to roll, run" >Plus, of course, PIE *ueghnos, 'wagon', *uoghos, 'wagon' and the related >*ueghitlom, 'vehicle', which produce: Watkins gives *wegh- "to go, transport in a vehicle" Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From edsel at glo.be Fri Jan 28 18:05:46 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 19:05:46 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2000 10:19 AM >> X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >> You wrote: > <>> branch of Indo-European (Indo-Iranian, Hellenic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, >>> Italic, and Tocharian)is that the word was borrowed when PIE was still a >>> unity. Unless the word was borrowed when PIE was a unity, then there is no >>> other way to account for this widespread occurrence in the family.>> >> Well the wheel is one way, isn't it? I mean the actual wheel. Like the >> computer or the telephone or the automobile. That would account for the >> word being so widespread, wouldn't it? I certainly don't see any geographic >> or other necessity that would make it difficult. > -- we're talking about the WORD. If the word was borrowed or invented > _before_ PIE split up, it would develop according to the usual sound laws for > each of the daughter languages. > If introduced afterwards, it would not. What is difficult about this? > In point of fact, there's no question that the first eventuality -- the word > for "wheel" being present before the dispersal of PIE -- is what actually > happened. [Ed Selleslagh] Actually various words, as you state in your next mail. But: 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. 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. Such a hypothesis also leads to a - possibly not reconcilable - dating of the synchronous spread of both the technology and the word(s). Ed. From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Fri Jan 28 11:58:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 11:58:00 GMT Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: Steve Long wrote >then how would that word have passed into non-IE Near East languages? .. Who maintains that? Perhaps you misunderstood me saying "of course the word is older"? But I ended with the meaning 'round-round' as the assumed original meaning giving the motive for the labelling of the wheel. So *wheel* would refer to the _form_, +rotHa- to a _function_ of the wheel. Mit freundlichen Grüßen Hans J. Holm, D-30629 Hannover From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Fri Jan 28 12:32:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 12:32:00 GMT Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: SG>>>But: the use for wheel seems to be specific IE. SG>>Not really. Gamqrelidze and Ivanov quote Sumerian gigir, Hebrew SG>>gilga:l, galgal, Georgian borbal, gorgal, "wheel" or "chariot". SG>And there's Sino-Tibetan *golo. After all these additions I try to summarize by two interpretations: 1. With the meaning 'wheel,chariot' it can be assumed as a cultural "Wanderwort". 2. With the meaning 'round' (often redublicated) it seems to be a universal. Mit freundlichen Grüszen Hans J Holm - - et monere et moneri - - From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Jan 28 08:26:48 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 03:26:48 EST Subject: Peripheral promotes "common innovation" ? Message-ID: >ECOLING at aol.com writes: >if major changes are taken as going through a number of stages >in the process of "drift". -- that's often the case. Eg., when two sounds collapse into a single one, it often creates lexical or morphological ambiguities, which in turn require other changes. >BECAUSE WE CAN DETECT THE TIME THEY TAKE FROM THEIR ORIGIN AT THEIR CORE >UNTIL THEY REACH THEIR FARTHEST EXTENTS -- actually, it's rare to be able to precisely date this sort of thing -- relatively, yes, precisely, no. Satemization is a classic example. One of the rare instances when we _can_ date sound shifts is the first bunch distinguishing proto-Germanic, which occurred after the borrowing of some technical vocabulary to do with ironworking from an early form of Celtic (which means it had to be after about 700 BCE). That's valuable because it's surprising those changes were so late; without that information, they would have been assumed to be much earlier. >That is, because the groups at the edges do not have genetically >related dialects on all sides of them, matters which were really >dialect-area phenomena, interpreted as common innovations on >nodes on a tree, will tend to segment off the outermost areas first? -- what happens is that the peripheral dialects, especially if the language-group is expanding rapidly, tend to become isolated from developments in the core. The archaism of say, Baltic, vs. a vs. say, Indo-Iranian, is partly due to this. Or for that matter, in a much milder way, American vs. British Standard English. From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Jan 27 20:04:46 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 20:04:46 -0000 Subject: Making IE materials available [was Re: IE etymological dictionary] Message-ID: I would be particularly interested in data rather than books on-line or in CDROM. Books one can get from a book shop (ironic laughter!) but raw data in a searchable form is much more difficult to find. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Jan 27 20:25:23 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 20:25:23 -0000 Subject: Northwest IE attributes Message-ID: Sean said: > So, what I'm saying is that the IE family is such that a tree > representation of the family is possible; and since this is the more > restructive formalism, it is the one we should choose. Thank you, Sean, for a full and clear (and patient!) response. Allow me to blunder further into an area where I probably should hesitate to tread. I guess I would reword my initial posting to say that an either-or between a wave model or a tree model obscures the evidence; and either model has implications for the history of PIE (or IE dialects) which we may not wish to make. A tree model implies a separation of branches to a degree which may at times be untrue - the status of Baltic between Germanic and Slavonic seems to indicate that. I am sure that a purely wave model has its inadequacies as well. Hence my preference for a spectrum with fuzzy groupings within it, with all the historic implications that go with that! Sean also said: >The wave representation of a tree will have >the special property that all of the set boundaries will be nested: you >won't get any overlapping lines. Wave models in general do allow >overlapping lines; we can define trees as that subset of wave models where >there are no overlapping lines. Pardon me if I'm wrong - but isn't the pattern of isoglosses in IE precisely a set of overlapping lines, like spokes in a wheel? I know there is a debate about the nature and choice of isoglosses, but there are so many that cut every which way, that I find myself compelled to believe the dialects remained in contact, which would allow wave phenomena - which happen, whether we like it or not, across any area where speech is spoken. So I find belief in a system of separated branches difficult, and therefore resist too strong a stress on the tree model. Peter From edsel at glo.be Fri Jan 28 17:39:34 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 18:39:34 +0100 Subject: Refining what trees show Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2000 4:05 PM > We often make much too little use of the capabilities of visual diagrams. > Choices in these do have strong implications for our thinking. > [snip] [Ed Selleslagh] Mr. Moderator: Shouldn't a generally accepted and readable picture format be allowed on this list, e.g. *.GIF, which is readable by all systems (PC, Mac) and internet software, and which allows a serious compression so that files can be pretty short. The graphic, non-verbal communication can be very important in matters like these: e.g. family trees. Pure text isn't really capable of rendering lots of subtleties and belongs to another age, and I am not speaking only about computers. I am NOT pleading for a fancy all-graphic type of communication as is fashionable, because that yields grossly bloated files, and compatibility problems because of the very different types and versions of hardware and software used by the members. Only for a minimalist graphic extension that everybody can at least read/visualize. I would appreciate it if you would publish this message and ask members if they have any objections. Kind regards, Ed. Selleslagh [ Moderator's reply: I have no simple way to look at the content of any binary file sent to these lists: The system on which they are run is *strictly* 7-bit ASCII, which often causes me a problem with text which is not MIME-encoded (and I have taken to keeping a printout of the Windows character set from 128 to 255 (octal 200 to 377, hexadecimal 80 to FF) simply so I can get a feel for what is being sent--and this obviously does not work if the post is from a Mac or a Unix system. Further, the mail programs on this system physically cannot handle a message which exceeds 300,000 characters in length. I have yet to see an image that encodes to much less than 1,000,000 characters, so such messages will never be delivered to the input queue--and there is no way to transmit them if they *did* arrive. If you have graphics, include the URL for an FTP or HTTP server which holds them in a message to the list, and those who can make use of them will do so, and those who cannot will ignore them. --rma ] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Jan 28 09:24:21 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 04:24:21 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >I do find him saying the precise same thing about "an early Indoeuropean >language." I suspect the difference is critical. -- no, it's trivial. Celtic was widespread in the last centuries BCE. If it didn't spread by migration (which Renfrew denies), then it must have evolved _in situ_ across its range. "It is most improbable that the (proto-)Celts were able to maintain parallel linguistic development from Ireland across western continental Europe from the beginning of the Neolithic to the historical period, a time-span on the order of 4000 years. For this reason, linguists have generally confined the search for the Proto-Celts to the later Bronze Age (c.1200 BCE onwards) or the Iron Age. As the Celtic languages spread in the early historic period, they provide us with cautionary evidence concerning the relationship between the process of linguistic expansion and visibility within the archaeological record. Even where we can trace in time the course of Celtic movements, such as the spread of Goidelic speakers from Ireland to Scotland in the first millenium CE, such a migration is in no way supported by hard archaeological evidence." -- Encylopedia of Indo-European Culture, p. 101. >Nor will you find it in Ireland (where there is history, folk memories and >other evidence of a series of migrations from the continent ABOUT OR AFTER >this time. -- now you're agreeing Celtic was brought to Ireland by Iron Age migrations from the Continent? I agree, but Renfrew doesn't. >I am willing to be corrected. I believe we have fragmentary evidence of >Gallic Celtic, Lepontic and Celtiberian and many centuries later we have the >more substantial evidence of the Celtic of the British Isles. -- the Ogham inscriptions are about on the same order as the evidence for Continental Celtic. Insular Celtic later has much more abundant written sources. There's more than enough, however, to show that Insular Celtic developed its peculiarities _after_ the period of the Ogham inscriptions. The Celtic languages, when first encountered, lack all the stranger features of, for example, Old Irish -- augmentation of verb forms, for instance. >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. >Well perhaps literate observers would have observed the same rate of change >earlier, but they weren't there and we have no record of them. -- you're missing the point completely. Renfrew's hypothesis requries that either _all the Celtic areas_ changed not at all, or identically, across 4000 years. When we can observe them, the Celtic languages undergo distinct and _different_ changes in each of their areas... which is exactly what one would expect from a relatively recent dispersal from a small nuclear area. When a language is both widespread and uniform, that means that it spread recently from a single core area. If it's widespread, it can't stay uniform. >as being Volcae and from the tribe of the Gallic Volcae -- you are aware that "Gallic" simply meant "Celtic-speaking" in Classical times? That any area where Celts lived would be called "Gaul"? (Hence "Galatia" in Anatolia). Incidentally, Celtic tribal names were widespread. Many of the tribal names in Gaul, Britain and Ireland were the same, and the Boii lived in both Bohemia and northern Italy, and so forth. >I don't know if I agree with Renfrew but it is not hard to see that a lot >could have gone on between "an early Indoeuropean language" and pre-Celtic. -- not uniformly, over 4000 years, and across half of Europe. Which is exactly the point. Of course Celtic evolved from an earlier IE form _somewhere_. Renfrew's theory requires that it do so across the entire area from Ireland to Austria. Which is just not the way things work. >And of course Celtic had to turn into Celtic somewhere - what is the >difference between IE>Celtic in the Danube or in France? -- It can't turn into Celtic _simultaneously_ in the entire area between Austria and Ireland, is the difference. >And 4000 years versus 3000 years or even 2000 years would not seem to solve >the problem of the this telling striking uniformity in 275BC, would it? -- striking uniformity in 275 BCE is exactly what one would expect if the Celtic languages had been confined to a small area and then spread rapidly, not long before first being observed. >Myceanean records are after all just over 3000 years old but there are plenty >of folk comfortable calling it not pre-Greek, but Greek. -- it's not "Greek" as spoken today. You're using terminological quirks to cloud the process again. Mycenaean, Classical, and modern "Greek" are distinct languages, as different from each other as modern English is from Proto-Germanic. >If we had no intervening evidence of Greek until modern Greek in the >year1999AD in the same location - what would we make of the difference >between the two languages? -- there would be no problem. That one was ancestral to the other would be perfectly obvious. >Why is "an early indoeuropean language" turning into the Celtic >languages with no record of the intervening years expected to perform so >differently - if an early indoeuropean language analogous to Mycenaean >existed in 4000BC? -- an early IE language turning into Celtic simultaneously, across half of Europe, is the problem. Greek evolved in one place and spread from there. So, of course, did Celtic... except in Renfrew's opinion. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Jan 28 09:28:31 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 04:28:31 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: << I don't claim any knowledge of Old Irish >but something has to be responsible for the radically different look of >Gaelic as compared to other IE languages -- a "brusque restructuring" during the early medieval period. Ancient Irish (and other Celtic languages of comparable date) are quite conventional Indo-European languages, no 'stranger' than say, Latin. What comes out the other end is, to be sure, very odd. From sonno3 at hotmail.com Fri Jan 28 21:19:38 2000 From: sonno3 at hotmail.com (Christopher Gwinn) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 16:19:38 -0500 Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: > I am willing to be corrected. I believe we have fragmentary evidence of > Gallic Celtic, Lepontic and Celtiberian and many centuries later we have the > more substantial evidence of the Celtic of the British Isles. I do not > believe either Lepontic or Celtiberian demonstrate what anyone has called > "striking uniformity." Gallic is specifically limited to only a third of > Gaul by Caesar and I am not aware of actual evidence of it being found > anywhere else - with the possible exception of an accountable presence in the > British Isles. Once again I may be wrong, but I do hope there is specific > evidence that I can look to. For the Gaulish material try Wolfgang Meid "Gaulish inscriptions," Pierre Yves Lambert "La Langue Gauloise," Michel Lejeune (ed) "Recueil des Inscriptions Gauloises 1, 2," Joshua Whatmough "Dialectc of Ancient Gaul," and especially Pierre Billy "Thesaurus Linguae Gallicae." For Celtiberian try Meid "Celtiberian Inscriptions" as an intro and for Lepontic try Lejeune "Lepontica." For Ogam - there is an excellent web site by Jost Gippert featuring several hundred Ogam inscriptions on the TITUS site. http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/ogam/index.html (you will need to get the TITUS font OGAM to see the site properly). The corpus of Continental Celtic can no longer be considered small - though we are not sure about many aspects of grammar - especially verbal forms - as well as proper etymologies for many words, there are literally thousands of attested words (I am in the process of creating an alphabetical Gaulish glossary - I already have 2,652 words and I have only just finished the i's) > You are saying that here is Celtic was unchanging for 700 years. But then > Celtic changes very quickly in the eyes of literate observers. Well perhaps > literate observers would have observed the same rate of change earlier, but > they weren't there and we have no record of them. (And of course the > Galatians were identified by both the Greeks and by Cicero as being Volcae > and from the tribe of the Gallic Volcae - and I believe the observer, > mentioned in Renfrew, did not know Celtic and merely said they sounded the > same. And the ogham use of a word for women - what about the rest of the > words in ogham? is "the women" the only match? - does not prove a lot > geographically and I'm not sure it is particularly strong proof of 'striking > uniformity from Ireland to the Danube.") Obviously the Celtic languages underwent change - I think what the original poster might have meant was that the languages underwent minimal change between their first written attestations on the continent (the oldest of which may be 6th century BC) and the oldest Ogam inscriptions. Irish and Celtiberian are more conservative branches of Celtic, retaining the PIE -kw- whereas Lepontic, Gaulish and Brittonic transform it into a -p-. There is a lot of uniformity within the Celtic branches, however, in the ancient period which did seem to survive somewhat into Old Irish and Welsh - for example, the Gaulish phrase Bnanom Brictom "Spells of women" matches the Irish phrase Brichtu Ban "spells of women." From Gaul we find a cognate of Welsh Annufyn "hell" in Antumnos (*Ande-dubnos "under-world") - from a Gaulish curse-tablet discovered in the '80's > < pre-Celtic across thousands of miles, for 4000 years. Which is in blatant > violation of everything we know about languages and how they develop.>> well, we do see a very important change in the P/Q split prior to the 6th or 7th century BC, as well as the Irish and Celtiberian treatment of vowels, which seem to differ in some cases from Gaulish, Lepontic and Brittonic. It is interesting to note that the characteristically Celtic loss of PIE -P- seems to be reaching its completion by the earliest Lepontic inscriptions - which have a letter -v- where we might expect a PIE -P- (ex: UVAMO- possibly from PIE *UP-eM-O). The value of the -v- is unsure - perhaps it is a consonantal -w- or an -f- sound. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Jan 28 10:08:57 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 10:08:57 +0000 Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister writes: [somebody else] >> Hasn't Frisian also generalised a plural in -ar or -er, which also >> corresponds with what Norwegian and Swedish (and formerly Danish) did? > Can you elaborate a bit more on the -ar/-er plural? > While the English strong plural was -en, > there seems to be some relic forms with -r-; actually -ren > e.g. child-r-en, eyren Middle English dialect plural for > [unless the -r- of eyren was part of the singular stem and perhaps lost in > the presumed singular ] Old English, like a good Germanic language, had many different classes of nouns exhibiting different sets of inflectional endings. So far as I know, a nominative plural in /r/ was found only in a rather small class of neuter nouns which formed their plurals in /-ru/ or sometimes in /-ra/. One of these was /æg/ 'egg', whose plural was /ægru/ or /ægra/. This plural developed regularly to Middle English (and variants). But the rarity of the r-plurals eventually allowed this to be assimilated into the (then) much larger class of n-plurals, and so a new double plural was created. This continued in use in the south of England until the northern form (of Scandinavian origin) displaced it. And 'children' is rather similar. In OE, this was a masculine noun with plural , but the word went walkabout and wandered into two or three other declensional classes. Most particularly, it entered the 'egg' class and acquired a new plural or . This gave rise regularly to ME or , which again finally acquired an n-ending to yield the double plural . English is not alone here. Roger Lass cites similar examples from other Germanic languages: Dutch 'egg', plural ; Afrikaans 'egg' (with incorporation of the old plural marker into the stem), plural ; Dutch 'child', plural ; Afrikaans 'child', plural . Compare standard German 'child', plural . So far as I know, the OE /-ru/ plurals are not cognate with the Scandinavian /r/ plurals. The OE forms appear to derive from PIE nouns with stems in */-es/ ~ */-os/. The addition of a vocalic plural suffix allowed the */s/ of the stem to undergo first Verner's Law (to */z/) and then rhotacism, yielding the observed /-rV/. But the Scandinavian /r/ plurals, on the whole, appear to derive from PIE */-Vs/ (note Greek /-os/ and Latin /-us/, for example). This became */-Vz/ in Proto-Germanic, and then /-r/ in Scandinavian, but the final consonant was lost entirely in Old English. But I'm no Germanist, and I'll be happy to be corrected if I've screwed this up. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From stevegus at aye.net Fri Jan 28 12:46:55 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 07:46:55 -0500 Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: Rick McCallister writes: >> Hasn't Frisian also generalised a plural in -ar or -er, which also >> corresponds with what Norwegian and Swedish (and formerly Danish) did? > Can you elaborate a bit more on the -ar/-er plural? > While the English strong plural was -en, > there seems to be some relic forms with -r-; actually -ren > e.g. child-r-en, eyren Middle English dialect plural for > [unless the -r- of eyren was part of the singular stem and perhaps lost in > the presumed singular ] Plurals in -r were one of a rather variable number of plural suffixes available in Old English. My understanding is, that they were one of the first to be marginalized, and the other semi-irregular plural suffix, -en, was compounded with it once they began to be felt as less than adequately marked for plural. (Not sure, but isn't the plural of 'egg' -Eier- in standard German?) What these plurals in -ren resemble, though, is NGmc -definite- plurals. All of the Norse-derived language have a definite -suffix- in -inn or -it, marked for case when case survives, which is attached to the suffix. In Swedish, this becomes -arna in the animate gender plural. Some dialects realize this suffix as /-ren/. AAR, where I got my ideas about Frisian was from Robinson's -Old English and Its Closest Relatives-, which observes that the oldest Frisian texts had generalized a masculine plural suffix of -ar or -er, and speculates that this plural suffix was borrowed from Old Norse. [I don't know what modern Frisian uses.] -- Sella fictili sedeo Versiculos dum facio. From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Jan 28 19:35:02 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 14:35:02 EST Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 1/28/00 3:15:15 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- these are known as isogloss boundaries, and present no fundamental problems.>> Good solution. Wrong methodology. I had been talking about about the UPenn tree in these posts. Isoglosses apply to maps. Basically an isogloss is nothing but a boundary line. And in simple location or wave or other diachronic maps, isoglosses can be used to help untangle what would appear to be conflicting evidence and make it subjectable to explanation, as with cultural explanations given for the Benrath and Urdingen isoglosses - the "Rhenish Fan." Maps add those kinds of dimensions to the analysis. HOWEVER, these kinds of conflicts need to be either resolved, avoided or disregarded BEFORE a tree is drawn, because there is no way to portray these variables in a SINGLE tree. The 'pure phylogeny' approach used in the UPenn tree is to draw MANY trees to arrive at the ones that minimize these kinds of conflicts (called I believe convexity in this approach). So in effect you are given the trees that avoid the conflicts best. Conflicts not reconciliable by realignment of the branching do not show up as conflicts in the final tree or trees. Regards, Steve Long From alex at AN3039.spb.edu Fri Jan 28 10:55:24 2000 From: alex at AN3039.spb.edu (Alexander S. Nikolaev) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 13:55:24 +0300 Subject: Horses Message-ID: JoatSimeon wrote: >>But if Renfrew is right, and PIE did come from Anatolia, an *ek^wos (or >>however it sounded at *that* time) meaning "donkey" would have trivially >>drifted to "horse" in the horse-rich (donkey-poor) environment of Northern >>and Eastern Europe. >> >-- 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 Thus the Sumerogramme (used instead of *Hek^wos-word [?]) means something like 'Gebierge Esel, mountain ass' and some (e.g. Vyach.Vsel.Ivanov) thought that this meaning could be chronologically prior to the meaning 'horse' Though i must say i personally do not believe in this... The real meaning of Luwian azuwa is also opaque... Alex Nikolaev From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Jan 28 08:34:43 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 08:34:43 -0000 Subject: Re Personal pronouns Message-ID: Dear Larry (,Ralf-Stefan) and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2000 4:15 PM >> [PR previously] >> Larry's definition of pronoun contains all the classses traditionally >> considered pronouns *except* possessive pronouns though it seems odd in the >> extreme that, in spite of the rejection of possessive pronouns, >> demonstrative pronouns are included *as well as* being listed under >> 'determiner' as "demonstrative". >> Perhaps you could explain to me why you think "demonstrative" may occur in >> both classifications but "possesive" may not. [LT] > OK; I'll have a shot. > So that's that: 'my' is strictly a determiner, while 'mine' is strictly a > pronoun, and 'this' can be either a pronoun or a determiner. [PR] This all seems very reasonable, and I thank you for this civil, patient and clear exposition of your ideas. However, under the entry "pronoun" in your _Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics_, pp. 221-222, you list several categories into which pronouns may be classified: personal ("(I, they)"), reflexive, demonstrative, indefinite, interrogative, and relative. You have told us above that a word like 'mine' is "strictly a pronoun". Which category among those listed in your dictionary encompasses 'mine'? [LT continued] > Now to the semantico-functional categories. We can set up a class of > 'demonstratives' on the basis of deictic properties, and we find that both > determiner 'this' and pronoun 'this' must be included in the demonstratives. > And we can perhaps set up a class of 'possessives' on some basis or other > (this is not so easy), and find that both determiner 'my' and pronoun 'mine' > deserve to be included in this possessive class. [PR] A gracious concession. [PR previously] >> Finally, I think it useful to retain the term "possessive pronoun" because >> it overtly identifies the fact that the pronoun stands for a noun in the >> possessive --- in addition to its function of deteremination. [LT] > No; I'm afraid I can't agree. > Whatever the intended meaning of "stands for" might be, a pronoun does not > "stand for" a noun. A pronoun doesn't even belong to the category 'noun'. > Instead, it belongs to the category 'noun phrase', and, in many cases, it > takes its reference from another noun phrase overtly present in the > discourse. > Example: > Q: "Where's the woman we're supposed to meet?" > A: "She's over there." > And *not*: > * "The she we're supposed to meet is over there." > A pronoun does *not* "stand for" a noun in any coherent sense. [PR] I am frankly rather surprised by your apparent uncertainty regarding the intended meaning of "stands for". And your example seems (no offense intended) trivial and the result of a knee-jerk application of your method. Your first sentence, of course, omits the relative pronoun that in a more formal register would have been present. "Where is the woman that we are supposed to meet?" Though such a sentence is not commonly seen, it would be perfectly acceptable to let "she" stand for "woman": "Where is she that we are supposed to meet?' Similarly, though rather stilted, "She that we are supposed to meet is over there." Obviously, articles do not precede pronouns in English (usually). It is obvious that "she" can stand for either "(the) woman" or the fuller NP: "(the) woman (that) we are supposed to meet". [LT continued] > Now, of course, 'my' is somehow related to 'I', at least semantically. > Depending on your theoretical tastes, you might like to state a rule -- > say, a lexical rule -- of the following approximate form: > [I] + [Poss] --> [my] > This rule is comparable to other conceivable lexical rules; for example: > [arrive] + [-al] --> [arrival] > But 'arrival' is not a verb because 'arrive' is a verb: it's a noun, as shown > by its grammatical behavior. Likewise, 'my' is not a pronoun because 'I' is > a pronoun: it's a determiner, as shown by its grammatical behavior. [PR] Perhaps the discussion could be foreshortened. 'My' could perhaps be termed a "pronominal determiner". [LT continued] > Finally, I might add that 'possessive' is a rather elusive category anyway. [PR] An interesting question for another time. Frankly, I believe that the definition of "possessive" can be rather simply stated. 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 kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Fri Jan 28 14:48:07 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 09:48:07 -0500 Subject: NW vs. E Gmc In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, Herb Stahlke wrote: (I had previously written that *z > r can be shown to be an independent change in NGmc and WGmc.) > As one only generally familiar with linguistic issues of early > Germanic, I'm puzzled by Sean's clause "after the two dialects had > separated". I've rather gotten the impression from sources like Orrin > Robinson's Old English and its Closest Relatives and Hans Frede > Nielsen's The Germanic Languages: Origins and Early Dialectal > Interrelations that Sean's presupposition is something of an > oversimplification. Rather, I've gathered, early Germanic, even after > the Gothic migration, had very much the characteristics of a dialect > continuum. Certainly, one can distinguish EGmc as a separate group > earlier than N or W, but N and W don't become clearly distinct > branches, rather than extremes on a continuum, until quite late, > perhaps after the continental period. Or is Sean simply using a > convenient shorthand that I'm being overly critical of? Okay, here's the details. There are three rules, one in NGmc and two in WGmc, which are sensitive to the *z/*r contrast, which therefore must not have collapsed until after some of the specifically NGmc and WGmc sound changes had occurred. In NGmc, but not in WGmc, the following rule occurred: *ai > a: / _ h, r (but not *z) Hence Old Icelandic *sair > sa'r "wound", but *maizan > meiri "more" (Noreen, 1904, p. 75). In WGmc, there is a sporadic rule which deletes *z before *n, *d with compensatory lengthening. The details are quite messy, because you get deletion in some words in some WGmc languages but not in others, and sometimes not in any: Goth OHG OE OFris OS mizdo me:ta me:d/meord me:de me:da "reward" -- lerne:n leornian lerne:n li:no:n "learn" (*z > r) huzd hort hord -- hord "treasure" razda rarta reord -- -- "language, speech" gazds gart gierd -- gard "sting, switch, goad" (There are alternate spellings in some cases which, for clarity, I haven't listed, but which have the same outcomes of *z as those listed above.) This is a mess, but the point is that while the deletion applies variably to *z, the deletion _never_ applies to original *r; so WGmc was sensitive to the the *z/*r contrast. Another such case occurred in Ingvaeonic, where word-final *z in stressed monosyllables deletes with compensatory lengthening (word-final *-z in unstressed syllables had already gone): OE OS OHG Goth. PGmc me: mi: mir mis *miz "me (dat.)" we: wi:, we wi(:)r weis *wi:z "we" ma: me:r me:r mais *maiz "more" (The -r was restored in OS me:r, and later in OE, by analogy with the comparative adjectives. Notice that rhotacism later applied in OHG.) Notice that this deletion never happens to original *r, as in *he:r > he:r "here". So we have one rule in North Germanic which is sensitive to the *r/*z distinction, but which is clearly NGmc only, hence postdating the WGmc/NGmc split. Thus, the merger cannot yet have happened when NGmc and WGmc separated. We likewise have two rules within WGmc which are sensitive to the contrast; same conclusion. (As I noted in a previous post, Ingv. is securely WGmc; it undergoes none of the NGmc sound changes, but it undergoes some seven different sound changes shared by all the WGmc languages before starting to innovate on its own, as with the Ingv. rule I listed above. Thus, the *z/*r contrast must have survived in WGmc until WGmc itself was already beginning to break into dialects.) There's one further bit of evidence: runic inscriptions clearly postdating the breakup of Germanic by centuries maintains a clear distinction between *r and *z. The inscribers don't get them mixed up, even in a period where NGmc and WGmc must have already separated, based on external historical evidence. If we didn't have such clear evidence of a *z/*r contrast within NGmc and within WGmc, we'd say that *z > r is an innovation which occurred in Proto-NWGmc before the split between NGmc and WGmc. But we clearly can't say this; the evidence is just too strong that this is not so. So the question is, what do we make of this? One perfectly reasonable possibility is that rhotacism is a purely independent parallel development in the two branches; rhotacism rules are not uncommon (one occurred in Greek, for example). Another possibility is that *z had already come to be somewhat phonetically rhotacized in Proto-NWGmc (without actually collapsing the contrast yet), so that the merger was phonetically likely, but didn't actually occur until later. A third possibility is that rhotacism was an innovation which spread across dialect boundaries after NGmc and WGmc had become clearly differentiated from one another but were still in relatively close contact. It can't be an _inherited_ common innovation, however. I should probably mention what I'm working on in my in-progress dissertation, which is about conspiracies of historical sound changes; it's relevant to this discussion. The elimination of *z in West Germanic is a complicated picture; there are actually several other rules which eliminate it in various ways, with rhotacism taking care of the residue. Traditionally, these processes eliminating *z have been treated as separate, unconnected rules; there is no way under traditional rule-based to conflate them, even tho they all mysteriously have the effect of eliminating *z within a fairly short period of time. What I'm saying is that conspiracies of this sort are no accident. I'm working in a recent formal model of phonology known as Optimality Theory, which makes use of ranked constraints rather than conventional rewrite rules. Previous authors working in OT have suggested that historical phonological change is to be modeled as a change in the relative ranking of the constraints. I accept this, and the point of my dissertation is to discuss a previous unexplored consequence of this idea: namely, that a change in the ranking of constraints can sometimes result in clusterings of seemingly connected surface phenomena for which traditional rule-based accounts can give no unified formal account. One of my chapters looks at the WGmc *z elimination conspiracy in close detail; I'm saying that all of the historical rules eliminating *z are actually the outcroppings of a single change in the grammar; namely, the rise in ranking of a constraint prohibiting *z, with the details of the individual rules (deletion with or without compensatory lengthening, rhotacism, etc.) falling out automatically from other, independently motivated aspects of the grammar. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Fri Jan 28 15:08:12 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 10:08:12 -0500 Subject: NW vs. E Gmc In-Reply-To: <01JL31OJQDSI9TK4D7@LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU> Message-ID: On Mon, 24 Jan 2000 CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU wrote: (I wrote:) >> 2. Marc Pierce mentioned gemination before *j. Actually, this is a >> strictly WGmc innovation, and thus isn't evidence one way or the other for >> the grouping of the three Gmc branches. > Doesn't North Germanic geminate -kj- -gj- to -kkj- -ggj-? (I don't have my > handbooks at hand.) Yes. (Gordon 1957, p. 282) However, WGG applies to a much broader range of cases: all of the consonants except *r (and *z) get geminated before *j, and there also sporadic gemination of *p, *t, *k, and *h before *r and *l. This broader gemination is strictly West Germanic. I actually don't know of a good argument against the idea that the gemination of velars could have been a common NWGmc innovation; I'd have to do a good bit of looking to see if there's anything in the relative chronology which would prevent this. Anyone know? > 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_). 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". \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Fri Jan 28 17:14:37 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 12:14:37 -0500 Subject: Computing phylogenies (was: Re: Indo-Hittite) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 26 Jan 2000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > Since it is mainly based on prior scholarship and selected PIE > reconstructions, I suspect there is nothing particularly novel about the > UPenn tree findings. It's clear that the methodology is originally designed > to find the best possible internal consistency for particular theories, > rather than testing the theories themselves. *Sigh* You still haven't understood the significance of this work. Let me summarize again, partly for you and partly also for the benefit of those who weren't on the list when we went of this last summer. Computing a phylogeny over character-based data is a very difficult computational problem. Together with the classic "travelling salesman" problem, it belongs to the class of NP (non-polynomial) complete problems. I could discuss exactly what this means, but what it means in practical terms is that computing the problem in a deterministic manner would take an impractical stretch of time, such as twenty years or a million years, even with the fastest computers. If you have 10 taxa (species, or languages in this case), there are 34,459,425 possible trees (17 x 15 x 13...) representing the relations among those taxa. 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. This would just take too long over any data sets of larger than trivial size. This is too bad, because there are obvious applications for being able to compute a phylogeny over character data. The best known example is that biologists would like to compute the evolutionary family tree for biological species based on the characteristics of the species. 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. Don Ringe and Ann Taylor (both Indo-Europeanists) got together with Tandy Warnow, and the team had the bright idea of using this algorithm, which was originally developed for biologists, to compute the phylogeny of the IE language family. This has never been done before. Because the technology to do this didn't previously exist, it _couldn't_ have been done before. Your statement that "there is nothing particularly novel" about this work is simply a misunderstanding about what has been done here. The first thing the team had to do was to come up with a data set encoding various characteristics of the IE languages. You state that 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. As for your statement "It's clear that the methodology is originally designed to find the best possible internal consistency for particular theories, rather than testing the theories themselves", I'm not sure what you're saying here. Perhaps you mean that if one chose a different character set, the algorithm might compute a different optimal tree. This is true, but as I've said before: another competent Indo-Europeanist might come up with a slightly different character set, but it could not be very different. There is only so much data to work with, and many of the interpretations of the data are non-controversial. Still, if you feel that the character set could be improved, you are free to do so and to set your results against those of Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor. This would be a very good thing to do. > As you say, adjustments were made in the data to give a relative chronology > to the tree afterwards. This looks like a garbled version of what the team actually did. _After_ the team produced the unrooted phylogeny and made a claim for where the root should be, they made a diagram showing the century where each language was first attested, and plotted the phylogeny against those dates. This involves graphically stretching the tree out a bit, but it doesn't involve any changes to the actual structure of the tree. Producing a diagram of this sort allows us to make some statements about absolute dates before which particular branchings must have occurred. For example, the team claims that the nearest relative of Greek is Armenian. Since a clearly differentiated Greek is attested in the middle of the second millenium BCE, it must be the case that the Greco-Armenian branching took place _before_ that date. > Some of these adjustments were geographical and relate to presumed > contact or lack of it. They made no such adjustments. The phylogeny was computed strictly based on what is actually found in the languages in question, without regard to geography. > There is no indication that the UPenn group ever hypothesized or > attempted to execute a tree where Hittite and PIE were hypothesized to > be sisters decended from a common ancestor to see if it was also > consistent with the data. You're misunderstanding their methodology if you believe that they would "attempt to execute" a particular tree. They feed the character data into the algorithm and take the tree that comes out. Second, the tree you describe is in fact the phylogeny which the team arrived at: they do believe that Anatolian is a sister of Proto-Everything-Else, which you refer to as "PIE" (and Steven, I am determined to ignore into the ground any objections over the labeling of the nodes). > Such a procedure might have been methodologically necessary to > properly 'test' the IndoHittite hypothesis. These findings also might > have carried assumptions that Hittite was a descendent of PIE (e.g., > some of the established reconstructed PIE that Ringe, et al used to > identify cognates for co-categorization presumably were reconstructed > with Hittite included in the comparative data) and the computer > confirmed that this was not inconsistent - a finding that could have > also possibly come out of hypothesizing Hittite as being a sister > language. Let me say it again: the phylogeny which the team arrived at is as follows: X / \ / \ Y Anatolian I'm referring to X as "PIE" and to Y as "Proto-Everything-Else". You're referring to Y as "PIE" (so I guess X would be "Proto-Indo-Hittite" in your nomenclature). From the perspective of the team's methodology, the two claims are identical and indistinguishable. Again, this is purely a matter of what we arbitrary labels we choose for the nodes, and I am determined to ignore any argument about it. Also, let me respond to someone else: > In a message dated 1/26/00 11:23:23 AM, Hans J Holm wrote: > < Ringe/Warnow tree is /not/ calculated, but inserted by Ringe as outcome of > traditional, mainstream views perhaps too much preoccupied by the only > early documentation of Hittite. >> (Responding to Hans Holm): Yes, it's quite true that the algorithm that Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor used produces an unrooted phylogeny. It would be a possible and coherent point of view to accept their unrooted phylogeny but to argue for some other point in the phylogeny as the root. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Jan 28 05:59:19 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 23:59:19 -0600 Subject: early IE dialect areas diagram In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I've read that Italic was in contact with Germanic before Celtic was My impression was that Italic would have been somewhere around the upper Danube, i.e. present Bavaria, Bohemia, Austria and/or Switzerland before moving into Italy I don't know what the exact time frame was, ¿2000-1500 BC? or whether Celtic would have been east or west of Latin at the time or which languages it was in contact with --although I have seen in passing some references to "Illyrian" influences in Ibero-Romance [in either Lapesa or Bolaños] but I don't know if this is just a wild guess or what Given that it seems that Celtic would have moved into former Italic-speaking territory, this conceivably may have resulted in Italic influence on Celtic. Any arguments one way or another? There's also the question of Lusitanian. Is it Celtic? Is it Italic? Does it form a W. IE branch along with Celtic and Italic [and possibly Venetic]? [snip] >If anyone can suggest the scenario for the positions of Celtic >and Italic especially at the very ealiest stages, and whether >their neighbors changed very much during the expansion of IE >dialects westwards, I would be grateful for any help with thinking. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From edsel at glo.be Fri Jan 28 18:58:28 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 19:58:28 +0100 Subject: Indo-Hittite Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Hans Holm" Sent: Monday, January 24, 2000 7:51 AM > LT>In fact, precisely this odd last view is the one commonly presented in > LT>those IE family trees that we see everywhere. But not many linguists > LT>are happy with such a massive sudden-disintegration scenario. > .. In the forthcoming 'Journal of quantitative linguistics' I will present > a much more differentiated model of the disintegration of IE. > And Hittite is not the first, but the last language to depart - from > Tokharian. The first to split were Germanic and Greek, as already stated > by Prof D.G. Kendall in Ross JRSS.B12/1950:49. [Ed Selleslagh] I think most of us would be grateful if you could present a summary (with a tree?) on this list. In tempore opportuno, of course. Personally, I'm glad to hear this about the split of Germanic and Greek, as I (not being a specialist) have always had a nagging suspicion that these two have something in common (apart from being IE) that sets them apart, notwithstanding important differences in various areas (Q-P-lgs., verbal flection,...). [snip] > Hans J Holm > - - et monere et moneri - - Ed. From michalov at uiuc.edu Fri Jan 28 20:48:46 2000 From: michalov at uiuc.edu (Peter A. Michalove) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 14:48:46 -0600 Subject: Indo-Hittite In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask observed on this list recently that Sturtevant's Indo-Hittite hypothesis is terminologically awkward, but that if we call it Indo-Anatolian (which is more correct), then it's not substantively different from saying merely that Anatolian was the first branch to split off from Indo-European, a position that many Indo-Europeanists agree with. That is, there's no substantive difference between the following trees, (1) and (2), other than which level you choose to call PIE: (1) Indo-Anatolian / \ / \ Anatolian PIE | | Germanic, Hellenic, Slavic, etc. (2) PIE / \ / \ Anatolian Non-Anatolian | | Germanic, Hellenic, Slavic, etc. (Please forgive the difficulty of drawing trees in email.) (:-) But I wonder if anyone on this list does see a substantive difference between the two models. That is, does tree (1) (which says PIE and Anatolian were sister languages on a par) imply that features characteristic of PIE but not Anatolian (like the feminine gender, the more elaborate system of verbal moods and tenses, etc.) are innovations in (non-Anatolian) PIE? Conversely, does tree (2) imply that these features were present in PIE (or whatever you want to call the predecessor of Anatolian and non-Anatolian) and subsequently lost in Anatolian? Or is tree (2) less likely to imply any position on how early these features were present? Similarly, if you're comparing Indo-European to other languages on a Nostratic level, and you want to avoid "reaching down" (that is, attributing features of only one branch to the entire family), does tree (1) mean that you should only cite features that are present in Anatolian and elsewhere in IE, while tree (2) makes no such requirement? 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 JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Jan 28 20:17:00 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 15:17:00 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Just what thoes considerable difficulties are is still something I am trying >to get at. -- just for starters: Ridiculous time-depth. Even if all the IE languages changed as slowly as Lithuanian, a 7000 BCE date for PIE is grotesque; and that's leaving aside the question of the technical vocabulary. Ignorance of the interrelationships of the IE language (according to Renfrew's theory Greek ought to be closely related to Hittite and distantly related to Sanskrit, whereas the reverse is true). Dogmatic insistance that human behavior, linguistic and otherwise, was somehow completely different in prehistory. >Actually if you read A&L you can see that what Renfrew was first of all doing >was chastising archaeologists for accepting presumptive dates based on >linguistics - which he points out were often based on old archaeology. -- in which he's simply wrong. What he's resistant to is the idea that linguistics can tell things about the past that archaeology cannot. It's methodological imperialism. >Some archaeologists think Renfrew should have never got involved in the >language/ethnic thing at all -- he shouldn't have. At least, not before he _understood_ what he was trying to critique. From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Fri Jan 28 12:27:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 12:27:00 GMT Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: SG>the paragraph above is simply wrong. .. Though SG is known as an expert in Tungus and Mongolian langs, not the arguments nor our style of communication allow such a decision. I think also of the immense impact of Mongolian on Evenki (cf Doerfer M-T, 1985) - in this case also without a migration. And according to Heissig (in Weiers 1986) Turcic began to become the dominating lang of the Golden Horde since 1262. Of course SG is correct that Hungarian is an *Ugric* language by relating it to the Ob-Ugric languages. I apologize for the slipage. Hans J. Holm From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Jan 28 12:25:02 2000 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max Wheeler) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 12:25:02 +0000 Subject: [was: Basque butterflies again] Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Larry Trask writes: > However, given the restriction of the expressives to French Basque, > and largely to Lapurdian, an economical view might be that is an > expressive pattern in Occitan which has been borrowed into neighboring > varieties of Basque and used there to coin new formations. I don't know > enough Occitan to say if this is plausible, but it can't be ruled out *a > priori*. There is evidence of the areality of . I've looked in S. Palay Dictionnaire du Béarnais et du Gascon modernes. I find numbers of head entries as follows: pamp- 29 pemp- 7 pimp- 21 pomp- 0 pump- 31 And its not just Gascon. Mistral, Tresor dóu Felibrige (pan-Occitan, including Gascon) gives entries: pamp- 27 pemp- 3 pimp- 26 pomp- 0 pump- 45 By way of comparison, Lewis & Short's Latin dictionary gives: pamp- 10 pemp- 0 pimp- 0 pomp- 12 pump- 0 These dictionaries are of very roughly comparable dimensions. A high proportion of the entries in question have a plausible affective component, though derivatives of POMPA 'show, display' account for most of the Latin pomp- words, while in Occitan/Gascon a good proportion of the pump- words are contain the sense 'pump'. If I get time I'll pursue the question whether any of the specific Lapurdian words Larry cites have plausible Occitan cognates. Max ______________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences University of Sussex Falmer BRIGHTON BN1 9QH, G.B. Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975 Fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 Email: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk ______________________________________________________________ From sonno3 at hotmail.com Fri Jan 28 21:40:54 2000 From: sonno3 at hotmail.com (Christopher Gwinn) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 16:40:54 -0500 Subject: Basque Message-ID: There is indeed a Gaulish word which might have this root - Pilentum, a Latinized Gaulish word for a type of Vehicle - which should be *Pil-ont-on in Gaulish (perhaps meaning "wheeled thing"). ----- Original Message ----- From: "Hans Holm" Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2000 3:29 AM In a nutshell: What about being 'bili' a loan from Gaulish? PIE *kwel- > Cel *kwi:l- > Gaul *pi:l >!> bask. pil/bil cf PIE *penque > Cel *kwinkwe > Gaul *pimpetos (ordinal) Mit freundlichen Gr|_en Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover. From Georg at home.ivm.de Fri Jan 28 22:30:11 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 23:30:11 +0100 Subject: Good Natured Ribbing (1) [was Re: Refining early Basque criteria] In-Reply-To: <005101bf6763$990c3300$be9f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: Further discussions should move to private e-mail. I believe that the topic has moved beyond interest for this list. --rma ] >[PR] >All well and good. But if we assume --- as we need to for this argument to >cohere --- that the FIRST syllable produced by the child should be the one >which the mother assigns to herself, then "*very* early" is just not early >enough. What the language community decides to conventionalise with whatever meaning is not dependent on any absolute "first" here. >[SG] >>At this stage, the child is certainly *not* "using" "language"; it's >>babbling. >>Babbling-research has established that, in phonetic terms, the sounds >>produced >>by infants vary greatly in frequency: at the top of the list are /m/ and /b/ >>alike, with the same frequency, followed by, in this order, /p/, /d/, /h/, >>/n/, /t/, /g/, /k/, /j/, /w/, /s/, aso. (Locke, J.L.: Phonological >>Acquisition and Change, NY: AP 1983). >[PR] >Where is the glottal stop in this list? Don't know. Probably quite late. >[PR] >Frankly, you are not too bad at childish babbling yourself! (:-O) Well, I was a child, before I was a linguist, at least so I'm told. >[SG] >>This is not brushing by. The word is "linguistics" (;-). >[PR] >Excuse. The phrase is "Ralf-Stefan's understanding of the application of >linguistic principles to this problem". These expressions are coextensive. >[PR] >Just when do you believe *?ama was "conventionalized"? 6478 B.C., 13th April, late afternoon. (which is the kind of answer your question deserves, of course) As ever, St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From Georg at home.ivm.de Fri Jan 28 22:51:35 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 23:51:35 +0100 Subject: Good Natured Ribbing (2) [was Re: Refining early Basque criteria] In-Reply-To: <005801bf6764$f7475160$be9f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: Further discussions should move to private e-mail. I believe that the topic has moved beyond interest for this list. --rma ] >[SG] >>No, Pat, this is independent of what a given child utters "first" to its >>given mother. >[PR] >This is truly a Grimm explanation. *What* child babbled /ma/ first so that >its pristine syllable could be adopted by its mother as a self-designation, >and with what authority did she insist (conventionalize) the syllable so >that all subsequent mothers had to accept her choice? This is of course not an answerable question. It extends to the question what kinds of individuals must possess what kinds of powers to make other community members his speech habits ? Of course, there are no such things which could be enumerated. Language change is an invisible-hand process. Some changes do spread through the community, some don't. The notion of selectional advantage plays some role hear. Syllables like /mama/, /ama/ aso. do possess a selectional advantage in that any future mother is quite likely to be able to tell that her child is "talking" to her very early in its career as a language-user. This is not so easy with sequences like "mushroom", "gobble-dee-gook" or "Proto-Language", which uis why they rather seldom get conventionalized with any meaning resembling "mum" or "dad". What is so difficult to understand about this, that we have to go over and over the same few points again ? Or, in other words, what are you going to tell us ? That /mama/, /ama/ and stuff lth. are as conventional and arbitrary as "asparagus", "cruise missile" or "Little Rock" ? If you do think that after all, we can end this discussion rather painlessly, since I won't be able to say anything to this. >[SG] >>Language is social convention, and even if in Arkansas >>children are so linguistically gifted that they utter /tata/ or /kaka/ long >>before they manage to produce the enormously difficult nasals, their >>parents won't have the power to change the *conventionalization* of /mama/ >>= "mother" all on their own. They may well tell everyone that their child >>"said" /takata/ long before /mama/, and they may even decide that in their >>family from now on, /takata/ "means" "mother". Why not ? But it won't have >>any consequences for the speech-community on the whole, which has >>conventionalized "mummy" and the like long ago. >[PR] >I was not born in Arkansas, educated here, or have I lived most of my life >here, so gentle gibes against Arkansas and Arkansans are absolutely without >interest to me. Oh, so that's why you simply ignored this gibe, I see ;-) Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 03:01:50 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 19:01:50 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <3a.730bb6.25babc56@aol.com> Message-ID: 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: ><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. 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) >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. > 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. So, bring in axle, and metal, and horse, and so on. They cannot *all* have fortuitously involved only sounds that changed relatively late! >(And BTW how drastic are the sound changes do we see in one of the other >wheel words: > Latin, rota; Lith, ratas; OHG, rod; Ir, roth - cf. Skt, ratha?) 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. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From tj at nysol.se Sat Jan 29 11:51:42 2000 From: tj at nysol.se (tj at nysol.se) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 11:51:42 GMT Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE / archeology Message-ID: Do anyone of you know where the first archeological evidences on the use of wheels has been found? It could be interesting to compare archeological evidences on wheels and different kinds of wheels with linguistics. /Torbjvrn Jerlerup Stockholm From mclasutt at brigham.net Sat Jan 29 17:28:33 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 10:28:33 -0700 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I think I finally get what you're really trying to ask here, Steve. You want to know how we can be sure that the actual DATE of the wheel's adoption into Indo-European culture preceded the breakup of PIE as defined by the sound changes that we use to describe the different families. Is that a fair summary? What you're looking for, however, can't really be answered linguistically. Let's look at some scenarios. 1) A small community (about the size of Liechtenstein) of people discovers that this round thing solves their transportation problems (that's worded so that it could have either been borrowed or invented). They name it *kwelos. The community grows and spreads and divides into different speech areas. Over time, the sounds change and words come and go. Modern linguistic evidence consists of words for 'wheel' in most, if not all, of the subfamilies descended from that small community and the modern reflexes show the effects of the sound changes. We can't date the adoption of the wheel with linguistic evidence alone other than using the general date assumed for the proto-language since the linguistic evidence points to an adoption while the language was unified. 2) A large group of people live in several communities over an area (about the size of Estonia), but still speak the same language with only minor dialect differences. One of those communities discovers that this round thing solves their transportation problems. They name it *kwelos. The other communities see this marvelous thing during visits for weddings and festivals and take it home with them along with *kwelos as its name. Now we have the same history and evidence as above, but note that the date of adoption is later than in Scenario 1. Linguistically, however, the two are indistinguishable. 3) A very large group of people live in a widespread area (about the size of Poland) speaking languages that are borderline between separate languages and very disparate dialects. There is some mutual intelligibility in the central regions, but speakers from opposite ends of the area cannot understand one another. One of the communities discovers that this round thing solves their transportation problems. They name it *kwelos. The immediately surrounding communities see this thing relatively soon (as in Scenario 2) and since their speech is similar adopt *kwelos as the name for it. It takes a while for it to spread across the entire area, however. Some of the other groups adopt *kwelos without changing the phonetics to match their own dialect; some of the other groups use their own word for it. In this case, the modern linguistic evidence will show that the borrowing occurred after the sound changes that define the modern subgroups had already been changing the dialects into separate languages. Once again, however, linguistic evidence alone cannot supply any date other than a relative one. Note that while Scenarios 1 and 2 are different in terms of their relative dating for the adoption of the wheel, linguistic evidence alone cannot distinguish between them, and the language in Scenario 2 would, in general linguistic terms, be considered the same language as that in Scenario 1. Both would be considered Proto-Indo-European and linguists would refer to both situations as "linguistic unity" since modern evidence cannot distinguish between them. Scenario 3, however, is quite different and modern linguistic evidence would be able to identify the relative date of wheel adoption in relation to the development of the family. Now, if I understand you correctly, you are trying to find out: 1) How can linguists distinguish between Scenario 1 and Scenario 2; and 2) What are the actual dates that distinguish Scenario 2 and Scenario 3. I've already answered the first question--we can't. The answer to your second question is also--we can't. We can determine relative dating and make fair estimates of dating, but we can never give you a specific date without other evidence (such as written records before and after a change or unequivocal archeological evidence [usually just more written records]). We can also sometimes supply very circuitous dating such as, "Since Language A borrowed Word B from Language C, and since Word B shows the effects of Sound Change D in Language A, then Sound Change D must have occurred after Language A was in contact with Language B." Linguistics cannot give you dates other than relative ones in the absence of written records. Only in concert with specific types of archeological and historical evidence can linguistics give you absolute dates (I consider "within the 2nd century BCE" to be as absolute a date as linguistics can provide for any changes before about the 19th century CE). 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 Sat Jan 29 20:26:20 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 15:26:20 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: << So once again what you've said so far does not force the conclusion that the >wheel word was introduced before PIE dispersed. >> -- given the broad range, it makes it overwhelmingly probable. Linguistics is not an experimental science; it deals in probabilities, not definitives. You are, to be frank, resisting the probabilities for reasons external to linguistics. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Jan 29 20:28:44 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 15:28:44 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: 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. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Jan 29 20:54:01 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 15:54:01 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >How do you know that the SPECIFIC sound changes in the wheel word happened >at the time of dispersal? -- both the sound-changes and the dispersal are _processes_, not specific datable events. The -process- of dispersal and the -process- of sound-changes are the _same thing_, functionally. "At the time of dispersal" is meaningless. It would have to be _during_ the time of dispersal. Which is also the time when the sound-changes must, by definition, have started. That's how language-change works. As contact decreases in frequency due to distance, uniformity decreases and isogloss boundaries appear. What we can say about the _words_ (plural) for 'wheel' and the parts of the wheel and for vehicles and travel by vehicle, is that the words date to a time before the changes which characterize the daughter languages (which _define_ them) had advanced very far. Or to put it another way, they arose during a time when interdialect communication was still common and rapid. >And how do you know the wheel was not introduced in the intervening period? -- the words all have PIE roots; "round thing", "shoulder-joint", "neck". They're not loan terminology at all; they developed from parts of the original language. And the probability of _all or most_ of the subsequent languages using the _same_ roots to describe a _new_ technology is somewhere between zip and nothing. >Here's the chronology. PIE disperses. The sound changes you see in the wheel >word have not occurred yet. The wheel word is introduced to most of the >daughters. Then afterwards the sound changes occur. -- well, in that case, the dispersal can't have gone very far, can it? You're playing games with the definition of "PIE" and "dispersal" -- this is what is known as "saving the hypothesis". From sarima at friesen.net Sun Jan 30 18:14:36 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 10:14:36 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 03:57 AM 1/27/00 -0600, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > I agree that if there are regular reflexes, then the word would >have borrowed either during a period of unity OR during a period of >adjacent dialects in the same sense that Romance is ... This latter case does NOT generally result in regular reflexes. Indeed your recent examples, such as coffee, tobacco, and telephone demonstrate this. The French version and the Spanish versions of these words *do* *not* show the sound correspondences found in inherited words. This *despite* the current existence of a dialect continuum between French and Spanish. > This begs the question of how long IE languages existed as a chain >of dialects. Not at all. A late borrowing, even while there was still a chain of dialects, would fail to incorporate the regular sound changes, unless it happened so very early the dialects were barely divergent. (And the 2000 or so years from the beginning of the Neolithic to the Late Neolithic origin of the wheel and wagon is *far* too long for such to be the case). > If Romance could have persisted for roughly 2000 years as a chain >of dialects, how long could IE have remained in that state? Actually, rather less than 2000. Latin was not really established in western Europe until circa 100 or 200 AD, and Latin did not really lose its unity until sometime around 500 AD or so. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 05:45:03 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 21:45:03 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <22.1121215.25bc124d@aol.com> Message-ID: At 03:14 AM 1/23/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 1/13/00 11:25:47 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: ><<-- except that it's linguistic nonsense, which requires Celtic to remain >completely unchanged for 4000 years,>> >Where specifically do you find this? And I mean in Renfrew. What book? >What page? It is not explicit, but rather implicit in the claim that the words for things like 'wheel' were borrowed into IE *after* it spread throughout Europe - by over a thousand years! -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 06:33:07 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 22:33:07 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <42.d64405.25bec14c@aol.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_. 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. >-- languages spread over a large area develop dialects and then eventually >split into separate, related languages. This is one of the fundamentals. >And we are speaking of a time before literacy or "standard" languages, as >well. Even now, *with* those things, and TV as well, dialects develop. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From edsel at glo.be Sat Jan 29 17:05:50 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 18:05:50 +0100 Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Friday, January 28, 2000 10:28 AM >> rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: > << I don't claim any knowledge of Old Irish >> but something has to be responsible for the radically different look of >> Gaelic as compared to other IE languages > -- a "brusque restructuring" during the early medieval period. > Ancient Irish (and other Celtic languages of comparable date) are quite > conventional Indo-European languages, no 'stranger' than say, Latin. > What comes out the other end is, to be sure, very odd. [Ed Selleslagh] What is the currently accepted explanation of this 'oddity'? Could it be the substrate influence of a typically insular non-IE language or languages (e.g. 'Pictish' - whatever that may actually mean) ? All the Celtic languages with the 'modern' characteristics are in fact insular (Breton is a Brythonic import). There are indeed some weird characteristics (see e.g. Rick McCallister's mail, and the tendency toward ergativity in certain circumstances) for IE languages, and right across the Goidelic-Brythonic divide. Archaeology (e.g. megaliths, some decorative motifs,...) might indicate some cultural relationship with the Basques, a very old and eminently seafaring people (there was even a Basque-Icelandic pidgin a few centuries ago), so why not a linguistic one (with the insular non-IE-ans I mean)? Note that the same archaeological traces are found along the continental European Atlantic coast, from N. Spain to S. Scandinavia, but one may safely assume that older non-IE languages died out there long before they did in the isolation of (parts of) the British Isles. But they probably survived, be it in more or less isolated pockets, the Celtic and Roman invasions of Britain. Still very intrigued, Ed. From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Jan 29 20:48:07 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 15:48:07 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: In a message dated 1/26/00 11:19:04 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- Renfrew (in Language and Archaeology) says that the pre-Celtic IE language reached Ireland with the first farmers -- that's 4000 BCE, roughly -- and that the Celtic languages developed _in situ_ >> I wrote: <> In a message dated 1/29/00 9:48:31 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: <<-- no, it's trivial. Celtic... If it didn't spread by migration (which Renfrew denies), then it must have evolved _in situ_>> No. I really think if one permits oneself a close look, one will see that the difference between saying "an early indoeuropean language" and "Celtic" is very important here. I'm sure that the author does not want to misrepresent what Renfrew wrote. And I'm sure that a closer look will convince him that Renfrew is not making the above claim. All that Renfrew's statement 'requires' is that "an early indoeuropean language" arrive in europe 'north and west of the alps' before 4000BC. AND that the Celtic languages were - perhaps very distant - descendents of that language. ***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.*** All that is required is that some ancient and distant parent or great-great-grand parent IE language arrived in western europe in the middle-late European neolithic. (As a side-note: copper metallurgy arrives in that area very soon after.) The idea that that early indoeuropean language had to be a 'proto-Celtic' or 'Celtic' or even distinctly 'Pre-Celtic' language is simply not to be found in the text of A&L. And the addition of that idea is not I'm sure the conclusion any reader would come to with a fair reading of the text. (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.') This may create a problem in dealing with the unknowable - what linguistically occurred in the region between the arrival of "an early indoeuropean language" and what will emerge as Celtic. But it most definitely does NOT mean that Celtic arrived in western Europe in 4000BC. The gap should not be a surprise to the holder of any theory about how and where Celtic emerged - unless you hold the belief that Celtic was born full-blown out of the head of PIE. And IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO NOTE that the gap between PIE and that 'early european language' could be - under Renfrew's scenario - much shorter in time than the gap between that 'early IE language' and Celtic. Based on this, the language that arrives in western Europe at 4000BC should be much closer to PIE than to Celtic. Going further - if you compare this early indoeuropean language in western Europe to the so-called post-Anatolian 'narro w PIE' - there could be as little as 500 years difference under Renfrew's analysis. To repeat that's as little as 500 years difference between narrow PIE and the first IE language in western Europe. Attested Celtic will be a long way off. I will try to address other issues brought up in another post. But I think that the basic fairness of readers on this list will come into play here if a careful consideration of what I've just written is given a chance. Celtic does not arrive in western Europe in 4000BC under Renfrew's scenario. A distant - and perhaps very distant ancestor does. Once this is understood, I think the harshness of the counterpoints made will be alleviated. Here by the way is the pertinent quote (remembering again that A&L is 'not the Bible' and that the argument is not about something written in stone): (C. Renfrew, A&L, Cam Univ Press, p. 249): "Celtic languages are seen to emerge, by a process of differentiation or crystalization, from an undifferentiated early Indo-European language spoken in Europe north and west of the Alps, and may be preserved in certain river names.... The earliest Indo-European speakers will have reached these areas by 4000BC, although the differentiation into individual languages may have taken place very much later." Others have mentioned before often enough that the reference to "individual languages" is expressly NOT to individual Celtic languages - and there is good reason for this (Renfrew possibly also had non-Celtic languges in mind 'north of the Alps' in mind.) And so this understanding of what was written here may raise other issues. But as to the issue raised here - it should be clear that nothing in it prevents Celtic from arising with LaTene for example - or even after it. Regards, Steve Long From sarima at friesen.net Sun Jan 30 18:21:30 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 10:21:30 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 04:37 AM 1/27/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >I've looked through Renfrew and I do not find any reference to either >"Celtic" or "pre-Celtic" reaching these areas at that time. I do find him >saying the precise same thing about "an early Indoeuropean language." I >suspect the difference is critical. Actually, that is *worse*, since it requires that the various dispersed dialects that became the various Celtic languages develop the characteristic Celtic phonetic changes *in* *parallel* while spread over several thousand square miles. In other words it effectively denies the very *existence* of Celtic as a branch of IE, and requires the similarities be late. Yuck! ><their languages are quite strikingly uniform, all the way from Ireland to the >Danube Valley.>> >I can only ask here what these Celtic language sources from BCE are. Once >again I mean what specifically? Greek colonies in southern Gaul make contact with the Celtic tribes, and indeed existed mainly in order to trade with the Celts. There is also the pre-Roman incursion of Celts into Asia Minor, where they established an important kingdom (which became the Roman province of Galatia). Now it is true there are few extended texts, but there are plenty of word and name citations. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 03:09:46 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 19:09:46 -0800 Subject: NE Germanic In-Reply-To: <000501bf6518$566d7e20$17c407c6@oemcomputer> Message-ID: At 03:36 PM 1/22/00 -0500, Steve Gustafson wrote: >So, I don't think you can say that the presence vs. absence of reduplication >is something that distinguishes Gothic from NWGmc. It's rather that we have >Gothic texts before this inherited distinction got hammered. >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. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 06:02:07 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 22:02:07 -0800 Subject: NW vs. E Gmc In-Reply-To: <01JL31OJQDSI9TK4D7@LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU> Message-ID: At 01:43 PM 1/24/00 -0600, CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU wrote: >The better reason is that the defining features of East Germanic -- funny >vocalism, almost complete devoicing of final stops and fricatives, peculiar >vocabulary -- are precisely *not* shared with North Germanic, which in all >these points agrees better with West Germanic. Neither is the almost complete >elimination of grammatischer Wechsel in strong verbs, clearly a Gothic >innovation that was not extended to modal verbs. But Sean is right that the >(probable) loans prove nothing. However, all of these are retained *ancestral* features in non-Gothic, and so tell us nothing about branching sequence. As autapomorphies in Gothic, they just define Gothic, they contain no information about its relationships. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From edsel at glo.be Sun Jan 30 10:52:54 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 11:52:54 +0100 Subject: NW vs. E Gmc Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sean Crist" Sent: Friday, January 28, 2000 4:08 PM [snip] >> 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? > 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". [Ed] Wasn't the verb 'forlose'? FYI: In Du. the verb 'to lose' is still 'verliezen (verlieren in some dialects), ik verlies, ik verloor, ik heb verloren'. 'I am lost' = 'Ik ben verloren'. >Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) Ed. From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 03:16:19 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 19:16:19 -0800 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <388c4028.19433494@mail.chello.nl> Message-ID: 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. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Jan 30 15:15:31 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 15:15:31 -0000 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: Ed Said: >Forgive me my ignorance, but could you elaborate on the relationship (or not) >of this phenomenon with a similar one in Greek, at least in some positions or >cases: thermos, -te, etc.? Greek thermos < gwher... and -te < -kwe. I think you are thinking of reflexes of the labialised velars in Greek, rather than the palatalised ones being discussed in Armenian? Peter From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 03:27:25 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 19:27:25 -0800 Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter In-Reply-To: <72.114fa83.25bbf21c@aol.com> Message-ID: At 12:56 AM 1/23/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>rao.3 at osu.edu writes: ><< Wouldn't the rise of new species be a better parallel to the rise of new >>languages? Ancestral species can exist at the same time as a species >>that has split off. >-- not generally. Actually, yes, quite generally. > Eg., we and the chimps (and gorillas and bonobos) are >descended from a common ancestor, and chimps are much more _like_ that common >ancestor, but we can't be said to be descended from chimps. Not a good example, we diverged over 5 million years ago, and there have been several species in each lineage in between then and now (humans are at least five speciation steps removed from the common ancestor, and probably more). You need to look at more recent speciation events to see co-occurrence of parent and daughter species. Better examples might be found in Hawaiian fruit flies, or Sonoran butterflies, or African chiclid fish. In fact the analogy is an excellent one, since exactly the same issue of "transitive" identity makes the exact moment of speciation impossible to identify, except in special cases. With few exceptions, parental generations are always able to interbreed with their offspring. This is exactly analogous to the parent-child similarity in speech that has come up here before. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From rao.3 at osu.edu Sun Jan 30 12:44:06 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 07:44:06 -0500 Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter Message-ID: wrote >>rao.3 at osu.edu writes: >>> << Wouldn't the rise of new species be a better parallel to the rise of >>> new languages? Ancestral species can exist at the same time as a species >>> that has split off. > -- not generally. The claim says 'can'. To give on example: Polar bears are generally thought to have descended from brown bears or grizzlies. Should we set up two species for the latter, one before and one after the split, just because of the split? Homo habilis seems to have survived till about 30000 BP. So it co-existed with a lot of other species in Homo which are usually derived from H. habilis or a descendent species. > Eg., we and the chimps (and gorillas and bonobos) are descended > from a common ancestor, and chimps are much more _like_ that > common ancestor, but we can't be said to be descended from chimps. I fail to understand the logic. You cannot deny the existence of counter-examples by giving examples. BTW, it is not at all clear that chimps are more like the common ancestor. There was an article in New Scientist several years ago which pointed out similarities between Homo and the common ancestor and suggested, tongue partly in cheek, that chimps were descended from humans. [The title was something like ``When we took to the trees''. This was a cover story.] From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Jan 30 15:18:03 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 15:18:03 -0000 Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter Message-ID: On inflectional morphology being borrowed, isn't the English plural -s exactly such an example? Peter From varny at cvtci.com.ar Sat Jan 29 04:09:23 2000 From: varny at cvtci.com.ar (Vartan and Nairy Matiossian) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 01:09:23 -0300 Subject: Horses Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > Sean Crist wrote: >> A few months ago, I made a post to the list in which I stated that the PIE >> word *ekwos "horse" is not probative in the question of the PIE homeland, >> since one need not have domesticated the horse to have a word for it. >> I want to retract that post. Beekes (1995) reports that horses (wild or >> domesticated) were not found in Anatolia in the period which Renfrew >> claims for the final IE unity, and Ringe (personal communication) has >> corroborated this claim. This is an important incongruity between the >> firmly reconstructed IE vocabulary and the homeland which Renfrew posits; >> it is a strong argument against Renfrew. > But Armenian eys^ (< *ek^wos) means "donkey". Actually, it's es^ (<*ek^wos), genitive is^oy "donkey" (the s^ is phonetically "sh"). Interestingly, Hurrian eshshi and ishshiya mean "horse". It has been suggested that the name of the land of Ishuwa from Hittite times, corresponding to the Classical Sophene, in the Southwestern corner of the Armenian Highland, is related to the Indo-European word for "horse". From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Jan 29 19:05:35 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 14:05:35 EST Subject: Horses Message-ID: In a message dated 1/29/00 12:56:50 PM, alex at AN3039.spb.edu wrote: <> My understanding is that later in cuneiform the same basic character would be the symbol for horse. Am I correct? This was actually pointed out by Childe (1954). Regards, Steve Long From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Jan 29 19:28:57 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 20:28:57 +0100 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: <2000Jan28.135524@AN3039.spb.edu> Message-ID: 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). Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 06:30:00 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 22:30:00 -0800 Subject: Horses in War In-Reply-To: <65.107fb5a.25be9442@aol.com> Message-ID: At 12:53 AM 1/25/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 1/17/00 6:48:58 PM, sarima at friesen.net wrote: ><post-PIE unity in date.>> >Well, that was my original point - that PIE was apparently not being spoken >by charioteers in the 2d millenium BC Near East. Umm, I am still not sure we are in synch. To be clear: I would suspect that the earliest charioteers spoke an IE language (perhaps Proto-Indo-Iranian), but not PIE itself. >Cav". Neither mentions what I think was a major role for the chariot - >jeeping around the top brass - the guys who the court poets gave the credit >for the victory that was probably actually won by the slingers, archers and >your basic grunts. That was actually a *later* development, after it ceased to be an effective 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. >(from Tom Clancy - who also mentions cavalry's superiority to chariotry:) Only once the modern stirrup was invented. >"Cavalry has rarely been a decisive arm by itself. Well, naturally. That is why the major powers also kept infantry. >The real impetus to chariot warfare came from the introduction of the two >wheeled, light horse-drawn chariot. This was introduced from India by the >Mitanni around 1600 BC, soon adopted by Hatti and Babylon and then became >common throughout the Near East. >There are records indicating that the Egyptians were familiar with the >chariot prior to the Hyksos conquest but the chariot did not come into use in >Egypt until then... The light chariot is known even earlier from northeast of the Caspian. (Still Indo-Iranian, just not Indian). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From rao.3 at osu.edu Sun Jan 30 12:47:00 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 07:47:00 -0500 Subject: Horses and chariots. Message-ID: Steve Long (quoting Tom Clancy?) wrote: > The Egyptians used the chariot differently from the rest of the > Near East in that while they too carried a javelin, they > abandoned the spear and adopted the bow. If chariots came to Egypt from Mittani Aryans, this doesn't make sense. In India, all chariot mounted warriors used the long bow. I think that the same is implied by Avestic evidence. Anthony and Vinogradov suggest this as the reason for the switch from riding to chariotry among Indo-Iranians (to answer the question of why anybody would do so). JoatSimeon wrote: > development of ... stirrups (post-300 CE). There is an old article of Littauer in Antiquity (mid to late 60's) about the history of stirrups. The oldest known representation of stirrups is on a Scythian (something) where one mounted warrior is clearly shown with a foot in a loop hanging from the horse. This artifact was dated to 3rd c. BCE, if memory serves right. Sanchi sculptures show a rope with loops at the ends used like stirrups (this would date to about 100 BCE). From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Sat Jan 29 05:40:07 2000 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 23:40:07 -0600 Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? Message-ID: Lloyd Anderson wrote, wondering whether the Greek and Sanskrit augment (found also in Armenian) might in some sense be "cognate" with ge- found in German past participles, asks: >What is the origin of that prefix in German? >Is it just barely conceivable that it might be related to >the Sanskrit and Greek augment, >and that it began with a laryngeal? Since no one has otherwise proposes even one instance in which a laryngeal has yielded *initial* Gmc. g-, the etymology would be entirely ad hoc It has been proposed that intervocalic or preconsonantal laryngeals have been "hardened" to a velar in certain forms -- I've even accepted some such suggestions in print -- but they are far from certain, and nothing warrants extending them to initial position. >I think the functions of German and of the >Greek and Sanskrit augment, in completive contexts, >are highly similar. Hardly. Greek and Sanskrit apply the augment to the imperfect indicative, a form which is anything *but* completive. Germanic ge-/gi-/ga- once had completive meaning: Middle High German _sitzen_ 'to be sitting' contrasted with prefixed _gesitzen_ 'to sit down'. It could occur on any form of the verb. But the other prefixed verb forms also had perfective meaning; ge- was not unique in this regard. Meanwhile, the augment had purely past meaning. So Anderson's proposal fails on both phonetic and semantic grounds. >Pardon, I am not a Germanicist and have >no immediate access to something that would tell me. >Pokorny's Comparative Germanic Grammar >pp.205-206 states a relation to Latin co(m)-, >but such a hypothesis is to me much more improbable on >semantic grounds. In this view, I would assume, >the /gV-/ prefixes gradually spread from their point of >origin at the expense of other prefixes. Perfectly possible. >Was that hypothesis posited long ago for simply for >lack of anything better, or because shows up only in some >of the western Germanic languages (OHG, English, etc.)? All West Germanic languages show some form of ge-. But so does Gothic, which has ga-. Old Norse doesn't have it -- not surprising, since it doesn't have the other familiar prefixes either. Semantically, ge- matches Latin com- very well, since on nonverbal forms it (like com-) it often has collective meaning. >Or is there substantial support behind it, >such as details of the gradual stages of infiltration from Latin? There was no "infiltration from Latin"; if they are related, they are truly cognate, i.e. lineal descendants of a form existing PIE, the ancestor of both Latin and Germanic. Phonetically, this is difficult, since initially, PIE k- should yield Gmc. h-, not g-. But g can result from h < k when "Verner's Law" applied. This is also difficult, since Verner's Law did not apply to initial consonants. Or did it? The prefix be- is sometimes derived from PIE *(H)epi-, the ancestor of a common Greek prefix; the Germanic form would have b- rather than expected f- if Verner's Law applied. So at least there would be a parallel. But all of this is *very* uncertain, and it may well be true that the connection between ge- and com- is indeed for lack of any better explanation. But the laryngeal solution you proposed is significantly worse, not better. Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at memphis.edu University of Memphis From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Jan 29 11:52:22 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 12:52:22 +0100 Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: 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/. >-Also, if there were a laryngeal, it would make its presence felt in Greek >and Indo-Iranian. It's too late in the evening for me to go digging thru >my notes, but a laryngeal would affect the vowel quality in Greek, and if >I remember right, a larygeal usually comes out at *a in Indo-Iranian. >I'm not sure what happens to a word-initial larygeal before a vowel in IIr >(I do seem to remember that word-initial augment + HC- > a:C, i.e. where >the laryngeal belongs to the stem; but I'm not sure if HaC- would give aC- >or a:C-). aC- The augment might well have contained a laryngeal, indeed it must have for those who think that no PIE word started with a vowel. The usual reconstruction is *H1e- (> Greek e-). >I'm a little surprised that Don accepts the suggestion that co(m)- might >be cognate with *ga-; the claim looks weak to me. It's true that *ga- is >often used in forming calques from Latin words with co(m)-; but this >doesn't strike me as a particularly good argument that the two are >cognate. You can certainly use a word or affix in forming a calque >without the word or affix being cognate with anything in the language that >you're calquing on. The "default" development of PIE *k in Germanic is *g, unless in absolute initial (i.e. directly preceding the PGmc. accent), or when directly following the *PIE* accent. Although the preverb ga- is initial, it is always unstressed. Unstressed *ko- > ga- might be perfectly regular. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jan 29 07:05:47 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 07:05:47 -0000 Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? Message-ID: Dear Sean and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sean Crist" Sent: Friday, January 28, 2000 5:51 AM > On Tue, 25 Jan 2000 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: >> I was just recently contemplating the augment *e- which precedes >> certain completed-action verbs in Indic and in Greek, and which, I >> gather from one correspondent, is usually taken as an inheritance from >> some common stage, one of several manifestations of a close >> Greek-Vedic relationship. >> If one takes that point of view, then it implies a Greek-Indic common >> innovation compared with PIE. Is that branch on a tree supportable? >> (differs from UPenn, right?) >> If not, then must one take it as an inheritance from PIE, lost elsewhere? 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. Based on all usages, the best definition of the function of the suspected Nostratic predecessor of both, *?e-, is, in my opinion, not so much completed action but simply alteriority, i.e. a time-setting different from that of the non-prefixed main verb in the discourse. Thus, if the setting is present, *?e- could indicate a past or future setting. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Jan 30 20:07:33 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 20:07:33 -0000 Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? Message-ID: > German > ge- of past participles, and the augment. The question has been asked - sensibly - but universally rejected. Alas I don't know details, but I do know that the ge- prefix shows completeness rather than past activity (as the augment does in I-I, Armenian, and Greek). The ge- prefix is related to (or identical with) the collective ge- prefix in Gebirge, Geschwester, Gelaende etc. From memory, its histroy is well enough known for the connection with the augment to be ruled out. The Greek-Armenian- IndoIranian grouping is widely accepted. There remains a question as to whether it is highly innovating (my approach, and I am not alone) or conservative (the older approach). Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Jan 31 15:42:43 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 15:42:43 -0000 Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? Message-ID: Ed suggested: >In Greek only the sigmatic aorist has an augment (grapho - igrapsa), not the >asigmatic one Untrue, I'm afraid. Both equally have an augment, in identical situations, as far back as we can go in Greek. The failure of the augment to survive into Modern Greek in some words is a totally different kettle of bananas. Examples of athematic aorists with augment are: ebalon, elipon, ebe:n, egno:n, eidon, ephagon, and hundreds of others. Peter From stevegus at aye.net Sat Jan 29 03:33:23 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 22:33:23 -0500 Subject: Frisian Message-ID: 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. -- Sella fictili sedeo Versiculos dum facio. From edsel at glo.be Sat Jan 29 10:54:25 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 11:54:25 +0100 Subject: Frisian Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Max Dashu" Sent: Friday, January 28, 2000 3:18 AM > 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. > Max Dashu [Ed Selleslagh] 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. Ed. From tj at nysol.se Sat Jan 29 12:03:49 2000 From: tj at nysol.se (tj at nysol.se) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 12:03:49 GMT Subject: Frisian Message-ID: > 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. > Max Dashu I knowa bit of the frisian history. It seems like they lived in the area of present day Netherlands, the present day German North-sea coast when the Romans fought with them and conquered them some years before Christ. That is one of the reasons why they did not expand beyond this area, because they where a part of the Roman empire (lat: Frisii later Frisones). As far as I know they expanded a bit (up to present day Slesvig) after the Roman empire collapsed but not much. They where a country of great traders so their influence on the Danes and the Germans must have been big. /Torbjvrn Jerlerup Stockholm From jharvey at ucla.edu Sun Jan 30 08:23:26 2000 From: jharvey at ucla.edu (Jasmin Harvey) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 00:23:26 -0800 Subject: Frisian In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 06:18 PM 1/27/00 -0800, you 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. >Max Dashu Yes, it extended in its greatest range from the Weser to the Rhine along the North Sea Coast, just before Charlemagne came along. Currently most of West Frisian is in the province of Friesland, in the Netherlands, while North Frisian is along some of the west coast and islands off Denmark, and the little remains of East Frisian are around Saterland in Germany. For rather full reference, with maps, I'd refer you to Thomas Markey's 1981 _Frisian_ (Trends in Linguistics: State of the Art Reports 13), The Hague/Paris/New York: Mouton Publishers. For a briefer overview, the chapter on Frisian in Orrin Robinson's 1992 _Old English and its Closest Relatives_, Stanford: Stanford UP is pretty good. Jasmin Harvey Rolfe-Campbell GTC/ Germanic Linguistics, UCLA jharvey at ucla.edu From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Jan 29 17:01:14 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 18:01:14 +0100 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: <005101bf6669$df0f8a00$57c407c6@oemcomputer> Message-ID: "Steve Gustafson" wrote: >Hasn't Frisian also generalised a plural in -ar or -er, which also >corresponds with what Norwegian and Swedish (and formerly Danish) did? Frisian (at least as spoken in the Netherlands) has no plurals in -r- at all, not even in cases where Dutch still has -eren. The Frisian plural ends in either -en or -s, with a few irregular cases of -ens and zero (ko, pl. kij "cow(s)", skiep "sheep", bern "child(ren)"). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 06:40:26 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 22:40:26 -0800 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <8e.624d74.25bec5f5@aol.com> Message-ID: 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 From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Jan 29 09:28:55 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 10:28:55 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <200001281400.p121@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: >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). 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. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Sat Jan 29 09:54:42 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 11:54:42 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <200001281400.p121@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: On Fri, 28 Jan 2000, Hans Holm wrote: > 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 ! Of course P-U *weti 'water' and P-IE *wed- might be of common origin. It is impossible to prove that they are -not-. But then again, in etymology it is pretty much impossible to prove -anything-, when it comes to prehistoric times. The question is rather: which is more likely, a semantically and phonologically flawless loan etymology, or a Proto-Indo-Uralic or Proto-Nostratic guess? Besides, even if Proto-U *weti is not an IE loan, this of course has no implication on the other loan etymologies. > I do not know a single linguist who would confirm that a word like 'water' > could be object to borrowing! Consider this: in the classical Helsinki slang of Finnish, 'water' was not vesi (as in standard Finnish), but voda (borrowed from Russian). Now this was of course only a social dialect, but it is nevertheless a speech form where the word for 'water' was replaced with a loan word. I would also like to know what makes 'water' so different from other basic vocabulary (mother, man, moon, food, meat, neck, tooth etc.) that it can absolutely -not- be borrowed (the examples in brackets can be borrowed and they have been). Note that I never said that borrowing a word for 'water' would be common or likely; nevertheless, I can't see why it would be impossible. - Ante Aikio From colkitto at sprint.ca Sat Jan 29 18:49:30 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 13:49:30 -0500 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] > 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! Myself, for starters. I will take the liberty of quoting myself: "It should always be borne in mind that linguistically unsophisticated native speakers are unable to distinguish borrowings from native words. In many instances words may have been borrowed and then, at some later stage, after they had become properly established in the language and thus indistinguishable from native words to native speakers, undergone a semantic shift and replaced original native terms for, e.g., "hand", "head", etc; cf. Russian ruka (probably an original borrowing from Baltic, see, e.g., Bernštejn 1961:92; Klimas 1970:265), and German Kopf, an original borrowing from Latin; neither of those forms would have been borrowed in their respective meanings of "hand" or "head", but would have shifted to these meanings after being "naturalized", parallel to the development of Latin testa to French tête. The arguments put forward by Bernštejn and Klimas are interesting: the Baltic form (Lithuanian rankà, Latvian roka) can be etymologized on the basis of Baltic forms ("the gatherer" < Lithuanian riñkti; renkù "gather") while Common Slavic *roka is isolated within Slavic. Bernštejn suggests that originally *roka may not have been borrowed in the meaning of "hand". While this proposal may well be correct, the implied evolution of the semantics of *roka, and the manner in which it became the Slavic word for "hand' would in any case be very complex, and, unhappily, in the absence of actual records, unrecoverable with our present state of knowledge." (Diachronica XVI) Refs. Bernštejn, Samuil B. 1961. Ocerk sravnitel'noj grammatiki slavjanskix jazykov. Moscow: Izd. "Nauka". Klimas, Antanas. 1970. "Baltic, Germanic, and Slavic". Donum Balticum ed. by Velta Ruk e- Dravin a, 263-269. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. I can't think of any actual examples where this would have happened with "water", but it seems quite plausible. Robert Orr From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Mon Jan 31 12:01:54 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 14:01:54 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 28 Jan 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Is there any lexical substrate (from an unknown source) common to > Uralic and any IE languages? e.g. between Uralic (or its branches) and > Germanic/Balto-Slavic (ot their sub-branches)? None has been found, but then again, no serious attempts to find it have been made. However, even if there is, it seems likely that it is very hard or maybe even impossible to detect it, since the substrate language could not have surviving daughters. But still, it might be worth the while to compare e.g. the corpus of Proto-Saami words without etymology (there are at least 500 of them) with e.g. the Germanic words of unknown origin. (Does anyone have or know where to find a list of these? I have compiled a list of Saamic words of unknown origin, which I'd be interested in comparing with e.g. Germanic). > What was the farther western boundary of Uralic speakers? Does it > correspond to historically known boundaries between Saami and Scandinavian, > & Estonian et al. and Baltic languages? Yes, most probably. > Or was Uralic once spoken in S. > Scandinavian and farther west along the southern Baltic? Probably not, but there are a couple of researchers who claim otherwise. However, their views have been received severe criticism from other Uralists. - Ante Aikio From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Mon Jan 31 13:26:18 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 15:26:18 +0200 Subject: PIE and Uralic In-Reply-To: <76.1547e69.25c26f48@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 27 Jan 2000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > Now I have somewhat earlier dates here for the existence of proto-Uralic > (Dolukhanov 1996) -- 10,000 - 7,000BP -- citing (Hajdu 1975). I also have it > extending all the way to the Black Sea and eastern Caucasus to the Urals. Do > you have newer data? I didn't have a chance to get a copy of Hajdu 1975 now, so I'll possibly get back on this (as well as some other comments/questions in yor mail) later in more detail. However, the area from Volga to Urals is the most common view these days, at least among Finnish researchers. I'm interested in finding out on what basis Hajdu assumes that the PU homeland reached south to the Black Sea and Caucasus - I have seen no evidence that would support such a view. As for dates, 7000BP is a sensible estimate and quite compatible with my "4000BC or earlier", while 10000BP seems -very- early. (I wrote:) > < which actually seem to derive from "early daughter languages" which still had > laryngals (see my previous mail to the list). The example words I put forward > in my first mail must be older loans, since they go back to proto-U.>> (Steve Long replied:) > How you identify the difference between PIE and the IE daughters in this > region - I think - would be interesting. The specific attributes of > daughters in that region might be of value to IEists, especially if they > retain laryngals. I am not sure what IE daughter language is supposed to > have been spoken in the Ukraine at such an early time. ("Ukraine" seems to be a misunderstanding - the loans I originally referred to appear only in the Baltic Sea / Scandinavia area, i.e. Finnic and Saamic, and were probably adopted from the Indo-European battle axe culture in that region around 3000-2000BC.) 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-tó- (> Germ. *radha- 'row etc.') 2) Finn. lehti 'leaf' (< *leSti) < PIE / Pre-Germ. *bhlH-tó- (> Germ. *bladha- id.) 3) Finn. rohto 'herb, medical plant' (< *roSto) < PIE / Pre-Germ. *ghróH-to- (> Germ. *gro:tha- 'herb, plant etc.') 4) Finn. puhdas 'clean' (< *puStas) < PIE *puH-to-s (> Old Indic pu:táh id.) 5) Finn. tahdas 'dough' (< *taStas) < PIE *taH-i-s-to-s (> Cymric toes, Russian testo id.) (Pre-Finnic *taStas instead of *taSistas because the latter was excluded on phonotactic grounds.) We have thus two chronologically distinct layers of IE loans in Uralic that show different laryngal reflexes. With a bit more speculative approach on the data, it seems possible to add a third layer (pre-Uralic). The loans that on distributional criteria seem to be the oldest ones show two kinds of substitutives fro IE *H in word-initial and postconsonantal position: PU *k on the hand and zero on the other (e.g. PIE *Hokw- 'see' > PU *koki- and PIE *kwelH- > PU *kulki-, but PIE *Hag´- 'drive' > PU *aja- and PIE *pelH- 'frightening etc.' > PU *peli-). It is hardly a coincidence that PU *x can be reconstructed only for preconsonantal and intervocalic position, but it seems to have been phonotactically excluded from postconsonatal position and word initium. Thus, it seems possible that these are pre-Uralic loans where PIE *H actually was substituted with Pre-U *x, and subsequently a sound change *x > zero in the aforementioned postions took place in PU. If this is the case, we have at least the following Pre-Uralic loans: 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 *Hag´- PU *käliw- 'brother/sister-in-law' (-w- is a suffix) < Pre-U ?*kälxiw- < PIE *ghlHi- When the change *x > zero had already happened, PU had to substitute PIE *H in these positions otherwise and thus we have e.g. PIE *kwelH- > PU *kulki- (and not ?*kulxi- > *kuli-). The above reconstructions are of course tentative, and no doubt other possible explanations for the correspondence IE *H = U zero exist, too. However, it seems at least possible that there were not only PIE loans in PU, but also (Pre-)IE loans in Pre-U. (Steve Long wrote:) > The vocabulary you mention is both quite basic (it would be at 4000+BC) and I > believe you said quite extensive - I forget, hundreds of words? Consider > that the retained presence of hundreds of basic cognates from PIE in a > language that was attested when? - well, for 6000+ years would probably > entitle Uralic to a special place on the Swadesh chart - possibly better than > some IE languages. There are not hundreds of them. The reconstructed PU vocabulary amounts to only approximately 300-350 items, and among these there there are 35-50 PIE loans (the number depending on how critically one views the etymologies, 35 reflecting a very critical attitude). (I wrote:) > < obviously dealing with loaning here. The loan explanation has more > explanatory power.... This is not the case if one assumes common genetic > origin: it is not possible to demonstrate regular sound correspondences > between the items.>> (Steve Long replied:) > Okay, so please follow me here. If p-U and PIE are both at their place of > origin "4000BC or before" one just north or south of the other - one would > think they would have been in some way related or there would have been > contact between the parents of these two unrelated languages - suggesting > that perhaps one was intrusive. (Can a language be intrusive in its own > homeland?) Since you find these PIE elements as definite loans happening at > a definite time - might that not suggest that PIE entered the area - or the > loans would have happened earlier - in the proto-proto-period? I can only say that on linguistic grounds, there is very little we can say about Pre-U and Pre-IE. Consequently, it is hard to identify Pre-IE loan words in Pre-U since we cannot reconstruct these languages. This creates a tempting, but possibly false picture that the IE and U groups came into contact when they still spoke their relatively uniform proto-languages. But we can't exclude the possibility that there was contact between the predecessors of the proto-languages even in very remote past - we simply cannot say, because without reconstructed pre-proto-languages the loan words may have chaged beyond our recognition. But even if we knew that there was contact between Pre-U and Pre-IE, this of course would not make it any more likely that the languages are ultimately related. (Steve Long wrote:) > As Jens mentioned in his elegantly fair message: < older than PIE; since it is apparently only lexical material, there is little > to tell us anything about the time depth of the donor forms.>> Yes; what I presented above only strengthens the Pre-IE > Pre-U loaning hypothesis. But then again, this implies that speakers of Pre-IE and Pre-U were neighbors, and subsequently also PU and PIE were. Ante Aikio From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 06:06:57 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 22:06:57 -0800 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) In-Reply-To: <200001241129.p65346@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: At 09:29 AM 1/24/00 +0000, Hans Holm wrote: >3) Of cause migrations can be found: Nobody claims the Indo-Aryans to be > the original inhabitants of India. But there is no prove that /they/ > destroyed e.g. the culture of Mohenjo Daro. In fact there are dating factors that suggest they were *not*. The basic decline in Mohenjo Daro begins about the time that trade with Mesopotamia broke down. >SF>IE-style burials are known >.. It is still an assumption that burials are 'IE'. Such an assumption >still needs to be specified and substantiated. Overall, I think the evidence is, at least,strongly suggestive. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jan 30 05:04:38 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 00:04:38 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com writes: <> In a message dated 1/29/00 4:24:49 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> Well, I've seen recent dates- coinciding with the Balkan-Anatolian pottery group - putting the intial expansion into Europe at 6000-5500BC. From the Balkans to the Ukraine and northern and western Europe between 4000 and 3500BC. So that IE languages would effectively have been present (if not alone) across that range by 3500BC. The hypothesis does not require that those languages change slowly at all. It may suggest a larger group of intermediate and unknown descendents between PIE and the first attestation of the various IE families. And because rates of change logically vary, I'm not sure that the string of sound changes reflected in many PIE reconstructions cannot easily survive the difference between say 6000BC as a latest date and the earliest date of 4500BC (mentioned a number of times as the assumed earliest possible date used by the UPenn tree on this list.) If post-Anatolian "narrow PIE" is the measure (Hittite being generally considered a very odd IE language) then 5500-5000BC as a dispersal date becomes even less compelling. There's no requirement of course that any of the attested languages would have developed at that point or even by 3500BC. The UPenn tree (only as an example) might not even 'require' that Tocharian (the second branch-off on that tree) to break off at this point. It should be remembered that 75 years ago - even after Hittite was discovered - it was commonplace to associate the date of PIE dispersal with the arrival of the Medes, the Achaeans at Troy and of course with the "Aryan" invasions. V. Gordon Childe actually set the clock going backward by postulating a pre-2000BC. If reconstructed PIE can survive a 2500 year change in that time, it surely can handle another millenium and a half more. JoatSimeon at aol.com also wrote: <> That conclusion is not required. 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. 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. It is after all a problem IN ANY THEORY as to why Greek and Sanskrit should show a 'closer' relationship. (See Lloyd's map.) 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. (The UPenn tree (again only as an example) actually has only Tocharian and Italo-Celtic separating Greek from Hittite and I-Ir splitting off later.) <> This is a very large accusation. The range of human behavior reflected in history doesn't seem - to me at least - to prohibit Renfrew's conclusions. But perhaps this enters the ideological area that is beyond the scope of this list. <<-- in which [Renfrew's] simply wrong. What he's resistant to is the idea that linguistics can tell things about the past that archaeology cannot.>> I'm pretty sure this is not true. Renfrew actually relies on established linguistics much more than I think many archaeologists and prehistorians do. And he certainly hasn't attacked the fundamental methods or principles. He has however challenged historic linguistics to consider how a change in data (which is there whether we like it or not) affects specific theories. Such challenges I'd suggest should be seen as opportunities to expand the reach and grasp of historical linguistics. Rather than acts of unrationalized destructiveness. Regards, Steve Long From Georg at home.ivm.de Sun Jan 30 09:16:30 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 10:16:30 +0100 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) In-Reply-To: <200001281427.p123@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: >SG>the paragraph above is simply wrong. >.. Though SG is known as an expert in Tungus and Mongolian langs, not the >arguments nor our style of communication allow such a decision. I think >also of the immense impact of Mongolian on Evenki (cf Doerfer M-T, 1985) - >in this case also without a migration. True. But it is hardly the case that the Mongolian influence on Ewenki happened under the circumstances of the present distribution of these languages. In NE Buryatia, there is physical contact even today, true enough, but the large-scale M-E influence must antedate the spread of E to (most of) its present habitat (e.g. touching the Yenissey in the West). And this involves migration (on the part of the Ewenki). > And according to Heissig (in Weiers >1986) Turcic began to become the dominating lang of the Golden Horde since >1262. True again. But that's because Mongolian dominance there was only the matter of a very thin layer of Mongolian lords and officials; the bulk of the population there was never Mongolian-speaking. >Of course SG is correct that Hungarian is an *Ugric* language by relating >it to the Ob-Ugric languages. I apologize for the slipage. So do I. I just couldn't resist the temptation to imagine Romy Schneider speaking Ostyak or Vogul in one of those German post-war B-Movies ... ;-) St.G. PS: if you feel I should alter my tone or, for that matter, apologise for it, OK, I didn't mean to sound too offensive and I hope noone feels unduly under personal attack. On the other hand, is "wrong" really such an offensive term ? I have been "wrong" myself more often than I really like to admit, and welcome every correction to this effect, however ruthless. It's the refreshing air of candor I'm after, like in most of Pat Ryan's postings, to which I - much to the chagrin of our list-owner, who more than once had to remind us that we've long since strained everyone's patience beyond the limits - usually answer in the same spirit. But we're not enemies, only antagonist thinkers. Polemike: me:te:r panto:n (but not polemos). Btw.: I feel much closer to your basic line of argumentation than I made myself sound, it's only your examples I felt I had to take issue with. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 05:57:37 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 21:57:37 -0800 Subject: SV: Indo-Hittite In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 10:22 AM 1/24/00 -0500, Sean Crist wrote: >This isn't correct; in every version of the work I've seen, the team used >Hittite to represent Anatolian. It wouldn't matter, anyway; despite the >terminology, the Indo-Hittite hypothesis holds that the earliest branching >in IE was between _Anatolian_ and what became the other IE languages. Actually, I would find the result more convincing if they *had* used Luwian! (Or, even better, both Luwian and Hittite). 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. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 06:16:21 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 22:16:21 -0800 Subject: Northwest IE attributes In-Reply-To: <34.97a598.25bebe8a@aol.com> Message-ID: At 03:53 AM 1/25/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >>Not *so* unlikely, after all. Palatalizations are, so to speak, the >>garden-variety of sound-changes. >-- yes, but the same one in two adjacent groups for different reasons? This >violates explicatory parsimony. Only if no other features contradict the grouping. The way parsimony works in cladism in biology is that one uses multiple shared features, allowing for convergent development in some, if that leads to fewer *total* steps across all features. Besides, there is a *third* alternative - Sprachbund, that is cross-language phonetic influence in a cultural area. Looked at this way the change is not purely independent, even though it may happen between quite separate languages. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 06:55:31 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 22:55:31 -0800 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] At 03:26 PM 1/25/00 +0000, Larry Trask wrote: >Why "absurd"? >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. B) language differentiation acts *very* much like biological speciation, except for happening much faster. C) the 'mutual comprehensibility' definition of separate languages is almost exactly equivalent to the biological species definition as a criterion for recognizing species. 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. In other words, the two sets of phenomena are so extremely similar that it is ineffective to try and treat them very differently. [P.S. the salamander ring I mentioned is formally considered one species for taxonomic purposes]. >> The same sort of situation can, and *does* hold for languages. The West >> Romance area is a dialect continuum, with chains of locally similar >> dialects connecting all of the separate "languages" in West Romance. So, >> does one treat all of West Romance as one language? It seems silly to call >> French and Portugese the same language, does it not. Yet they are connected >> by a series of pairwise similar dialects. >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". -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From mclasutt at brigham.net Sat Jan 29 16:23:23 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 09:23:23 -0700 Subject: Making IE materials available [was Re: IE etymological dictionary] In-Reply-To: <001501bf696b$a13e6020$64b001d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: If anyone gets REALLY interested in an IE etymological data base, interested to the point of looking for funding, I've spent the last six years building just such a data base for the Numic languages of Uto-Aztecan with NSF and NEH funding. I'd be happy to share my experiences, failures, redirections, and successes over that time with whoever wants to be the project director for the PIE data base. It would make a stronger proposal to show that you've examined what has and has not worked in the past. 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: Indo-European mailing list [mailto:Indo-European at xkl.com]On Behalf > Of petegray > Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2000 1:05 PM > To: Indo-European at xkl.com > Subject: Re: Making IE materials available [was Re: IE etymological > dictionary] > I would be particularly interested in data rather than books on-line or in > CDROM. Books one can get from a book shop (ironic laughter!) but raw data > in a searchable form is much more difficult to find. > Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Jan 29 09:13:59 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 03:13:59 -0600 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? What's the time difference? Is the difference between Avestan and Old Persian as great as the chart would indicate? Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Jan 31 15:30:59 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 15:30:59 -0000 Subject: Is "satem" a gradient? Message-ID: There are two potential gradients: sibilation and merger. A sibilation gradient certainly exists, between "centum" languages showing one reflex of *k' or *k, and one of *kw (eg Latin), and an ideal "satem" language showing one reflex of *k', and one of *k or *kw (eg Indic, almost). This gradient falls entirely within the group that merge original *k and *kw, and is based on the degree to which all original *k' have maintained their palatalisation, rather than merging with the common reflex of *k and *kw (Baltic - Slavic - Iranian - Indic). Armenian and the Luwian group of Anatolian do not fit this gradient, because in these languages it is not a question of how far original *k' sibilates. Armenian sibilates all *k', keeps all *k plain, merging them with *kw before a back vowel, and differently sibilates *kw (*gw, *gwh) before an original front vowel. Because of the sibilation and the merger of most *k and *kw, it could be called a satem language which maintains the distinction of some *kw from *k by sibilation. The Luwian group sibilates *k', and, like all the Anatolian languages, maintains the difference between *k and *kw. Because *k and *kw are never merged, it could be called a centum language group which maintains the distinction of *k' from *k by sibilation. Thus on a merger gradient, we would have only Armenian - all the others show complete merger or complete separation of *k and *kw. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Jan 31 15:31:14 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 15:31:14 -0000 Subject: Is "satem" a gradient? Message-ID: Lloyd said (rightly in my opinion) > "Satem" may be defined in a number of different ways, ... > "Satem" may very well be a gradient concept, > with fuzzy edges. To my mind this is not just a matter of definitions, but a very important reflection of the actual nature of IE and the inter-relationship of IE dialects. I think this is why a tree structure for PIE or IE dialects is in some ways unhelpful - it implies distinct boundaries and divisions despite actual evidence to the contrary. The "UPenn Tree" being discussed on a separate list is a poor model for some aspects of IE study. Peter From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jan 31 16:33:04 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 16:33:04 +0000 Subject: Re Personal pronouns Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Pat Ryan writes: [LT] >> Whatever the intended meaning of "stands for" might be, a pronoun does not >> "stand for" a noun. A pronoun doesn't even belong to the category 'noun'. >> Instead, it belongs to the category 'noun phrase', and, in many cases, it >> takes its reference from another noun phrase overtly present in the >> discourse. >> Example: >> Q: "Where's the woman we're supposed to meet?" >> A: "She's over there." >> And *not*: >> * "The she we're supposed to meet is over there." >> A pronoun does *not* "stand for" a noun in any coherent sense. > [PR] > I am frankly rather surprised by your apparent uncertainty regarding the > intended meaning of "stands for". > And your example seems (no offense intended) trivial and the result of a > knee-jerk application of your method. > Your first sentence, of course, omits the relative pronoun that in a more > formal register would have been present. > "Where is the woman that we are supposed to meet?" > Though such a sentence is not commonly seen, it would be perfectly > acceptable to let "she" stand for "woman": > "Where is she that we are supposed to meet?' Sorry; not relevant. The required form is *'the she', and not merely 'she'. > It is obvious that "she" can stand for either "(the) woman" or the fuller > NP: "(the) woman (that) we are supposed to meet". Nope. That 'she' cannot take the place of 'woman', and that is the end of it. [on 'possessive'] > An interesting question for another time. Frankly, I believe that the > definition of "possessive" can be rather simply stated. Well, I'd certainly like to see your effort! ;-) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Sat Jan 29 02:28:27 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 20:28:27 -0600 Subject: Basque butterflies again (again) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] At 10:47 AM 1/25/00 +0000, Larry Trask wrote: >Roz Frank writes: [RF] >> I would note that in addition to its meaning of "butterfly", Azkue (I:173) >> lists (B) with the meaning of "daisy" ("margarita de los >> prados") while refers simultaneously to the following three >> objects: a butterfly, a daisy and a poppy. [LT] >Yes. A point I refrained from making in my earlier postings is this: a single >Basque expressive formation often has a rather startling array of quite >different senses, sometimes in a single variety, but more commonly, perhaps, >in different varieties. This is yet another characteristic which >distinguishes expressive formations, even if not entirely sharply, from >ordinary lexical items, which on the whole do not exhibit such a range of >unrelated meanings. [snip] [RF] >> In what are now non-Basque speaking zones of Navarre we find evidence for >> the prior existence in the Basque of the zone for >> (<*bitxi/pitxi(n)-gorri> from "red"). Jose Maria Iribarren (1984) >> records this expression, spelling it as and listing its >> meaning as "poppy". The compound might be glossed as "pretty little red >> thing". [snip] [LT] >But the lesson I draw is again that these formations are, in general, neither >ancient nor long-lived, nor even stable in form and meaning. [snip] >> [LT] >>> I therefore conclude that Lloyd's efforts at linking some of the Basque >>> words to words in other languages (and also to one another) are without >>> foundation. The Basque 'butterfly' words are numerous and severely >>> localized; they conform strongly to observed patterns for coining >>> expressive formations; and they can scarcely be of any antiquity. [LT] >Well, I stand by these words, and I think the point raised above by Roz >(multiple unrelated senses for individual formations) constitutes evidence in >favor of my position. 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. Stated differently, a compound expression such as 'poppy' cited above seems to me to be fully motivated by its component parts: * 'pretty, little, lively', derived from in its palatalized form, and 'red' (cf. Agud & Tovar 1991, III, 34; Azkue for derivations of from ). And you yourself stated in a previous email, if I am not mistaken, that you agreed with Ed that the origin of in compounds meaning "butterfly" could be traced back to , although in your first message you didn't mention explicitly that it was the palatalized/diminutive form of that appears to have given rise to this formation. 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.) 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). 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. 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 *. 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'. 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. 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. 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 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. 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. And in the case of <-le>, it, too, is quite common in Basque being an agentive suffix (does it have another name?), regularly used with verbal stems to refer to 'actors', e.g., from the non-finite verbal form '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. 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. Also, it is clearly related to 'to live; to be alive', 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. 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>. In the case of , the final /i/ is lost in the compound. 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. That means a non-finite verb in produced a free-standing stem. I mention this since Larry has argued that this never happens, 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>. 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. 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'. 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. 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? 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. However, given that 1) the old collective suffix in <-eta> gaves rise to the plural marker in oblique cases in Basque and 2) it is found as a semi-fossilezed form in toponyms, it follows that previously formations in <-eta> were more common and that consequently if *<-le-eta> was once a producive suffixing element, a formation like * could be considered to date back to Pre-Basque. It's all in how one looks at the data. 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> are subjected to rigorous analysis, the case for * must remain a highly tentative one. 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. Ondo ibili, Roz Frank From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Sat Jan 29 04:01:48 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 22:01:48 -0600 Subject: Basque Message-ID: At 12:31 PM 1/26/00 +0100, you wrote: >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Larry Trask" >Sent: Monday, January 24, 2000 12:51 PM >> Roz Frank writes: >>> (*?)"knot", whose meaning is not always entirely >>> clear. >> As explained above, the first two of these are transparent and regular. The >> third is obscure: very likely it does contain *, but its first element >> is opaque. >[Ed] >What about *gorda-bil, where the first element could be a Romance loan (< >corde, cuerda), i.e. coiled up rope? That would require or at least be more convincing if the word * was attested in Basque while is, cf. Spanish 'rope'. Actually does exist in Basque but it is used to mean "to keep, preserve; save' and would appear to be nothing more than a borrowing based on Message-ID: In a message dated 1/28/00 2:09:09 PM, edsel at glo.be wrote: << Roz Frank writes: (*?)"knot" <> Taking it a little further back - Greek - corde (F. 'rope') is nearly always explained as < chordam, chorde (Gr.) gut, dried gut as in 'catgut', string, (cf sausage) PLUS ( L-S): -ileos [or eileos] - intestinal obstruction -eile^don (eile^)/ile^don - by twisting or coiling round -eilo^ - shut in, prevented from flowing away AND: - sumpileo^ - force together [like felt]: of the intestines, to be obstructed SEE ALSO: -pileo^ - compress wool, make it into felt; generally, compress, close up, tighten -pile^sis - compression of wool, felt; generally, compression, contraction by cold -pile^ma - compressed wool or hair; generally compression, balled up *gorda-bil = (chorde^ + (p)ile^)? - blocked, closed up, compressed, tightened gut or string = knot? (cf. the knots at the ends of a sausage) perhaps -bil- has Greek relatives? Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Jan 30 14:08:09 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 14:08:09 +0000 Subject: Basque Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Miguel Carrasquer Vidal writes: [LT] >> 'cartwheel', 'wheel' >> This is from 'cart' + *. The phonology is absolutely regular: >> * --> * --> * --> * -> . >> 'small round bread roll or pastry' >> This is from 'bread', and again the phonology is perfect: >> * --> * --> * --> * --> . > 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/. > Of course, -b(i) [?], -d(i), -g(i) compounded before initial > vowel give -t, which then becomes harder to explain. Maybe an > initial vowel was formerly preceded by a glottal stop in Basque > (which isn't the case now), and we might suppose that the fortis > variant of /?/ became /t/: > begi + *?ile > beg?ile > be??ile > betile > ardi + *?ile > ard?ile > ar??ile > artile. But the analysis endorsed above generalizes neatly to handle such cases, without the positing of any hypothetical sounds. >> 'fist' >> This is from the archaic 'forearm', recorded in Oihenart in the 17th >> century, and again the phonology is perfect: >> * --> > (In old compounds -i and (usually) -u are dropped, while -a/-o/-e > become -a-). I wonder about the motivation for that last change. > Could it have gone through a stage */@/ (schwa), which later > became Basque /a/? So, in this case: uko [*uggo] + bil > uk at bil > ukabil. Precisely this reduction to schwa, followed by the change of svchwa to /a/, has been cautiously posited. But we have no evidence. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Jan 30 14:22:39 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 14:22:39 +0000 Subject: Basque Message-ID: Hans Holm writes: > What about being 'bili' a loan from Gaulish? > PIE *kwel- > Cel *kwi:l- > Gaul *pi:l >!> bask. pil/bil > cf PIE *penque > Cel *kwinkwe > Gaul *pimpetos (ordinal) First, no such item as * exists in Basque. Second, Basque * 'round' is always *, and never *, a form which would have been impossible in Pre-Basque. In compounds like 'cartwheel', the /p/ is strictly secondary, resulting from a well-understood internal Basque process of word-formation. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Mon Jan 31 06:50:58 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 00:50:58 -0600 Subject: Basque Message-ID: At 04:40 PM 1/28/00 -0500, Christopher Gwinn wrote: >There is indeed a Gaulish word which might have this root - Pilentum, a >Latinized Gaulish word for a type of Vehicle - which should be *Pil-ont-on >in Gaulish (perhaps meaning "wheeled thing"). >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Hans Holm" >Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2000 3:29 AM >In a nutshell: >What about being 'bili' a loan from Gaulish? > PIE *kwel- > Cel *kwi:l- > Gaul *pi:l >!> bask. pil/bil > cf PIE *penque > Cel *kwinkwe > Gaul *pimpetos (ordinal) >Mit freundlichen Gr|_en >Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover. In constructing an argument that would derive the Basque item as a loan from Gaulish one should keep in mind the following set of facts: the structure of the verb demonstrates that it belongs to a class of verbs with a prefix in /i-/ or /e-/ (cf. Trask 1995). These are considered to be "ancient Basque verbs" where a prefix appears in all non-finite forms, highly unusual in a suffixing language such as Basque. Furthermore, is a Class I or <-i> class verb which takes the suffix <-i>. There are several hundred Class I verbs in Basque, although certainly not all of them have the prefixing element in (or * as proposed by Michelena 1997). As Larry has noted in his detailed and thoughtful study of these non-finite forms, the function of the prefix * has never been established, although its antiquity in the language is evident. In my own discussions with Larry on the IE list, I have taken the position that <-bil->, the radical of , was utilized in (*ibildu> and that <-bil> in compounds such as is related to the same verbal stem. However, because is a Class I verb, it's radical is contained in the verb itself and as Larry has rightfully pointed out, we have no evidence for free-standing parent-stems that then go on to become the radicals of Class I verbs. It simply doesn't happen. What can occur, however, is for the radical to break free of the non-finite form and then become available for reprocessing as a member of Class III non-finite forms through the utilization of the suffixing element <-tu>. This appears to be what happened in the case of where the radical from the non-finite form , a Class I ( class) verb became the root-stem/radical of the new verb form. After undergoing palatalization became and that palatalized version of the Class I radical was reprocessed as the stem of a Class III verb, i.e., , also recorded as . 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. 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. In my own case, my knowledge of IE linguistics is limited so I'd rather provide the data on Basque, to the best of my ability, and let the rest of you figure out how it ought to be interpreted. Best regards, Roz Frank From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jan 31 16:04:05 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 16:04:05 +0000 Subject: Basque * 'round' Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Ed Selleslagh writes: [on my observation that * 'round' cannot be present in 'be in motion'] > I learned it (i.e. "go around") from you, maybe two years or so ago, on the > Basque-l list. Ah, mea culpa. I may well have used this gloss, unfortunately, but I meant it in the sense of 'go about', 'go here and there'. > In that case I don't understand your statement of a few years ago. Have you > changed your opinion? (which I would readily accept). No; it just means I'm correcting a thoughtless and misleading gloss. My apologies for misleading you. [on * 'round' and the verb <-- *] > Do we really know the kind of root *bil originally was? Yes. The one in is demonstrably verbal. But the one meaning 'round' is equally demonstrably non-verbal. The second occurs as the final element in compounds. No verbal root ever occurs bare inside a compound. And even a verbal stem ( in our case) can only occur as the first element in word-formation, not as the final element. Hence the <-bil> of , , , and so on cannot be verbal. [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'. 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. 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. [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? 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? [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. > Quite a few Iberian toponyms could just as well be Basque (Oriola, Looks vaguely Basque, but what would the Basque etymology be? > 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? > 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/. > 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/. > 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? [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. 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 *. [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. > 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? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jan 31 16:25:02 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 16:25:02 +0000 Subject: Basque Message-ID: 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? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Mon Jan 31 08:34:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 08:34:00 GMT Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: SL>Isoglosses apply to maps. SL>BEFORE a tree is drawn, because there is no way to portray these SL>variables in a SINGLE tree. .. in fact there has been /one/ attempt to combine isoglosses with trees: FCSouthworth in Language 40:557ff. Mit freundlichen Grüszen Hans J Holm From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Mon Jan 31 08:00:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 08:00:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: A>Persian took the word {wa} = and" from Arabic. .. and Turcic seems to have done so, too; but without some more arguments this is speculation in the moment. And these are not just "any" words but belonging to the language of very long lasting islamic regimes. I think, as a reason for borrowing, a "homophone load" alone will not do. Mit freundlichen Grüszen Hans J Holm - - et monere et moneri - - From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Mon Jan 31 16:07:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 16:07:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] AA>There is a misunderstanding here. We are -not- dealing .. who is 'we'? AA>precisely - AA>radically AA>has already been found out AA>all of them have failed AA>this has not been succesful .. ? aha... Besides: There are some more arguments required to "prove" borrowing. (See Anttila e.g. 89 for details). E.g. it is much more likely for a cultural concept like 'wheel' to be borrowed - as opposed to 'water', isn't it? AA>Of course, it is impossible to -prove- (...) that the lexical similarities AA>are not due to common genetic origin. But then, it is impossible to AA>disprove -any- proposed genetic relationship. .. 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'. AA>Because of this, the task of proving belongs to those who propose a AA>genetic relationship, and this has not been succesful for proto-Indo- AA>Uralic or Nostratic. .. you know everything about that to be so sure? AA>these contain at least 30 proto-IE loans, I'd say that chance AA>correspondence is ruled out .. 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". or see e.g. LCampbell in Diachronica VII-2/1990:174. There are indeed some serious attempts. Mit freundlichen Grüszen Hans J Holm - - et monere et moneri - - From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Mon Jan 31 06:38:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 06:38:00 GMT Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? Message-ID: SC>the tree computed by Ringe, Warnow and Taylor is as follows: ..How can we discuss a Hypothesis that never has been completely published? Until now I have read three articles on the 'Ringe-Warnow-Taylor-Tree': - 1996 Warnow/Ringe/Taylor: "Reconstructing the evolutionary history of natural languages" in Procds 7th annual AMC-SIAM Symp discr. algorithms, ch.36; - 1997 Warnow: "Mathematical approaches to comparative linguistics" in PNAS 94:6585-90; - 1997 Bonet/Phillips/Warnow/Yooseph: "Inferring Evolutionary Trees from Polymorphic Characters, and an Analysis of the Indo-European Family of Languages" in DIMACS 37:43-55. - the html-page as abridged form. Compared with e.g. Dyen/Kruskal/Black 1992 or even Krishnamurti/Moses/ Danforth 1983 the 'UPenn-tree' is not as completely documented as to be comprehensible. *I* am not able to trace the decisions leading to /this/ mystery tree in detail. Perhaps can anyone help me. Warnow, Ringe did not. Mit freundlichen Grüßen Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover Tel=FAX x39-511-9585714. From Georg at home.ivm.de Tue Jan 4 22:33:34 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 23:33:34 +0100 Subject: Erich Neu In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I just received the sad news that Erich Neu, Professor of Indo-European Linguistics and Hittitology at Bochum university, for most of us the finest connoisseur of things Anatolian, passed away on 31st Dec 1999. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jan 11 12:17:05 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 12:17:05 +0000 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Ed Selleslagh writes: I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with most of what Ed has written here. > After my first response on Dec. 18, 1999, I have been thinking about the PIE > root *kwekwlo- (and *rotH-) in a wider context, in particular about its > possible presence in Basque. It is almost certain that the Basques, who had > been living in virtual isolation throughout the last Ice Age, Maybe a little rash? The Basque language was certainly in place before the Romans arrived in the first century BC, and very probably before the Celts arrived in the first millennium BC. But anything before that is sheer speculation: there is no evidence. > learned about the > wheel from IE peoples or their otherwise spreading culture, since the terrain > of the Pyrenean peoples offered little incentive for inventing the wheel, as > opposed to steppe peoples who had to travel long distances over essentially > flat terrain. Maybe, but what evidence is there? There is no evidence for IE speech near the Basque Country before the first millennium BC. But I confess I simply don't know how early the wheel is attested there. > In Basque, there is a root *bil that has a meaning of 'round'. Correct. Though our reconstructed * is nowhere recorded as an independent word, its presence in a number of transparent formations makes its former reality certain. > It appears in compounds like 'ibili' ('walk', originally: 'go around') No; I can't agree. First of all, the verb does not mean 'walk', though it is often so glossed, for want of a better equivalent. It is a verb of undirected motion, and the best English gloss I can offer is 'be in motion'. And no such sense as 'go around' is attested or reconstructible. Perhaps I should explain that Basque, like its Romance neighbors, is a language in which verbs of motion incorporate path but not manner. English is just the opposite. English is full of motion verbs expressing manner, such as 'walk', 'run', 'sidle', 'trot', 'swim', 'fly', 'drive', 'ride', 'limp', 'scramble', 'toddle', 'stagger', 'sail', 'float', 'crawl' and 'creep'. But path is not incorporated into native verbs, and particles like 'up', 'down', 'in', 'out', 'across' and 'through' must be added to express this: 'ride out', 'go in', 'walk across', 'run down', and so on. (Formal registers of English of course have the other type of verb, like 'enter', 'exit', 'ascend', 'descend' and 'traverse', but these are borrowed from French or Latin, in which they are normal.) But Basque is full of verbs like 'go up', 'go down', 'go in', 'go out', and the like. And manner must be expressed by adding an adverbial, such as 'on foot', 'on horseback', 'swimming', 'toddling', 'by car', 'by train', 'on wing', 'on all fours', and so on: there are lots of these. Unlike its Romance neighbors, Basque has a dedicated verb of undirected motion, , used when no goal or source is stated or implied. So, for example, is 'walk', 'be walking' (with no goal), and is 'swim', 'be swimming' (with no goal). Furthermore, the verb is definitely not a compound, nor does it contain the element * 'round'. It has the normal structure for a native Basque verb. The citation form of a Basque verb is its perfective participle, and a native verb has a participle of this form: *. Here <-i> is the participial suffix, possibly identical with the ancient adjective-forming suffix <-i>, as in 'salty', from 'salt'. Removal of this suffix yields the stem of the verb, which was formerly a free form and still is in the east, where it is called the 'radical'. The prefix * is of unknown function, but it occurs in all non-finite forms of native verbs. In my 1990 paper, I argued that it was probably a nominalizer which created verbal nouns. The original (well attested) becomes modern by a well-understood phonological change, a vowel-height assimilation: e --> i / #Co __ C(C) V[+high] C V Now, it seems clear that, in early Basque, verbal roots were sharply distinguished from all other roots. A verbal root could only be verbal, and never nominal or adjectival, unless converted to a nominal or adjectival stem by the addition of a category-changing affix. There is no known case of a nominal or adjectival root appearing inside a prefixing verb (a verb taking the prefix *). Hence surely cannot contain adjectival *, and the resemblance in form is a coincidence. > and 'biribil' (a reduplicated form meaning 'round'). Agreed. > This could be a phonological adaptation of a derivation of *kwekwlo-, > especially its Germanic forms (cf. Eng. wheel, Du. wiel), or -just maybe- > one of its oldest Celtic forms (But: mod. Welsh: 'olwyn' = wheel, apparently > with metathesis), because Basque doesn't have /w/, and the closest Basque > phoneme is /b/ (a tendency that is still alive in Castilian: Washington = > Bassinton, at times even on TV! And a WC is often called 'un bater'). I am not sure what the word 'this' at the beginning is meant to refer to. But I cannot see how * can plausibly be derived from the IE word, and still less its reduplication , which itself can be accounted for within Basque. > The Basque word 'ibili' needs some further explanation. It is obviously a > compound, but of what? No; I can't agree. It is not a compound at all. It consists of one root and two affixes. > My hypothesis is as follows: *i-b(i)-bil-i, with haplology. The initial and > final i's are common features of Basque verbs. -b(i)- would be a root that > means 'walk, run' (cf. IE wad-), and -bil- '(a)round', of course. Those vowels are more than "common features": they are affixes, one of which is fully understood, the other of which is only partly understood. And this proposal strikes me as very fanciful: it is supported by no evidence at all, and it conflicts with the observation that a native Basque verb has the form *, where the root must be strictly verbal. Moreover, native verbal roots are usually monosyllabic and very commonly of the form -CVC-. > The hypothetical root *b(i) is the subject of a long running historical > controversy. It is supposedly found in words like: > bide ('way, road'), probably a compound of *bi- and the common suffix (of > 'extent') -te, meaning something like 'the physical area where one walks'. No such root as the suggested * can be defended, in my view. Moreover, <-te> is not a suffix of extent, but rather a temporal suffix indicating 'duration'. Examples: 'wartime' ( 'war'), 'famine' ( 'hunger'), 'rainy season' ( 'rain'), 'wintertime' ( 'winter'), 'drought' ( 'dry'), and many others. Finally, an original * should *not* develop into . There is no parallel for such a development. > ibi, more commonly ubi ('ford, a place where one can wade through the > water'), according to e.g. Michelena, u-bide ('water-way': u-, uh- or ug- is > the form of ur, 'water', in compounds), Correct. In Basque word-formation, a first element loses its final /r/. Hence 'water' + 'way' yields * regularly, followed by reduction to (such reductions in final elements are sporadic but frequent), and then by vowel assimilation to . In fact, the form , with assimilation but no reduction, is recorded in 1630, in the writer Etxeberri of Ziburu, so the etymology is directly confirmed. > and to Bertoldi, a compound of ibi-bide, with haplology. Far less likely, I'd say, and in fact unnecessary: why try to derive from a hypothetical *? What does this achieve? Anyway, the attested form confirms the proposal *. > The existence of a root *(i)b(i) has been posited since Hubschmidt, > because of its wide diffusion, not only in the Basque areas, but also, and > mainly in the Iberian zones. But Hubschmid was not a Vasconist, and his ideas about Basque have been widely dismissed by specialists as fanciful and unsupported. His problem was that he wanted to find Basque sources for just about every problematic word and name in the Romance-speaking area -- though, to be fair, his conclusions are somewhat more sober than I'm making them appear here. > Both explanations are not necessarily contradictory: u-ibi-bide > ubi or ibi. > A related problem is that of the Basque word for 'bridge': zubi, a compound > of zur ('wood, wooden', possibly a remote relative of a.Grk. xylon) and ubi > or bide, thus meaning either 'wooden road' or 'wooden ford'. Michelena proposed 'wood' + 'way', and I endorse this, even though this time we are not so fortunate as to find * recorded. > ibai ('river') and ibar ('river valley bottom, Sp. vega, Du. waard, polder'), > but this is very controversial. Not all of it. The word 'river' is pretty clearly a derivative of . This may look funny, but recall that a final /r/ is regularly lost in the first element in word-formation. Compare cases like 'thigh', 'groin', the second being plus a suffix of the approximate form *<-ei> or *<-i> (or quite possibly *<-egi>, in fact, but that's another story). > It would be explained via 'running [water]'. Sorry, but I can't follow this. How on earth can be assigned such a meaning? > Ibai is often thought of as the origin of Sp. vega (via ibai-ka), This etymology is popular in some Romanist circles, but I stress that it remains speculative at best. See Corominas and Pascual for some discussion. > while ibar is usually related to Iberia, the Iberians and the river Ebro, > etc. Well, I query that "usually". Modern is clearly from Latin , but the origin of this name is unknown, and Basque is an implausible place to look. The Romans used the name before they encountered the Basques, I believe. > Finally, I would not exclude the possibility of *(i)b(i) being related to IE > wad- (ua-dh-) (Eng. wade, Du. waden, Lat. vade:re), especially via the forms > ibai and/or ibar, if the initial i is a prefix, as has often been thought. But there *is no evidence* for this fanciful *<(i)b(i)>. It looks to me, I'm afraid, like nothing more than an excuse for dragging in everything under the sun containing /ib/ or /bi/ or even just /b/. As for the idea that initial /i/ is a prefix, this goes back to Schuchardt, but it has proved entirely fanciful, and it is accepted today by no specialist known to me. > All this is, of course, rather speculative, even though based upon a body of > pretty well accepted ideas. Not all of the ideas put forward above can reasonably be described as "pretty well accepted". > Anyway, it looks like the hard core of very ancient and definitely Basque > words is still shrinking after words like (h)artz (bear, Gr.arktos), gizon > (man, PIE*ghdonios) and maybe buru (head, Sl. golova) etc. have been exposed > as of IE origin - or was it simply a very ancient common substrate origin? This is far too fanciful for me, and I object to that word "exposed". Some kind of IE origin for 'bear' is considered plausible by many specialists, but no good IE source is known, and the proposal remains speculative. As for the other two, these strike me as beyond belief. Sorry to be such an old grouch, but, with comparisons like these, we can derive anything from anything. > If you don't believe Basque has any relatives, not even extinct ones, forget > what I said. My own view is that no one has ever made an even vaguely plausible case for linking Basque genetically to any other language at all, living or dead, apart from its own ancestral form Aquitanian, and that there now remain so few stones unturned that it is extremely unlikely that any link will ever be found. > If you do, Er...what? If you *do* believe that Basque has relatives? How can any reasonable person believe this, when no link has ever been demonstrated? > I hope it will stimulate you to look into this type of > problems. Something interesting might come out of it, both for Basque and for > P...PIE. Well, with respect, I think we need a lot more than very vague resemblances and entirely fanciful etymologies. We need hard evidence. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From stevegus at aye.net Tue Jan 11 12:52:34 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 07:52:34 -0500 Subject: Northwest IE attributes Message-ID: JoatSimeon writes: > But Baltic and Slavic both share dateive and instrumental case endings in > *-m- rather than in *-bh- as in all other IE languages which still have these > cases. > Exemplia, Lithuanian 'vilkams', OCS 'vulkomu', meaning 'to the wolves', but > Sanskrit 'vrkebhyah'. > This overlap indicates that after Indo-Iranian had moved far enough away to > no longer share innovations with, say, Germanic, it was still in contact with > Baltic and Slavic, and that Baltic and Slavic were still in contact with > Germanic. Not sure what it does to your hypothesis, but one of the most dependable features of Germanic languages with a dative case is, the dative plural ends in -m. 'To the wolves' in Old Norse is -ulfum-. -- Sella fictili sedeo Versiculos dum facio. From rdrews at richmond.edu Tue Jan 11 13:57:39 2000 From: rdrews at richmond.edu (Robert Drews) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 08:57:39 -0500 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <0.5891f6ba.258c6752@aol.com> Message-ID: It now seems that the wheeled vehicle was invented ca. 3500 BC (calibrated C14 dates), and spread very quickly through most of western Eurasia. See Jan Bakker, Janusz Kruk, et al., "The Earliest Evidence of Wheeled Vehicles in Europe and the Near East," pp. 778-790 in 73 (1999). The evidence extends from Uruk to Jutland. 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 rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jan 12 04:31:46 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 22:31:46 -0600 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <000b01bf4afd$d686c100$aa01703e@edsel> Message-ID: There are also similar words throughout the postulated Nostratic languages --see Larry Trask's text on Historical Linguistics. And also, it seems, in African and SE Asian languages as well. Several researchers have proposed that "wheel" was a technological word, much like "computer" today, e.g. Japanese kompyutaa [sp?]; If this is true, the concept and the word may have spread so fast that it looks like as if it were inherited from IE There also seems to be an onomatopoetic [or expressive] element to the class of words dealing with circles, spheres and balls I'd like to see some intelligent reasoned commentary on this [snip] >In Basque, there is a root *bil that has a meaning of 'round'. It appears in >compounds like 'ibili' ('walk', originally: 'go around') and 'biribil' (a >reduplicated form meaning 'round'). This could be a phonological adaptation >of a derivation of *kwekwlo-, especially its Germanic forms (cf. Eng. wheel, >Du. wiel), or -just maybe- one of its oldest Celtic forms (But: mod. Welsh: >'olwyn' = wheel, apparently with metathesis), because Basque doesn't have /w/, >and the closest Basque phoneme is /b/ (a tendency that is still alive in >Castilian: Washington = Bassinton, at times even on TV! And a WC is often >called 'un bater'). [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Jan 13 07:10:12 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 07:10:12 GMT Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <000b01bf4afd$d686c100$aa01703e@edsel> Message-ID: "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >In Basque, there is a root *bil that has a meaning of 'round'. It appears in >compounds like 'ibili' ('walk', originally: 'go around') and 'biribil' (a >reduplicated form meaning 'round'). This could be a phonological adaptation >of a derivation of *kwekwlo-, especially its Germanic forms (cf. Eng. wheel, >Du. wiel) But these forms with /i/-like vowel are very recent. The PGmc. form was something like *hwe(g)wlaz, not really similar to Basque -bil-. This apart from the geographical and chronological difficulties of Germanic-Basque contacts. >The Basque word 'ibili' needs some further explanation. It is obviously a >compound, but of what? Obviously??? The infinitive is clearly *e- (verbal noun formant) + *-bil- + *-i (adjectival suffix), the inflected forms (e.g. na-bil "I walk (around)") show nothing but the verbal root *bil (which also, and probably not by coincidence, happens to be a nominal root *bil "round"). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Jan 13 07:29:32 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 02:29:32 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 1/10/00 10:21:08 PM, sarima at friesen.net replied: <> I wrote: (In some cases, they have even been conformed after the fact to the local sound rules.) The reply: <> Remember that I offered two ways for the word for "wheel" to spread across a already existing IE diversity. The first was as a technological innovation. The second was as a preexisting word adapted to a new meaning. With regard to the way the word would have altered if it were imported with the technology - Technology can create and carry its own vocabulary, of course. (I was amazed to hear the word 'plinth' being used by a builder the other day.) "Learned words" are adapted to the phonotactics of the language but only so much - something being in English still does have some connection to . So we do in fact see at least some consistent "retrofitting" with words like 'theatre' and 'coffee/kava.' and 'telephone.' And the words for wheel in IE languages are not as consistent or wide-spread as any of these examples - which might suggest diverse origins and no original word. But there is also the "technical innovation' that is a cultural innovation. You reminded me of something Sean Crist wrote awhile ago (Fri, 30 Jul 1999 10:23:36 -0400) that struck me - <<...there are recent loan words [in Japanese] (e.g. tiishatsu "T-shirt")...>> I would love to compare T-shirt as it has been "accepted" into languages that are nearer or farther from English and see if the pattern did not approximate the kind of changes 'wheel" underwent. Also, post hoc sound changes make sense when a system is being introduced - which I have reason to think would have accompanied the wheeled vehicle and wheel-making. Such systems will give a nod to pre-existing sound differences between languages - especially when there is an awareness of the differences - as in: " For example, when British missionaries introduced the root pask- 'Easter' (from Latin pascha), the Irish changed it to casc- in order to conform to the correspondence between P-Celtic and Q-Celtic established by sound changes that had been completed centuries before (compare Thurneysen 1980: 570-72 on the phenomenon; also Schmidt 1993 on the relative dating)." Finally there is the matter of about half of IE apparently not using *kwelos/*kolos (fl. Buck) at all as the source of its word for wheel. So that the predicted sound changes extend as far as I can see only to some IE language families - particularly German and Slavic - and agreeing with Buck I don't think Greek is one of them. (And when you have at least two words for wheel you don't have strictly speaking the singularity that necessarily suggests pre-divergence unity - compare the word for 'wool' e.g., which demonstrably would be older than the word for wheel.) Which brings me back to what I think is the more convincing explanation - that diverse PIE speakers used a pre-existing word to describe the wheel. Which I'd like to address in another message. <> And I'd like to address 'horse' too. And I hope at least that I'm suggesting that the theory that PIE can be dated by such vocabulary is not entirely leakproof - even to those who have been convinced by such methods in the past. Regards, Steve Long From edsel at glo.be Wed Jan 19 18:24:49 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 19:24:49 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2000 1:17 PM > Ed Selleslagh writes: > I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with most of what Ed has written > here. >> After my first response on Dec. 18, 1999, I have been thinking about the PIE >> root *kwekwlo- (and *rotH-) in a wider context, in particular about its >> possible presence in Basque. It is almost certain that the Basques, who had >> been living in virtual isolation throughout the last Ice Age, > Maybe a little rash? The Basque language was certainly in place before the > Romans arrived in the first century BC, and very probably before the Celts > arrived in the first millennium BC. But anything before that is sheer > speculation: there is no evidence. [Ed] See H. Haarmann's article in FLV77 (1998) "Basque ethnogenesis, acculturation and the role of language contacts". He is very cautious, but the text contains serious indications for what I said. Of course no 'evidence'. >> learned about the wheel from IE peoples or their otherwise spreading >> culture, since the terrain of the Pyrenean peoples offered little incentive >> for inventing the wheel, as opposed to steppe peoples who had to travel long >> distances over essentially flat terrain. > Maybe, but what evidence is there? There is no evidence for IE speech near > the Basque Country before the first millennium BC. But I confess I simply > don't know how early the wheel is attested there. [Ed] Evidence, no, indications: yes, albeit almost exclusively cultural and in suspected substrate effects. See also above. What is much better known, is the presence of 'Basque genes' in the area, probably going back to the Upper Palaeolithic. >> In Basque, there is a root *bil that has a meaning of 'round'. > Correct. Though our reconstructed * is nowhere recorded as an > independent word, its presence in a number of transparent formations makes > its former reality certain. >> It appears in compounds like 'ibili' ('walk', originally: 'go around') > No; I can't agree. [Ed] I learned it (i.e. "go around") from you, maybe two years or so ago, on the Basque-l list. > First of all, the verb does not mean 'walk', though it is often so > glossed, for want of a better equivalent. It is a verb of undirected motion, > and the best English gloss I can offer is 'be in motion'. And no such sense > as 'go around' is attested or reconstructible. > Furthermore, the verb is definitely not a compound, nor does it > contain the element * 'round'. It has the normal structure for a native > Basque verb. [Ed] In that case I don't understand your statement of a few years ago. Have you changed your opinion? (which I would readily accept). > The citation form of a Basque verb is its perfective participle, and a native > verb has a participle of this form: *. Here <-i> is the > participial suffix, possibly identical with the ancient adjective-forming > suffix <-i>, as in 'salty', from 'salt'. > Removal of this suffix yields the stem of the verb, which was formerly a free > form and still is in the east, where it is called the 'radical'. > The prefix * is of unknown function, but it occurs in all non-finite > forms of native verbs. In my 1990 paper, I argued that it was probably a > nominalizer which created verbal nouns. > The original (well attested) becomes modern by a > well-understood phonological change, a vowel-height assimilation: > e --> i / #Co __ C(C) V[+high] C V > Now, it seems clear that, in early Basque, verbal roots were sharply > distinguished from all other roots. A verbal root could only be verbal, and > never nominal or adjectival, unless converted to a nominal or adjectival stem > by the addition of a category-changing affix. There is no known case of a > nominal or adjectival root appearing inside a prefixing verb (a verb taking > the prefix *). Hence surely cannot contain adjectival *, > and the resemblance in form is a coincidence. [Ed] Do we really know the kind of root *bil originally was? >> and 'biribil' (a reduplicated form meaning 'round'). > Agreed. >> This could be a phonological adaptation of a derivation of *kwekwlo-, >> especially its Germanic forms (cf. Eng. wheel, Du. wiel), or -just maybe- >> one of its oldest Celtic forms (But: mod. Welsh: 'olwyn' = wheel, >> apparently with metathesis), because Basque doesn't have /w/, and the >> closest Basque phoneme is /b/ (a tendency that is still alive in Castilian: >> Washington = Bassinton, at times even on TV! And a WC is often called 'un >> bater'). > I am not sure what the word 'this' at the beginning is meant to refer to. > But I cannot see how * can plausibly be derived from the IE word, and > still less its reduplication , which itself can be accounted for > within Basque. [Ed] 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-. >> The Basque word 'ibili' needs some further explanation. It is obviously a >> compound, but of what? > No; I can't agree. It is not a compound at all. It consists of one root and > two affixes. [Ed] That may be right or not: at face value it looks right, but not if it is a contraction of syllables as explained hereafter. I agree I shouldn't have said 'obviously': it was only to me. >> My hypothesis is as follows: *i-b(i)-bil-i, with haplology. The initial and >> final i's are common features of Basque verbs. -b(i)- would be a root that >> means 'walk, run' (cf. IE wad-), and -bil- '(a)round', of course. > Those vowels are more than "common features": they are affixes, one of which > is fully understood, the other of which is only partly understood. And this > proposal strikes me as very fanciful: it is supported by no evidence at all, > and it conflicts with the observation that a native Basque verb has the form > *, where the root must be strictly verbal. Moreover, native verbal > roots are usually monosyllabic and very commonly of the form -CVC-. >> The hypothetical root *b(i) is the subject of a long running historical >> controversy. It is supposedly found in words like: >> bide ('way, road'), probably a compound of *bi- and the common suffix (of >> 'extent') -te, meaning something like 'the physical area where one walks'. > No such root as the suggested * can be defended, in my view. Moreover, > <-te> is not a suffix of extent, but rather a temporal suffix indicating > 'duration'. Examples: 'wartime' ( 'war'), 'famine' > ( 'hunger'), 'rainy season' ( 'rain'), > 'wintertime' ( 'winter'), 'drought' ( 'dry'), and many > others. [Ed] It is also part of (compound) 'extent' suffixes like -ate, -arte, ...You're right if you consider -te in isolation. > Finally, an original * should *not* develop into . There is no > parallel for such a development. [Ed] Right, but not impossible for such an old term. >> ibi, more commonly ubi ('ford, a place where one can wade through the >> water'), according to e.g. Michelena, u-bide ('water-way': u-, uh- or ug- is >> the form of ur, 'water', in compounds), > Correct. In Basque word-formation, a first element loses its final /r/. > Hence 'water' + 'way' yields * regularly, followed by > reduction to (such reductions in final elements are sporadic but > frequent), and then by vowel assimilation to . In fact, the form > , with assimilation but no reduction, is recorded in 1630, in the > writer Etxeberri of Ziburu, so the etymology is directly confirmed. >> and to Bertoldi, a compound of ibi-bide, with haplology. > Far less likely, I'd say, and in fact unnecessary: why try to derive > from a hypothetical *? What does this achieve? Anyway, the > attested form confirms the proposal *. >> The existence of a root *(i)b(i) has been posited since Hubschmidt, >> because of its wide diffusion, not only in the Basque areas, but also, and >> mainly in the Iberian zones. > But Hubschmid was not a Vasconist, and his ideas about Basque have been > widely dismissed by specialists as fanciful and unsupported. His problem was > that he wanted to find Basque sources for just about every problematic word > and name in the Romance-speaking area -- though, to be fair, his conclusions > are somewhat more sober than I'm making them appear here. >> Both explanations are not necessarily contradictory: u-ibi-bide > ubi or >> ibi. A related problem is that of the Basque word for 'bridge': zubi, a >> compound of zur ('wood, wooden', possibly a remote relative of a.Grk. xylon) >> and ubi or bide, thus meaning either 'wooden road' or 'wooden ford'. > Michelena proposed 'wood' + 'way', and I endorse this, even > though this time we are not so fortunate as to find * recorded. >> ibai ('river') and ibar ('river valley bottom, Sp. vega, Du. waard, >> polder'), but this is very controversial. > Not all of it. The word 'river' is pretty clearly a derivative of > . [Ed] 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). > This may look funny, but recall that a final /r/ is regularly lost in the > first element in word-formation. Compare cases like 'thigh', > 'groin', the second being plus a suffix of the approximate form > *<-ei> or *<-i> (or quite possibly *<-egi>, in fact, but that's another > story). >> It would be explained via 'running [water]'. > Sorry, but I can't follow this. How on earth can be assigned such a > meaning? [Ed] Through the meaning of 'movement' in the hypothetical root (i)b(i). >> Ibai is often thought of as the origin of Sp. vega (via ibai-ka), > This etymology is popular in some Romanist circles, but I stress that it > remains speculative at best. See Corominas and Pascual for some discussion. >> while ibar is usually related to Iberia, the Iberians and the river Ebro, >> etc. > Well, I query that "usually". Modern is clearly from Latin , > but the origin of this name is unknown, and Basque is an implausible place to > look. The Romans used the name before they encountered the Basques, > I believe. [Ed] 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. Quite a few Iberian toponyms could just as well be Basque (Oriola, Aspe, Ibi, Tibi.....and maybe Calpe). So looking for a Basque-like etymology is not far-fetched, even though it hasn't been proven that this is admissible. 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). >> Finally, I would not exclude the possibility of *(i)b(i) being related to IE >> wad- (ua-dh-) (Eng. wade, Du. waden, Lat. vade:re), especially via the forms >> ibai and/or ibar, if the initial i is a prefix, as has often been thought. > But there *is no evidence* for this fanciful *<(i)b(i)>. It looks to me, I'm > afraid, like nothing more than an excuse for dragging in everything under the > sun containing /ib/ or /bi/ or even just /b/. [Ed] Of course: this is exploratory thinking! See below. > As for the idea that initial /i/ is a prefix, this goes back to Schuchardt, > but it has proved entirely fanciful, and it is accepted today by no > specialist known to me. >> All this is, of course, rather speculative, even though based upon a body of >> pretty well accepted ideas. > Not all of the ideas put forward above can reasonably be described as "pretty > well accepted". [Ed] Accepted by quite a few people, and often not the least. >> Anyway, it looks like the hard core of very ancient and definitely Basque >> words is still shrinking after words like (h)artz (bear, Gr.arktos), gizon >> (man, PIE*ghdonios) and maybe buru (head, Sl. golova) etc. have been exposed >> as of IE origin - or was it simply a very ancient common substrate origin? > This is far too fanciful for me, and I object to that word "exposed". > Some kind of IE origin for 'bear' is considered plausible by many > specialists, but no good IE source is known, and the proposal remains > speculative. [Ed] Grk. arktos (and related IE) looks like a pretty good candidate to me. Of course, it is possible that it is a shared substrate. > As for the other two, these strike me as beyond belief. Sorry to be such an > old grouch, but, with comparisons like these, we can derive anything from > anything. >> If you don't believe Basque has any relatives, not even extinct ones, forget >> what I said. > My own view is that no one has ever made an even vaguely plausible case for > linking Basque genetically to any other language at all, living or dead, > apart from its own ancestral form Aquitanian, and that there now remain so > few stones unturned that it is extremely unlikely that any link will ever be > found. >> If you do, > Er...what? If you *do* believe that Basque has relatives? How can any > reasonable person believe this, when no link has ever been demonstrated? [Ed] 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. >> I hope it will stimulate you to look into this type of problems. Something >> interesting might come out of it, both for Basque and for P...PIE. > Well, with respect, I think we need a lot more than very vague resemblances > and entirely fanciful etymologies. We need hard evidence. [Ed] 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. Regards, Ed. Selleslagh From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jan 12 04:39:28 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 22:39:28 -0600 Subject: Northwest IE attributes In-Reply-To: <0.16dcbdd2.258c8ec8@aol.com> Message-ID: Why the exception kravih? Is it because of the vowel or a combination of /r/ and non-palatal vowel? Is pekus exceptional because of the velar vowel? Is Balto-Slavic Satem necessarily linked to Indo-Iranian Satem? Sometimes, it almost looks as if IE has recessive genes, e.g. Romance Satem, the various p/q dichotomies, /r/ in various dialects of English, etc. ;> [ Moderator's note: The following material is quoted from a message by JoatSimeon at aol.com, with additional material by the moderator. --rma ] >>X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >>Satem is still a very good way to separate I-Ir from the western group. (I >>believe the current stance is that satem may have been adopted by >>Balto-Slavic.) >-- The Baltic and Slavic languages have undergone satemization; there's no >'may' about it. [ moderator snip ] >But both Slavic and Baltic (especially Baltic) also show some exceptions; >eg., PIE *peku, 'cattle', becomes Lithuanian 'pekus', not 'pesus'. >[ Moderator's note: > Even Indo-Iranian shows some exceptions: Cf. Skt. _kravih._ "raw meat", > Latin _cruor_ "gore, blood". > --rma ] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Wed Jan 12 16:11:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 16:11:00 GMT Subject: Northwest IE attributes Message-ID: >PIE *peku, 'cattle', /becomes/ Lithuanian 'pekus .. wouldn'd it rather be 'remained'? Mit freundlichen Gr?szen Hans J Holm __________monere et moneri______________ From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Jan 14 19:09:44 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 14:09:44 EST Subject: Northwest IE attributes Message-ID: I wrote: <> You miss my point. *IF* satem was innovated among I-Ir speakers and then only later 'adopted' by Balto-Slavic speakers, then we can still keep B-S out of the "original" satem group and in the original NW group - since satem would have been only adopted in B-S after the NW split-off. (I'm sure you are aware of the old East-West IE distinction that is now called dubious. I believe there was some controversy there at one time. :)) Sean Crist writes: <> Yes and no. Exclude only Anatolian and I-Ir. Greece is certainly northwest of Anatolia and east of the Caucasus. Consider Armenian a border territory of the NW group on the edge of Anatolian and I-Ir. Tocharian obviously the result of a radical migration needs a separate categories as do the largely unknown groups. Sean Crist writes: <> Actually I think it sort of matches the UPenn tree - with the possible exception of IIr - but maybe not. Group Two goes NW and forms the NW branch. Group Three goes east and forms the I-Ir group. And Group One stays in Anatolia. Sean Crist writes: <> I hope you see here that you have not negated an NW IE in any way here. All you are pointing to is an innovation in "I-C" that did not occur in Germanic. This does not prove they were not once one group, but only that they split at some point and innovated separately. PS - B-S could be included. I wrote: <> Sean Crist replied: <> I believe you've already said there is no published complete list and none is mentioned on the web. But I will promise not to bring the matter up again, so long as the tree is not used to "prove" anything. Regards, Steve Long From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jan 12 04:52:13 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 22:52:13 -0600 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: What is the basis of this tree in Germanic? How secure is East Germanic? Why is it not just an early form of N. Germanic? i.e. what are the points that distinguish it? Is there any merit to the idea that there was a separate branch of Germanic including Anglian, Jutish and pre-Frisian, intermediate between N & W Germanic, andf that modern English and Frisian are the result of a fusion between this and W Lowland Germanic? [snip] > PGmc > / \ > PNWGmc \ > / \ \ > WGmc NGmc EGmc [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jan 16 09:02:02 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 04:02:02 EST Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: I wrote: <> Sean Crist replied (1/11/00 1:52:22 AM): <> Well, then that raises a very interesting question. One of the criticisms that came up often when I asked some linguists to comment on the tree was that it mixed apples and oranges. And cherries. Syd Lamb wrote in a private message (repd w/permission) that lexical, phonological and morphological items "are largely independent of one another in how they are involved in change. Hence a tree constructed on purely phonological grounds, for IE or Uto-Aztecan, or any complex family, will come out quite different from one constructed on purely lexical grounds, and both will differ from one constructed on purely morphological grounds." There's no question that morphology can reflect different genetic relationships than lexical or phonological items. This is precisely what happened with Germanic in the UPenn exercise. It was pointed out in another post that "there are a great many morphological and constructional elements to be found in the earliest Indoeuropean texts that are in opposition to apparent lexical similarities and dissimilarities. One example is the accusative of specification discussed by Hahn in 'Naming Constuctions in Indoeuropean languages' ... This kind of morphology and syntax points in a very different direction than mere homonyms." It was also pointed out that the UPenn "outcome showed that their lexical choices in German were older than their morphological choices,..." so that it looks as if "the Germans got their words from Latin and Celtic first and their syntax from Slavic later." Suggesting perhaps that the "problem is trickier than it looks." Does all this reflect the possibility that an accurate and true morphological IE tree would and should look different than an accurate and true lexical IE tree? Is the process of change that complex? If that is the case, then measuring "relatedness" by mixing the two together in a lump of shared charcteristics may very well render the result inaccurate on both counts. I was also given an example that I will try to repeat related to how conservatism might affect the usable evidence of relatedness: Two IE languages - possibly in contact - accidentially retain a feature from PIE. All other IE languages lose that feature before any records exist. The researcher would be forced to conclude that this feature is a shared innovation, having NO WAY OF KNOWING of the PIE origins. He would have no way of knowing that it should go in the "lost" category for the other languages. On that basis, the two languages might have a common "character" in the UPenn analysis and show evidence of relatedness. But in fact all that is being measured is the relative conservatism of the two languages. (As far as non-borrowability of "syntactical morphology" goes, I was given the example of the overwhelming and extensive use of the original Latinism <-tion> in modern English. And the comment was that if that sort of thing showed up in two ancient languages with no recorded history to explain how it got there, "some historical linguists would probably say that it had to come from the proto-language.") Which brings me back to the point of my original post. A language borrows and innovates radically. To the point where let's say - to make the point clear to the most obtuse degree - 99% of all lexical and morphological features are not from the original parent. Sean Crist replied: <> This misses the point. The point is simply evidentiary. The radically changing language could have little or no evidence left of its genetic affilation. CRITICAL EVIDENCE OF THAT 'GENETIC' AFFILATION HAS BEEN LOST. (And whether the borrowings happened before or after the sound changes is not relevant here - the borrowings are the bulk of the language and all the evidence you have.) Saying that these attributes fall into the "lost" category on the UPenn grid just won't do. And that's simply because there is no way of knowing if they were lost or if they were ever there. Something that is "lost" looks and acts exactly like something that was never there. The UPenn tree uses some 300 features across all of IE and some 4000 years. Is it possible that the absence of some of those features in some languages is not due to recent innovations but losses in other languages? Is it possible that things that are categorized as "lost" in the UPenn grid were never there? These problems are not simple ones and the solutions mentioned in your post do not neatly answer them. The sum total of the relationships between 12 language families over 4000 years may be too complex to settle with just 300 "shared" features. Regards, Steve Long PS - Someone - I forget who - also wanted to know how the UPenn tree analysis could claim to "confirm the Indo-Hittite hypothesize" when the actual language used was Luwian. From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Jan 18 20:45:02 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 15:45:02 EST Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: [I'm using asterisks instead of brackets on Mr. Crist's quotes because this e-mailer has seemed to have gone south in honor of Y2k. Hope it doesn't make the reading too difficult.] On Nov 5, 1999, I wrote: << If - for example - a language has innovated and borrowed so wildly that it retains very little of the ancestor, it may be "more closely related" in some chronological sense. But in fact we can imagine it being far more different from the immediate ancestor than say some conservative cousin that retained the attributes common to the family.>> In a message dated 1/11/00 1:52:22 AM, Sean Crist replied: **No. The _amount_ of innovation is not the basis on which we draw Stammba"ume; we draw these trees on the basis of what is _shared_.** I think if you look closely you'll see that you cannot identify "shared" innovations if they are no longer there to identify. Putting aside for the moment the question of how much that is lost is recoverable, I think you'll agree that a language that has changed quickly and radically could have lost some or all of the evidence of "sharing" that you draw your Stammbaume with. I am simply trying to proceed one point at a time. The only issue is how you know that evidence of what was shared has not disappeared. Which is why I wrote: <> Sean Crist wrote: **The presence of loan words doesn't alter the genetic affiliation of a language.** Maybe not. (I think that may be terminological again. Since a language that is made up entirely of loan words would have no genetic affilation except the languages it loaned from.) But the real question is not genetic affilation but EVIDENCE of genetic affiliation. In dealing with prehistoric languages, we don't have God's eye on things. We can only go by the evidence we have. And a robust language exposed to new ideas and things may be too interested in change to retain the very shared attributes and innovations that you might be using to show relatedness. If this is true, it should throw up a big caution sign in terms of measuring relatedness in the context of varing rates of change among languages. If I subject a group of plants to a good does of radiation and they mutate like crazy and then compare the next generations to their unmutated relatives, I may be hard put to call them very closely related at all. Their genes are markedly different. Their phenotypes are markedly different. If I didn't know about the induced mutations, I would HAVE conclude that they were not related at all. (And in a certain respect, they are not. And, please, there is no reason to think the same sort of thing cannot happen to languages.) Sean Crist wrote: **Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor did not just "count" any old differences; what they were specifically looking for are shared characteristics which cannot reasonably be attributed to parallel innovation.** Nevertheless, Ringe, et al., are still counting. And "the shared characteristics" may not all deserve equal weight. See my prior post in this thread. Sean Crist wrote: **No, no, no. It's well known that things such as morphological categories can be independently lost; this is a very common sort of parallel innovation. Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor were well aware of this, and dealt with this problem by assigning a separate numeric code to each language in the case of such loss so that such spurious groupings would not occur.** Yes, yes, yes. Ringe, et al., did not create a separate numeric code for "was never there." And in some cases, it might be argued that what is being called "lost" in this category may "never have existed" - as the two categories often look exactly alike -evidence is absent. AND conversely things that are truly "lost" - unidentifiably so - might have altered the shared characteristic scheme showing a completely different evidence of relatedness. Sean Crist writes: **A _separate_ value is assigned for each branch to mean "lost".** Not relevant here. "Lost" logically means that the absence has been accounted for, the character was once shared and the characteristic does not negate relatedness. "Was never there" is the opposite, showing that a characteristic may never have been "shared" and shows unrelatedness. Using the "lost" value can be seen in some cases as a means of creating evidence where there is none. I also wrote: <> Sean Crist replied: **Languages can certainly develop new tense markings over their history, but the explanation you've given here is teleological. There's nothing that would suggest that languages develop more complex tense systems upon coming into contact with a technologically more sophisticated culture.** I think I will be able to challenge you on this one. I'm hoping to have some evidence of what happened to modern primitive languages when they are exposed to more complex cultures. I will pass it along when it comes. But let me point out that the highest and therefore earliest "node" on the UPenn IE tree - Anatolian - includes a language - Hittite - that lacks syntactical aspects (e,g,. gender) that arrive in lower and later "nodes" and that those new features certainly add new complexity to those languages and hide to some degree the old simplier system. Conversely, English's loss of inflection has been attributed to contact with and the need to communicate with the Danes. AND finally the evolution of Frankish to French may be direct and historical evidence of a how a language with insufficient resources needed to alter substantially to absorb a much more complex cultural situation. As far as "teleological", I'd prefer ontological. After all, it seems to make common sense that when you suddenly have a lot of new things to talk about, you are going to need lots of new ways to say them. Regards, Steve Long From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jan 12 04:58:14 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 22:58:14 -0600 Subject: PIE words for sexual organs In-Reply-To: <006a01bf491f$7a7d2960$cd9f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: Is this ultimately based on an expressive/onomatopeic form similar to the English expressive pu, pew, Spanish expressive puchi, uuf, puaf, Italian expressive puzzi, etc.? Are these expressive forms pretty universal? [snip] >*pu:to-s, I think it is relatively certain that its >basal meaning is 'source or site of strong fragrance' (as attested by >*pu:ti-, 'rot'), a concept broad enough to include both cunnus and podex >olfactorily. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jan 12 05:04:18 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 23:04:18 -0600 Subject: PIE words for sexual organs In-Reply-To: <007c01bf523b$de486de0$338f01d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: How 'bout a form ancestral to English "balls", Gaelic palla [sp?], perhaps *bhel-; or are these later developments? Gaelic palla "penis" is obviously borrowed (or expressively mutated) but the meaning is different from English I believe Theo Vennemann mentioned similar forms in Afroasiatic Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Thu Jan 13 18:54:30 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 13:54:30 -0500 Subject: PIE words for sexual organs In-Reply-To: <000401bf4b1e$5440d3e0$bf9301d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Sun, 19 Dec 1999, petegray wrote: > The overlap need not be a surprise. Even in English (at least some > dialects) this can happen. Some women of my acquaintance refer to "front > bottom" and "back bottom", as if bottom meant both vulva and anus. Another case in point: the word _fanny_ means "buttocks" in American English but "vulva" in British English. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From MPeter4165 at aol.com Thu Jan 13 01:03:48 2000 From: MPeter4165 at aol.com (MPeter4165 at aol.com) Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 20:03:48 EST Subject: responses to renfrew Message-ID: I've just finished Renfrew's Archaeology & Language and I'm interested in reading responses to it. Is any prior list discussion collected and available on the Web somewhere? Or can anyone give me a list of some responses in the literature? I don't need (or have time for) an exhaustive list; just a few high points would be fine. Thanks! Melanie S. Peterson [ Moderator's response: One major response to Renfrew is J. P. Mallory's book _In Search of the Indo- Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth_, available in paperback. The IE list archives are located at http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/indo-european.html I believe that there is a search engine available. --rma ] From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Jan 14 08:20:32 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 08:20:32 GMT Subject: Refining early Basque criteria In-Reply-To: Message-ID: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote: >Once children reach the stage at which they are beginning to have enough >control over their vocal tracts to produce speech sounds consistently, they >behave in a highly consistent fashion, as argued by Jakobson as long ago as >1941. The first vowel they learn to produce is [a] -- the easiest vowel to >produce, since it requires minimal tongue action. The first consonants they >produce are labials -- [m], [b], [p] -- presumably because these require no >tongue control. The next consonants they learn are coronals -- [n], [d], [t] >-- presumably because these require no more than the raising of the tip/blade >of the tongue. Velars, which require bending of the tongue, come later, as do >other consonants. >From limited personal observation, I'd say that within the coronals, palatals ([n^], [d^], [t^]) seem to be produced earlier or more easily than alveolars or dentals, which is somewhat unexpected given their absence or markedness in most languages. On the other hand, that would explain their frequent use in "nursery" or "affective" vocabulary. Does Jakobson or any other literature confirm this? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From thorinn at diku.dk Fri Jan 14 11:20:49 2000 From: thorinn at diku.dk (Lars Henrik Mathiesen) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 12:20:49 +0100 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria (miau) In-Reply-To: (larryt@cogs.susx.ac.uk) Message-ID: > Date: Wed, 22 Dec 1999 09:31:53 +0000 > From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) > Nor does the use of a computer in any way guarantee greater > objectivity. If I decide to reject words showing property P, then I > can do this by hand or with a computer program, and the results will > be the same. After all, the computer isn't going to inform me that > it doesn't like my criteria. Given total objectivity in the researcher, that is true. However, in many scientific communities it is recognized that most researchers will unconsciously bias their evaluation of experimental data to reject more of those instances that will not support their theory. That is the reason for the use of double-blind experimental procedures in medicine, for instance: Not so much a fear of dishonesty, but a recognition that even honest researchers cannot avoid bias. Having the researcher set the rules for acceptance of data and the computer apply them, would make it much harder to get a bias in there. Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Jan 16 07:47:33 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 07:47:33 -0000 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria Message-ID: Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ralf-Stefan Georg" Sent: Saturday, December 18, 1999 10:44 PM >> I would suggest rather that these very ancient words have been retained in a >> substantially unchanged form because of the strong emotional significance >> they have in most human societies. >> Let us assume that, for reasons I cannot fathom, children all over the world >> are *independently motivated* (by what, pray tell ???) to employ for >> 'mother'. > I don't see any difficulty here. When you do nothing, repeat nothing > specific with your vocal tract or articulatory apparatus but keep your > mouth shut and switch on your vocal cords you have /m/. If, then, you go > one step further and open your mouth for a change, guess what is the most > likely vowel to come out ? Right. It is my understanding that oral consonants are articulated by children before nasal consonants. Is this incorrect in your view? > Now, what happens next is that mothers *do* like to be addressed by their > infants as early as possible by something which could be interpreted as > something in the way of a "word". What is more natural, then, to > *conventionalize* the simplest audible syllable any infant is likely to > produce very early in its career as a language-user as precisely that: > "mother" ? To make it a bit more harder to meet this requirement for the > infant, one introduces reduplication as a further requirement, and there > you are. Of course, this doesn't *have* to happen in each and every speech > community of mankind, it is only tremendously likely. Any different > conventionalizations like Georgian /mama/ "father" or language without > bilablials or whatnot should not disturb us here. In this respect, Pat may > even be right in assuming that the first homines loquentes might have had a > conventionalized "mother"-term closely resempling /mama/ or sthlth. *But*, > the fact that it is still so wide-spread today among the world's languages > would *not* cry for the explanation that it is a *retention* from olim's > times. The very reasons outlined above make it clear that it is likely to > be *innovated* time and again in languages. So, again, we have an attractor > here, and the nursery words go out. All you have written is, of course, very plausible. But --- and there is always a but, is there not? --- this does not really address my argument, I do not think. I am *not* maintaining that *mama is the early term for 'mother' but rather *ama. Larry brushes by this difference but I am hoping you will not. While *mama may be a perfectly plausible child's word for 'mother', the frequently found form *?ama can, with an implausible level of difficulty, be derived from it. Do you not 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 proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Jan 16 08:00:30 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 08:00:30 -0000 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Larry and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Tuesday, December 21, 1999 10:45 AM > Pat Ryan writes: > [on Mama-papa words like Basque 'mother'] >> I feel that you may be mixing apples with oranges here. >> I would, myself, be quite sceptical of any claim that an imitative word like >> indicated anything more than an attempt to capture the quintessential >> acoustic impression of a cat-call. >> But, 1) there is nothing "imitative" about for 'mother'; > Agreed, but I didn't mean to say there was. The point is not that such words > are imitative; the point is that they are *motivated*. >> 2) more importantly, does not have the form we would expect from >> childish babbling, which, I hope you would agree, would be along the lines >> of C(1)V(1)C(1)V(1). > Yes; babbling is stereotypically of the form CVCV (reduplicated). But not > invariably so. No, but for your argument to be plausible, *(?)ama would have to be frequent enough to be widely accepted as a word for 'mother', is that not correct? >> I gladly concede that , , , etc. are childish attempts >> to render other words, e.g. <*?ama> and <*?atV>, etc. > Oh, no -- this is not the point at all. See below. Perhaps not your point! But it is my point. >> but there is nothing that I know which *necessitates* or universally >> *inclines* children all over the world to connect /m/ with 'motherhood' or >> /d/ or /t/ with 'paternity' --- short of some universalistic sound-symbolism >> argument, which I provisionally do not accept. > No; this is a misunderstanding. > Children do not make any such connections as those suggested at all. > The point is that nursery words are *not* invented by children: they are > invented by adults. > Once children reach the stage at which they are beginning to have enough > control over their vocal tracts to produce speech sounds consistently, they > behave in a highly consistent fashion, as argued by Jakobson as long ago as > 1941. The first vowel they learn to produce is [a] -- the easiest vowel to > produce, since it requires minimal tongue action. The first consonants they > produce are labials -- [m], [b], [p] -- presumably because these require no > tongue control. The next consonants they learn are coronals -- [n], [d], [t] > -- presumably because these require no more than the raising of the tip/blade > of the tongue. Velars, which require bending of the tongue, come later, as > do other consonants. > Accordingly, the first consistent noises the eager parents hear from the > child are things like [(m)ama], [(b)aba], [(p)apa], followed by [(t)ata], > [(d)ada], and so on. It is at this point that the delighted parents decide > that their child is trying to speak -- which is very doubtful -- and assume > happily that the little bugger is trying to say 'mother' and 'father'. The > assumption that the kid is trying to say 'mother', rather than 'tickle' or > 'telephone' or 'banana' is one made *entirely* by the parents. Jumping to > this conclusion, the happy parents begin to speak back to the child, using > what they fondly -- but wrongly -- believe to be the child's own words. In > this way, such "mama-papa words" -- as we call them -- can become > institutionalized in adult speech. This scenario is attractive but rather weak when carefully considered. Unless you are arguing that *mama almost invariably is produced *first*, and that the mother is inclined to accept the baby's *first* "word" as referring to herself, then it is equally likely that the mother will reinforce *baba or *papa as a selfg-designation --- a very rare occurrence. > So, such words recur in lots of languages as a direct consequence of the > observable universal progression of speech-sound production in infants, > coupled with the widespread tendency of parents to interpret these early > sounds as having specific meanings. That's all. Merely adding parentheses to *mama {*(m)ama} does not responsibly address the argument, IMHO. >> I would suggest rather that these very ancient words have been retained in a >> substantially unchanged form because of the strong emotional significance >> they have in most human societies. > But this is fanciful, and there exists a far simpler explanation. Just > listen to an infant producing its first speech sounds, and you have your > explanation. Nothing more elaborate is called for. I have listened to children making their first "noises" and am under the impression that oral consonants are produced before nasal ones. Is that incorrect? 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 Jan 14 06:38:27 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 06:38:27 -0000 Subject: Fwd: Re: Pre-Basque Phonology Message-ID: Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ralf-Stefan Georg" Sent: Saturday, December 18, 1999 12:05 PM [ moderator snip ] > The wine-word has for long been thought to be an originally near-eastern > Wanderwort, mainly because it is so widespread in the NE and because this > region is generally thought to be the origin of wine-cultivation. However, > there may be reasons to believe that the word is originally IE after all, > since a connection to the root *weiH- "twist around athl." seems likely (cf. > Latin vi:tis "vine", vieo: "bind", Lith. vyti, veju` "wind" etc.). The NE > words, then, would be loans from one or several IE sources (Hattic windu-, > Ar. wain, Hebr. yayin [which show a rather old intra-Semitic sound-law, > pointing to some early date of the borrowing], Georgian Gvino may evidence > the intermediate stage of the Armenian w- > g- shift, and thus point to a > loan-scenario from (pre-)Armenian to Georgian (it doesn't seem to be of > proto-language age in Kartvelian). > So, the IE > elswhere-scenario is favoured over the elsewhere > IE one by its > possibly being derived from an IE verbal root. Of course, there is room for > doubt. Well, I guess we need someone else to assert "elsewhere to IE". My view roughly parallels your own; and like you, I acknowledge the likelihood though not the certainty of that direction of movement though, of course, I would also consider the possibility of a common Nostratic derivation. "Wine", after all, seems only to be a specific use of "vine" so perhaps the region of origin for grapes is not really the bellwether, 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 Jan 14 06:41:46 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 06:41:46 -0000 Subject: Fwd: Re: Pre-Basque Phonology Message-ID: Dear Vartan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Vartan and Nairy Matiossian" Sent: Saturday, December 18, 1999 2:49 PM [ moderator snip ] > Dear Pat, > I'm not aware of any counterclaim to Illyich-Svidich. It doesn't mean > there isn't any, just I'm too far from University-Libraries to be aware > of daily developments. (For instance, I know personally Vahan Sargisian, > I have been contributing to his Armeno-Basque studies journal, "Araxes", > in Yerevan, I have several of his other articles, but I was pleasingly > surprised to hear about his latest article in Fontes Linguae Vasconum, > thanks to Ed Selleslagh). In connection to the Arm. etymology of "gini" > (wine), Guevork Djahukian --besides noting VIS-- has advanced the view > that it could be stemmed from IE *uin ("to twist, to twirl"), bearing in > mind the regularity of the Arm. root. Yes. But for the fuller exposition of the premise, see Ralf-Stefan's nice summary of the counterevidence. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Jan 14 14:27:24 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 14:27:24 +0000 Subject: Basque 'sei' Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Ed Selleslagh writes: >>> Iberian has two sibilants (and also rhotics) that might very well be the >>> same as the Basque ones, including the affricated varieties. [LT] >> Iberian certainly had two contrasting sibilants (at least), but the phonetic >> nature of the contrast is entirely unknown. Aquitanian probably had at >> least four, and perhaps six, of the things, but the Roman orthography was >> defective, and the various sibilants were not written in any very consistent >> manner. > [ES] > The nature of the contrast of the two Iberian sibilants is not entirely > unknown, as some toponyms have survived: e.g. Saitabi(a) > Xa'tiva, Very interesting. I didn't know that this etymology had been established. Has it been? > which indicates that the S must have been rather closer to Basque (apical) s > than z. Why? True, at a much later stage, a shushy sibilant in Arabic sometimes came into Castilian as [esh], developing later to jota. But on what basis can we extend this pattern centuries further back into the past? > Some Iberian words are extremely similar to some Basque words I'd be very careful here. First, it is not trivial to identify Iberian words at all. Many Iberian texts use a mark which l0oks like a word-divider, but not all do so, and not all do so consistently. For example, one Iberian text contains the following unsegmented sequence: IKBAIDESVISEBAR'TAS'ARTIDVRAGVNAN Decisions about word-boundaries in such cases are difficult and debatable. In practice, nothing much interesting can be said about Iberian words. Instead, it is the seemingly recurrent morphs which attract attention. These are presumed to represent morphemes, and some of them do indeed resemble items in Basque. However, in almost no case do we know the meaning of the Iberian item, and hence the comparisons must be strictly of forms -- not very illuminating. The few Iberian morphs to which meanings can be assigned with some confidence do not, in general, look like anything in Basque. In its phonological structure, Iberian seems to be rather similar to Basque, and hence it is perhaps not very surprising that similar sequences exist in both languages. But, when we don't know the meanings of the Iberian items, we have no right to claim that Iberian and Basque possess "extremely similar words". For example, Iberian has a recurrent element BIOS-, which looks like Basque 'heart'. But we have not the faintest idea what the Iberian item means, and there is no more reason to assign it the meaning 'heart' than there is to assign it any other meaning. Why not 'life', for example, given Greek 'life'? Finally, recall that Basque is of no more assistance in reading Iberian than is, say, Norwegian or Zulu. This must count for something. > (I know you don't accept this to be anything but coincidence), There is no reason to see anything other than coincidence when all we have is resemblances in form, with no meanings attached. > and these similarities always point to a systematic correspondance of the two > Iberian sibilants and Basque s and z. Really? This is news to me. What evidence can you adduce to support this claim? > From toponyms and other words one can deduce that Aquitanian and Iberian also > had the corresponding affricates (ts and tz). In Iberian script these are > written exactly as the non-affricated ones. In other scripts and in > Aquitanian in Latin script orthography is pretty confusing, but often > resembles later usages. The Iberian script distinguishes only two sibilants, and I know of no hard evidence that the language actually had four. The defective Roman script used for writing Aquitanian doesn't distinguish any sibilants at all very clearly, except that X or XS seems to have represented affricates, while S and SS appear to have represented fricatives. > I don't know where you found that Aquitanian may have had two additional > sibilants. This derives from the conclusion that Aquitanian represents an ancestral form of Basque, more or less identical to the Pre-Basque reconstructed from Basque-internal evidence. Modern Basque has the following sibilants: laminal , apical , and palato-alveolar . Now, one feature of our reconstruction is that only the first four could ever appear in the unmarked forms of lexical items, while were entirely confined to expressive variants -- mainly diminutives. We therefore surmise that Pre-Basque -- and hence Aquitanian -- *may* also have had these last two, even though they don't show up clearly in the written records. Now, I know of one piece of evidence suggesting that may indeed have been present in Pre-Basque and in Aquitanian. Basque has an ancient diminutive suffix <-to>, long unproductive but still present in a handful of fossilized forms, such as 'little girl', from 'girl'. As is normal with diminutive suffixes, this one long ago underwent spontaneous palatalization to <-txo>, the productive diminutive suffix today. The palatalization of to is completely regular. Now, Aquitanian appears to exhibit <-to>, for example in the female personal name NESCATO, to be identified with modern . But it also exhibits a frequent suffix written <-xo> or <-xso>, which presumably contains an affricate. For example, the Aquitanian female name ANDERE, identified with modern Basque 'lady', is seemingly related to the Aquitanian female names ANDEREXO and ANDEREXSO. We surmise that this -XO ~ -XSO may represent the modern palatalized diminutive suffix <-txo>. >>> The Castilian s and z/c (theta) are the descendants of the old Basque-type >>> distinction, I believe. [LT] >> I don't follow. Castilian /s/ simply continues Latin /s/, except that it is >> apical, whereas the Latin /s/, on the Basque evidence, was probably laminal. >> But the Castilian theta derives ultimately, in most cases, from Latin /k/ >> before a front vowel; this is thought to have become some kind of affricate >> before developing into theta (or into /s/, according to region). [ES] > In derivations from Latin this true, but in all other cases it is not. I > didn't mean that the Castilian s/z distinction is descended directly from the > Basque apical/laminal opposition, as a parallel evolution in particular > words, but that its very existence is due to a pre-existing awareness of such > a phonological distinction (it did in Iberian), something most European > languages don't have (and ditto for the rhotics). "A pre-existing awareness"? Strange wording, almost mystical. May I translate into terms more familiar to me? I presume the suggestion is that the Castilian s/z contrast derives from areal pressure, from the influence of neighboring languages that already had it. But the modern s/z contrast dates only from the 16th century -- rather late for areal influence from Iberian, I'd say, or even from Basque -- which in any case has a distinction decidedly different from the Castilian one. As for other European languages, I will remind you of Martin Joos's 1952 paper in Language, in which he argued that an apical/laminal contrast in sibilants was in the medieval period widespread in Europe. >>> What about Arabic? It certainly has various sibilants. [LT] >> Yes, but it does not have an apical/laminal contrast, and I know of no >> evidence that Arabic phonology had any effect on Castilian phonology, still >> less on Basque phonology. [ES] > As far as Castilian is concerned, I am not so sure: does any one have any > references or information on that subject? No, but I no of no evidence or argument that Arabic ever had the slightest effect upon Castilian phonology, apart from the forms of a few individual words that entered Castilian after Arabic mediation, like 'soap'. > In Basque, it is rather the opposite: e.g. kuttun < kitab, i.e. Arabic words > were adapted to Basque phonology. Yes, and this is what normally happens in borrowing. By the way, Basque ~ ~ (and other variants), which has been applied to various kinds of written things, is thought to derive from the Arabic plural 'books'. This appears to be one of the rare cases in which Basque has taken over an Arabic word without Romance mediation. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Jan 15 05:49:24 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 23:49:24 -0600 Subject: Basque 'sei' In-Reply-To: <000f01bf494c$8d87e9a0$b701703e@edsel> Message-ID: [snip] >[Ed Selleslagh] >The nature of the contrast of the two Iberian sibilants is not entirely >unknown, as some toponyms have survived: e.g. Saitabi(a) > Xa'tiva, which >indicates that the S must have been rather closer to Basque (apical) s than z. >Some Iberian words are extremely similar to some Basque words (I know you >don't accept this to be anything but coincidence), and these similarities >always point to a systematic correspondance of the two Iberian sibilants and >Basque s and z. [snip] >>Castilian /s/ simply continues Latin /s/, except that it is >>apical, whereas the Latin /s/, on the Basque evidence, was probably laminal. >>But the Castilian theta derives ultimately, in most cases, from Latin /k/ >>before a front vowel; this is thought to have become some kind of affricate >>before developing into theta (or into /s/, according to region). There were voiced and unvoiced forms affricates /_dz_/ and , [c cedilla] /c/ in Castilian, although the spelling is not always coherent In some cases, /c/ is from Arabic, e.g. >[Ed] >In derivations from Latin this true, but in all other cases it is not. I >didn't >mean that the Castilian s/z distinction is descended directly from the Basque >apical/laminal opposition, as a parallel evolution in particular words, but >that its very existence is due to a pre-existing awareness of such a >phonological distinction (it did in Iberian), something most European >languages >don't have (and ditto for the rhotics). >>> What about Arabic? It certainly has various sibilants. >>Yes, but it does not have an apical/laminal contrast, and I know of no >>evidence that Arabic phonology had any effect on Castilian phonology, still >>less on Basque phonology. It does have a relaxed/emphatic contrast [if that's the right terminology] (both voiced and unvoiced) and the emphatic /S/ does have a muffled quality that is similar in some aspects to apical /S/ On the other hand, there may have been differences in Andalusian Arabic or Arabic spoken by Berbers who settled in Spain There is a class of words in Spanish, of which Ja/tiva is one, in which > /_sh_/ > /x, h/ jabo/n "soap", is another example In grad school, these were quicked explained as "Mozarabic" forms, giving the impression that this was a phenomenon of Southern Ibero-Romance [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rdrews at richmond.edu Fri Jan 14 15:25:09 2000 From: rdrews at richmond.edu (Robert Drews) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 10:25:09 -0500 Subject: date of wheeled vehicles Message-ID: It appears now that the wheeled vehicle was invented ca. 3500 BC, and almost immediately established itself over a huge area, from Uruk to Jutland. Good article by Jan Bakker, Janusz Kruk et al., "The Earliest Evidence of Wheeled Vehicles in Europe and the Near East," in the last fascicle of Antiquity (Antiquity 73 [1999], pp. 778-790). 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 rao.3 at osu.edu Tue Jan 18 10:35:40 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 05:35:40 -0500 Subject: Wheeled Vehicles. Message-ID: I wrote: > In footnote 10 (p.105), he says ``The yoke saddle was a harness device > that seated the yoke firmly on the withers and shoulders of chariot > horses, preventing slippage of the yoke more firmly on the withers and > shoulders of chariot horses, preventing slippage of the yoke and keeping > the weight off the horses throats and chests.'' I repeated the words ``more firmly on the withers and shoulders of chariot horses, preventing slippage of the yoke'' and let it slide while editing. I apologize for the error. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jan 18 21:17:05 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 16:17:05 EST Subject: Wheeled Vehicles. Message-ID: >rao.3 at osu.edu writes: >the only evidence for this (s)he has given is quotations from the article of >Anthony and Vinogradov in Archaeology. -- "A two-wheeled vehicle with wheels some 60 cm in diameter was recovered from a Catacomb burial at Maryevka in the Ukraine, presumably of the third but possibly second millenium BCE... the chariot is well attested in the Shinasta culture southeast of the Urals. Dating from c. 2100 to 1700 BCE, this culture provides abundant evidence for chariots... The wheels have eight to twelve spokes. The vehicles, found in burials, are unequivocally associated with horses and were drawn by a paired team." -- Mallory & Adams, Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, ps. 627-8 >Secondly, the slippage of the neck bands was prevented by placing the axle >of the chariot at the back -- this is a specific feature of _Egyptian_ chariots, and was not common elsewhere. Hittite chariots, for example, used a mid-body location for the axle. Mallory & Adams' reconstruction of the Shinasta chariot shows a yoke with Y-fork additions at the front -- precisely the form of "primitive horse-collar". From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Jan 14 15:44:48 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 10:44:48 EST Subject: Hawk /siiiii/ ! Message-ID: Thanks to Larry Trask for this absolutely delightful example of how a common expression (even across mammal and bird species!) can have a motivated cause, a quite unexpected one. Quoted below. I hope all linguistics students get educated about such examples. Whenever we find some highly ubiquitous term, a wide consistency of sound-meaning link, we should be alert to the possibility of such a motivated cause, and just because we haven't found one yet, we should not assume there isn't one. However, Trask goes on to say: >To put it another way, comparative linguistics is obliged to work with >linguistic items which are arbitrary in form -- items, that is, >whose form is in no way motivated by their meaning. >Trying to work with motivated >(non-arbitrary) items is a guarantee of spurious conclusions. There is no simple dichotomy between linguistic items which are arbitrary in form, and those which are in no way motivated by their meaning. Linguistic items can be *mostly* arbitrary in form, in the sense that there is only a very weak and partial motivation for their form, which we usually see reflected by a less-than-ubiquitous distribution, and by a less-than-overwhelming similarity of form. There are intermediates. And since a *limited* but widespread distribution of a form can arise through any of three mechanisms at least: (a) motivated by the real world, arising independently (b) inherited from a common ancestor language (c) inherited in some languages, borrowed into others we cannot logically assume merely from a widespread distribution across what we *currently* take to be independent families of languages that the reason for this distribution is (a) rather than (b,c). For *kukurru*, *miaou*, *mu*, *me*, the case is a rather easy one. For many other bird names equally so (though it is not to be sneezed at that some bird names were the same in Sumerian as in the present day, there can also be historical influences at work simultaneously). For the warning cry /siiiii/ for avian predators, the case is not an immediately obvious one, and it presumably took considerable work to establish that there was a cause of type (a), which as I noted does not exclude that there might be also a cause of type (c) operating, if animals can learn at all, which we certainly know they can. So there is reason to leave conclusions open when we really do not have sufficient evidence to give a conclusive answer. Withholding judgement is in fact the *conservative* position when we do not have sufficient evidence. (Just as a well-known error of logic is to assume that lack of evidence is evidence of lack of phenomenon.) Sincerely, Lloyd Anderson >Now, it has been observed that a diverse array of species -- >birds and small mammals -- all use acoustically very similar >danger calls for warning of hawks and similar flying predators: >a kind of high-pitched [siiiii] noise. >Since such calls are found in a range of birds and mammals, >the descent view [...] would require us to derive all these calls >from a single ancestral hawk-warning call in Proto-Mammal-Bird, >over 300 million years ago. Right? Could it also have been originated by one group of animals, and learned by some of the others? That is, be a loan-"word"? >But there's a much better explanation. >Hawks have acute hearing, and they are >very good at locating the source of a sound accurately. >This fact would appear to make the production of *any* danger call >a very dangerous enterprise for the individual producing it, >and hence an evolutionary disaster for his species. >*But*. It turns out that the hawk's usually reliable sound-location >mechanism breaks down with high-pitched noises resembling [siiiii]: >it can't locate the source. >So, we have a simple explanation for the widespread form-meaning >pairing that we observe in diverse species: >independent motivated creation. >Individuals that produce such calls are not spotted, >and they survive and pass on their genes. >Individuals that produce other calls get spotted and eaten. >So, since there exists a simple explanation for the widespread form-meaning >pairing in terms of motivation, its "ubiquity" is already accounted for, >and there is no reason to appeal to common origin. From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Jan 14 15:44:46 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 10:44:46 EST Subject: Egyptian 'cat' ? Message-ID: Joat Simeon writes: >Ancient Egyptian for "cat" was "miw" actually, given the lack of voweling and some difficulties in interpreting the "i" and "y" writings, could it have been "mi(ao)w" or "mi(u)w" or ?? For the last, compare English "mew" [myuw], the verb. Lloyd Anderson From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Jan 14 20:56:59 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 15:56:59 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE) Message-ID: >sarima at friesen.net writes: >My take on this would be that this supports my idea that the chariot proper >was invented by Proto-Indo-Iranian speakers (as opposed to being PIE proper >in origin). -- true at present; although with a date of 2100 BCE, we're nearly back to PIE times (3000 BCE or so). The Shinasta vehicles show definite signs of an ox-cart ancestry, although they're indubitably chariots. From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Jan 15 05:10:28 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2000 00:10:28 EST Subject: Dates for "PIE technology" Message-ID: In a message dated 1/11/00 1:31:47 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> I thought twice about responding. But I also thought that members of the list may be interested in how this "great slew" of items affects the latest dating of PIE. JUST HOW LATE A DATE DO THESE ITEMS SUPPLY FOR PIE UNITY? Using mainly my Harper Collins Atlas of Archaeology (1997 Borders Press) w/intro by Colin Renfrew, we might DATE THE ABOVE TECHNOLOGIES AS FOLLOWS: - Evidence of the PLOW in Mesopotamia and Lower Danube by 4500BC. Evidence of horticultural implements that would have functioned as "short plows" and been called plows, @7000BC at Ain Mallaha in the Levant; 5500BC in the Danube basin. - Evidence of METALWORK (copper beads and jewelry) at Catal Huyuk in Anatolia (possible IE homeland) circa 7000BC. Recently discovered evidence of arsenic and tin bronze being made in Thailand @8000BC. First casting technology, Anatolia and SE Europe, 7000-6000BC, by 4400BC along the Dnieper, in Scandinavia and the Italian Penisula. Earliest tin/bronze metallurgy: Anatolia, southern Caucasus @ 5000BC. - Evidence of the WEAVING dates back to paleolithic times (e.g., among the Swiss lake dwellers). - With regard to the WEAVING of fine cloth... "Fragments of simple linen burial cloths prove that circa 6,000 B.C. weaving with flax existed in Catal Huyuk,... In Jarmo in northeast Iraq there is evidence of woven cloth circa 7,000 B.C., while in Nahal Hemar in the Judean desert there is proof of woven cloth circa 6,500 B.C" Also as to the WEIGHTED LOOM, "The discovery at Catal Huyuk of what seem to be ceramic warp weights and a heading band seems to prove the existence of the warp-weighted loom in early Neolithic Anatolia." - With regard to MILKING AND MILK PRODUCTS, I have these citations: earliest evidence for regular goat herd milking, North Africa @7000BC (SFEC 11/2/97 Z1, page 6). Earliest representational evidence of cheese-making 4000BC (HFA, 1996, p.121) (Historiel?rarnas F?renings Arsskrift, Uppsala, Sweden). A. Sherrat's "secondary product revolution" premised on the surplus economy first developed during Bandkeramik period (@5500-4000BC). (I'll put off the wheel for another occasion.) Not one of these items argues for a date after 4500BC. Most leave open the possibility that PIE speakers could have come in contact with these items - enough to name them - thousands of years before the arbirary date of 3500BC. <> QUITE TO THE CONTRARY, as a group they seem to suggest that PIE could have been exposed to these items about 5000BC or earlier if it was anywhere in the vicinity of Europe or Anatolia. There is hardly any definite conclusion to be drawn from them together or separately, except that they won't support anything like a Copper Age date for PIE. Far from it. Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Jan 15 20:37:16 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2000 15:37:16 EST Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter Message-ID: In a message dated 1/11/00 12:05:57 AM, Sean Crist wrote: <> (caps mine) So we get back to why one way of looking at it is THE RIGHT WAY and the other is not. My point in this post was only to suggest that if one calls a Parent coexisting with a Daughter "reification" then speaking of two Daughters coexisting might also be "reification". But let's put that aside for the moment and consider the forking versus branching question again. Sean Crist wrote: *A forking in a language follows from a forking in the community of speakers, typically because of migration leading to geographical separation. When the original single group splits into two groups who wander off from each other, the copies of the language information in the minds of the members of both groups start out basically identical. Over time, however, the norms in the two communities DRIFT IN DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS, since the two groups are no longer in contact* Which does not answer the question why the proper model is a forking rather than a branching. The DEGREE OF DRIFT may vary between the two groups. A RADICAL DEGREE OF DRIFT in one group and a SMALL CONSERVATIVE DRIFT in the other would suggest a branching not a forking. What is important to my post is: WOULD YOU HAVE CALLED THE SMALL CONSERVATIVE DRIFT A NEW LANGUAGE IF THE SPLIT HAD NEVER OCCURED? Methodologically, it appears that you are "reifying" a new language because a split has occurred - NOT because of any quality of change in the language. A splits into B and C. You would have continued to call A "A" if no split occurred. But because of the split, you call it "B." I hope you understand there is a bit of a problem here. But my question now is does it matter? If you go back in the archive, you'll see that you answered my question without using the "parent cannot co-exist with its daughter" idea and that it was Prof Trask who cited it. I suspect that the difference between branching and forking are terminological and operationally cannot tell us about the degree of drift in both or either language. It also does not tell us if what is drifting is going to become a designated "innovation" in determining any kind of a family tree. Some innovations don't matter, some do. My question was something like - could Anatolian, after say innovating away from "narrow PIE", borrow back features that it had lost? I was looking for b orrowings that imitated genetics. E.g., Mencken noted that after abandoning the "King's English", Americans rediscovered and adopted it. <> Actually, this does happen biologically in non-sexual reproduction. The amoeba splits in two and technically there is no parent left. If this is your model, I'm fine with that. But the real question is I think - can we mistake the influence of one daughter on another and mistakedly call it the remains of the parent? E.g., -if Slavic loaned the word for wheel from Greek - or vice versa - could we mistake it as being a gift to both from the reified parent - PIE? Regards, Steve Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Jan 16 07:37:12 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 07:37:12 -0000 Subject: Re Personal pronouns Message-ID: Dear John and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dr. John E. McLaughlin" Sent: Saturday, December 18, 1999 11:41 PM > I love jumping into the middle of a discussion without having read in detail > the previous discussion, but this is just too tempting. > I've been reading quite a number of introductory syntax books lately for > teaching purposes, and every single one of them lists the possessive > pronouns as straightforward determiners. They aren't even classed as > "components of a determiner" in the way that "The little poor child" is a > component of a determiner in the sentence, "The little poor child's > Christmas was quite happy." This really isn't a point of contention among > linguists. If the question had been framed as such, I would understand your position completely. But, if I understand the issue clearly, the question is really different. I have no problem with Larry's definition of 'determiner' as recorded in his dictionary; and I have no problem acknowledging the usefulness of categorizing several different kinds of words ("articles...demonstratives...quantifiers...", etal.) as 'determiners'. But Larry seems to me to be denying the validity and usefulness of the term 'possessive pronoun' altogether though, of course, "possessive" is included as one of the various categories of 'determiners'. Larry's definition of pronoun contains all the classses traditionally considered pronouns *except* possessive pronouns though it seems odd in the extreme that, in spite of the rejection of possessive pronouns, demonstrative pronouns are included *as well as* being listed under 'determiner' as "demonstrative". Perhaps you could explain to me why you think "demonstrative" may occur in both classifications but "possesive" may not. Finally, I think it useful to retain the term "possessive pronoun" because it overtly identifies the fact that the pronoun stands for a noun in the possessive --- in addition to its function of deteremination. 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 Jan 18 02:46:52 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 02:46:52 GMT Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Sean Crist wrote: >A few months ago, I made a post to the list in which I stated that the PIE >word *ekwos "horse" is not probative in the question of the PIE homeland, >since one need not have domesticated the horse to have a word for it. >I want to retract that post. Beekes (1995) reports that horses (wild or >domesticated) were not found in Anatolia in the period which Renfrew >claims for the final IE unity, and Ringe (personal communication) has >corroborated this claim. This is an important incongruity between the >firmly reconstructed IE vocabulary and the homeland which Renfrew posits; >it is a strong argument against Renfrew. But Armenian eys^ (< *ek^wos) means "donkey". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Jan 18 05:36:56 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2000 23:36:56 -0600 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: Message-ID: The word presumibly could have applied to other equids. I don't know if wild asses were present in Anatolia at that time but they were present in nearby Mesopotamia and Iran. The weakness, of course, is that words derived from *ekwos almost invariably apply to the horse. >A few months ago, I made a post to the list in which I stated that the PIE >word *ekwos "horse" is not probative in the question of the PIE homeland, >since one need not have domesticated the horse to have a word for it. > >I want to retract that post. Beekes (1995) reports that horses (wild or >domesticated) were not found in Anatolia in the period which Renfrew >claims for the final IE unity, and Ringe (personal communication) has >corroborated this claim. This is an important incongruity between the >firmly reconstructed IE vocabulary and the homeland which Renfrew posits; >it is a strong argument against Renfrew. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Jan 18 13:09:35 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 08:09:35 EST Subject: Horses - retracting the retraction? Message-ID: In a message dated 1/17/00 8:09:31 PM, Sean Crist wrote: **A few months ago, I made a post to the list in which I stated that the PIE word *ekwos "horse" is not probative in the question of the PIE homeland, since one need not have domesticated the horse to have a word for it. I want to retract that post. Beekes (1995) reports that horses (wild or domesticated) were not found in Anatolia in the period which Renfrew claims for the final IE unity, and Ringe (personal communication) has corroborated this claim. This is an important incongruity between the firmly reconstructed IE vocabulary and the homeland which Renfrew posits; it is a strong argument against Renfrew.** The retraction may not have been necessary. See Russell and Martin, Catal Huyuk Bone Reports 1998 Br Arch Repts -- preliminary report can be found on the web at: http://catal.arch.cam.ac.uk/catal/Archive_rep98/martin98.html (watch the wrap-around) Summary states: "A wide range of taxa have been identified from ?atalh?y?k, including sheep and goats, cattle, wild horses and asses,... Among the equid remains from ?atalh?y?k West, several bones were observed as belonging to 'large' equids, which is likely to mean Equus caballus..." Exposure to wild horses by Anatolians could be postulated in any case, based on such earlier findings as those at Diana Kirkbride's excavation at Beidha in southern Jordan (occupied in first half of seventh millennium (9000-8500 BP)) where animal remains included "aurochs, wild board, ibex, wild goats, gazelle, hares, jackals, hyrax, and wild horses." Extensive trade contacts with Anatolia were established by the presence of large amounts of obsidian brought from that area. Wild horse remains have also been found in early neolithic layers in the Nile Delta (BOESSNECK Y., Joachim und Angela von den DRIESCH, Tell el-Dab'a VII. Ethnographisch-arch?ologische Zeitschrift 34 (1992)). See also Norbert Benecke, The Domestication of the Horse/Abstract: "On the basis of subfossil bone remains, archaeological findings and artistic representations the current state of research concerning the domestication of the horse.... New osteometric data from Early and Middle Holocene wild horses, as well as from early domestic horses, support the assumption of a polytope origin of the domestic horse, with Central Asia, Eastern, Central and South-Western Europe being more or less independent regions of domestication. In all those areas the domestication of the horse took place within agrarian societies or at least in contact with them." (30th WAHVM-Congress, Veterinary Faculty, Munich 1998.) (This would suggest that the technology being exchanged was not "the horse" - already present - but rather domestication.) On the otherside of Anatolia, at Franchthi Cave in the Argolid, the hunting of wild horses as the main source of meat occurred right up until the end of the mesolithic - so the memory of such animals might be fresh in the minds (if not the stomachs) of those who would have adopted neolithicism and PIE on its way to Europe where subspecies of wild horses (tarpan, equus ferus) probably still existed. I'm not familiar with Beekes approach to this issue, but I would question something else. The presence of wild equids - not equus caballus - in the area could just as easily have given rise to a common name for equids that was later transfered specifically to the horse. I have a note here that Gordon Childe in his 1954 article "Wheeled Vehicles" mentions that as early as 3000BC the pictograph appears that would become the regular cuneiform ideogram for horse - it is a compound of "ass" and "mountain", possibly either referring to the special size or source of the "true horse." Also, the problem of the decent of the horse shouldn't obscure the fact that wild horses (e.g., Przewalski's) may not have had all the characteristics of the domesticated animal, including large size, that would have so clearly distinguished it from other equids, especially as the object of a hunt. (As a parallel, I'm told that the Dakota gave the horse a name that was a compound of their name for dog, "pte" - probably observing that it was also domesticated.) Furthermore, given the habit of Indoeuropean languages to generalize and transfer the names of everything from body parts to colors over time, it strikes me as a bit overzealous and overenthused to say that such evidence - if it were accurate - would supply "a strong argument against Renfrew." The idea that there could be no "semantic" drift for such a word since 4000BC or before seems somewhat implausible. A reasonably objective approach could even have suggested that the word could have been imported in the late stages of PIE when Renfrew has it a short distance away from the northwest shore of the Black Sea, where wild horses were apparently in abundance. In any case, it really isn't all that clear that the horse needs to be there when PIE occurs - there are certainly enough IE languages where *ekwos is not the word for horse. And one of them is Hittite. But more on that later. Regards, Steve Long From swheeler at richmond.edu Tue Jan 18 04:06:37 2000 From: swheeler at richmond.edu (Stuart Wheeler) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 00:06:37 -0400 Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords In-Reply-To: <0.7660cba5.25908425@aol.com> Message-ID: The conversation now proceeding is very helpful to me as a non-IndoEuropeanist and reminds me to remind you that this topic is directly in the path of a colloquy the University of Richmond is hosting March 17-19, 2000. .The topic of our colloquium is "Greater Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite Language Family." Robert Drews, professor of Classics and History at Vanderbilt University and this semester visiting professor of Classics at Richmond is the genius behind the colloquy and the host. The keynote speaker is Colin Renfrew. Speakers include Elizabeth Barber, Bill S. Darden, Margalit Finkelberg, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Peter Kuniholm. Alexander Lehrman, Craig Melchert, Colin Renfrew, Jeremy Rutter, and Paul Zimansky. There will be significant periods of time for participant discussion and interaction. February 20, 2000 is the deadline for registration. You can find all the information about the colloquy including the full program and registration procedure at http:hermes.richmond.edu/anatolia. Stuart Wheeler From rohan.oberoi at cornell.edu Tue Jan 18 06:38:05 2000 From: rohan.oberoi at cornell.edu (rohan.oberoi at cornell.edu) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 01:38:05 -0500 Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: Dear Steve, The lag time on this list is so bad that I can't call up what you originally wrote, so my last letter may well not have been "in the context of your post"; if so I do apologise. [ Moderator's apology: I am sorry for the recent lapses in the posting frequency. I believe that everything is now fully under control again, and that we can look forward to a timely, working list for the foreseeable future. --rma ] The consensus between 1987 and now can I think be fairly demonstrated from the literature to be in favour of defining the earliest and latest bounds of probable PIE dispersal, referring to 2500BC as "no later than", and varying on the other end between 3000 and 4500 BC. (I personally find Renfrew's analysis of the literature unconvincing, but that may be just me. To prove that historical linguistics is built upon faulty assumptions about archaeology requires going through the latest literature to demonstrate that linguists are not regularly revisiting their assumptions, as they should. How does quoting Friedrich 1970 or Gimbutas 1960 prove that?) The upper bound is obviously what you have trouble with. Anthony's 1991 JIES article based his 3300BC on what he termed the dates of the earliest indisputable evidence for wheeled vehicles in Europe, combined with these arguments for reconstructing wheeled vehicles (not just circles or spheres or balls) to PIE. Since I have a para from it, let me quote it here: "...linguistic studies that have never been seriously challenged (Specht 1944:99-103) suggest that the final period of PIE unity can be firmly dated on the basis of shared PIE terms for wheeled vehicles. At least five word roots related to wheeled vehicles can be safely assigned to the PIE lexicon. These common roots occur across all of the major IE language stocks, from Celtic to Tocharian. Words based on these roots in the daughter IE languages have retained their specific references to "wheel"...; "axle"...; "thill" or yoke pole...; and "wagon"... Most of the roots are demonstrably IE, meaning that most of this vocabulary was created within the IE community. ... Moreover, the thematically inflected stems that characterize this entire group of terms identify them as relatively late additions to the PIE vocabulary, words that were created not long before the dispersal of IE speakers (Lehmann 1990:13). These terms form a semantic field in which the documented phonetic and semantic regularities are so pervasive throughout the IE languages that it is virtually certain that late PIE speakers were familiar with wheeled vehicles (Anthony and Wailes 1988)." You may disagree with that sort of argument, but I don't think you can reasonably attack it as based on circular assumptions. Of course, "articles" in my last post should have been "words". Regards, Rohan. From rao.3 at osu.edu Tue Jan 18 10:31:17 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 05:31:17 -0500 Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: "Stanley Friesen" wrote: > In particular the evidence from Egypt prior to 1100 BC shows > clearly that the chariot was a mobile combat platform, actively used in > shock warfare. What is ``shock'' warfare? 2nd millennium BCE chariots, as far as we know, were extremely light. Given the size of horses in use then (ponies by modern standards) and the requirement of quick acceleration, they could not have been otherwise. It would not possible to use them except as mobile archery platforms or personal transport (more like a motor cycle than a pick-up truck). Much latter, Assyrians and Persians used much heavier vehicles to drive through opposing ranks. But, firstly, they had knives affixed to their axle, and any effect they had came from this. Secondly, they did not turn very fast. This kind of ``chariot'' would not be any improvement over the straddle cars and such in use in ANE by 2300 BCE. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jan 18 20:57:55 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 15:57:55 EST Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Latin was spoken among the Celts before the Roman Army ever arrived. -- by a few traders. Are you suggesting that Latin would have spread over the whole of Europe in the _absense_ of Roman conquest and subsequent political power? >Latin's main attraction was the badge of Roman citizenship. -- and Roman citizenship was important because the Romans had conquered a huge area. QED. ><folk migrations and conquests starting in the 5th century AD.>> >I don't know what this has to do with anything. The point was that there >have been many cases where the "dominant elite" disappear in the pre-existing >language. -- _my_ point was that the spread of Slavic is an excellent illustration of the sort of mechanism by which PIE probably originally spread -- folk-migration accompanied by establishment of political dominance. This does _not_ require any elaborate state structure -- the Slavs didn't have anything above a local chieftainship. There are numerous African examples in historic times; the Galla migrations into the Ethiopian highlands, for instance. >The point was, e.g., the Russians do not speak Mongul, Turkic, Gothic, Greek >or Scandinavian - although all of these arguably represented the languages of >various "dominant elite" - these speakers all seem to have been assimilated >by Russian. -- quite true; I don't buy Renfrew's "elite dominance" model. Something much more substantial is required, especially in a pre-state and pre-literate setting. >Be assured I find your reply not absurd but very confusing. "Every major >Middle Eastern power" were NOT steppe invaders nor IE speakers. -- to begin with, the Hittites _were_ IE speakers, and the elite of the Mitannian kingdom were (originally) IE speakers too -- Indo-Aryan, to be precise. Even after they were assimilated by their Hurrian-speaking subjects, they retained Indo-Aryan terms for chariot and horse technology (as well as throne-names for their kings and the names of some gods, Indara, Mitra and so forth). Moreover, the chariot was invented _not_ in the Middle East, but in the Eurasian steppe zone, by IE speakers. They _introduced_ it into the Middle East; we have more records of chariot warfare there because that was the zone of literacy. However, the Vedas (dating from the mid-2nd-millenium BCE) are full of descriptions of chariot warfare -- archers shooting from moving chariots -- essentially identical to that in the Middle East. The Shang Chinese also adopted the chariot as their elite military arm. Archaeological sources show it was common in barbarian Europe; so do later written sources by Mediterranean observers. There's a petroglyph of a chariot from as far north as Sweden dated to about 1300 BCE. the chariot was the dominant military arm from the early 2nd millenium on -- the battle of Kadesh would be an example, but there are hundreds of others. We have more examples from the Middle East because >I took your suggestion to heart and discovered that by all accounts the use >of the chariot by archers was innovated by the Eygptians about 1200BC. -- that is grotesque. The chariot-born archer was a staple of warfare centuries before that and all through the region. From rdrews at richmond.edu Tue Jan 18 14:20:38 2000 From: rdrews at richmond.edu (Robert Drews) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 09:20:38 -0500 Subject: archers in chariots In-Reply-To: <0.d3f21126.2591c1ea@aol.com> Message-ID: Steve Long has written, >By the "period when the chariot was an actual factor", you say you mean when >it was being used by archers. I took your suggestion to heart and discovered >that by all accounts the use of the chariot by archers was innovated by the >Eygptians about 1200BC. >I take it therefore that it is your well thought-out contention that the >IndoEuropeans borrowed this idea from the Egyptians to conquer many lands and >force IE languages upon them? I will further "study the data" from the >period and let you know what I turn up. >Steve Long This is wrong. Ca. 1200 BC chariots as mobile platforms for archers were suddenly going out of style. Chariot warfare began ca. 1700 BC, and was basic to the success of both the 15th (Great Hyksos) Dynasty in Egypt and to Hattusili and Mursili of Hatti. And although most linguists and Aegeanists would not agree, I am still convinced that it was not coincidental that the Shaft Grave dynasty appeared at Mycenae just after chariot warfare began. 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 larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jan 18 11:29:06 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 11:29:06 +0000 Subject: Basque butterflies Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister writes: [on the Basque 'butterfly' words in ] > Any possible link between and Spanish "bug, > critter, varmint" and also various slang meanings Doubt it. Basque means 'pretty', 'pretty little thing', 'ornament', 'jewel'. It has no connection with bugs or any other critters anywhere except in the 'butterfly' words cited. And let's face it: as bugs go, butterflies are exceptionally pretty. This occurs in various other names. For example, the common Basque word for 'daisy' is -- literally, 'jewel-flower', I guess. [on Basque 'grasshopper', literally 'Marty-jump'] > maybe influenced by Spanish "Grasshopper", literally > "jump weeds" In fact, formations of this general kind are fairly frequent as names for small creatures in both Basque and Spanish. Note, for example, 'Mary-witch' for 'praying mantis', 'Martin-fisherman' for 'kingfisher', and others in this vein. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Tue Jan 18 13:17:16 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 15:17:16 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: Good IE-ists! I'm interested in knowing how widely accepted is the theory that the Indo-European "Urheimat" was located in Eastern Europe. And how much support do such theories as e.g. Colin Renfrew's idea of the Anatolian origin of IE languages have? I ask this beacause one central piece of evidence in support for the East-European origin comes from outside the field of IE studies, namely Uralic linguistics. But it seems to me (correct me if I'm wrong!) that among many IE-ists, there's a tradition of uninterest in diachronic linguistics done outside the IE language family. So, I'd also like to ask how well is the recent progress in Uralic linguistics known inside your field of research? And especially, I'd be interested in hearing comments on what is presented below from those who do NOT support the East-European original home. During the last ten years it has been discovered that Uralic languages possess extremely ancient IE loan words: they were loaned from proto-IE to proto-U[ralic], which has been dated approximately 4000 bc or before. In order to provide some substance for discussion, I will give some examples on the loan etymologies. All etymologies derive from the Germanist Jorma Koivulehto and most can be found in his book "Uralische Evidenz f?r die Laryngaltheorie" (1991). The etymologies are meant to serve only as an illustration. Thus, only a fraction of the credible loan etymologies put forward are presented here. proto-U *pel(x)i- 'fear' < proto-IE *pelH- 'grau, fahl; schreckig' p-U *toxi- 'bring, give, sell' < p-IE *doH- 'give' p-U *koki- 'see, find' < p-IE *Hokw- 'see' p-U *kulki- 'move, flow, walk' < p-IE *kwelH- 'drehen, sich drehen usw.' p-U *mos?ki- 'wash' < p-IE *mozg(-eye)- 'untertauchen' p-U *s?alkaw- 'pole, rod' < p-IE *g?halgho- id. p-U *weti- 'water' < p-IE *wed- id. The criteria by which the loans must be judged proto-Uralic are the following: 1) The phonological shape of their cognates in present-day U languages does not warrant one to assume that they were loaned separately into (and between) already differentiated U languages / dialects. The distribution suggests the same: all the etymologies above have cognates in at least one U language in the Baltic Sea area and one in Siberia. 2) the proto-U form requires a specifically proto-IE loan original. Many even show proto-U *k or *x as a substituent of an IE laryngal. It is undeniable that the contacts between speakers of U and IE languages date back to the earliest stages recovered by the comparative method. Thus the speakers of proto-U and proto-IE must have been geographical neighbors. As a result, theories such as Renfrew's Anatolian "Urheimat" must obviously be discarded (it is of course impossible to assume that proto-U spekers would have occupied an area south of the Black Sea). It seems that the only logical option is to place proto-IE in Eastern Europe north of the Black Sea. This area is just about south from area where current research usually places the center of the Uralic expansion. Ante Aikio student of the Saami language and general linguistics The Department of Finnish and Saami Language and Logopedics University of Oulu, Finland anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Jan 19 14:37:54 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 14:37:54 +0000 Subject: Basque butterflies again Message-ID: This is a joint response to the comments made by Ed Selleslagh and by Lloyd Anderson. First, I endorse Ed's observation that words for 'butterfly', at least in European languages, often appear to exhibit a moderately high degree of instability, rendering them of questionable value in investigating linguistic prehistory. Second, and far more importantly, I am not happy with attempts at considering the numerous Basque words for 'butterfly' in isolation from the rest of the Basque lexicon. The 'butterfly' words in Basque, or most of them, exhibit a number of phonological and distributional characteristics which are entirely typical of expressive formations but not at all typical of ordinary lexical items: unusual length, unusual segments and sequences, severe localization, great and unusual variation in form, and other things. Take the mainly Lapurdian forms ~ . Lapurdian, almost alone among the varieties of Basque, is very fond of expressive formations in , and . Here are some examples of such expressive forms: 'bounce' 'back' 'favorite' ~ 'bud' (of a flower) 'tit' (bird) ~ 'garfish' 'bang!' 'somersault' 'sound of falling' 'rag doll' 'thud', 'heartbeat' ~ 'chatterbox', 'long-winded person' 'a kind of bell' 'hitting' (nursery word) '(a) blow' ~ 'doll' ~ 'heartbeat', 'elegantly dressed' ~ 'petite, plump and pretty' (of a woman) ~ 'very large mushroom' 'sound of a fall', 'sound of a gunshot' '(a) fall', 'peashooter' 'in a slow, trudging manner' 'large bell' ~ 'bounce' (of a ball) 'hammering' 'tuft', 'tassel' ~ ~ '(a single) tear', 'dewdrop', 'bubble', 'bulb' 'somersaulting' 'clog' (footwear) (nursery word) 'poppy' These words have no identifiable morphological structure, and they contain no recognizable morphemes, apart from the adverbial <-ka> found in a couple of them. They are nothing but sequences of speech sounds. Now, I submit that the Lapurdian butterfly words in belong strongly to this group of expressive formations, and that their origins should therefore be sought in this specifically Lapurdian pattern of coining expressives, and not among vague resemblances in implausibly far-flung languages. It appears that the Lapurdians, some centuries ago, settled on an expressive pattern consisting of , or followed by more or less arbitrary sequences of agreeable sound in order to coin expressives. Items of such a form are all but unknown in other varieties of Basque. And, of course, native Basque lexical items with the slightest claim to antiquity never begin with /p/ (the ancient Basques apparently couldn't pronounce initial /p-/) and never contain the sequence /np/ (which was categorically voiced to /nb/ in Lapurdian and in most other dialects in the medieval period). A few further comments. The word 'pretty', 'pretty little thing', 'ornament', 'jewel', apparently present in the large group represented by , is of uncertain origin but is often suspected of being a palatalized form of 'alive', 'living'. The suggested semantic development is 'living' > 'moving' > 'flashing', 'sparkling', > 'pretty', 'jewel', or something similar. So, as Ed suggests, is very likely the *ultimate* source of the first element, but it cannot be the *direct* source. The final sequences <-tola>, <-dola> and <-tera>, found in some of the words, are described by Ed as familiar derivational or diminutive suffixes. Not in Basque, I'm afraid. No such word-forming suffixes as these are attested in Basque in any function at all: they appear to be no more than arbitrary extensions. Finaly, I am amused by Ed's suggestion that the of (and variants) might represent "the noise of a flying insect". Butterflies don't make any noise. I therefore conclude that Lloyd's efforts at linking some of the Basque words to words in other languages (and also to one another) are without foundation. The Basque 'butterfly' words are numerous and severely localized; they conform strongly to observed patterns for coining expressive formations; and they can scarcely be of any antiquity. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From edsel at glo.be Wed Jan 19 18:17:39 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 19:17:39 +0100 Subject: Root versus lexical languages. Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Wednesday, December 29, 1999 9:25 PM > I wonder if we really can "distinguish" the two types of language? Is it > not more of a spectrum, of which we can identify the two ends? We might > well be able to compare two languages and recognise that one lies more one > way along this spectrum than the other, but I don't think we can make a > division, in the way Stephane's posting suggests. Indeed, I have seen > precisely this comparision usefully made for English and German in a German > book about English. > As for "lexical" languages developing into "root" languages, is that not > currently happening in Chinese - where new formations are transparently > formed from lexical items by the addition of a further syllable or even > syllables, whose "lexical" meaning has become less important than their > lexicalising function? E.g. the plural marker on pronouns, the -zhe suffix, > the temporal/aspectual markers, the directional markers on verbs, and so on. > Peter [Ed. Selleslagh] What about the following theory: isolating > agglutinating > flecting, in a continuous manner. And much later on > isolating. That seems a fair description of what's happening to Chinese (first step), Finnish (second step), English (third step) etc. Ed. From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Wed Jan 19 19:00:26 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 14:00:26 -0500 Subject: permissible IE roots? In-Reply-To: <003c01bf53a9$2791aca0$b37819d4@bigcomputer> Message-ID: On Fri, 31 Dec 1999, Daniel Baum wrote: > Hi all, > > On a similar subject, would anyone happen to know why there appear to be no > roots of the form CHH? There are roots with two laryngeals (such as one of > the words for "to sit", as in Skt aaste), but none with two contiguous. If it's the case that the laryngeals are some sort of fricatives (which is as good a guess as any), this isn't too surprising; it's not uncommon for languages to prohibit sequences of two consecutive fricatives. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Wed Jan 19 06:32:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 06:32:00 GMT Subject: IE etymological dictionary Message-ID: In spite of the dated and questionable quality of the old "Indoeuropaeisches etymologisches Woerterbuch" by Pokorny, many scholars would like to have a CD-ROM-version of it. Does anyone know the state of the work on a new IE etymological dictionary at LEIDEN, NL? I tried an e-mail to Kulikov at pcmail.LeidenUniv.nl, but that was returned by the net. Regarding to the Leiden-University homepage, Kulikov is not listed in their staff nor did I find any hint on such a project. Does anyone have an up-to-date information on the Leiden project? Does anyone know of digitalized versions of the 'Pokorny IEW' What font has been used? Hans J Holm - - et monere et moneri - - From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Jan 20 07:01:51 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 07:01:51 GMT Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <006c01bf62aa$825f28a0$e401703e@edsel> Message-ID: "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) Only ON hwel < *kwelo-. The English and Dutch vowels can only derive from *ew. The development was: *kwekwlo- > *hwegwlo ~ *hweGwlo > *hwewlo > { OE hwe:ol > wheel | ODu. *hwi at l > wiel }. Curiously, the loss of -g- here is only semi-regular (or we wouldn't have OE hweogul), which makes me wonder why Szemere'nyi, in his "Introduction", chose this example to illustrate the regularity of sound laws in general (2.1. "... To give an extreme but by no means untypical example: the correspondence between Eng. wheel, Gr, kuklos, and OInd cakra-, despite appearances to the contrary, is exact to a hair (as we shall see later, 4.7.5.1)." Cakra is exact to hair from *kwekwlo-, but the Greek word too is only semi-regular (regular would have been **teklos, would it not?). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Jan 20 21:32:17 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 16:32:17 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >Several researchers have proposed that "wheel" was a technological >word, much like "computer" today, e.g. Japanese kompyutaa [sp?]; >If this is true, the concept and the word may have spread so fast >that it looks like as if it were inherited from IE -- apart from the fact that the PIE words for "wheel" can be analyzed into PIE roots, this wouldn't make any difference even if 'twere so. If it was borrowed into PIE while PIE is still united, that dates the era 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. From edsel at glo.be Fri Jan 21 12:09:50 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 13:09:50 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2000 8:29 AM [snip] > Remember that I offered two ways for the word for "wheel" to spread across a > already existing IE diversity. The first was as a technological innovation. > The second was as a preexisting word adapted to a new meaning. [snip] > Finally there is the matter of about half of IE apparently not using > *kwelos/*kolos (fl. Buck) at all as the source of its word for wheel. So > that the predicted sound changes extend as far as I can see only to some IE > language families - particularly German and Slavic - and agreeing with Buck I > don't think Greek is one of them. (And when you have at least two words for > wheel you don't have strictly speaking the singularity that necessarily > suggests pre-divergence unity - compare the word for 'wool' e.g., which > demonstrably would be older than the word for wheel.) [Ed. Selleslagh] To that, I would like to repeat what I said before Xmas (but it got published on the list two weeks later), and recently (about the reduplication in *kwekwlo), becuase it widens the range of probably pre-existing words: "What if all the IE words like *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- , and Gr. trochos are older than the wheel/chariot/wagon, and represent only new uses as required by the emergence of new technology? (cf. German Rechner = computer, a new use of a much older word). My suggestions would be the following: - Tro'chos/trocho's: maybe a variant (Mycenean inspired? cf. iqo - hippo's) related to Tro'pos/tropo's, meaning 'turn, return' - *kwekwlo-, Gr. kyklos: meaning 'circle, round'. - *rotHo- : meaning 'rotate, turn around, revolve, spin'. [*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. On the other hand, M. Carrasquer said: "The PGmc. form was something like *hwe(g)wlaz", which would mean my view is wrong.] That would mean various things: 1. IE languages had a choice among pre-existing semantically related roots for the new technology. 2. Even if they had all chosen the same root, quod non, this would still not be proof of IE unity at the moment the wheel was invented or became known to IE lgs. speaking peoples. Just a thought..." BTW, I don't understand why you exclude Greek from the *kwe(kw)los group, or is it only from the ones that share the sound changes of the word? > Which brings me back to what I think is the more convincing explanation - > that diverse PIE speakers used a pre-existing word to describe the wheel. [snip] > And I hope at least that I'm suggesting that the theory that PIE can be dated > by such vocabulary is not entirely leakproof - even to those who have been > convinced by such methods in the past. > Regards, > Steve Long I couldn't agree more. Ed. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jan 20 04:05:02 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 22:05:02 -0600 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <006c01bf62aa$825f28a0$e401703e@edsel> Message-ID: It seems like someone had Spanish "to be in motion, engage in activity, function/work (i.e. machines), go around, walk, travel, etc." in mind as the translation for Basque and then tried to come up with an English equivalent.[Note that andar does have somewhat different semantics in different regions of the Spanish speaking world.] And from what Larry Trask says, I wonder if either andar or ibili may be semantically influenced by the other form. [snip] >[Ed] >I learned it (i.e. "go around") from you, maybe two years or so ago, on the >Basque-l list. >> First of all, the verb does not mean 'walk', though it is often so >> glossed, for want of a better equivalent. It is a verb of undirected >> motion, >> and the best English gloss I can offer is 'be in motion'. And no such sense >> as 'go around' is attested or reconstructible. >> Furthermore, the verb is definitely not a compound, nor does it >> contain the element * 'round'. It has the normal structure for a >> native >> Basque verb. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Thu Jan 20 08:15:06 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 02:15:06 -0600 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: At 07:10 AM 1/13/00 GMT, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: [speaking of the non-finite form in Basque] > The infinitive is clearly *e- (verbal noun formant) >+ *-bil- + *-i (adjectival suffix), the inflected forms (e.g. >na-bil "I walk (around)") show nothing but the verbal root *bil >(which also, and probably not by coincidence, happens to be a >nominal root *bil "round"). I'd like to follow up a bit on Miguel's last comment above. First let me state that I'm a bit confused about the nature of the Basque evidence itself. But before turning to that question, let me add that the relationship between the Basque root-stem <-bil> and the IE materials is equally unclear to me at this stage. So, speaking of the meaning "round" that is attributed of proposed nominal root *, could someone explain to me the role of <-bil> in the compound (also ) defined by Azkue as "sphere, something round" (all citations are from Azkue unless otherwise indicated). Also, what is the meaning of the first element and could that element be affecting our interpretation of the prototype meaning of <-bil> (as well as *)? Actually I'm not familiar with appearing in isolation with the meaning "round". For example, the most commonly cited compound is whose meaning is glossed/translated as "round". But isn't the meaning "round" derived primarily from two expressions both being compounds? And, yes, I do know that the meaning that is assigned to * is "round" and that there are other compounds where <-bil> appears as a suffixing element. Nonetheless, I believe a closer examination of the compounds will suggest a slightly different interpretation. In the case of it seems to me that there is a question concerning its composition. One analysis could derive it from a reduplication based on which is a relatively high frequency prefixing element in Basque. Yet my own intuitive analysis of the compound would identify the first element with "his/her/its", one of two 3rd p. sg. genitive pronouns, that has undergone vowel raising, not particularly unusual in Basque. Moreover, is a common element in compounds Also, when dealing with the Basque evidence one must consider the possible relationship between the verbal root of ( "to gather up" and the <-bil-> of . The bare-stem or radical , as in , is found in a large number of compounds, and if I'm not mistaken, almost always with the notion of "gathering up, collecting", e.g., "joint, place of articulation; meeting place (from with <(g)une> "space, segment, opening, moment"); "pilgrimage, 'romeria', outing with a going and coming; reunion; ritual or communal turn for recollection of goods, i.e., usually involving following an agreed upon itinerary through the village or countryside (and hence 'movement'): from where <-era> is the allative ending ("towards") also commonly used to form nominal compound constructions. The allative ending is <-ra> after vowels and <-era> after consonants. Certainly * (*) could be interpreted as "to move/turn on oneself, to roll (oneself) up, to gather oneself up, to move toward oneself, to contract". I would note that we find the following in Azkue: () "redondear; agenciar; enroscarse una culebra"; ()"envolver, apelotonar, ganar por astucia o deseza, enredar; recoger el ganado." In addition there is the example of and its variant which were coined to mean "automobil" and said to be a compound translating quite literally the notion of "self-mover" (cf. Llande's _Dictionaire...1926), at least that was how the word was explained to me by Basque speakers many years back. In addition, there are a number of bisyllabic and trisyllabic items that appear to be compounds ending in a suffixing element in <-pil/-bil>, () "wheel", "type of pastry; hinge", (*?)"knot", whose meaning is not always entirely clear. I'm quite certain that there a several other examples that simply don't come to my mind right now, although Jon Patrick probably could pull them up from his computerized list. The difficulties involved in retrieving such items, compounds with a given suffix, is another reason that Azkue's dictionary should be computerized in its entirety and without attempting to modify the spelling of the entries in order to convert them all into Batua, the written standard invented some thirty years ago. And following up on LT's comment about the meaning of , would "to go about" be a better rendition of its meaning? Azkue translates it simply as "andar". Furthermore, I would imagine that if LT once glossed the meaning of "ibili" as "to go around", he probably meant by that to say the verb often was used to mean "to go around/about (doing X or Y)." Additionally, with respect to * giving rise to , there is a curious aspect of Basque that might be related to the meanings cited above for compounds such as and . I refer to the fact that there is a certain amount of evidence that in Basque the notion of "to turn into, transform (oneself)" is connected to the concept of "twisted" but not from the point of view of our highly negative IE image schemata which sets out "straightness" as a standard/base reality. Rather "twisted" carries strong connotations of "resistance", of "rolling up on itself/oneself" as a newly woven rope is prone to do, twisting itself back into a series of loops, coiling itself up: when pressure is applied it can be straightened out, but when the pressure/force is removed it goes back to its "natural" shape, and curls itself back up." In Spanish for instance I believe that "twisted" implies that force was applied to an object that was originally "straight" and that produced its "twisted" appearance. In Basque the internal strength of being is in , in the return to the rolled up or coiled up state in which the being's innate energy is exercised and contained in the shape itself. It would appear that in Basque the polarity of the gestalt is/was fundamentally positive although certainly the resistance offered by the rope, person or object to our will/desires can be problematic. Yet this complex image schema that is at work here making it possible for to mean "to twist up, coil up, curl up" as well as "to transform" ("to take back its original shape" almost as if an inner force, as was the case with the coiled rope, sets in motion the change). Keeping this in mind, it could be argued that the meanings of * derive from or are in some fashion related to this same gestalt. Notice that in English we "bend someone to our will", implying that the person's "resistance" is conceptualized or projected spatially as "straightness" to which force is applied and in this way it will be twisted/bend out of its original shape. The scene projected metaphorically is one in which energy source comes from the outside and is then applied to the object or person. Stated differently, there are two scenarios: 1) in English when the object's resistance ("ego/individual will") is overcome, the shape implied by the expression is "twisted" and when the external force is removed, the object remains "bent" or "twisted" and 2) in Basque while the external force iseing applied the object is offering resistance to being "straightened out" by the will/force of the other and then once the external force is removed the object is understood to immediately spring back and recover its original shape. In short, generally speaking in English, as I mentioned above, "straightness" is viewed as the "given", the natural state, and "twisted" is what results from the application of an * external * force. And a final aside. In the case of , certainly today we find it used with negative connotations, much as it is in Spanish, but at the same time it often carries a strong notion of "mischieviousness". Indeed, I've heard Basque parents who when discussing the problem of "educating/civilizing" their children, refer to this as a problem of "domesticating" their off-spring. Indeed, according to Azkue, the abstraction refers to "caracter violento; indocil" which might be rendered by the English term "wild(ness)" Again, I would emphasize that in Basque the notion of "transformation" calls into play an image gestalt or motion gestalt that doesn't appear to be present in Romance or English. Actually is used today also to mean "to translate"). In summary, I don't know of any general studies of this problem in IE languages, especially diachronic ones since it is clear that the Basque data has conceptual overlays that can be traced to the image schemata found in the surrounding IE languages and firmly embedded in the metaphoric legacy of Christianity, etc. And to conclude this perhaps already too lengthy discussion, I would mention that in Mikel Morris's highly readable and well researched Basque-English/English-Basque Dictionary (1998), we find that the English word "coil" is translated by three terms containing the element : as , and . On egin, Roz Frank From rao.3 at osu.edu Fri Jan 21 10:28:29 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 05:28:29 -0500 Subject: Wheeled Vehicles. Message-ID: wrote, in a message dated Tuesday, January 18, 2000 4:17 PM Subject: Re: Wheeled Vehicles. > -- "A two-wheeled vehicle with wheels some 60 cm in diameter was recovered > from a Catacomb burial at Maryevka in the Ukraine, presumably of the third > but possibly second millenium BCE... the chariot is well attested in the > Shinasta culture southeast of the Urals. Dating from c. 2100 to 1700 BCE, > this culture provides abundant evidence for chariots... The wheels have eight > to twelve spokes. The vehicles, found in burials, are unequivocally > associated with horses and were drawn by a paired team." But could they turn at gallop or even at canter? If not, why are they superior to the straddle cars of ANE? Horses are not magic. I am yet see any solid evidence backed up >real data< to why horse draught is inherently superior to onager draught. >> Secondly, the slippage of the neck bands was prevented by placing the axle >> of the chariot at the back > -- this is a specific feature of _Egyptian_ chariots, and was not common > elsewhere. Hittite chariots, for example, used a mid-body location for the > axle. This is questionable. See Littuar and Crowell, ``Wheeled vehicles and ridden animals in ANE''. Hittite evidence is from seals and sealing, where space constraint is a problem. Later NE evidence (Assyrian and Persian) shows rear-axle as well. This was not specifically Egyptian. To put it bluntly, mid-body axle and yoke secured by neck-bands would pose serious problems unless steps are taken to keep the weight on the axle at all times, including in turns. This is clear to any one with working knowledge of levers (which seems to be decreasing over time). If you disagree go out, do the experiments and publish the photos. If not, I will go with those who done that. If it is to work in the real world, one experiment is worth 1000 philogists/archaeologists/linguists' speculations. > Mallory & Adams' reconstruction of the Shinasta chariot shows a yoke with > Y-fork additions at the front -- precisely the form of "primitive > horse-collar". What is the evidence this is based on? I have seen the photos from the digs. There is nothing but indentations from the wheels and the ends of axles. Show me the physical evidence for these ``y-forks''. I don't buy proof by authority. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jan 20 03:48:38 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 21:48:38 -0600 Subject: T-shirt/was Wheel In-Reply-To: Message-ID: In Spanish there are probably at least a dozen words for T-shirt The most common ones I've run into are: camiseta < camisa "shirt" + -eta feminine derivative (and usually) diminuitive suffix for (mainly) objects derived from or resembling some other object --this is the most common word that I've run into playera < playa "beach" + -era feminine occupational suffix (English -er) In Cuba I heard "pulover" < English pullover I've seen "camisa de T" but only on packages of T-shirts made by US companies I've only heard "T-shirt" /ticher/ used by US Hispanics and other Hispanics in the US [snip] ><<...there are recent loan words [in Japanese] (e.g. tiishatsu "T-shirt")...>> >I would love to compare T-shirt as it has been "accepted" into languages that >are nearer or farther from English and see if the pattern did not approximate >the kind of changes 'wheel" underwent. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From mclasutt at brigham.net Thu Jan 20 07:08:58 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 00:08:58 -0700 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: <10.290418.25b62ace@aol.com> Message-ID: Steve Long wrote: "I am simply trying to proceed one point at a time. The only issue is how you know that evidence of what was shared has not disappeared." I've got a couple of points to make on this issue. If two modern languages had a common origin very long ago (past the 10,000 year boundary layer, for example), then it's highly probable that they have lost or changed in opposite directions so many common characteristics that their relationship is no longer recognizable. If we assume monogenesis, for example, then Basque has modern relatives, but all evidence of the relationship is gone or changed beyond recognition. In other words, if two languages have changed so much over a long period of time, then the evidence, as you rightly say, IS lost or unrecognizable. To tie that comment directly to the above quote, in this case we CANNOT know anything about what has disappeared or even whether or not it was there in the first place. My second point, however, calls into question your assumptions that this case must also apply to Indo-European in many respects. The process you mention (complete loss or unrecoverability) is a fixture of DEEP time depths and prevents us from crossing the BOUNDARY. Indo-European is a relatively young family (compared to, for example, Australian, whose time depth is on the order of 40,000 years and whose member languages have been subject to areal borrowing and dissemination of features on a scale that isn't really surpassed anywhere else [you should read R.M.W. Dixon, The Rise and Fall of Languages]). Let's look at English as an example of a "radically changing language". If we look at the lexicon of English, we find that well over half of the total vocabulary is Italic or Hellenic in origin. But if we look at the 1000 most common words, then they are 80% inherited from Proto-Germanic. Within the morphology of the language, much of the Proto-Germanic morphology is overwhelmed by derivational affixes borrowed from Italic and Hellenic. Yet, once again, when we look at the most common morphology it is Germanic. Our syntactic structures are also clearly derived from Germanic structures. But that is working with productive evidence and is not to your point. When a feature is "lost" in a language, it does not suddenly disappear, and usually does not completely and totally disappear even after a long period of time. Take, for example, the strong verbs of English. These reflect a productive process in Germanic for forming past tense verbs by vowel modification. In English it is dying out. It is not productive, but it is not gone either. We see the process in decay in many ways as it becomes less common, but there is still substantial evidence for it. (My wife and I were playing Boggle tonight and she found the word 'dived'. For the life of me, I couldn't make the past participle of 'dive' sound at all right. 'I have dove' is certainly ungrammatical, but 'I have dived' is equally obnoxious to me. I'm glad I don't enjoy swimming!) As another example of how "long lost" are actually not really lost, but only hiding, in Proto-Numic (ca. 2000 BP) from the Great Basin of the US (Uto-Aztecan stock), geminating the medial consonant of a verb stem (overwhelmingly CVCV) indicated that the verb was durative in aspect. Some of the daughter languages have exactly the opposite meaning for gemination, i.e., momentaneous aspect, and some have lost the feature altogether. However, the key to determining that this feature is not "lost" in any of the languages is that a very small (and dwindling) set of verbs in each of the languages also mark plural object or subject by geminating the medial consonant. It is this internal reconstruction that allows us to see evidence of older features of the grammar of a language even when that feature has long since become totally unproductive. It's been my experience after 20 years of looking at comparative data from Native America (where there is no written tradition), that using internal reconstruction can triple or even quadruple the amount of good phonological, morphological and syntactic evidence for demonstrating relationships or doing subgrouping. The time depth of Proto-Indo-European is well within any maximum limit to the effectiveness of identifying internal evidence of formerly productive processes in the great majority of languages. So then: Can every piece of evidence for a relationship be lost or unidentifiably changed? Yes, but only at very great time depths (at least over 10,000 years). Can vocabulary be borrowed to such an extent that evidence of a relationship is lost? Not that I have ever seen. Even when a language borrows really extensively from another language (as English has borrowed from Italic), there is always a base level of commonly-used vocabulary that still retains its ancestral lexicon. Can morphology and syntax be borrowed to such an extent that evidence of a relationship is lost? Most likely not. While languages in long-term contact, such as the languages of the Northwest Coast of North America, can exhibit a great many similarities in phonological, morphological, and syntactic structure, there are always significant differences. Internal reconstruction can be used to identify structures characteristic of ancestral relationships even when none of the structures are still productive. Many comparative linguists actually consider the results of internal reconstruction to be better evidence for a relationship than productive processes. There may be a few features of Proto-Indo-European that are either lost or unrecognizable by any means in some or all of the daughters, but they are undoubtedly a small minority compared to the array of recognizable features. 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 alderson at netcom.com Thu Jan 20 18:59:28 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 10:59:28 -0800 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On 16 Jan 2000, Steve Long wrote: > Which brings me back to the point of my original post. A language borrows > and innovates radically. To the point where let's say - to make the point > clear to the most obtuse degree - 99% of all lexical and morphological > features are not from the original parent. If the language has *borrowed* 99% of its lexical and morphological features from another, it is a dialect of the second language with a substrate of the first, not the first at all. If it has borrowed 99% of its lexicon, and *innovated* 99% of its morphology, such that it does not match the morphology of the lexical donor, it would most likely be best viewed as a creole. Whatever the mix envisioned, yes, as Mr. Long writes, > The radically changing language could have little or no evidence left of its > genetic affilation. CRITICAL EVIDENCE OF THAT 'GENETIC' AFFILATION HAS BEEN > LOST. However, since we would not be looking at such a language for genetic evidence, it is irrelevant to the main effort. Rich Alderson From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Jan 20 22:01:43 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 17:01:43 EST Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: >rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: > How secure is East Germanic? Why is it not just an early form of N. Germanic? >i.e. what are the points that distinguish it? -- East Germanic is the earliest attested form of Germanic (the Gothic bible) but it already shows innovations not present in the earliest form of North Germanic, the runic inscriptions. There's a very close similarity; the Germanic languages were probably still one cluster of mutually intelligible dialects as recently as 0 CE. From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Jan 20 20:11:53 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 20:11:53 -0000 Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: Rick said: > How secure is East Germanic? > Why is it not just an early form of N. Germanic? W Walker Chambers & J R Wilkie "A short history of the German language" (1970) page 23 say "The older way of accounting to the development of these Germanic dialects was to assume the Primitive Germanic divided in to three branches: North ... East ... and West. This family tree is is still useful as a classification of the Germanic dialects, but it cannot explain their growth." They then go on to outline a theory - which they admit is not universally accepted - that Germanic should not be seen as a primitive unity which broke apart, but as a collection of at least five major groups which drew together as the common political and cultural life shifted and changed. The reality is that the various forms of Germanic are interrelated in complex ways, and a simple family tree does not do justice to the complexity. Nonetheless, East Germanic cannot be seen as an early form of North Germanic - it shares too much with Allemanic and Bavarian, for a start. Peter From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Jan 20 22:10:07 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 17:10:07 EST Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Does all this reflect the possibility that an accurate and true >morphological IE tree would and should look different than an accurate and >true lexical IE tree? -- no. Not if you're talking about determining genetic relationship. Vocabulary is borrowed much more freely than morphology, and from a wider range of sources. Therefore morphology gives a more accurate picture, on the whole. >This misses the point. The point is simply evidentiary. The radically >changing language could have little or no evidence left of its genetic >affilation. -- if 99% of the original language has been replaced, you're not talking about borrowing, you're talking about language succession; ie., abandoning one language and adopting another. To give examples of how this works in the real world, Persian and English both have very large stores of borrowed lexical items -- from Arabic and the Romance languages, respectively; amounting to around 50% of the total vocabulary. Nevertheless, any linguist could -- without any prior knowledge of these two languages -- take a brief look at modern Persian or English and give you a perfectly accurate analysis of their genetic relationships, including the period in which the massive borrowings took place. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Jan 20 22:42:27 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 17:42:27 EST Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >I think if you look closely you'll see that you cannot identify "shared" >innovations if they are no longer there to identify. -- in which case the language isn't there any more either. >(I think that may be terminological again. Since a language that is made up >entirely of loan words would have no genetic affilation except the languages >it loaned from.) -- actually, no. Borrowing vocabulary is not the same thing as borrowing syntax. In any case, languages do not in fact borrow all their vocabulary -- even in the case of a radically innovative language like English, the _core_ vocabulary remains remarkably stable. That, incidentally, was how the existance of Indo-European was deduced originally -- "father", "mother", etc. >And a robust language exposed to new ideas and things may be too interested >in change to retain the very shared attributes and innovations that you >might be using to show relatedness. -- you're anthromorphizing the process of language change again. It's not a conscious process, on the whole, and languages are not individuals. A language has no interests, desires, needs or wants and does not make "decisions". >If this is true, it should throw up a big caution sign in terms of measuring >relatedness in the context of varing rates of change among languages. -- we don't measure relatedness in terms of the RATE of change, we measure it in terms of SHARED INNOVATION. English has changed much more rapidly than say, Icelandic. This affects the genetic relations involved not one iota. >If I subject a group of plants to a good does of radiation and they mutate >like crazy and then compare the next generations to their unmutated >relatives, I may be hard put to call them very closely related at all. -- no, in point of fact their relationships would be entirely obvious once you'd done a DNA comparison. There's less than 2% genetic difference between chimps and humans, for instance. If you changed _all_ or nearly all the genes in an organism, it would die 100% of the time. >I would HAVE conclude that they were not related at all. -- see above. >AND finally the evolution of Frankish to French may be direct and historical >evidence of a how a language with insufficient resources needed to alter >substantially to absorb a much more complex cultural situation. -- Frankish did not evolve into French. Where did you get this bizzare notion? Frankish (a Germanic language) became _extinct_ in the Gallo-Roman areas to which the western Franks migrated, and in which the Franks were a dominant minority. It was replaced by a local Late Latin dialect which evolved into French (a Romance language). There are a couple of hundred Frankish loan-words in French, and some Celtic loans. French is no more Frankish than English is Italian (or Hindustani). From karhu at umich.edu Fri Jan 21 02:28:18 2000 From: karhu at umich.edu (Marc Pierce) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 21:28:18 -0500 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hi, Nobody else appears to have tackled this yet, so here's my shot: East Germanic is pretty secure. It's set off by the following: (1) a long e from Proto-Germanic long e1 (North and West Germanic have either long a or long o); (2) lack of r as a reflex of PGmc *z; (3) thorn + l corresponds to NWest Germanic f+ l; (4) some miscellaneous verbal things, like a passive inflection, a fourth class of weak verbs, and a reduplicated class of strong verbs. There's some other stuff, too: Gothic lacks umlaut, and consonant gemination before PGmc *j, and so on. There are a couple of points of North and East Germanic unity (Holtzmann's Law and so on), but I think they're pretty well outweighed by the evidence for NWest Gmc. Your next question sounds like Ingvaeonic (or North Sea Germanic), which is a separate group within West Germanic, not as an intermediate stage. There's a book on this topic, by Tom Markey, published in the 1970's in the IBS series. Marc Pierce On Tue, 11 Jan 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > What is the basis of this tree in Germanic? > How secure is East Germanic? > Why is it not just an early form of N. Germanic? > i.e. what are the points that distinguish it? > Is there any merit to the idea that there was a separate branch of > Germanic including Anglian, Jutish and pre-Frisian, intermediate between N > & W Germanic, andf that modern English and Frisian are the result of a > fusion between this and W Lowland Germanic? [ moderator snip ] From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Fri Jan 21 15:42:11 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 10:42:11 -0500 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: In an earlier post, I gave the following as the family tree for Germanic: >> PGmc >> / \ >> PNWGmc \ >> / \ \ >> WGmc NGmc EGmc On Tue, 11 Jan 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > What is the basis of this tree in Germanic? > > How secure is East Germanic? > Why is it not just an early form of N. Germanic? > i.e. what are the points that distinguish it? > Is there any merit to the idea that there was a separate branch of > Germanic including Anglian, Jutish and pre-Frisian, intermediate between N > & W Germanic, andf that modern English and Frisian are the result of a > fusion between this and W Lowland Germanic? Okay, let me answer your first two questions first. The sound changes which characterize NWGmc, which are not shared by EGmc, are as follows: -Stressed */e:/ > */a:/ -Word final */-o:/ > */-u/ -Unstressed word-final */-am/ > */-um/ There's also a morphological character whose specific identity is slipping my mind at the moment; there's some noun case or verb form where NWGmc has an innovative form. Now, it's true that some earlier authors grouped NGmc and EGmc together, so that the tree would show PGmc branching into WGmc and "NEGmc". The one decent argument for doing this is the so-called "sharpening" (Verscha"rfung). PGmc *-ww- comes out in Gothic as something spelled , and in Old Icelandic as something spelled or . This does superficially look like a shared innovation, but when you consider this one character against the four listed above, it appears that the correct analysis is that the Verscha"rfung is a parallel innovation (Alternatively, the phonologist Rolf Noyer and I have discussed the possibility that the Verscha"rfung was a _synchronic_ rule of PGmc which was lost in WGmc, which would likewise be consistent with the tree I drew above). Now, for your second question. You asked: > Is there any merit to the idea that there was a separate branch of > Germanic including Anglian, Jutish and pre-Frisian, intermediate between N > & W Germanic, andf that modern English and Frisian are the result of a > fusion between this and W Lowland Germanic? Within West Germanic, it's not possible to draw a clean Stammbaum, because the dialects developed in close contact with one another. Still, we recognize a major division within WGmc: 1) Ingvaeonic, also known as North Sea Germanic, which includes Old English, Old Frisian, and, with some complications, Old Saxon; versus 2) Old High German. (You used the term "Jutish"; we don't have any documents written in a language called "Jutish", but given that there's a traditional claim that there was a people called the Jutes who participated in the Germanic invasion of Britain, we can take Jutish to mean some part of the Ingvaeonic dialect continuum. Anglian, of course, is a dialect of OE.) There's sometimes been an idea floating around that "West Germanic" is an artificial designation, i.e. that "WGmc" is really an amalgamation of dialects which don't actually descend from any single Proto-West-Germanic language. This idea is can be safely rejected; there are some seven secure cases where the WGmc languages all share early innovations which are not found outside WGmc (again, I can list them if there's interest, but it would take a lot of time). The Ingvaeonic languages all show the common WGmc developments, and none of the NGmc developments; Ingv. is thus securely WGmc and not "intermediate" between WGmc and NGmc. There are a few sound changes which distinguish Ingvaeonic from the other WGmc languages. I won't go thru them all here unless there's interest, but one change which gives readily recognizable results to anyone who knows English and German is this: in Ingv., but not in OHG, a nasal before a voiceless fricative deletes with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel (this had already happened before */x/ in PGmc, but Ingv. extended it to all voiceless fricatives). Examples: English German other ander tooth Zahn soft sanft five fu"nf (etc. - many more examples) OE and the other Ingv. languages all underwent this change; none of the OHG dialects did. So if I were going to further flesh out the tree I drew above, I'd put a further branching under WGmc with a two-way split into Ingvaeonic and OHG. I wouldn't care to draw a Stammbaum for WGmc with any further detail than that, because there's just too much cross-contamination between dialects. I can't tell you how refreshing it is to actually talk about something with some real linguistic content for a change, rather than the interminable and largely vacuous discussions about whether a parent can coexist with its daughter, etc. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From jer at cphling.dk Thu Jan 20 16:27:46 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 17:27:46 +0100 Subject: NW vs E Germanic In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 11 Jan 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > What is the basis of this tree in Germanic? > How secure is East Germanic? > Why is it not just an early form of N. Germanic? > i.e. what are the points that distinguish it? Gothic is opposed to an innovating group of North and West Germanic in the following respects: 1. Final /-o:/ yields NWG -u, but Goth. -a. 2. Final /-am(z)/ yields NWG -um, but Goth. -am. 3. Voiced /z/ is not developed in the direction of /r/ in Goth., but is in NWG. 4. The pronoun *ju:z preserves its original vowel in Goth., but is changed to *ji:z in North and West. 5. Reduplicated ablauting verbs are preserved in Goth., but replace their interior part by the odd "/e:/2" in North and West. That spells unity for Norse and West Germanic. However, then there is the Verschaerfung problem which seemingly combines Norse and Gothic to the exclusion of West Germanic. On balance I believe one must see this as secondary disappearance of (at least some) Verschaerfung in West Germ., so that the events that produced Versch. operated in the common prehistory of ALL the Germanic we know. Jens > Is there any merit to the idea that there was a separate branch of > Germanic including Anglian, Jutish and pre-Frisian, intermediate between N > & W Germanic, andf that modern English and Frisian are the result of a > fusion between this and W Lowland Germanic? [...] I would like to know what linguistic facts that idea is based on. Jens From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Jan 20 11:21:54 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 11:21:54 +0000 Subject: Indo-Hittite Message-ID: Steve Long writes: > PS - Someone - I forget who - also wanted to know how the UPenn tree analysis > could claim to "confirm the Indo-Hittite hypothesize" when the actual > language used was Luwian. This is perhaps a misunderstanding arising from idiosyncratic terminology. Sturtevant's 'Indo-Hittite hypothesis' is awkwardly named, and it might better be called the 'IE-Anatolian hypothesis', or some such. This hypothesis says nothing about Hittite in particular, in spite of its name. Instead, it holds that Proto-Anatolian -- the ancestor of the entire Anatolian group, including Hittite and Luwian -- was not a daughter of PIE, but rather a sister of it. That is, it holds that PIE and Proto-Anatolian were both daughters of a single more remote ancestor, which might be called 'Proto-IE-Anatolian', or maybe 'Proto-Indo-Anatolian', but, in Sturtevant's terminology, it comes out bizarrely as 'Proto-Indo-Hittite'. Sturtevant's 'Indo-Hittite' is eccentric: it's comparable to referring to Balto-Slavic as 'Balto-Russian', or to Indo-Iranian as 'Indo-Kurdish'. I will confess, though, that I have never been able to see any testable empirical basis for distinguishing between the Indo-Hittite hypothesis and the less grandiose view that Proto-Anatolian was simply the first of the known branches of the IE family to separate from the rest. As far as I can see -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- Sturtevant's hypothesis, which requires a hypothetical single language equivalent to 'Proto-all-of-IE-except-Anatolian', can only be distinguished from a scenario in which the ancestral PIE splintered simultaneously into a number of distinct daughter branches. In fact, precisely this odd last view is the one commonly presented in those IE family trees that we see everywhere. But not many linguists are happy with such a massive sudden-disintegration scenario. It's merely that evidence has been lacking for imposing a more highly branched and more normal-looking tree structure upon the family. But this is precisely the issue addressed by the UPenn work. What Ringe's group was trying to do was to find a principled basis for drawing up just such a branching tree structure. And one of their results is that PIE did indeed undergo an original binary split into Proto-Anatolian and Proto-the-rest-of-IE. Of course, you don't have to buy their methods or their conclusions, but it is clear that the results they report confirm Sturtevant's hypothesis. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Jan 21 04:26:16 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 22:26:16 -0600 Subject: Basque butterflies again In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] >Take the mainly Lapurdian forms ~ . >Lapurdian, almost alone among the varieties of Basque, is very fond of >expressive formations in , and . Here are some >examples of such expressive forms: Not all of these seem expressive, some seem to be modified loanwords from Romance with assimilated consonants; perhaps "expressive" forms of loanwords I don't know the Gascon, Aragonese, Catalan or Occitan cognates to the French and Spanish forms [nor do I have access to dictionaries of those languages. But these may offer better matches > 'rag doll', ~ 'doll' See French poupon, English pompon < French ?; see proposed *bunn-/*munn- "lump, bump, hill, etc." > ~ ~ '(a single) tear', 'dewdrop', >'bubble', 'bulb' See Spanish bombilla, French ampule [sp?] > 'a kind of bell'; 'large bell' See Spanish campana --with assimilation of /k/ > /p/ > 'poppy' See Spanish amapola > 'thud', 'heartbeat' See Spanish palpitar [admittedly very weak] [snip] >A few further comments. The word 'pretty', 'pretty little thing', >'ornament', 'jewel', apparently present in the large group represented by >, is of uncertain origin but is often suspected of being a >palatalized form of 'alive', 'living'. The suggested semantic >development is 'living' > 'moving' > 'flashing', 'sparkling', > 'pretty', >'jewel', or something similar. >So, as Ed suggests, is very likely the *ultimate* source of the first >element, but it cannot be the *direct* source. Is it possible that < ? IE *wiwos "live" ? [ Moderator's note: The IE etymon of Latin _vivo-_, Greek _bio-_, Sanskrit _jiva-_, clearly has an initial labiovelar; other bits of evidence lead us to reconstruct an "o- coloring" laryngeal in the root, so *g{^w}iH{_3}-. Whether or not the Basque form can be derived thereform must be answered by someone else. --rma ] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Jan 21 04:46:12 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 22:46:12 -0600 Subject: Basque butterflies In-Reply-To: Message-ID: It might work, given that Spanish bicho also means "pecker" --like Yiddish schmuck < German schmuck "jewel". In [Brazilian] Portuguese, it's also acquired the meaning "sissy, pansy" [i.e. "effeminate"] >Rick Mc Callister writes: >[on the Basque 'butterfly' words in ] >> Any possible link between and Spanish "bug, >> critter, varmint" and also various slang meanings >Doubt it. Basque means 'pretty', 'pretty little thing', 'ornament', >'jewel'. Is it from a Gascon, Catalan or Occitan term cognate to French bijou? > It has no connection with bugs or any other critters anywhere except >in the 'butterfly' words cited. And let's face it: as bugs go, >butterflies are >exceptionally pretty. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From Georg at home.ivm.de Thu Jan 20 09:06:24 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 10:06:24 +0100 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria In-Reply-To: <007001bf5ff5$f6003c20$669f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: >It is my understanding that oral consonants are articulated by children >before nasal consonants. Is this incorrect in your view? Yes, this is incorrect in my view. You will not repeat that keeping your moputh shut and simply turn on your vocal cords ("/mmm/") is such a difficult thing that it invariable comes after, say, /p/, /ts/ or /r/, will you ? A different question is, however, whether this very simple, let's call it an "articulatory gesture", is really a "consonant". It might be sensible to reserve this technical term for non-vocalic articulatory gestures *when they form part of linguistically meaningful items*, which is certainly not the case for infants who first try out their articulatory tracts. So, again, the nasal /m/ is articulated *very* early, and it's association with whatever semantic content - done by the parents, of course - is an artefact of adults fancying that the child is actually speaking to them. At this stage, the child is certainly *not* "using" "language"; it's babbling. Babbling-research has established that, in phonetic terms, the sounds produced by infants vary greatly in frequency: at the top of the list are /m/ and /b/ alike, with the same frequency, followed by, in this order, /p/, /d/, /h/, /n/, /t/, /g/, /k/, /j/, /w/, /s/, aso. (Locke, J.L.: Phonological Acquisition and Change, NY: AP 1983). >All you have written is, of course, very plausible. Yes, it very obviously is ;-) >But --- and there is always a but, is there not? --- this does not really >address my argument, I do not think. >I am *not* maintaining that *mama is the early term for 'mother' but rather >*ama. Some societies conventionalize the fully reduplicated form /mama/, some don't. Some languages do know initial labials, some don't (and among these, some may allow for such a thing in a marked nursery term, some won't). Some cultures chose to conventionalize /deda/ for "mother", reserving /mama/ for "father". Some will conventionalize a one-syllable /ma/, some won't. When it comes to the act of conventionalizing, which is to be kept sharply apart from the "pre-speech-act" of babbling, the phonotactic rules of the language the poor child is about to learn from now on, do play a role (after all, the happy parents of a Tlinkit child do of course think that their napper is talking Tlinkit to them, and not Abkhaz, so even when the little one constantly babbles /mama/ they'll assume for convenience' sake that it actually wanted to say /ama/ [for argument's sake I assume that Tlinkit is one of the labialless languages of the American NW,. and that /ama/ is "mother" there; if this is not the case, take any language, where it is, and replace this example]). There may be other reasons, apart from phonotactics, and in some individual cases they may be hard to tell. So what ? >Larry brushes by this difference but I am hoping you will not. This is not brushing by. The word is "linguistics" (;-). >While *mama may be a perfectly plausible child's word for 'mother', the >frequently found form *?ama can, with an implausible level of difficulty, be >derived from it. Do you not agree? Of course, such words may change, once they have become conventionalized items of a language, they may be subject to any systematic change of the sound structure of this language. They may, however, and this is the point, why such terms shouldn't be allowed to play a decisive role in any classificatory work, escape this, either remaining stable in spite of sound-changes in other parts of the lexicon, or be innovated over and over again to maintain their emotional connotations (or, for that matter, in the case of imitative words, their iconicity). St.G. PS: Shoot, "mother" is /tla/ in Tlinkit, so think up a different example ... Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From Georg at home.ivm.de Thu Jan 20 09:17:10 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 10:17:10 +0100 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria In-Reply-To: <008501bf5ff7$da7dc6a0$669f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: >Unless you are arguing that *mama almost invariably is produced *first*, and >that the mother is inclined to accept the baby's *first* "word" as referring >to herself, then it is equally likely that the mother will reinforce *baba >or *papa as a selfg-designation --- a very rare occurrence. No, Pat, this is independent of what a given child utters "first" to its given mother. Language is social convention, and even if in Arkansas children are so linguistically gifted that they utter /tata/ or /kaka/ long before they manage to produce the enormously difficult nasals, their parents won't have the power to change the *conventionalization* of /mama/ = "mother" all on their own. They may well tell everyone that their child "said" /takata/ long before /mama/, and they may even decide that in their family from now on, /takata/ "means" "mother". Why not ? But it won't have any consequences for the speech-community on the whole, which has conventionalized "mummy" and the like long ago. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Thu Jan 20 22:53:53 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 17:53:53 -0500 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria (miau) In-Reply-To: <200001141120.MAA04215@tyr.diku.dk> Message-ID: On Fri, 14 Jan 2000, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote: >> From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) >> Nor does the use of a computer in any way guarantee greater >> objectivity. If I decide to reject words showing property P, then I >> can do this by hand or with a computer program, and the results will >> be the same. After all, the computer isn't going to inform me that >> it doesn't like my criteria. > Given total objectivity in the researcher, that is true. However, in > many scientific communities it is recognized that most researchers > will unconsciously bias their evaluation of experimental data to > reject more of those instances that will not support their theory. [...] > Having the researcher set the rules for acceptance of data and the > computer apply them, would make it much harder to get a bias in there. Actually, I think there's a real danger here. The mechanical way in which a computer carries out a query can give us an unwarranted confidence in the objectivity of the results. The problem is this: the database upon which you run your query was created by humans with the same potential for bias that you point out. Let me give an example here. Suppose that I'm creating a dictionary database of Old English, and I'm coding each word for the dates and dialects where it is attested. Well, scholars have differences of opinion regarding the date and dialect of a particular document. In such cases, I have to make a decision one way or the other; I have to consider the arguments that everyone gives and make my own best judgment about how I'm going to code this particular controversial case. So suppose you're querying my database, and you say, "Give me all the words attested in such-and-such a century and dialect with properties X, Y, and Z". The computer will indeed be entirely mechanical in selecting the words which meet these critera; but I hope it's clear that the output will unavoidably reflect the choices I made when building the database to start with. I'm not saying that we shouldn't use computers for this kind of purpose; quite to the contrary, I think that we've just scratched the surface of what computers can do for work in historical linguistics. My point is that researcher bias is just as possible when you're using computers as when you're doing the same work with paper and pencil. I reject the criticism that a set of findings are any less trustworthy because they were produced without the aid of a computer. Computers merely allow you to produce the same bias-prone results more quickly. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jan 20 08:13:34 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 08:13:34 -0000 Subject: PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: Dear Rick and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Rick Mc Callister" Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2000 4:58 AM [RC wrote:] > Is this ultimately based on an expressive/onomatopeic form similar > to the English expressive pu, pew, Spanish expressive puchi, uuf, puaf, > Italian expressive puzzi, etc.? > Are these expressive forms pretty universal? [PR wrote previously] >> *pu:to-s, I think it is relatively certain that its >> basal meaning is 'source or site of strong fragrance' (as attested by >> *pu:ti-, 'rot'), a concept broad enough to include both cunnus and podex [PR] The slope dividing lexical root from expressive is a slippery one, I admit. But, perhaps, one test that might be applied to differentiate them is whether the morpheme is question is capable of compounding. 'Whew!' is a expression of relief. But we do not --- except humorously --- say *whewness for 'relief'. Therefore, provisionally, we may probably account 'whew' to expressives. *pew(H)-, on the other hand, shows derived forms in many languages: e.g. Egyptian [bw] and [bwt], 'detest, abominate'. Here, I think we may probably accept *pew(eH)- as a lexical root. However, an additional factor may be that lexical roots which have a form that may be interpreted expressively tend to be retained over long periods of time. This particular root is very well represented in languages around the world. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Jan 20 20:00:03 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 20:00:03 -0000 Subject: PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister asked: > How 'bout a form ancestral to English "balls", Pokorny is interesting here (p121, under the entry bhel-, bhle:, to blow up, swell up). He refers to 'Hess. bille "penis" middle low German (ars-)bille, Dutch bil, old high German arsbelli (buttocks); and Anglo-saxon bealluc (testicles) < *bhol-n.' He includes Greek phallos "penis". "Bollocks" is interesting - it shows the older diminutive suffix found in hillock, bullock, buttock. Peter From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Jan 20 22:45:17 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 17:45:17 EST Subject: PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: >Rick Mc Callister >How 'bout a form ancestral to English "balls", Gaelic palla [sp?], >> -- ah... "balls" is rather transparently derived from the English word for "round object". From oldgh at hum.au.dk Fri Jan 21 09:24:16 2000 From: oldgh at hum.au.dk (George Hinge) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 10:24:16 +0100 Subject: PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister suggested > How 'bout a form ancestral to English "balls", Gaelic palla [sp?], >perhaps *bhel-; or are these later developments? Gaelic palla "penis" is >obviously borrowed (or expressively mutated) but the meaning is different >from English > I believe Theo Vennemann mentioned similar forms in Afroasiatic The English 'ball' is traditionally derived from the IE root *bhel- "swell", cf. Pokorny 120-2, i.e. *bhol-n-; a deminutive of 'ball' (which in the most Germanic languages has the polite meaning only) is to be found in Old English 'bealluc' "testicle". Pokorny also cites the Old High German 'arsbelli' "buttocks" (with umlaut). The zero grade, *bhl-no-, is represented by Greek 'phallo/s' (if not from *bhl-ios), Phrygian 'ba(m)balon', 'ballion', Old Irish 'ball' "limb, member", and English 'bull', which has kept in some Germanic Dialects a more explicit sexual denotation: Pokorny cites Hessisch 'bulle' "vulva", and I can add from my own language, Danish, the colloquial 'bolle' "have intercourse with". The e grade, *bhel-no- is represented (so Pokorny) by Middle High German '(ars)bille', Dutch 'bil' "buttocks" and Hessisch 'bille' "penis". It is interesting how the same root can generate different meanings such as "penis" and "testicle" on the one hand and "vulva" and "podex" on the other. I don't know if the Gaelic can be derived from OI 'ball'. George Hinge The Department of Greek and Latin The University of Aarhus, Denmark oldgh at hum.au.dk From jreiss at retemail.es Thu Jan 20 14:24:52 2000 From: jreiss at retemail.es (Jordi Reiss) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 15:24:52 +0100 Subject: Fuzzy phonology and phonetic change Message-ID: Hello to all, Just a short question: Is someone investigating in fuzzy phonology and linsguistic (phonetic) change? Regards, Jordi Reiss From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Jan 20 19:47:52 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 19:47:52 -0000 Subject: Northwest IE attributes Message-ID: As I understand the debate about NW attributes, it has reduced to an either-or which I believe is misleading. People appear to be arguing either that the NW group split off early, in which case satemisation is a problem, or that the language groups concerned remained in contact with I-I, in which case we cannot say there is a NW group. I think, on the contrary, that we can talk of a group even within a spectrum. We can talk of the three colours at the red end of the rainbow as a "group" in a meaningful sense (they are the "warm" colours, etc); we can talk of the three "blue" colours at the other end as another group. Likewise, I see no problem in talking of a group within a spectrum of languages. Within the Romance spectrum from Portugal to the toe of Italy, we could talk meaningfully of a group from Catalan to Piedmont, or a Galician-portuguese group, or a Southern Italian group. Therefore I think the debate is misguided. To talk of a "NW group" does not imply that these languages must have split off early from the other IE dialects. The boundaries can also remain fuzzy: Celtic and Germanic can be seen as central to the group, with Baltic and Slavonic on the one hand, and Italic on the other, sharing some characteristics but not others. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Jan 20 19:37:43 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 19:37:43 -0000 Subject: Northwest IE attributes Message-ID: Rick asked: > Why the exception kravih? It is far from being the only such word. PIEists reconstruct three series of velar consonants, based on centum kw ~ satem k; centum k ~ satem k; and centum k ~ satem k' (and simliarly for g, and gh, except that the evidence is slighter.) There are 166 PIE roots listed in Bird which begin with /k/ rather than /k'/ or /kw/, while 51 begin with plain /g/, and 57 with plain /gh/. Baldi, Foundations of Latin, says (summarised): The palatal series: satem k>s' and kw>k except (i) before /r/ and /a/; (ii) after /u/. This accounts for nearly all cases of the plain series /k/ (as opposed to the palatal k' or the labiovelar kw), so the plain series may not be needed for the reconstruction of PIE. See Beekes, Comparative IE linguistics 1995 p 109-113, and Lehmann, Theoretical Bases, 1993 pp 100-101. Baldi seems sadly out of line with the evidence. Many of the roots in Bird do not fit his "rules", and he also seems to ignore the evidence of a three-fold series suggested for both Anatolian and Albanian. Rick also said: > Sometimes, it almost looks as if IE has recessive genes, e.g. Romance > Satem, No - palatalisation in Romance is always and only due to the following vowel, while the whole point of the three-fold velar series in PIE is that the palatalisation in the satem languages has no explanation in any surrounding phonological features - at least none that we can yet discover, pace Baldi. Peter From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Jan 20 21:59:03 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 16:59:03 EST Subject: Northwest IE attributes Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >I You miss my point. *IF* satem was innovated among I-Ir speakers and then >only later 'adopted' by Balto-Slavic speakers, then we can still keep B-S >out of the "original" satem group and in the original NW group - since satem >would have been only adopted in B-S after the NW split-off. -- both Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian are satemized at the earliest recorded dates for either of those language groupings. This is one of a number of innovations shared by Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian and indicates that they remained in contact after Indo-Iranian had _lost_ contact with the other western IE dialects. It would be more accurate to refer to satemization as a process beginning somewhere in the Indo-Iranian dialect cluster and then spreading from there, the process "fading out" as it reached Balto-Slavic (and Armenian) and not carrying over into the next tier of IE dialects -- Germanic and Greek, for instance. Hard to date, but not later than, at the extreme, 1500 BCE or so -- the earliest recorded Mitannian sources (specifically Indo-Aryan) are from about that date) Most probably about a thousand years earlier -- say around 2500 BCE. Shared innovations between Baltic and Germanic indicate continued contact from a very early date. The obvious inference is that Baltic formed a geographical "bridge" for some time between Indo-Iranian and Germanic after the breakup of PIE, which again indicates a date for the terminus ad quem of PIE between 3500 and 3000 BCE. The west-to-east line would go Germanic-Balto-Slavic-Indo-Iranian, and there's every indication that the relative positions have always been that way. (Eg., early Indo-Iranian loans in Proto-Finno-Ugric vs. Proto-Germanic loans in Finnish proper, which would put proto-Indo-Iranian around the southern Urals and Proto-Germanic on the southern shore of the Baltic and in Scandinavia.) >Greece is certainly northwest of Anatolia and east of the Caucasus. -- Actually Greece proper is due west of Anatolia. This says nothing, however, about where the IE dialect antecedent to Greek was at the time in question. And Greek and Armenian share some innovations, as do Greek and Indo-Iranian. Greek is 'closer' to Indo-Iranian than it is to, say, Latin or Germanic. It's generally classified as part of a group of SE dialects within PIE. So pre-Greek (and Armenian, and probably Phyrgian) remained in contact with the developing Indo-Iranian dialect cluster longer than Germanic, Italic or Celtic; but not quite so long as Balto-Slavic. Ie., Armenian is a satem language, while Greek isn't, indicating that at the time of the spread of the 'satem' innovation, Armenian was _between_ Greek and Indo-Iranian, probably on a northeast-through-southwest vector. This makes perfect sense, since we know that Armenian is intrusive in its historically attested location in NE Anatolia; prior to that (in the 2nd millenium BCE) it was far to the west, in the Balkans -- which is to say, precisely in the area between Greek and the nearest Indo-Iranian language. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Jan 20 21:41:16 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 16:41:16 EST Subject: Northwest IE attributes Message-ID: >Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de writes: >>PIE *peku, 'cattle', /becomes/ Lithuanian 'pekus >.. wouldn'd it rather be 'remained'? -- well, that's the point. It maintains the "k". From alderson at netcom.com Thu Jan 20 18:26:56 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 10:26:56 -0800 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: (message from Rick Mc Callister on Tue, 11 Jan 2000 22:39:28 -0600) Message-ID: On 11 Jan 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Why the exception kravih? > Is it because of the vowel or a combination of /r/ and non-palatal vowel? > Is pekus exceptional because of the velar vowel? These and similar "exceptions" to so-called "satemization" were seen by the Neogrammarians as evidence for a third series of dorsal obstruents in PIE, that is, that along side the palatovelar *k{^y} and the labiovelar *k{^w}, there was a "plain" velar (or possibly back velar) *k. Since then, it has been argued that PIE had either (1) palatals and velars, and labiovelars are a late development, or (2) plain velars and labiovelars, and palatals are a late development. Today's consensus view seems to be a third alternative, that PIE had palatals and labiovelars, and plain velars are an odd development of one or both. > Is Balto-Slavic Satem necessarily linked to Indo-Iranian Satem? Given that the two branches share not only the assibilation of the palatals but also special treatment of *s following *r, *k, *i, and *u, it seems unlikely that they are *not* linked. Further, remember that there are other "satem" branches, such as Armenian and Albanian. Rich Alderson From rao.3 at osu.edu Fri Jan 21 10:15:54 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 05:15:54 -0500 Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter Message-ID: Wouldn't the rise of new species be a better parallel to the rise of new languages? Ancestral species can exist at the same time as a species that has split off. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Jan 21 21:04:06 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 16:04:06 EST Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >So we get back to why one way of looking at it is THE RIGHT WAY and the other >is not. -- because one is accurate, and one is not. >My question was something like - could Anatolian, after say innovating away >from "narrow PIE", borrow back features that it had lost? -- no. >I was looking for borrowings that imitated genetics. E.g., Mencken noted >that after abandoning the "King's English", Americans rediscovered and adopted it. -- what exactly do you mean by this? >E.g., -if Slavic loaned the word for wheel from Greek - or vice versa - could we mistake it as being a gift to both from the reified parent - PIE? -- no. The sound-changes would reveal the date of the borrowing. From lmfosse at online.no Fri Jan 21 11:29:20 2000 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 12:29:20 +0100 Subject: SV: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: Vidhyanath Rao [SMTP:rao.3 at osu.edu] skrev 18. januar 2000 11:31: > What is ``shock'' warfare? > 2nd millennium BCE chariots, as far as we know, were extremely light. > Given the size of horses in use then (ponies by modern standards) and > the requirement of quick acceleration, they could not have been > otherwise. It would not possible to use them except as mobile archery > platforms or personal transport (more like a motor cycle than a pick-up > truck). > Much latter, Assyrians and Persians used much heavier vehicles to drive > through opposing ranks. But, firstly, they had knives affixed to their > axle, and any effect they had came from this. Secondly, they did not > turn very fast. This kind of ``chariot'' would not be any improvement > over the straddle cars and such in use in ANE by 2300 BCE. Those members of the list who would like a demonstration, might want to blow the dust off their Anabasis. Xenophon gives a description of the Persian army deploying such weaponry in the battle where the Persian prince the Greeks are working for get killed. I haven't got time to find out exactly where in the text. Another lively description of chariots in use is given in Caesars Gallic Wars, book on the invasion of Britain. 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 rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Jan 21 04:53:00 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 22:53:00 -0600 Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords In-Reply-To: <21.64b620.25b62dd3@aol.com> Message-ID: Roman citizenship wasn't universally granted until 212 AD or so. Before then, you either had to be of Italic ancestry or do something meritorious such as serve in the legions to get it. [ Moderator's note: The following quoted material is from a posting by JoatSimeon at aol.com. --rma ] >>X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >>Latin was spoken among the Celts before the Roman Army ever arrived. >-- by a few traders. Are you suggesting that Latin would have spread over >the whole of Europe in the _absense_ of Roman conquest and subsequent >political power? >>Latin's main attraction was the badge of Roman citizenship. >-- and Roman citizenship was important because the Romans had conquered a >huge area. QED. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Jan 21 21:09:45 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 16:09:45 EST Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: >In a message dated 1/21/00 3:40:49 AM Mountain Standard Time, rao.3 at osu.edu >writes: >2nd millennium BCE chariots, as far as we know, were extremely light. Given >the size of horses in use then (ponies by modern standards) and the >requirement of quick acceleration, they could not have been otherwise. It >would not possible to use them except as mobile archery platforms or >personal transport (more like a motor cycle than a pick-up truck). -- there are several references to shock action by chariots in the Egyptian records (Kadesh, etc.) and Hittite chariots carried a crew of 3. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Jan 21 21:10:46 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 16:10:46 EST Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: >In a message dated 1/21/00 3:40:49 AM Mountain Standard Time, rao.3 at osu.edu >writes: >Much latter, Assyrians and Persians used much heavier vehicles to drive >through opposing ranks. But, firstly, they had knives affixed to their axle, >and any effect they had came from this. >> -- knife-hubed chariots were always rare. Most Assyrian chariots did not have this feature. From stevegus at aye.net Fri Jan 21 12:52:47 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 07:52:47 -0500 Subject: Horses Message-ID: Rick McCallister writes: > The word presumibly could have applied to other equids. > I don't know if wild asses were present in Anatolia at that time > but they were present in nearby Mesopotamia and Iran. > The weakness, of course, is that words derived from *ekwos almost > invariably apply to the horse. It is not unknown for inherited words to fasten themselves to different species. Gk. "phegos" refers to a kind of oak, unlike Latin "fagus" and English "beech." On this side of the Atlantic, the "robin" and "buzzard" are different birds from the ones the words originally pointed to. -- Sella fictili sedeo Versiculos dum facio. From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Fri Jan 21 14:22:31 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 09:22:31 -0500 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: <3885d342.52172567@mail.chello.nl> Message-ID: On Tue, 18 Jan 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > Sean Crist wrote: >> A few months ago, I made a post to the list in which I stated that the PIE >> word *ekwos "horse" is not probative in the question of the PIE homeland, >> since one need not have domesticated the horse to have a word for it. >> I want to retract that post. Beekes (1995) reports that horses (wild or >> domesticated) were not found in Anatolia in the period which Renfrew >> claims for the final IE unity, and Ringe (personal communication) has >> corroborated this claim. This is an important incongruity between the >> firmly reconstructed IE vocabulary and the homeland which Renfrew posits; >> it is a strong argument against Renfrew. > But Armenian eys^ (< *ek^wos) means "donkey". A transparent case of semantic drift. Are you arguing that this poses some problem for the reconstruction of *ek'wos as "horse"? \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Jan 21 08:00:42 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 08:00:42 -0000 Subject: Egyptian 'cat' ? Message-ID: Dear Lloyd and Joat and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Friday, January 14, 2000 3:44 PM > Joat Simeon writes: >> Ancient Egyptian for "cat" was "miw" > actually, given the lack of voweling > and some difficulties in interpreting the "i" and "y" > writings, could it have been "mi(ao)w" or "mi(u)w" or ?? > For the last, compare English "mew" [myuw], the verb. Though Egyptologists would not agree, I believe any early Egyptian alphabetic spelling represents Ca combinations: so, [mjw] = *mayawa. This is roughly analogous with the situation we might expect if we had a very early IE MYW (*meyewe). If stress-accent is considered, one can easily imagine *mayawa taking many forms, e.g. *maya'u. 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 Fri Jan 21 21:19:44 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 16:19:44 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi writes: >I'm interested in knowing how widely accepted is the theory that the >Indo-European "Urheimat" was located in Eastern Europe. -- that depends on what you mean by "Eastern Europe". The consensus location, insofar as there is one, is the Ukraine -- the area north of the Black Sea. >And how much support do such theories as e.g. Colin Renfrew's idea of the >Anatolian origin of IE languages have? -- very little, among linguists, because of the weird contortions in linguistic development he assumes. Some, among archaeologists in Britain and the US (where extreme anti-diffusionist and anti-migrationist positions are common, essentially for ideological reasons). >I ask this beacause one central piece of evidence in support for the >East-European origin comes from outside the field of IE studies, namely >Uralic linguistics. But it seems to me (correct me if I'm wrong!) that among >many IE-ists, there's a tradition of uninterest in diachronic linguistics >done outside the IE language family. -- actually, early IE (and Indo-Iranian) loanwords in the Uralic languages have been known for some time, and are commonly cited (eg., by Mallory). >It is undeniable that the contacts between speakers of U and IE languages >date back to the earliest stages recovered by the comparative method. Thus >the speakers of proto-U and proto-IE must have been geographical >neighbors. As a result, theories such as Renfrew's Anatolian "Urheimat" >must obviously be discarded (it is of course impossible to assume that >proto-U spekers would have occupied an area south of the Black Sea). -- I see nothing to disagree with here. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Jan 20 21:39:58 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 16:39:58 EST Subject: Northwest IE attributes Message-ID: >rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >Is Balto-Slavic Satem necessarily linked to Indo-Iranian Satem? -- in a word... yes. Unless you're going to postulate that two geographically adjacent dialect-clusters of PIE underwent the same process at the same time but for completely distinct reasons. Which is highly unlikely. From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Sat Jan 22 05:57:18 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 00:57:18 -0500 Subject: IE etymological dictionary In-Reply-To: <200001190832.p65009@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: On Wed, 19 Jan 2000, Hans Holm wrote: > In spite of the dated and questionable quality of the old > "Indoeuropaeisches etymologisches Woerterbuch" by Pokorny, many scholars > would like to have a CD-ROM-version of it. > Does anyone know the state of the work on a new IE etymological dictionary > at LEIDEN, NL? I tried an e-mail to Kulikov at pcmail.LeidenUniv.nl, but that > was returned by the net. Regarding to the Leiden-University homepage, > Kulikov is not listed in their staff nor did I find any hint on such a > project. > Does anyone have an up-to-date information on the Leiden project? > Does anyone know of digitalized versions of the 'Pokorny IEW' What font > has been used? Pokorny is still under copyright; the most recent edition is copyright 1959. It will be a great many years before that edition passes into the public domain. The U.S. government keeps extending the term of copyright longer and longer; they just bumped it up another 20 years a few years ago. Now, if the publisher (Bern: Franke) wanted to release the dictionary on CD or to license it to some other publisher to distribute on CD, they could do so. Of course, since the dictionary is under copyright, this online version would only be available to those individuals and libraries that can afford it. If you're a high school student with a burning interest in Indo-European studies but little money, or if you're a college student in a low-income country with barely any library but with an Internet connection, you _could_ access these materials if they were freely available; the Internet has essentially eliminated the considerable costs of publishing. For reasons of profitability, however, an artificial scarcity is maintained. It's for this reason that I'm interested in taking old IE-related materials whose copyright has expired and placing them online for free, with the intent that volunteer effort can work to bring the materials up to date. If volunteer effort can produce a first-rate and entirely free operating system, I'm sure it can produce a set of quality online IE-related materials; we simply need to do it. I've been poking in a small way at putting IE-related materials online, but I'm champing at the bit to do this on a much larger scale. It's one of the biggest temptations which distracts me from getting my dissertation done. The next volunteer effort I want to organize is to create free online corpora of Old High German and Old English. There is an online corpus of OE, but regrettably, its creators are asserting copyright on these 1000-year-old cultural artifacts and are refusing to allow them to be freely shared, which means e.g. that I can't build a free web service where you can click on any word in a text to get dictionary information. I think this is wrong, and that the response should simply be to create a separate corpus which is under no copyright restrictions, using printed editions whose copyright has expired. Over the last few months, I've been slowly putting together a list of all the known Old High German documents with an aim toward parceling them out to volunteers for typing or scanning; you tell me how many pages you'd like to do, and I'll mail them to you (this worked extremely well for an Old English glossary which I organized last summer; it's online now, and anyone can use it). Unfortunately, I have to repeatedly tell myself that I need to make the dissertation my first priority; otherwise I'd already be asking for volunteers for an OHG corpus. I'm throwing this out here because I'm certainly not the only one capable of doing this. Anyone who wants to can find a pre-1923 dictionary or document which would be of use in creating a free body of Indo-European related materials, and organize volunteers to put sections of it online (or do the whole thing yourself, if you like). There are certainly people on this list who could make recommendations for texts, if you're not sure what to work on. For example, I've got a 60-page glossary of Old High German which I scanned, but which needs a good deal of hand correction, if someone would like to work on that. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Jan 22 07:55:02 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 02:55:02 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 1/22/00 12:12:34 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> 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? 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. 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. (And BTW how drastic are the sound changes do we see in one of the other wheel words: Latin, rota; Lith, ratas; OHG, rod; Ir, roth - cf. Skt, ratha?) Steve Long From sarima at friesen.net Sun Jan 23 06:59:26 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 22:59:26 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 02:29 AM 1/13/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Technology can create and carry its own vocabulary, of course. (I was amazed >to hear the word 'plinth' being used by a builder the other day.) "Learned >words" are adapted to the phonotactics of the language but only so much - >something being in English still does have some connection to legis>. So we do in fact see at least some consistent "retrofitting" with >words like 'theatre' and 'coffee/kava.' and 'telephone.' But very rarely to the degree that it would masquerade as an inherited word from a common ancestor. Indeed with regard to "legal" we may even *have* the inherited form: "leech" (as in physician). (This etymology is marked as uncertain, but it illustrates the basic point). Accomodation usually takes the form of merely coercing the words into the current sound structure of the receiving language or perhaps a folk etymology like "woodchuck" from Cree "ocek". > And the words for >wheel in IE languages are not as consistent or wide-spread as any of these >examples - which might suggest diverse origins and no original word. Except that the differences are greater than expected for a late borrowed word - by a great deal. ><<...there are recent loan words [in Japanese] (e.g. tiishatsu "T-shirt")...>> >I would love to compare T-shirt as it has been "accepted" into languages that >are nearer or farther from English and see if the pattern did not approximate >the kind of changes 'wheel" underwent. It won't. The word for wheel can usually be derived from the reconstructed word via the regular sound changes distinguishing each daughter language. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Jan 22 07:57:00 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 02:57:00 EST Subject: date of wheeled vehicles Message-ID: In a message dated 1/20/00 9:46:04 PM, Robert Drews wrote: <> I haven't read the article, but I have the abstract. What surprises me is that these authors have previously argued that the evidence points to European origins for the wheel. This is from 1998 SAA Symposium abtract, which is reproduced in several places on the web: "The earliest evidence of wheeled transport in Europe and the Near East. J. A. Bakker, J. Kruk,A. E. Lanting, S. Milisauskas A wheeled model from the Late Uruk site Jabel Aruda (Syria), 4500-4400 bp (GrN, uncalibrated) and earlier wagon pictographs of Uruk IV are the earliest proof of wheeled vehicles in the Near East. A cart-rut below a TRB megalithic tomb at Flintbek (Germany) has been dated 4800-4700 bp. A TRB pot with wagon motifs from Bronocice (Poland) is dated 4725 bp (GrN), but seven C-14 dates (DIC) of the same Bronocice III phase yield 4610-4440 BP." "The GrN dates and the Flintbek age seem to suggest that wheeled vehicles were invented in Europe together with the ard, ox-team and yoke, not in the Near East." The Antiquities abstract pulls back a bit on the European origin claims made 2 years earlier: "Results of excavations and 14C determinations from Poland, Germany, Iraq, Syria and Turkey suggest that the appearance of wheeled vehicles was contemporary in Europe and the Near East. (citing: Uruk-Eanna, Uqair, Bronocice III, Jebel Aruda, Arslantepe and Flintbek)" An important thing about the Flintbek find - for this discussion- is that it occures not in connection with so-called kurgan graves but rather in an earlier megalithic context. (1994a Die Ausgrabungen chronisch gef?hrdeter H?gelgr?ber der Stein- und Bronzezeit in Flintbek, Kreis Rendsburg-Eckernf?rde: Ein Vorbericht. Offa, 49/50, 1992/93, Wachholtz, Neum?nster, Schleswig-Holstein, 1994:15-31.) "A long barrow in Flintbek in the center of Schleswig-Holstein supplied information on the use of a two-wheeled cart (Zich 1992). During excavation work, traces of a cart were exposed which had been conserved under a long barrow and led to a dolmen (Fig. 9). It is possible that the barrow had been used to transport stones or earth for the construction of a dolmen chamber. The weight of the stones or of earth is probably responsible for the deep tracks.... It is thought that a single axle vehicle was moved back and forth as clay from the pit for the chamber construction was removed." "The tomb was built during the Funnel Beaker Culture's Early Neolithic II phase. Consequently, the tracks (which were sealed by the mound that covered the chamber) date sometime between 3600 - 3400?cal BC." Bakker, Kruk, et al also don't seem to mention a find at Federsee also in Germany: evidence of plank roads across moorland preserving corduroy cart tracks. The settlement and plank roads are a good deal earlier, carbon dated all the way to 4400BC. The Federsee Museum is calling them the oldest evidence of wheeled carts in Europe. The suggestion has been made that this and other evidence (e.g.,Schacht 1995) points to the wide roads that always adjoin megalithic tombs as being for the cart rather than only foot or hoof use, and even that conservation of wood for the such things as carts may have help cause the shift from thick timber to megalith construction. (M. Baldia 1998) And of course there is little question that some kind of rotational devices had to be used to build the megaliths and that the Flintbek find emphasizes the secondary nature that evidence must take. Actual disk wheels found in Europe are older than any direct evidence of wheeled transport in the Near East. (In fact I believe Piggott gives 3625BC as a date for the earliest wagon burial!) One reason for this may be that the practice of wagon burials artificially preserve the wheels that would have otherwise been recycled. The absence of wheel finds in the Near East - despite unequivocal secondary evidence - argues in favor of this viewpoint. Bakker/Kruk's apparent new diffusion theory - that wheeled transport quickly spread from Jutland to Uruk - making it practically contemporaeneous - fits in with Sherrat's idea of a steady pipeline between the Near East and northern Europe along the old Bandkermik highway. Another conjecture would be that if the wheel-for-transport was that dispersed at 3500BC, it might have been "invented" a good deal earlier and followed the usual diffusion time table - in the case of copper metallurgy, about 1000 years. And all this may not fit in with the idea that metal made the wheel possible: ("Metal tools revolutionized crafts. For example, metal saws could cut wooden planks into circular shapes, allowing such inventions as the wheel." Littauer and Crauwel 1979). Regards, Steve Long From stevegus at aye.net Sat Jan 22 17:04:35 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 12:04:35 -0500 Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: Marc Pierce writes: > East Germanic is pretty secure. It's set off by the following: (1) a long > e from Proto-Germanic long e1 (North and West Germanic have either long a > or long o); (2) lack of r as a reflex of PGmc *z; (3) thorn + l > corresponds to NWest Germanic f+ l; (4) some miscellaneous verbal things, > like a passive inflection, a fourth class of weak verbs, and a > reduplicated class of strong verbs. There's some other stuff, too: Gothic > lacks umlaut, and consonant gemination before PGmc *j, and so on. At least some of these things may simply be because the early, geographically isolated Gothic did not participate in innovations shared by the otherwise still common Germanic. At the time of the texts, all the NW Germanic languages had bulldozed the anomalous, dwindling class of reduplicating verbs, while Bible Gothic preserves them; but I don't think you can conclude that their loss was present at the separation. FWIW, the sharpening of *ww and *jj is -shared- by Gothic and Norse, but the realization is different. Gothic has -ddw- and -ddj-, Norse -ggv- and -ggj-. On the other hand, the status of the diphthongs 'ai' and 'au' in Bible Gothic may point to a vowel shift in Gothic not shared by NW Germanic. I am not sure to what extent they hypothesis is still accepted, that both of these digraphs may have had two different realizations in speech, based on ancestral forms. When Wulfilas invented a new alphabet to write Bible Gothic in, and added these digraphs, it seems unlikely that in the process he would have ignored a phonemic distinction; it isn't like he also had to be faithful to a pre-existing tradition of Gothic literacy. If there was a phoneme pair there, he'd have found a way to write it. Umlaut seems to have been a Scandinavian feature that spread south and west. Only Old Norse seems to have kept a productive and relatively consistent -a umlaut; in the other languages, it's a relic irregularity by the time we see them. I-umlaut is the most consistent across the board, and remains productive both in German and Icelandic. U-umlaut is a consistent rule in Norse; it appears also in some Old English dialects (but is scanty in West Saxon), but it never seems to have spread to the other West Germanic languages. I suspect some rudimentary intelligibility among the NWGmc speeches may have survived into historical times, at least on the "see that house" level. The modern English pronoun -they, them- is a Norse form that was melded into the language, which suggests that Norse was not felt to be completely foreign to Old English when the Norsemen came to northeastern England. More than 30% of the Swedish vocabulary is of Low German origin; and the percentage may be higher, given the many cases where you just can't tell. The extremely productive suffixes -else and -het are Low German, fully domesticated in Sweden. This may reflect the rise of a Low-German based lingua franca among the Baltic and Hanseatic ports, which was apparently sufficient for communication among native speakers of both Low German and Swedish. -- Sella fictili sedeo Versiculos dum facio. From edsel at glo.be Sat Jan 22 19:33:01 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 20:33:01 +0100 Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sean Crist" Sent: Friday, January 21, 2000 4:42 PM [snip] > Now, for your second question. [in response to Rick McC] > You asked: >> Is there any merit to the idea that there was a separate branch of >> Germanic including Anglian, Jutish and pre-Frisian, intermediate between N >> & W Germanic, andf that modern English and Frisian are the result of a >> fusion between this and W Lowland Germanic? > Within West Germanic, it's not possible to draw a clean Stammbaum, because > the dialects developed in close contact with one another. Still, we > recognize a major division within WGmc: 1) Ingvaeonic, also known as North > Sea Germanic, which includes Old English, Old Frisian, and, with some > complications, Old Saxon; versus 2) Old High German. (You used the term > "Jutish"; we don't have any documents written in a language called > "Jutish", but given that there's a traditional claim that there was a > people called the Jutes who participated in the Germanic invasion of > Britain, we can take Jutish to mean some part of the Ingvaeonic dialect > continuum. Anglian, of course, is a dialect of OE.) > There's sometimes been an idea floating around that "West Germanic" is an > artificial designation, i.e. that "WGmc" is really an amalgamation of > dialects which don't actually descend from any single Proto-West-Germanic > language. This idea is can be safely rejected; there are some seven secure > cases where the WGmc languages all share early innovations which are not > found outside WGmc (again, I can list them if there's interest, but it > would take a lot of time). The Ingvaeonic languages all show the common > WGmc developments, and none of the NGmc developments; Ingv. is thus > securely WGmc and not "intermediate" between WGmc and NGmc. > There are a few sound changes which distinguish Ingvaeonic from the other > WGmc languages. I won't go thru them all here unless there's interest, > but one change which gives readily recognizable results to anyone who > knows English and German is this: in Ingv., but not in OHG, a nasal before > a voiceless fricative deletes with compensatory lengthening of the > preceding vowel (this had already happened before */x/ in PGmc, but Ingv. > extended it to all voiceless fricatives). Examples: > English German > other ander > tooth Zahn > soft sanft > five fu"nf > (etc. - many more examples) > OE and the other Ingv. languages all underwent this change; none of the > OHG dialects did. [Ed. Selleslagh] Somehow, Dutch (21 million native speakers) (including S. Dutch, also called Flemish, my mother tongue: my name means that my ancestors were from a 'gens Salica'), and even non-Saxon Low German, is strangely missing from this picture. Where does it fit in your schematic picture? English Dutch other ander tooth tand: here the -n- has remained! soft zacht: the ch (jota sound) - f correspondance is systematic: laugh lachen (but English orthography is still witness of a similar pronunciation in times past). With German:kraft kracht. five vijf In addition, Dutch is actually a synthesis (because of shifting of its cultural center: Brugge > Antwerpen > Amsterdam) and a mixture of the main dialect groups: coastal and West-Flemish and Frisian (Ingwaeonic), Hollands (in the narrowest sense), Brabants (basically Frankish), Limburgs (closer to Rhineland-semi-Low-German) and Saxon (E. Holland). Present unified Dutch is mainly a mixture of Antwerp Brabants and Amsterdam Hollands, mainly as a consequence of the massive emigration of the Antwerp intelligentsia to Amsterdam at the end of the 16th century (Religion wars against the Spanish Habsburgs). Limburgs and Saxon are somewhat outside mainstream Dutch, and Frisian is considered a separate language. It's the first time I see 'Ingwaeonic' used in such a wider sense, but I am no specialist in this matter. I would also like to point out that Frisian has apparently some external characteristics of NGmc., like the preservation of -isk (Eng. -ish, Du. -is(ch), pronounced -is) and similar Danish (Jutish?) sounding features. I think that the idea that Ingwaeonic is halfway between N and WGmc is due to the different use of the term (namely coastal continental WGmc). > So if I were going to further flesh out the tree I drew above, I'd put a > further branching under WGmc with a two-way split into Ingvaeonic and OHG. > I wouldn't care to draw a Stammbaum for WGmc with any further detail than > that, because there's just too much cross-contamination between dialects. >Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) >http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ Ed. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Jan 22 10:32:21 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 04:32:21 -0600 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: <006101bf6382$b247a000$239001d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: What would the postulated 5 branches be? Would they be somthing like the following? 1. Scandinavian 2. Ingwaeonic [Anglo-Frisian] 3. Dutch/Low German [Saxon-Franconian?] 4. High German [Allemanic-Bavarian] 5. East Germanic [Gothic-Burgundian-Lombard] or are the differences between 2, 3 & 4 essentially the result of a later sorting out? I'd like to see their arguments and some discussion of its merits >Rick said: >> How secure is East Germanic? >> Why is it not just an early form of N. Germanic? >W Walker Chambers & J R Wilkie "A short history of the German language" >(1970) page 23 say "The older way of accounting to the development of these >Germanic dialects was to assume the Primitive Germanic divided in to three >branches: North ... East ... and West. This family tree is is still >useful as a classification of the Germanic dialects, but it cannot explain >their growth." > They then go on to outline a theory - which they admit is not universally >accepted - that Germanic should not be seen as a primitive unity which broke >apart, but as a collection of at least five major groups which drew together >as the common political and cultural life shifted and changed. >The reality is that the various forms of Germanic are interrelated in >complex ways, and a simple family tree does not do justice to the >complexity. Nonetheless, East Germanic cannot be seen as an early form of >North Germanic - it shares too much with Allemanic and Bavarian, for a >start. >Peter Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Jan 22 10:43:31 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 04:43:31 -0600 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: thanx for everyone for the explanations [snip] >Within West Germanic, it's not possible to draw a clean Stammbaum, because >the dialects developed in close contact with one another. Would Dutch/Franconian, Low German/Old Saxon be the jokers in this framework? Or just the first of many? Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Sat Jan 22 15:11:18 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 10:11:18 -0500 Subject: NW vs. E Gmc In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I'd like to bring up a few points which were discussed in connection with the distinction between NW and E Germanic: 1. Both Marc Pierce and Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen cited *z > r as an example of a shared innovation in NWGmc. It's true that a sound change along these lines operated in both WGmc and NGmc, but it can be shown that this is a parallel change which operated after the two dialects had separated. The evidence is that there are rules both in WGmc and in NGmc which are sensitive to the *z/*r distinction; the merger of the two categories must have happened _after_ the two dialects had developed separately for a while. 2. Marc Pierce mentioned gemination before *j. Actually, this is a strictly WGmc innovation, and thus isn't evidence one way or the other for the grouping of the three Gmc branches. 3. Marc Pierce mentioned that Gothic retains the old IE passive verbal morphology. It's true that this is lost both NGmc and WGmc, but since the loss of a morphological category is something which can readily occur independently, we once again can't take this as evidence for a NWGmc grouping (even tho there are other grounds for making such a grouping). 4. Pete Gray said "...East Germanic cannot be seen as an early form of North Germanic - it shares too much with Allemanic and Bavarian, for a start." There are some Gothic loan words into Old High German, but this is an event which happened well after the Germanic languages were well differentiated. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From stevegus at aye.net Sat Jan 22 20:36:17 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 15:36:17 -0500 Subject: NE Germanic Message-ID: Couple misrememberings, further-rememberings, and corrections to my post on reduplication and sharpening in Gmc --- 1. Old Norse actually preserved a couple of reduplicated verbs. Conditions for keeping them were apparently set when the stems contained s- or r-. So -sa'- (sow) had a past 3sg. -so/ri- (<*soRi, <*sesi), and -ru'a- (row) had a past -ro/ri-. This small group actually attracted members by analogy, so that -gru'a- (grow) formed a past -gro/ri-. By this time, the 'reduplication' no doubt is no more noticed; what is added is a new past suffix in -o/r-. There are other hints of reduplication in conjugation oddities. -Auka- (add) yields -jo'k- from *aiauk. So, I don't think you can say that the presence vs. absence of reduplication is something that distinguishes Gothic from NWGmc. It's rather that we have Gothic texts before this inherited distinction got hammered. 2. In Gothic, *ww yields -ggw-, not -ddw- as I said earlier. -- Sella fictili sedeo Versiculos dum facio. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Jan 22 09:13:44 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 03:13:44 -0600 Subject: NW vs E Germanic In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator snip ] >Gothic is opposed to an innovating group of North and West Germanic in the >following respects: >1. Final /-o:/ yields NWG -u, but Goth. -a. >2. Final /-am(z)/ yields NWG -um, but Goth. -am. >3. Voiced /z/ is not developed in the direction of /r/ in Goth., but is in >NWG. >4. The pronoun *ju:z preserves its original vowel in Goth., but is changed >to *ji:z in North and West. >5. Reduplicated ablauting verbs are preserved in Goth., but replace their >interior part by the odd "/e:/2" in North and West. So the major changes in High German occurred after East Germanic split >That spells unity for Norse and West Germanic. However, then there is the >Verschaerfung problem which seemingly combines Norse and Gothic to the >exclusion of West Germanic. On balance I believe one must see this as >secondary disappearance of (at least some) Verschaerfung in West Germ., so >that the events that produced Versch. operated in the common prehistory of >ALL the Germanic we know. Excuse my ignorance. Can you explain Verschaerfung? >Jens >> Is there any merit to the idea that there was a separate branch of >> Germanic including Anglian, Jutish and pre-Frisian, intermediate between N >> & W Germanic, andf that modern English and Frisian are the result of a >> fusion between this and W Lowland Germanic? [...] >I would like to know what linguistic facts that idea is based on. Me too :> Seriously, the idea of an Ingwaeonic branch is something I've read in passing in various places without any real elaboration. I suppose they have in mind such things as retention of initial /s-/, /_th_/ & /_dh_/ in English Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From ECOLING at aol.com Sat Jan 22 13:41:41 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 08:41:41 EST Subject: Cladistic trees Message-ID: Scientific American (February 2000 pp.90-95) has a really excellent article "Uprooting the Tree of Life" describing the revolution from the biological classification of Linnaeus to trees based only on shared innovations, just like what we ideally practice in linguistics. It shows also biological trees without roots, and trees with multiple roots. This should be a very good set of analogies for thinking about where comparative-reconstructive linguistics has been and where it may be going. Also of non-analogies. In the same article there is a review of a book "In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil record to a New History of Life" which discusses the problem of what data is lost and how we recover history. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics (couldn't resist) (and the title of this message is odd, or redundant, given the origin of the term "cladistic") From lmfosse at online.no Sat Jan 22 15:00:33 2000 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 16:00:33 +0100 Subject: SV: Indo-Hittite Message-ID: Larry Trask [SMTP:larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk] skrev 20. januar 2000 12:22: >> PS - Someone - I forget who - also wanted to know how the UPenn tree >> analysis >> could claim to "confirm the Indo-Hittite hypothesize" when the actual >> language used was Luwian. .......................... > But this is precisely the issue addressed by the UPenn work. What Ringe's > group was trying to do was to find a principled basis for drawing up just > such > a branching tree structure. And one of their results is that PIE did indeed > undergo an original binary split into Proto-Anatolian and Proto-the-rest-of- > IE. > Of course, you don't have to buy their methods or their conclusions, but it > is > clear that the results they report confirm Sturtevant's hypothesis. Sturtevant's hypothesis found support in the following work: A. L. Kroeber and C.D. Chr?tien (1939). "The statistical technique and Hittite". Language, Journal of the Language Association of America. LXXIII(4): 309-314. I would be curious to know if Ringe's group used Kroeber's and Chr?tien's article, or arrived at their conclusions through methods that were entirely independent of Kroeber . 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 Sat Jan 22 22:54:31 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 17:54:31 EST Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: >alderson at netcom.com writes: >Further, remember that there are other "satem" branches, such as Armenian >and Albanian. -- very good point. If we take the ancestors of Armenian and the presumed Illyrian ancestor of Albanian to be originally the northern neighbors of Greek (along with Thracian and Phyrgian) then the relationship of Greek to Indo-Iranian is clarified. pre-Greek would then be the southernmost of an early dialect or proto-language chain running south-to-north as follows: Greek-Ilyrian/Phyrgian/Armenian/-Indo-Iranian-Balto-Slavic. Within the original, pre-dispersal dialect cluster proto-Indo-Iranian would be east-central, proto-Balto-Slavic central-northwestern, and proto-Greek on the southern fringe, with the dialects ancestral to the Balkan and Balkan-Anatolian languages As proto-Greek moved south toward its historic range sometime in the 3rd millenium BCE, it would lose contact sufficiently to be unaffected by satemization, with Armenian (for example) in an intermediate position. What a pity we don't know more about Macedonian and Epirote! Or Illyrian and Phyrgian, for that matter. From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Jan 23 01:53:50 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 01:53:50 GMT Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <200001201826.KAA08713@netcom.com> Message-ID: "Richard M. Alderson III" wrote: >On 11 Jan 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> Why the exception kravih? >> Is it because of the vowel or a combination of /r/ and non-palatal vowel? >> Is pekus exceptional because of the velar vowel? >These and similar "exceptions" to so-called "satemization" were seen by the >Neogrammarians as evidence for a third series of dorsal obstruents in PIE, >that is, that along side the palatovelar *k{^y} and the labiovelar *k{^w}, >there was a "plain" velar (or possibly back velar) *k. >Since then, it has been argued that PIE had either (1) palatals and velars, >and labiovelars are a late development, or (2) plain velars and labiovelars, >and palatals are a late development. Today's consensus view seems to be a >third alternative, that PIE had palatals and labiovelars, and plain velars are >an odd development of one or both. In my opinion, the likeliest possibility is that there were indeed three series (plain, palatalized and labialized), which developed out of a Pre-PIE single velar series when in contact with different vowels (which we might notate as **a, **i and **u). The allophones became phonemic when these vowels were either lost or transformed. So far, that makes sense. Figuring out the details is a different story. One thing that, in this view, seems quite certain is that stressed **a > *e and unstressed **a > zero (also: **ai > *ei ~ *i, **au > *eu ~ *u). We can also imagine that unstressed *i and *u were lost, leaving behind only palatalization [which I'll notate as ^] or labialization [which I'll notate as w]. So *h1'ek^u-os "horse" would be **h1'akiw-as and *nekwt- "night" < **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). Additionally, we should also consider the possibility of rising diphthongs **ia, **ua > *^e, *we. I do believe there is evidence for palatalization and labialization outside of the velar series. Borrowing an idea of Jens Rasmussen, I have reconstructed the 2p.sg. active verbal ending *-s as **-tw (< ***-tu), where labialized *tw is subject to specific soundlaws: it becomes *s initially and finally (or rather, it merges with *sw in these positions), but becomes *t between vowels, as in the 2pl. active ending *-te- (< **-tw-a-). The special development of final -**tw can alse be seen in the PIE nominal plural *-(e)s (< **-atw), where Armenian shows the special development *-sw > -k`, and the locative suffix *-i becomes -u after the labialized consonant (except in Greek, where *-sw-i > -si). Slavic has -*s^U, with a shibilant that is normally explained as analogical from the i- and u-stems, but might well reflect the normal development of original non-final *sw in Slavic (as in s^estI "6" < *swek^tis, or possibly the 2sg. thematic ending -es^I ~ -es^i < *-e-sw-(e)i). A special rule of dissimilation of two adjacent labialized sibilants (*swVsw > *usw) would account for *(i)us "you" (pl.) < **swesw < **tu-atu (but Hittite sumes < *suwes), and Armenian vec` < *uswec` < *sweswek^s "six" (cf. also OPr. uschts "sixth"). Here PIE *sw reflects borrowed Semitic s^ (Akk. s^es^s^e-t- "six"). Other cases of *t/*s alternation can also be explained as original **-tw > *-s and *-tw- > *-t- (e.g., pace Szemere'nyi [Myc. is not Pre-Greek]), the pf.act.ptc. masc.nom. *-wo:ts (Greek -o:s), obl. *-w(o)t- (Greek -ot-), n. *-wos (Grk. -os), fem. *-ws + ih2 (Greek -uia) [so the fem. suffix -ih2 (like -i in the present verbs) was only added after the working of the law *-tw > *-s(w)]). The active verbal endings also contain evidence for a labialized *mw, in 1pl. -*mwen ~ *-mwes ( < *mu-an, *mu-atu), -men in Greek but -wen in Hittite, and o-vocalism *-mos < **-mwes in Pre-Latin. Similarly, the independent 1pl. pronoun with m- and w- reflexes in the IE languages: ***mu-atu > **mwesw > *mes or *wes (or *wei). A lexical item like *mel- "grind" (Latin Vollstufe mol-, Greek Nullstufe mul-) can be best interpreted as original *mwel-. There is also evidence for palatalized non-velar consonants, as in the well-known doublet *nem- ~ *iem- "to take" (< **n^em-), or possibly the -i/-n- heteroclitics (Skt. asthi, asthnah "bone") if from **-n^/-n^-, cf. non-palatalized *-r./-n- < **-n/-n-. Palatalized **l^ might also have given *i, but the only example I can remember at this moment is my rather wild idea to link the Hittite 1sg. imp. -lit (-lut, -allu(t)) as in "may I be, let me be!" with the IE optative in *-ieh1- (<**-l^et-, with -t > -h1 as in the ins.sg. Hitt -it, (non-Anatolian)IE *-eh1). See further Gamqrelidze and Ivanov, which I don't have handy right now, on their hypothesized *s^, *sw, *tw, *dw. It is clear that a system with both palatalization and labialization, as I advocate for (Pre-)PIE, is not stable. Old Irish (as the result of a much later and independent development) had both i-coloured (palatalized, slender) and u-coloured consonants, but the u-colouring quickly became marginal and was lost before Middle Irish. The loss of jers in Slavic has led to a full series of palatalized consonants, but not to a parallel set of labialized/velarized consonants (not at the phonological level at least). By the time of common PIE, the plain-palatalized- labialized distinction had only been retained in the velar stops, and there too the system was in the process of breaking down, with confusions between palatalized-plain or plain-labialized, which account for the hesitations we find even among the ranks of the two main blocks ("satem" and "centum"). The generalization of front *e as the "default" vowel may have favoured the palatals, while certain positions may have had specific effects (e.g. de-palatalization before *r [*k^r > *kr], or de-labiaization before *u [*kwu > *ku]). But that still leaves plenty of non-palatal, non-labiovelar "plain velars" which cannot be explained away. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Sun Jan 23 13:31:06 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 08:31:06 -0500 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <200001201826.KAA08713@netcom.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 20 Jan 2000, Richard M. Alderson III wrote: > These and similar "exceptions" to so-called "satemization" were seen by > the Neogrammarians as evidence for a third series of dorsal obstruents > in PIE, that is, that along side the palatovelar *k{^y} and the > labiovelar *k{^w}, there was a "plain" velar (or possibly back velar) > *k. > Since then, it has been argued that PIE had either (1) palatals and > velars, and labiovelars are a late development, or (2) plain velars and > labiovelars, and palatals are a late development. Today's consensus > view seems to be a third alternative, that PIE had palatals and > labiovelars, and plain velars are an odd development of one or both. The first view, which you attribute to the Neogrammarians, is the majority view today. The main objections to the view that IE had three series of dorsals are 1) that there are no known examples of such a consonant system among the modern languages of the world, and 2) that no daughter language maintains the supposed three-way contrast intact. #1 is simply wrong; there are such languages. #2 is also wrong, since Luvian of the Anatolian group maintains the three-way dorsal contrast. However, objection #2 is simply irrelevant; it represents a misunderstanding of the comparative method. Even if no daughter language maintained the contrast, we'd still have three correspondence series among the daughter languages, with no clear phonologically conditioning environment which would allow us to collapse two of the series; so we follow the methodology and reconstruct three sets of series for the proto-language. > Further, remember that there are other "satem" branches, such as > Armenian and Albanian. That's not correct; Armenian underwent an independent set of consonant changes which roughly resemble Grimm's Law in Germanic. Armenian did not undergo the satem consonant shift. As for Albanian, I can't say much; it's so heavily mutated that it's not of much use in reconstructing PIE, and I know next to nothing about the sound changes it underwent. I can say that I've never heard anyone claim that Albanian underwent the satem shift. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From xdelamarre at siol.net Sun Jan 23 18:41:46 2000 From: xdelamarre at siol.net (Xavier Delamarre) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 19:41:46 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <200001201826.KAA08713@netcom.com> Message-ID: Rich Alderson wrote (answering Rick Mc Callister) >Since then, it has been argued that PIE had either (1) palatals and velars, >and labiovelars are a late development, or (2) plain velars and labiovelars, >and palatals are a late development. Today's consensus view seems to be a >third alternative, that PIE had palatals and labiovelars, and plain velars are >an odd development of one or both. This is not true at all. There is no consensus for a two-series system of tectals (whatever the arrangement). The doubts cast on a three-series system (k', k, k^w) goes back to Meillet in his _Introduction ? la gramm. comp. des langues IE_ (last ed.1937), repeated by Lehman in his _Phonology_ (1952), and taken up since by a variety of scholars in France & US. Two prominent scholars that do not share the alleged "consensus" have shown recently the methological necessity of positing three series : - M. Mayrhofer, _Indogermanische Grammatik I-2_ (Phonology), 1986 - O. Szemer?nyi, _Introduction to IE Linguistics_ , 1996 Oxford. Holger Pedersen had already shown in 1900, that Albanian has 3 different reflexes of the three tectals before front vowels (article in KZ), and most recently Craig Melchert has made the same observation about Luwian (_Fs Cowgill_, 1987, inter alia). I recommend on this subject to the American reader, and others who have doubts, the reading of the excellent article by Martin E. Huld in _Festschrift for Eric P. Hamp_ Vol. 1 (JIES Monograph 25) :"Satem, Centum and Hokum", 115-138. The consensus seems to be, contrary to what stated, in favor of three tectals for IE, as posited more than one century ago by our dear Neo-grammarians. Xavier Delamarre Ljubljana 23/1/2000 From colkitto at sprint.ca Sat Jan 22 23:29:25 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 18:29:25 -0500 Subject: PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: > How 'bout a form ancestral to English "balls", Gaelic palla [sp?], >perhaps *bhel-; or are these later developments? Gaelic palla "penis" is >obviously borrowed (or expressively mutated) but the meaning is different >from English This one is coincidence. Gaelic "ball" (palla?) is related to Greek "phallos" I'm not sure of the exact history, but English "balls" is clearly a metaphorical (cf. the widespread use of forms with the primarily meaning "eggs") Robert Orr From gordonselway at gn.apc.org Sat Jan 22 23:54:44 2000 From: gordonselway at gn.apc.org (Gordon Selway) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 23:54:44 +0000 Subject: re PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: George Hinge wrote (but I am not sure yet who introduced the idea): >I don't know if the Gaelic can be derived from OI 'ball'. I'm not aware of this. I cannot lay hands on my Irish dictionaries, but there is no in Dwelly, which is to hand. Has Dennis Jung anything to add, if he's currently on this list? This is not surprising. One of the features of the Celtic languages is the P-IE p* > zero, after all. There is 'peilear' (ball, bullet - not as far as I know 'testicle', which may be 'clach' (Sc.)/'cloch'(Ir.), ie 'stone'), and 'peile' is football (ie soccer) in Irish Gaelic. I'm not sure of its earlier spelling (though 'palla' cannot lead to 'peile' - that would require a change in the quality of both consonants from broad to slender - as I understand things). But it is not an item inherited by internal tradition from PIE, whatever its source is. [As an aside, both Brythonic and Gadelic seem to have borrowed wholesale from Latin in the later imperial-early mediaeval period.] Gordon Selway From oldgh at hum.au.dk Sun Jan 23 14:48:51 2000 From: oldgh at hum.au.dk (George Hinge) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 15:48:51 +0100 Subject: PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: Gordon Selway: >George Hinge wrote (but I am not sure yet who introduced the idea): >>I don't know if the Gaelic can be derived from OI 'ball'. Rick Mc Callister did introduce the idea in his mail, asking > How 'bout a form ancestral to English "balls", Gaelic palla [sp?], > perhaps *bhel-; or are these later developments? I supposed that the bracketed [sp?] is questioning the orthography, and if the beginning of the word is spelled in some other way, the comparison might be possible? >There is 'peilear' (ball, bullet - not as far as I know 'testicle', which >may be 'clach' (Sc.)/'cloch'(Ir.), ie 'stone'), and 'peile' is football (ie >soccer) in Irish Gaelic. I'm not sure of its earlier spelling (though >'palla' cannot lead to 'peile' - that would require a change in the quality >of both consonants from broad to slender - as I understand things). But it >is not an item inherited by internal tradition from PIE, whatever its >source is. The source might be Latin 'pila' "ball" with a short -i- and consequently -e- in Late Latin / Romance. George Hinge The Department of Greek and Latin The University of Aarhus, Denmark oldgh at hum.au.dk From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Sat Jan 22 15:50:50 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 09:50:50 -0600 Subject: Basque butterflies again Message-ID: At 02:37 PM 1/19/00 +0000, Larry Trask wrote: [big snip] [LT] >And, of course, native Basque lexical items with the slightest >claim to antiquity never begin with /p/ (the ancient Basques apparently >couldn't pronounce initial /p-/) [RF] Just for the record, I'd mention that this is Larry Trask's position, one that he has discussed on other occasions. However it is not the only position. Indeed, for a rather different rendition of phonological events I would suggest taking a look at Jose Ignacio Hualde's article "Pre-Basque Plosives" forthcoming in a volume edited by Jon Franco, Alazne Landa and Juan Martin, _Grammatical Analyses in Basque and Romance Linguistics_ John Benjamins, Vol. 187 of the series Current Issue in Linguistic Theory. Since I understand that Larry read an earlier version of that article, I'm certain that he's familiar with the evidence. Given the complexity of the issue, I would only state that based on my reading of Hualde's data, the fact a word appears in modern Basque with an initial /p/ would not in and of itself argue for or against its "antiquity". And by saying this I don't mean to imply that I'm taking any particular position on the antiquity of the examples found in the current discussion. [snip] [LT] >A few further comments. The word 'pretty', 'pretty little thing', >'ornament', 'jewel', apparently present in the large group represented by >, is of uncertain origin but is often suspected of being a >palatalized form of 'alive', 'living'. The suggested semantic >development is 'living' > 'moving' > 'flashing', 'sparkling', > 'pretty', >'jewel', or something similar. >So, as Ed suggests, is very likely the *ultimate* source of the first >element, but it cannot be the *direct* source. [RF] A few additional comments on this item. I would suggest that the development suggested above >'living' > 'moving' > 'flashing', 'sparkling', > 'pretty', >'jewel', or something similar. is probably essentially correct. For example, one should note that the term is used as an adjective to mean "lively, agile' (not just "living") and this has a palatalized diminutive form in French Basque dialects in which Llande translates as: "un peu vif, un peu piquant; vivement, prestement" while he gives the meaning of as "original; drole" and in composition as "singularite" while the verb is rendered as "devenir original", these meanings being essentially the same as the ones given by Azkue in his dictionary. The words and (both listed in Llande) form verbs, i.e., and ) with the characteristic reduction of the <-tz-> to <-z>, and carry the verbal meanings of "resusciter; allumer, ranimer, germer, raciner". They form part of the semantic field of . Llande also lists and gives its meaning as "joli" but in the same entry he adds the comment "(voc. puer.)". I would note that there are other words based on the same root-stem that mean "small, tiny", e.g., "little, little bit" and from < pixka-kin> "little sticks of wood as well as others in where there <-tx-> appears to have been replaced with a palatalized /tt/. The latter term is used to refer not just to "little, tiny" in general but also to one's "little finger". Again the replacement in question is not unusual in Basque, e.g. "little" with palatalization turns into . In summary, it would appear that the development of the term could be traced back ultimately to , as both Larry and Ed agree, and that it may well have been a diminutive/affective variant of that gave rise initially to and that line of development produced a meaning chain that ultimately ended up as a polysemous term whose meanings included that of "jewel", i.e., something small and pretty. That then leads us in another direction and to other questions: what relationship should be proposed for the following items based on the following facts. It is alleged the Breton term (defined as "anneau") is the etymolgical source for Fr. , at least according to my Petite Larousse (note that Buck gives a different version). The Larousse dictionary defines as "object de parure, d'un matiere au d'un travail precieux, fig. chose admirable, elegante et d'un petitesse relative". If one were to relate the two data sets, the data enountered in the Basque semantic field would suggest that the meanings recorded in Breton and French, if they are assumed to be related to the Basque items, might be best categorized as representatives of an "extension" of the term's prototypic meaning, i.e, near the end of the chain of meanings that lead back to and finally to . Are the two data sets related? I don't know if there are even any articles on the topic or whether there has been investigations of the Basque semantic field using additional data from other sources in the same geographical zone, e.g., Provenzal, Aragonese, Asturian, etc., that should be examined. Finally, turning to a recent exchange between LT and RM: Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 11:29:06 +0000 Rick Mc Callister writes: [on the Basque 'butterfly' words in ] >> Any possible link between and Spanish "bug, >> critter, varmint" and also various slang meanings [LT] >Doubt it. Basque means 'pretty', 'pretty little thing', 'ornament', >'jewel'. It has no connection with bugs or any other critters anywhere except >in the 'butterfly' words cited. And let's face it: as bugs go, >butterflies are exceptionally pretty. [RF] However, before I respond to the comment by LT above, I'd like to review a short section from his extensive and well researched material on Basque "butterflies" that he put together and sent to the list on Dec. 13. [LT] >Where the information is available, I have listed the dialects for which a >given form is recorded and its date of first attestation, but this >information is often not available. The dialects cited, roughly from west >to east, are as follows: >B: Bizkaian >Sout: Southern (extinct; recorded in 16th-century Alava) >G: Gipuzkoan >HN: High Navarrese >L: Lapurdian LN: >Low Navarrese >Z: Zuberoan >I have grouped the forms into nine classes, of which the first is subdivided. >Group 1a. >bitxilote (B) >bitxileta pitxilote (B) >pitxoleta (B) >pitxeleta (B) >pitxilota (B) >These appear to be based on , western variant , 'pretty little >thing', 'ornament', 'jewel', an item well attested everywhere as an >independent word (though in varying senses), and also very frequent as a first >element in expressive and nursery formations. The final element is entirely >obscure, and very likely a meaningless expressive element. >(See also Alavese Spanish . Alava was Basque-speaking until >recently, and the local Spanish has, or until recently had, a number of loans >from Basque.) >Group 1b. >mitxeleta (B, G) (1745) >mitxilote (B) >mitxoleta mitxelot (B) >(and many more variants) ************************ [RF] I would note that in addition to its meaning of "butterfly", Azkue (I:173) lists (B) with the meaning of "daisy" ("margarita de los prados") while refers simultaneously to the following three objects: a butterfly, a daisy and a poppy. In what are now non-Basque speaking zones of Navarre we find evidence for the prior existence in the Basque of the zone for (<*bitxi/pitxi(n)-gorri> from "red"). Jose Maria Iribarren (1984) records this expression, spelling it as and listing its meaning as "poppy". The compound might be glossed as "pretty little red thing". Returning now to the discussion concerning the possible relationship between the Basque and Spanish (Castilian) items. First we should note that it is well known that Moliner (1966:I, 373) and others (I don't have Corominas at hand) derive from Vulgar Latin and Clas. Lat. . Yet there does seem to be room to question whether the Basque term might not have played some role also, in the development of the Romance item. Indeed, when I learned Spanish, my understanding of was that it referred to any sort of (small) flying/creeping insect. It was used by metaphoric (ironic) extension, in my opinion, to apply to large animals, e.g., a horse or cow. Again, I emphasize that that was the way that I learned the expression from those around me. Furthermore, the extension of a word meaning "butterfly" to a class of "flying insects" or to some other kind of flying objects that look like more or less like butterflies would not be unusual, particularly if speakers were no longer able to disambiguate the components of the compound in question. Morever, there is evidence from Bearn, a zone where Basque was spoken previously, that is of interest: ", masc. 1) papillote: 'Si manque de bichous, nou manque pas de toupet.' S'il manque de papillotes, il ne manque pas de toupet. 2) BICHOUS, morceaux de papier dont on garnit les cotes et la queue de d'un cerf-volant (jouet d'enfant) pour qu'il se maintienne droit lorsqu'il est enleve par le vent: 'Lous cerpentz de cerc...per defaut de bichous enta ha l'aploumb...hen la capihoune.' Les cerfs-volants, faute de morceaux de papier (en forme de papillotes) pour faire l'aplomb (pour maintenir d'aplomb), font la cabriole" (Lespy et Raymond, _Dictionnaire bearnais ancien et moderne_ [1887] 1970: 106, source: "Lettres d'Orthez, dans le journal _Le Mercure d'Orthez_)). For those who might not be familiar with the term in French, I offer the following definition: ": 1) nom vulgaire du 'lucane male', insect coleoptere a mandibules enormes (long: jusqu'a 8 cm.) [in English we are talking about a 'stag beedle' of the family Lucanidae, having long, powerful, antlerlike mandibules AHD]; 2) jouet d'enfant, compose d'une carcasse legere sur laquelle on tend un papier fort ou une etoffe, et que l'on fait voler" (Petit Larousse 1963:182). In this case, the are the pieces/strips of cloth that are tied, giving the appearance of butterflies, to the cord forming the tail of the kite. It strikes me that someone familiar with French, but not Basque, would assume that in the example above, was nothing more than a somewhat odd and/or localized use of the French word . On the other hand, a careful reading of the information found in the semantic field of the Bearnese item suggests a different interpretation. Finally, based on the implications of the data sets discussed above, I'm not convinced that LT's closing remark, cited below, fully reflects the semantic realities (and complexities) of the situation: [LT] >I therefore conclude that Lloyd's efforts at linking some of the Basque words >to words in other languages (and also to one another) are without foundation. >The Basque 'butterfly' words are numerous and severely localized; they conform >strongly to observed patterns for coining expressive formations; and they can >scarcely be of any antiquity. Ondo ibili, Roz Frank From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Jan 23 02:35:59 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 02:35:59 GMT Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter In-Reply-To: <24.47c7c4.25ba23c6@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >>E.g., -if Slavic loaned the word for wheel from Greek - or vice versa - >>could we mistake it as being a gift to both from the reified parent - PIE? >-- no. The sound-changes would reveal the date of the borrowing. This is an oversimplification. It depends on whether there *had* been any relevant sound changes in the intervening period, and in general we can only establish *relative* dates for sound changes, if we're lucky (many times not even that). Sound changes can of course not be dated absolutely if there are no written documents. In the case of closely related languages or where bilingualism is the norm, things are further complicated by people's awareness of the sound laws themselves. Basques still borrow Spanish words ending in -(i)o'n as ending in -(i)oi, despite the fact that Castilian final -e after /n/ had already dropped in the early Middle Ages, and likewise the Basque rule to drop -n- between vowels has stopped working many centuries ago (OSp. -one -> Bq. -oe > -oi :: Sp. -o'n -> Bq. -oi). If we're lucky we can catch a mistake (e.g. when two sounds have merged in one language but not in the other, and "folk etymological borrowing" assigns it to the wrong prototype), but not in general. In this case, of course, Slavic (*koles-) has not borrowed the word from Greek (*kw(e)kwl-o-). I wonder, though, whether another word for wheel, *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. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Jan 23 05:56:44 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 00:56:44 EST Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter Message-ID: >rao.3 at osu.edu writes: << Wouldn't the rise of new species be a better parallel to the rise of new >languages? Ancestral species can exist at the same time as a species >that has split off. -- not generally. Eg., we and the chimps (and gorillas and bonobos) are descended from a common ancestor, and chimps are much more _like_ that common ancestor, but we can't be said to be descended from chimps. From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Jan 23 03:16:19 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 03:16:19 GMT Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Sean Crist wrote: >On Tue, 18 Jan 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: [ moderator snip ] >> But Armenian eys^ (< *ek^wos) means "donkey". >A transparent case of semantic drift. Are you arguing that this poses >some problem for the reconstruction of *ek'wos as "horse"? I'm pretty sure that when the pre-Armenians walked (or rode) into Anatolia, their *ekw^os (however it sounded at the time) meant "horse" (and shifted to "donkey" in the apparently donkey-rich and horse-poor environment of Eastern Anatolia). But if Renfrew is right, and PIE did come from Anatolia, an *ek^wos (or however it sounded at *that* time) meaning "donkey" would have trivially drifted to "horse" in the horse-rich (donkey-poor) environment of Northern and Eastern Europe. The argument works both ways, except that it's apparently intellectually unattractive to have a theory where one thing goes from A to B and then back again from B to A. That's why such theories are rare (not because such things do not happen). As a matter of fact, I personally believe that Renfrew is wrong, but that some of the *ancestors* of the Proto-Indo-Europeans *did* come from Anatolia, became PIE-ans somewhere in the Tisza-Danube area, and then some of them (the Anatolians, later the Armenians) went *back* to Anatolia. Renfrew (because you can't have A->B->A) prefers to have the Anatolians (and I believe the Armenians as well) never to leave Anatolia, which poses some severe linguistical problems such as the lack of affinity between Anatolian and Armenian or Greek. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From Stporfiri at cs.com Sun Jan 23 04:55:27 2000 From: Stporfiri at cs.com (Stporfiri at cs.com) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 23:55:27 EST Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: In a message dated 1/22/2000 5:34:42 PM Pacific Standard Time, JoatSimeon at aol.com writes: << >Much latter, Assyrians and Persians used much heavier vehicles to drive >through opposing ranks. But, firstly, they had knives affixed to their axle, >and any effect they had came from this. >> -- knife-hubed chariots were always rare. >> It has been doubted that the knives were that effective. It seems to me that cavalry is important for breaking up the ranks; they seem to have had this value in most contexts, regardless of knives. When the other side has cavalry, the value depends on whether or not our cavalry successfully routs theirs, and on whether our cavalry remember to return to the battle scene to assault enemy infantry from the rear to obtain the happiest effects. The weakness of cavalry (and tank) is that it cannot hold ground. Dan Monroe, Latin teacher Marshfield High School Coos Bay, OR From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Jan 23 05:59:04 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 00:59:04 EST Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: In a message dated 1/22/00 5:20:06 PM Mountain Standard Time, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >Roman citizenship wasn't universally granted until 212 AD or so. Before >then, you either had to be of Italic ancestry or do something meritorious >such as serve in the legions to get it. -- exactly. It was originally the badge of membership in a conquering, ruling _ethnos_, and conveyed considerable legal privilege. (Eg., St. Paul was a Roman citizen, and so could appeal from a local court to the Emperors' judgement in Rome.) From sarima at friesen.net Sun Jan 23 06:20:37 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 22:20:37 -0800 Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords In-Reply-To: <0.d3f21126.2591c1ea@aol.com> Message-ID: At 12:55 AM 12/22/99 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Latin was spoken among the Celts before the Roman Army ever arrived. Latin's >main attraction was the badge of Roman citizenship. Mallory has something to >say about all this in ISIE and given the subtle nature of your argument, I >think something is worth repeating: And, even *after* the conquest, the main reason the Celts had for adapting Latin was NOT the Roman army. As long as you paid your taxes and didn't incite to riot, the Roman government didn't much care what language you spoke. But Latin was the language of education, trade in luxury goods, and election campaigns (even in imperial times there were still elections of local officials for many years). >I don't know what this has to do with anything. The point was that there >have been many cases where the "dominant elite" disappear in the pre-existing >language. Quite so, and also vice versa. It is hard to come up with a hard and fast rule. Britain, with its late crop of Roman loyalists, still dropped Latin, despite having few successful invasions by outsiders. France, with numerous successive conquests by various outside groups (mostly Germanic) retained Latin. Go figure. >The point was, e.g., the Russians do not speak Mongul, Turkic, Gothic, Greek >or Scandinavian - although all of these arguably represented the languages of >various "dominant elite" - these speakers all seem to have been assimilated >by Russian. On the other hand Romania speaks Romanian, a derivative of the language of a dominant elite that only ruled *there* for a short time. Persistance of one language or another in a multilingual community is often hard to predict. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Sun Jan 23 07:16:46 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 23:16:46 -0800 Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords In-Reply-To: <002701bf619f$2b0363c0$5c71fe8c@lucent.com> Message-ID: At 05:31 AM 1/18/00 -0500, Vidhyanath Rao wrote: >"Stanley Friesen" wrote: >> In particular the evidence from Egypt prior to 1100 BC shows >> clearly that the chariot was a mobile combat platform, actively used in >> shock warfare. >What is ``shock'' warfare? What the modern US army calls "mobile warfare". What we called "Blitzkrieg" a few decades ago. It is attacking rapidly with a powerful force in a manner that throws the enemy into confusion, disrupting their ability to fight. It is what cavalry was used for from late Roman times on. It is what helicopters are used for today. >2nd millennium BCE chariots, as far as we know, were extremely light. So? A *rapid* attack, with powerful weaponry is the key factor, not weight of the platform allowing the speed. >Given the size of horses in use then (ponies by modern standards) and >the requirement of quick acceleration, they could not have been >otherwise. It would not possible to use them except as mobile archery >platforms ... Which accomplishes the goal of shock warfare. (Actually, one can also use them as mobile spear throwing platforms, but that comes to the same thing). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jan 23 08:08:19 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 03:08:19 EST Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: Dear Rohan, In a message dated 1/21/00 5:10:32 AM, you wrote: <> First, let me emphasize that nothing I've written is meant to be disrespectful of historical linguistics. I certainly should not give any impression that Colin Renfrew disrespects linguistics, which I have every reason to believe is the farthest thing from the truth. And I'm not insisting that "linguists are not regularly revisiting their assumptions..." In fact, quoting "Friedrich 1970 or Gimbutas 1960" was meant to show that dates given by linguists for PIE dispersal HAVE changed. If you recall my original point was that "the earliest possible date" given by some members of this list have backed up - and I did check back in the archives to verify that. The quote from the UT Austin web page in my last post should assure you that the 3000BC-2200BC dates are still around and quite clearly, even with the benefit of the doubt, they were intended to reflect the earliest and latest possible dates - and are simply repeating old and dated information. This is not an indictment of historical linguistics. It started as and is nothing more than an observation that old ideas die hard. So my purpose was not "to demonstrate that linguists are not regularly revisiting their assumptions, as they should." But rather to figure out how those assumptions are affected by changes in archaeological information. Renfrew's neolithic hypothesis stretches the information but how does it stretch the linguistic assumptions? Is it enough to simply say that the earliest possible date of PIE dispersal is now 3300BC? Or is there something that now goes on with the linguistic analysis that might alter other assumptions or conclusions? Does the fact that PIE speakers now appear to be exposed to the horse a thousand years before this date and to chariots (once considered the equivalent of PIE) a thousand years after, change anything in the use of those items with regard to the dating PIE unity? Also let me make it clear again that my purpose is and was not "to prove that historical linguistics is built upon faulty assumptions about archaeology." Faultiness is not what I'm pointing to - although on this list there have been a number of statements about the archaeological evidence that have been quite faulty (e.g., with regard to the evidence in early Greece.) The connection between archaeology and linguistics is a complex matter. It is not always clear to me what a piece of new archaeological evidence "means" in terms of linguistics. A lot of what I have been doing is just trying to figure out what "the assumptions" are. You use the phrase assumptions that historical linguistics "is built upon." And that is perhaps an issue I am running into. Is historical linguistics finished being built? I'm sure you would say it is not, but it raises the question: just how built is it? Consider that archaeology is designed to operate in a state of almost constant dissatisfaction. Especially among American archaeologists, there is a constant race to find the next oldest date, etc. (This parallels the mentality one sees in physics and biology, where there is a persistent dissatisfaction with the limits of both existing data and theory.) There are some on this list who have privately suggested to me that they think that the only mechanism that allows for historical linguists "to revist" their assumptions is archaeology. I want to believe that is not true. I think that a consciousness of uncertainty allows one to explore accepted assumptions again even without new data. Archaeology can of course remind one of that uncertainty. The kind of uncertainty expressed in the fact that if the earliest possible date of PIE dispersal might now be say 4000BC in conservative terms, then what would that extra 1500 years over the Childe-Kossina dates mean to historical linguistics? Does that extra time mean anything in terms of the linguistic journey traveled by the language between PIE and the attested daughters? Or is everything reconstructed and are we now finished with all that and should we move on to the Nostratic list? :) And finally I should say that Colin Renfrew has been working with real historical linguists and that my speculations on how his work affects linguistics are the efforts of an amateur and may not be of much use in that direction. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jan 23 10:00:21 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 05:00:21 EST Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: In a message dated 1/17/00 6:48:58 PM, sarima at friesen.net wrote: <> Well, Renfrew does not have IE originating in Greece and in fact he does not even need to assert IE languages were spoken throughout Greece for the whole neolithic period. Herodutus tells us that non-Greek was being spoken in his time. It's been nearly 500 years since the first native American names were adopted into european languages, but native American languages are still being spoken. There is also the question whether the place names are non-IE or just non-Greek. Regards, Steve Long From sarima at friesen.net Sun Jan 23 05:54:49 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 21:54:49 -0800 Subject: Northwest IE attributes In-Reply-To: <0.81a0cd51.258c907e@aol.com> Message-ID: At 02:23 AM 12/18/99 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Eg., Both Baltic and Slavic and Indo-Iranian undergo satemization, and both >groups also show the 'ruki rule' (modifications in *-s- after r, u, k or i. I am not yet convinced this is not a sprachbund (areal) effect, and thus late. If Balto-Slavic shares other, less famous, isoglosses with Indo-Iranian, I might reconsider this >In other words, there was still a dialect continuum across the whole >Indo-European field at this time. However, this is quite possible also. For instance, there is currently *still* a dialect continuum across the entire West Romance area, some 1500 years after the split up of Latin. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From Georg at home.ivm.de Sun Jan 23 11:40:23 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 12:40:23 +0100 Subject: Northwest IE attributes In-Reply-To: <9e.2510b1.25b8daae@aol.com> Message-ID: >>rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >>Is Balto-Slavic Satem necessarily linked to Indo-Iranian Satem? >-- in a word... yes. >Unless you're going to postulate that two geographically adjacent >dialect-clusters of PIE underwent the same process at the same time but for >completely distinct reasons. Well, we donm't know at what time both dialect-clusters underwent the satemization-processes, so we cannot tell whether it was "the same time". Then, although Baltic, Slavic, and Indo-Iranian share a great deal of very specific details in the process, there are also differences (incomplete satemization in Baltic and Slavic; traces of labiovelars in Indian etc.), which may strengthen a position which tends to keep the languages apart. The major argument for not laying too much weight on Satem for classificatory reasons is the very naturalness of assibilations of inherently palatal consonants (or velars in palatalizing contexts. for that matter). There is hardly a language family in the world, where not one or two lgs. or branches could be called "satem". When the issue of satemization is defined very strictly, it consists - not of the assibilations and spirantizations - but of the merger of velars and labiovelars (with the old palatals showing distinct reflexes), as opposed to kentum lgs., where palatals and velars merged and labiovelars show autonomous reflexes. If this definition is fololwed strictly, Armenian and Albanian are out (no merger at all); Baltic and Slavic are mostly in (but not entirely, because of the sizable number not-at-all satemized elements). Which leaves us with Indo-Iranian as the only real and true-blue satem branch (and if we look at the remnants of labiovelars there, even that is not entirely sure). In short: - palatalizations and assibilations of palatal consonants (especially of tectal ones), is maybe the one most common sound-change in the languages of the world - the so-called "satemization" processes in Baltic, Slavic and Indo-Iranian do indeed show a great deal of specificity, but also important differences which leads to: - kentum/satem should not be overemphasized as a major dialect-dividing isogloss in Indo-European, though - it is likely that a contact-induced Schmidtian "wave" comprises Indo-Iranian, most of Slavic and most of Baltic (satemization peters out a bit in the west, there being slightly more non-satemized elements than in Slavic [I think; please, correct me someone]. - Armenian and Albanian are out, there being autonomous reflexes of the three series of tectal stops. >Which is highly unlikely. Not *so* unlikely, after all. Palatalizations are, so to speak, the garden-variety of sound-changes. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Jan 23 06:10:40 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 01:10:40 EST Subject: Egyptian 'cat' ? Message-ID: >proto-language at email.msn.com writes: << Though Egyptologists would not agree, I believe any early Egyptian >alphabetic spelling represents Ca combinations: so, [mjw] = *mayawa. >> -- "miw" is about as onomatopoeic as "kuku" for Cuckoo. Therefore it's pretty well impossible to trace loans or their direction. Given that the Egyptians domesticated the cat and that it spread from there, I'd bet on the Egyptians being the ones who invented the word, though. From sarima at friesen.net Sun Jan 23 06:40:40 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 22:40:40 -0800 Subject: "is the same as" [was Re: Respect goes both ways!] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 11:14 AM 12/22/99 +0000, Larry Trask wrote: >Stanley Friesen writes: >> I guess I am not so adamant that sameness always be transitive. >Well, if the relation 'is the same as' is to be taken as non-transitive, then >what, if any, semantic content can be assigned to it? How would it then >differ, say, from the relation 'is similar to'? It can be taken to be of *local* import only. Let us take an example from an area I am somewhat more familiar with to make the point clearer. In California, as I am sure you know, the mountains surround a central valley. In these mountains there are populations of salamanders of a particular sort - that cannot live in lowland areas like the Central Valley. Now, starting from (if I remember correctly) somewhere around San Fransisco, one can trace an unbroken series of populations northwards. Adjacent populations are always virtually identical, and can always interbreed successfully. By the biological species definition (the biological equivalent of the mutual comprehension definition of a language) any adjacent pair of these populations are clearly the same species. One can continue this chain on around the Central Valley into the Sierras, and then southwards to the edge of the desert.. By this time, despite each adjacent population being virtually identical, the salamanders are easily distinguished from the ones we started with on the other side of the Valley. Now we continue the chain on around, back to the coast ranges via the transverse ranges, and then north again to where we started. When we finally meet our original populations, the two sets of populations can NOT interbreed. By the standard definition they are distinct species. Or are they? After all, if one goes the other* way, the two locally distinct populations are connected by a continuous series of interbreeding populations. It seems absurd to say that just because the end-points are clearly distinct that each of the intermediate steps must *also* be held to be distinct! Ergo, I must use "same" to refer to a purely "local" state of affairs - any two *specific* populations are either the same or not, irregardless of the situation with other pairs of populations in the same series. The same sort of situation can, and *does* hold for languages. The West Romance area is a dialect continuum, with chains of locally similar dialects connecting all of the separate "languages" in West Romance. So, does one treat all of West Romance as one language? It seems silly to call French and Portugese the same language, does it not. Yet they are connected by a series of pairwise similar dialects. >> It is generally rather messy to try to apply a transitive form of >> similarity to biological entities, not just language. ... >> And natural languages are clearly biological entities. So fuzziness is the >> only useful way to go. >I have no quarrel with anything in these last two paragraphs, with which I >agree. >But, if we agree to a fuzzy interpretation of 'is the same as', and hence to >its negation 'is not the same as', then we can no longer manipulate these >relations as though they had non-fuzzy interpretations, and draw non-fuzzy >conclusions -- which I think is the practice I was objecting to in the first >place. I am a little confused here. I do not remember ever actually applying "sameness" in a non-fuzzy manner in this discussion. (Of course, given the time lags, my memory is a little fuzzy itself). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jan 23 08:53:03 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 03:53:03 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: In a message dated 1/14/00 12:53:28 AM, you wrote: <> But remember both the horse and the wagon are now pretty much "neolithic" in Europe. And the horse's domestication in is a region that is late in converting to agriculture. I wrote: >Perhaps the most recent trend has been the realization that "kurgan" >characteristics did not cause anything but minor changes in a great many >areas where they were adopted. You wrote: So? Why does language replacement *have* to make more than a minor change? I wrote > More important changes seem to have to do >with climate, economics and resulting changes in trade and material >processing and social structure. You wrote: <> Let me give you an alternative hypothesis. One characteristic of most of the technical changes that are associated with PIE or early IE languages show a pattern of regular diffusion in one direction or another. Is it possible that language did not come along with or follow those innovations, but instead made their quick diffusion possible? Is it possible that PIE became the language of technology and cultural change so that language was the pipeline for spreading everything from kurgan culture to metallurgy to wagon-making (no easy task, if you've ever tried it) to the potter's wheel? Or even the improvements in farming we find throughout the neolithic? This puts language on a higher level - where I think it belongs - as a medium for the spreading of the advances we keep on trying to attribute to something else. Homer's "winged words" outrun traders and armies and chariots and bookeepers, so that the idea of wheel (along with maybe those wheeled models we call toys) gets to Europe before any physical wheels get there? Transferred along various dialects of PIE that maintain their mutual intelligibility because they are the language of new ideas and new material goods? I wrote: > The influx was not of new peoples in >most cases and where they were we do not find horse warriors, but rather "the >sheperds of the kurgan culture" as one recent research report described them. You wrote: <> It's funny, but one of the largest replacements we see in modern times happens in migration, but the language change is not to the home population but to the migrant. The US Census estimated that 65% of the US population consists of those whose ancestors did not speak English in 1850. The parallel idea is that the PIE spread not by it coming to people, but people coming to it. Or lets say to the PIE farming settlement and polis from the countryside. Regards Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jan 23 09:45:01 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 04:45:01 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: I wrote: >We are talking about a period between roughly 2650BC - 1650BC in mainland >Greece. My statement was that there is no serious material evidence of a >significant immigration during that period, EXCEPT from Anatolia. >If there are other "lines of evidence" of an "incursion" from the north, I'd >very much like to hear what they are. In a message dated 1/17/00 6:08:29 PM, sarima at friesen.net wrote: <> Just a reminder that my original posts on this subject were in response to claims on this list that there was very clear evidence of a major incursion from the north. In fact that evidence is not there. The disconcerting thing I think you will understand is that first a piece of evidence is cited as proving something. And then when that evidence disappears, it is suddenly asserted it doesn't mean anything. <> Evidence of wheeled carts have been found in Germany and the Near East before they are found in the Balkans. Evidence of shaft graves appear in the Caucasus where Mallory said linguistics does not permit IE and they never appear in Luwian country in Anatolia or in western Europe. And evidence of the domesticated true horse apparently takes 2000 years to travel a quarter way around the Black Sea coast to get to Greece - while it appears in Denmark in about 700. If you see a clear pattern here, does it coincide with your linguistic understandings? Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jan 23 10:22:42 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 05:22:42 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: In a message dated 1/21/00 7:38:23 AM, anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fiwrote: <> Betraying my ignorance, I must once again ask why this exchange must have happened with PIE and not with an early daughter. I MUST also find out someday why Uralic would need to borrow words for water, move, bring and wash from IE. anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fiwrote: <> PIE originates just south of where Uralic originates? So that Uralic did not expand south because PIE speakers were already there? Or did somebody move in? Or is the assertion that they were all once one language and perhaps this wasn't borrowing at all. <> I'd wait until you have a chance to review the alternative explanation. Just to get both sides and seem a little unbiased. Regards, Steve Long From Georg at home.ivm.de Sun Jan 23 11:24:18 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 12:24:18 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Some, among archaeologists in Britain and the US (where extreme >anti-diffusionist and anti-migrationist positions are common, essentially for >ideological reasons). I'm just curious and don't want to open a thread on the pros and cons of Renfrew's approach here, but: What are the ideological reasons which lead people to what you call extreme anti-diffusionism and anti-migrationism ? What kind of ideology is lurking behind this ? Could you sum up in a few words ? Really only curious. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From jer at cphling.dk Mon Jan 24 01:08:01 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 02:08:01 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: In his mail of Tue, 18 Jan 2000, Ante Aikio speaks, I believe, a word of common sense. If there are pan-Uralic words of IE origin that look as old as our reconstructions, they may very well be loanwords from Proto-IE into Proto-Uralic or one of its prestages. They may of course also be older than PIE; since it is apparently only lexical material, there is little to tell us anything about the time depth of the donor forms. Therefore, it is not absolutely compelling to draw the conclusion that the two protolanguages were contiguous, but it is still one very fair possibility. It is also a quite strong argument that, if the Uralic Urheimat is placed for independent reasons somewhere in Central Ukraine and the IE ditto has been put in the southern part of the Ukraine, the two protolanguages were in fact once contiguous and the old loan relations stem from some period within that contact. As for the position of Anatolian, there are very few things that distinguish Proto-IE as it was before the break-off of pre-Anatolian from what it became during the time up to its next split when the second branch (Tocharian?) left the remaining stock. Consequently, we cannot tell from the form of an IE loanword in Uralic whether it was borrowed before or after the separation of Anatolian from the rest. That being so, we cannot quite exclude that the IE homeland was in Anatolia and that the rest had moved to the north of the Black Sea and there met the (pre-)Proto-Urals and handed them a bag of loanwords. Note that laryngeals are not retained only in Anatolian; there are enough laryngeal-sensitive phonetic changes in the individual branches to guarantee that laryngeals survived as segmental units well into the separate lifelines of the other subbranches also. 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 (the words for "earth", "bear" or "fire" would be interesting), and until such time we just cannot decide the issue on a linguistic basis and should, consequently, leave it up the archaeologists to argue about it. Flaunting my ignorance, I may perhaps ask the silly question: How can you exclude that the Uralic homeland had a prehistory south of the Black Sea? If Proto-Uralic was only one language when it split into the many that have become known, can one really exclude that the speakers of that language had earlier lived somewhere else? I'm not advocating that one should make up all sorts of fanciful scenarios, far from it, but it just could be playing a trick on us. Even so - and that is what I like about your suggestions - it should be specified how things are in case appearances are NOT deceitful and things really ARE what they seem. In that case we have certainty about the location of the IE Urheimat - and even if there is some deception involved the argument is still pretty strong that both groups lived at two stations north of the Black Sea and so may well have been in contact here. Jens From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jan 23 08:14:05 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 03:14:05 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: In a message dated 1/13/00 11:25:47 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- except that it's linguistic nonsense, which requires Celtic to remain completely unchanged for 4000 years,>> Where specifically do you find this? And I mean in Renfrew. What book? What page? Steve Long From mclasutt at brigham.net Mon Jan 24 06:42:44 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 23:42:44 -0700 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <3a.730bb6.25babc56@aol.com> Message-ID: Steve, You've got a basic flaw in your logic. Joat wrote: <> You responded with some lengthy questions about dating and specific sound changes, but it was your concluding comment that attracted my attention: <<...If this particular word for wheel entered after PIE dispersed but before those sound changes, then we'd should have exactly the same outcome.>> Absolutely not. If PIE had already dispersed into separate languages or speech areas, then there is absolutely no reason to assume that a word borrowed into one end of the Indo-European region into one dialect/language would necessarily spread throughout all the languages in the family. The ONLY way to account for the very existence of the word in nearly every branch of Indo-European (Indo-Iranian, Hellenic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Italic, and Tocharian) is that the word was borrowed when PIE was still a unity. Unless the word was borrowed when PIE was a unity, then there is no other way to account for this widespread occurrence in the family, whether or not specific sound changes had or had not occurred yet. If the word only existed in, say, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, and Tocharian, then the borrowing is quite likely one that only penetrated the eastern end of PIE. The same would be true on the western end of PIE if the word only existed in Celtic, Germanic and Italic. However, since *kwelos has reflexes throughout Indo-European, and the sound changes that have affected it in each of the daughters are completely regular, the only logical assumption that we can make is that the word was borrowed when PIE was still a unity. Any other assumption requires a leap of faith and violates the principle of Occam's Razor. 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 Jan 24 09:11:44 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 09:11:44 +0000 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister writes: > It seems like someone had Spanish "to be in motion, engage > in activity, function/work (i.e. machines), go around, walk, travel, etc." > in mind as the translation for Basque and then tried to come up > with an English equivalent.[Note that andar does have somewhat different > semantics in different regions of the Spanish speaking world.] Yes. Spanish is the usual dictionary gloss of Basque , and it certainly matches better than anything in English. The usual French gloss is , which is also better than anything in English. > And from what Larry Trask says, I wonder if either andar or ibili > may be semantically influenced by the other form. Quite possibly. Especially (though not only) among Spanish Basques, shares some of the idiomatic meanings of , such as 'fare', 'get along' and 'work', 'function'. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From karhu at umich.edu Mon Jan 24 09:33:32 2000 From: karhu at umich.edu (Marc Pierce) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 04:33:32 -0500 Subject: NW vs. E Gmc In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 22 Jan 2000, Sean Crist wrote: > I'd like to bring up a few points which were discussed in connection with > the distinction between NW and E Germanic: > 2. Marc Pierce mentioned gemination before *j. Actually, this is a > strictly WGmc innovation, and thus isn't evidence one way or the other for > the grouping of the three Gmc branches. Not quite. Gemination before *j is also found in North Germanic, but it's limited to the velars, which I should have mentioned in my original post. Marc Pierce From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jan 24 12:27:15 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 12:27:15 +0000 Subject: Basque butterflies again Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Rick Mc Callister writes: [LT] >> Take the mainly Lapurdian forms ~ . >> Lapurdian, almost alone among the varieties of Basque, is very fond of >> expressive formations in , and . Here are some >> examples of such expressive forms: > Not all of these seem expressive, some seem to be modified > loanwords from Romance with assimilated consonants; perhaps "expressive" > forms of loanwords > I don't know the Gascon, Aragonese, Catalan or Occitan cognates to > the French and Spanish forms [nor do I have access to dictionaries of those > languages. But these may offer better matches Yes. A few of the Basque words cited bear some kind of resemblance to words in Romance, and especially in Occitan. I omitted from my list a couple of cases that looked like obvious loans, but several of the others are possible loans, though, if so, they have been substantially altered within Basque. However, given the restriction of the expressives to French Basque, and largely to Lapurdian, an economical view might be that is an expressive pattern in Occitan which has been borrowed into neighboring varieties of Basque and used there to coin new formations. I don't know enough Occitan to say if this is plausible, but it can't be ruled out *a priori*. [on 'pretty' possibly from 'alive'] > Is it possible that < ? IE *wiwos "live" ? > [ Moderator's note: > The IE etymon of Latin _vivo-_, Greek _bio-_, Sanskrit _jiva-_, clearly has > an initial labiovelar; other bits of evidence lead us to reconstruct an "o- > coloring" laryngeal in the root, so *g{^w}iH{_3}-. Whether or not the Basque > form can be derived thereform must be answered by someone else. > --rma ] The IE source has been proposed by several specialists, but there appears to be no way of investigating this. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From jrader at m-w.com Mon Jan 24 10:12:47 2000 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 10:12:47 +0000 Subject: Basque butterflies Message-ID: Sorry, but just about everything in this statement is inaccurate. The word in question is Eastern Yiddish , without vowel variation between dialects, which is a pretty good indication it is not part of the Germanic component of Yiddish. German in the sense "ornament" is borrowed from Low German and did not become general until Fruehneuhochdeutsch. It has no counterpart in Yiddish. The Germanic component of Yiddish is based largely on Rhenish dialects of Middle High German. With the eastward migrations of Jews from western Germany in the 14th and 15th centuries contact between Eastern Yiddish dialects and German was virtually severed. It is not sound etymologizing to equate Yiddish words directly with modern German words. The actual origin of Eastern Yiddish , a vulgar word for "penis," has been much debated. Jim Rader > It might work, given that Spanish bicho also means "pecker" --like > Yiddish schmuck < German schmuck "jewel". > In [Brazilian] Portuguese, it's also acquired the meaning "sissy, > pansy" [i.e. "effeminate"] > Rick Mc Callister > W-1634 > Mississippi University for Women > Columbus MS 39701 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jan 24 17:12:32 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 17:12:32 +0000 Subject: Basque butterflies (and phonemes) again Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Roz Frank writes: > [LT] >> And, of course, native Basque lexical items with the slightest >> claim to antiquity never begin with /p/ (the ancient Basques apparently >> couldn't pronounce initial /p-/) > [RF] > Just for the record, I'd mention that this is Larry Trask's position, one > that he has discussed on other occasions. However it is not the only > position. Indeed, for a rather different rendition of phonological events I > would suggest taking a look at Jose Ignacio Hualde's article "Pre-Basque > Plosives" forthcoming in a volume edited by Jon Franco, Alazne Landa and > Juan Martin, _Grammatical Analyses in Basque and Romance Linguistics_ John > Benjamins, Vol. 187 of the series Current Issue in Linguistic Theory. Since > I understand that Larry read an earlier version of that article, I'm > certain that he's familiar with the evidence. Given the complexity of the > issue, I would only state that based on my reading of Hualde's data, the > fact a word appears in modern Basque with an initial /p/ would not in and > of itself argue for or against its "antiquity". And by saying this I don't > mean to imply that I'm taking any particular position on the antiquity of > the examples found in the current discussion. OK. First, let me stress that I have the very greatest respect for Hualde's work. In my view, Hualde is the finest descriptive linguist working on Basque today. And it is not often that I disagree with him, but on this issue I certainly do. The standard reconstruction of the phonology of the Pre-Basque of some 2000 years ago is that by Michelena. Michelena reconstructs two contrasting sets of plosives: the "fortis" */p t k/, of which he says */p/ was rare and may possibly not have existed at all, and the "lenis" */b d g/. These symbols are chosen to reflect the most usual reflexes in the modern language, and they should not be regarded as necessarily representing phonetic reality in Pre-Basque. These two sets, M concludes, contrasted only word-medially and mostly only intervocalically. Word-initially, only */b d g/ could occur, and moreover initial */d/ never occurred in native words, though it was used freely to render both Latin /d-/ and Latin /t-/ in early borrowings. This asymmetric distribution, or better neutralization, is not confined to the plosives. On the contrary, M reconstructs just such a neutralization for *all* his proto-consonants, all of which come in fortis-lenis pairs: free contrast between vowels, only lenes initially (and not all of them), and only fortes finally (and not all of them). This reconstruction is powerfully supported by the evidence, including the modern forms of Basque words, the treatment of borrowed words, and the medieval graphies. It cannot lightly be waved away. Now, I have heard and read several versions of Hualde's proposal here, though I have not yet read his final published version, and so I must direct my remarks to the earlier versions, which I hope are not substantially different from the final version. Important point: Hualde does *not* reject Michelena's reconstructed phonological system. Instead, he proposes to reinterpret its phonetics, and its later development. In M's analysis, word-initial */b d g/ in Pre-Basque, which were always unaspirated and usually voiced, develop regularly into /b d g/ in the modern language, with certain complications, notably for /b/, which are irrelevant here and which I shall ignore. 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. This is a perfectly plausible and respectable analysis, of course, but now it must be evaluated against the evidence. And here, I think, it falls down. The problem, in my view, is that this analysis requires that both native words and borrowed words should turn up in modern Basque, arbitrarily and unpredictably, with both voiced and voiceless plosives, or in many cases with both. Hualde has tried hard to argue that precisely this is indeed the case. But I can't agree. To me, it seems overwhelmingly clear that obviously native words with initial */b g/ (no native initial */d/, recall) turn up in modern Basque with /b g/ virtually without exception. I am thinking of words like 'head', 'two', 'road', 'new', 'heart', 'hot', 'cart', 'after, later', 'waist', 'red', 'bad', 'salt', and many dozens of others. These native words *just do not* turn up with initial /p k/. Exceptions to this statement are few, confined to small areas, and often explicable by the sporadic but familiar right-to-left voicing assimilation we find in Basque. For example, 'cart' appears nowhere as *, but its phonologically regular derivative 'cartwheel' is recorded as in the Gipuzkoan dialect -- by anticipatory voicing assimilation. In great contrast, obvious loan words overwhelmingly show both initial /p t k/ and, more particularly, enormous regional variation in initial voicing. Examples: ~ 'peace'; ~ 'beech'; ~ 'pepper'; 'pine' (no *); ~ 'tithe'; ~ 'breast'; ~ 'letter'; ~ 'onion'; ~ 'tower'; ~ 'bag'; ~ 'wine-press'; ~ 'hinge'; ~ 'rustic gate'; ~ 'cap'; ~ 'transparent'; and countless others, with both variants typically being found in many parts of the country. Such voicing fluctuation is so pervasive among loanwords that we may, with considerable confidence, take it as the signature of a loan word. When we encounter a doubtful case like ~ 'dung', with both variants found right throughout the country, we may be almost certain that we are looking at a loanword. Accordingly, I find myself obliged to reject Hualde's interpretation. It requires native words to behave just like loanwords in their initial voicing, but they plainly do not. Finally, on the particular question of initial /p/, which, recall, Michelena regarded as rare or nonexistent in Pre-Basque and as absent from initial position. I challenge anybody on this list to produce even a single Basque word with initial /p/ which meets my usual criteria: it is recorded before 1600; it occurs in all or in nearly all dialects; it does not appear to be polymorphemic; and it cannot reasonably be suspected of being borrowed from a neighboring language. Any takers? Given the dozens of words in initial /b/ which satisfy my criteria, Hualde's thesis requires us to find at least something like a comparable number with initial /p/ or with /b/ ~ /p/ variation throughout the country. And I can't think of one. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From edsel at glo.be Mon Jan 24 18:42:03 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 19:42:03 +0100 Subject: Basque 'sei' Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Friday, January 14, 2000 3:27 PM [snip] >> [ES] >> The nature of the contrast of the two Iberian sibilants is not entirely >> unknown, as some toponyms have survived: e.g. Saitabi(a) > Xa'tiva, > Very interesting. I didn't know that this etymology had been established. > Has it been? [Ed] i.e. a number of authors think so, but I haven't been able to dig that out from my documentation, for now. It can certainly be identified with Grk. Saitabi's which in turn is assumed to be Xa'tiva (the local, Valencian name, with x = [esh]. "Ja'tiva" is the Castilianized form, now widely used because Valencian is losing ground rapidly in southern parts of the province of Valencia and in Alacant). Other forms are S'aitibi (in Lat. alphabet Saetabi) and the obvious ethnonym S'aitibietar. >> which indicates that the S must have been rather closer to Basque (apical) s >> than z. > Why? [Ed] Because of the correspondence of s' with Valencian x, and with Basque apical s (wheneever a similar word or segment is encountered in Basque and Iberian). Sometimes it corresponds to Cast./Val. s (which is also rather apical) like in s'aguntiko <> (from?) Sagunt(o), Lat. Saguntum.. E.g. in the text of the stela from Sinarcas, we can interpret and re-write (because there is no distinction of voiced/unvoiced stops etc., and no word separation in the original) part of the text as saying "gauek as'ko loitegarri"; in Basque "asko" (with apical s) means Sp. 'bastante' in both its meanings: '(largely) enough' or 'a lot'. > True, at a much later stage, a shushy sibilant in Arabic sometimes came into > Castilian as [esh], developing later to jota. But on what basis can we > extend this pattern centuries further back into the past? >> Some Iberian words are extremely similar to some Basque words > I'd be very careful here. [Ed] See above. I admit anybody's guess is as good as mine. > First, it is not trivial to identify Iberian words at all. Many Iberian > texts use a mark which looks like a word-divider, but not all do so, and not > all do so consistently. Decisions about word-boundaries in such cases are > difficult and debatable. In practice, nothing much interesting can be said > about Iberian words. Instead, it is the seemingly recurrent morphs which > attract attention. These are presumed to represent morphemes, and some of > them do indeed resemble items in Basque. However, in almost no case do we > know the meaning of the Iberian item, and hence the comparisons must be > strictly of forms -- not very illuminating. The few Iberian morphs to which > meanings can be assigned with some confidence do not, in general, look like > anything in Basque. [Ed] Some do: see e.g.'asko'. > In its phonological structure, Iberian seems to be rather similar to Basque, > and hence it is perhaps not very surprising that similar sequences exist in > both languages. But, when we don't know the meanings of the Iberian items, > we have no right to claim that Iberian and Basque possess "extremely similar > words". Finally, recall that Basque is of no more assistance in reading > Iberian than is, say, Norwegian or Zulu. This must count for something. [Ed] I would object to that: there are similarities, and there was very likely some exchange among these lgs. I know a lot of crackpots have pretended to have translated Iberian texts and that most of that is simply impossible to be true (like based upon modern Basque words, or of Romance origin, and worse), but some parts of texts can be interpreted (i.e. one can guess the general meaning) if other information is available, like the likely use, purpose, archaeological context etc., and some connection with (mainly) Basque root stems or words doesn't seems too far-fetched, and this yields a compatible meaning. >> (I know you don't accept this to be anything but coincidence), > There is no reason to see anything other than coincidence when all we have is > resemblances in form, with no meanings attached. >> and these similarities always point to a systematic correspondance of the >> two Iberian sibilants and Basque s and z. > Really? This is news to me. What evidence can you adduce to support this > claim? [Ed] See above. >> From toponyms and other words one can deduce that Aquitanian and Iberian >> also had the corresponding affricates (ts and tz). In Iberian script these >> are written exactly as the non-affricated ones. In other scripts and in >> Aquitanian in Latin script orthography is pretty confusing, but often >> resembles later usages. > The Iberian script distinguishes only two sibilants, and I know of no hard > evidence that the language actually had four. > The defective Roman script used for writing Aquitanian doesn't distinguish > any sibilants at all very clearly, except that X or XS seems to have > represented affricates, while S and SS appear to have represented fricatives. >> I don't know where you found that Aquitanian may have had two additional >> sibilants. > This derives from the conclusion that Aquitanian represents an ancestral form > of Basque, more or less identical to the Pre-Basque reconstructed from > Basque-internal evidence. > Modern Basque has the following sibilants: laminal , apical , and > palato-alveolar . Now, one feature of our reconstruction is that only > the first four could ever appear in the unmarked forms of lexical items, > while were entirely confined to expressive variants -- mainly > diminutives. We therefore surmise that Pre-Basque -- and hence Aquitanian -- > *may* also have had these last two, even though they don't show up clearly in > the written records. [Ed] I'm truely sorry: this apparent disagreement is caused by my very restrictive use of the word 'sibilant', excluding the voiced and palatalized forms. Maybe I should have said somethging like 'various s sounds'. Michelena e.g. calls the palatalized forms 'chicheantes' (Fr. chuintantes). BTW, Iberian script doesn't distinguish affricated forms either. [snip generally known stuff] >>>> The Castilian s and z/c (theta) are the descendants of the old Basque-type >>>> distinction, I believe. > [LT] >>> I don't follow. Castilian /s/ simply continues Latin /s/, except that it >>> is apical, whereas the Latin /s/, on the Basque evidence, was probably >>> laminal. But the Castilian theta derives ultimately, in most cases, from >>> Latin /k/ before a front vowel; this is thought to have become some kind of >>> affricate before developing into theta (or into /s/, according to region). > [ES] >> In derivations from Latin this true, but in all other cases it is not. I >> didn't mean that the Castilian s/z distinction is descended directly from >> the Basque apical/laminal opposition, as a parallel evolution in particular >> words, but that its very existence is due to a pre-existing awareness of >> such a phonological distinction (it did in Iberian), something most European >> languages don't have (and ditto for the rhotics). > "A pre-existing awareness"? Strange wording, almost mystical. > May I translate into terms more familiar to me? > I presume the suggestion is that the Castilian s/z contrast derives from > areal pressure, from the influence of neighboring languages that already had > it. [Ed] Something like that: familiarity with the phenomenon, even if they didn't have it themselves. Like I'm aware of French uvular r, but I can't really pronounce it even though I'm fluent (and used to work) in French. > But the modern s/z contrast dates only from the 16th century -- rather late > for areal influence from Iberian, I'd say, or even from Basque -- which in > any case has a distinction decidedly different from the Castilian one. [Ed] As we know it, yes. But there must have been a precursor distinction that turned into the present one. I think this was already discussed on this list some months ago. > As for other European languages, I will remind you of Martin Joos's 1952 > paper in Language, in which he argued that an apical/laminal contrast in > sibilants was in the medieval period widespread in Europe. [Ed] In which languages you mean? >>>> What about Arabic? It certainly has various sibilants. > [LT] >>> Yes, but it does not have an apical/laminal contrast, and I know of no >>> evidence that Arabic phonology had any effect on Castilian phonology, still >>> less on Basque phonology. > [ES] >> As far as Castilian is concerned, I am not so sure: does any one have any >> references or information on that subject? > No, but I no of no evidence or argument that Arabic ever had the slightest > effect upon Castilian phonology, apart from the forms of a few individual > words that entered Castilian after Arabic mediation, like 'soap'. [Ed] Actually, I was not thinking of an Arabic influence, but it may have existed after so many centuries. I was just using it as an example of a lg. with more than one sibilant (in casu emphatic/normal). >> In Basque, it is rather the opposite: e.g. kuttun < kitab, i.e. Arabic words >> were adapted to Basque phonology. > Yes, and this is what normally happens in borrowing. > By the way, Basque ~ ~ (and other variants), which > has been applied to various kinds of written things, is thought to derive > from the Arabic plural 'books'. This appears to be one of the rare > cases in which Basque has taken over an Arabic word without Romance > mediation. > Larry Trask [Ed] I read once that there are a few more, but I can't find the reference. Ed. Selleslagh From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jan 24 11:51:42 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 11:51:42 +0000 Subject: Basque Message-ID: Roz Frank writes: [on Basque 'be in motion' and related topics] > First let me state that I'm a bit confused about the nature of the Basque > evidence itself. But before turning to that question, let me add that the > relationship between the Basque root-stem <-bil> and the IE materials is > equally unclear to me at this stage. > So, speaking of the meaning "round" that is attributed of proposed nominal > root *, could someone explain to me the role of <-bil> in the compound > (also ) defined by Azkue as "sphere, something round" > (all citations are from Azkue unless otherwise indicated). Also, what is > the meaning of the first element and could that element be affecting our > interpretation of the prototype meaning of <-bil> (as well as *)? > Actually I'm not familiar with appearing in isolation with the > meaning "round". For example, the most commonly cited compound is > whose meaning is glossed/translated as "round". But isn't the meaning > "round" derived primarily from two expressions both being compounds? And, > yes, I do know that the meaning that is assigned to * is "round" and > that there are other compounds where <-bil> appears as a suffixing element. > Nonetheless, I believe a closer examination of the compounds will suggest a > slightly different interpretation. OK. Basque * 'round' is nowhere recorded as an independent word. But it occurs as an element, usually a final element, in a number of more-or-less transparent formations. Examples: 'cartwheel', 'wheel' This is from 'cart' + *. The phonology is absolutely regular: * --> * --> * --> * -> . 'small round bread roll or pastry' This is from 'bread', and again the phonology is perfect: * --> * --> * --> * --> . 'fist' This is from the archaic 'forearm', recorded in Oihenart in the 17th century, and again the phonology is perfect: * --> The same element is also seemingly present in other formations whose first element is obscure or unidentifiable, such as 'testicle'. Now, the common word 'round' looks like a reduplication. Certainly an original * would develop regularly to , since /l/ > /r/ between vowels is a regular change. But this admittedly leaves that medial /i/ unaccounted for, and opinion is divided here. Some posit an original *, with an interfix for phonological or expressive reasons. Others favor a purely expressive formation, consisting of an arbitrary sequence plus *. As for ~ 'round thing', 'sphere', 'globe', this pretty clearly contains *, but the first element is unidentifiable, and may be of expressive origin, though there are various other stories on the table. Anyway, this word is not recorded before 1886. For all of these, Agud and Tovar's etymological dictionary provides a good review of the data and of the proposals, including the crazy ones. > In the case of it seems to me that there is a question concerning > its composition. One analysis could derive it from a reduplication based on > which is a relatively high frequency prefixing element in Basque. I presume the reference is to the common combining form ~ 'twice', 'double', 'again', as in '40', from '20'. But the origin of this is known. It is the word 'bent', 'redoubled', 'twisted', discussed below. We know this because the combining form appears as in Landucci's 1562 dictionary of the Basque of Alava, which has, for example, for '40'. Anyway, this combining form always has the trilled written between vowels, and hence it cannot be present in , which has the tapped written . > Yet > my own intuitive analysis of the compound would identify the first element > with "his/her/its", one of two 3rd p. sg. genitive pronouns, that > has undergone vowel raising, not particularly unusual in Basque. Moreover, > is a common element in compounds Yes, but what would be the semantic motivation for this? > Also, when dealing with the Basque evidence one must consider the possible > relationship between the verbal root of ( "to gather up" > and the <-bil-> of . Indeed, though 'gather', 'collect' cannot, I think, be related to . But specialists have suspected for decades that it might be related to * 'round', though the semantic link requires a bit of fancy footwork. Recall that ancient Basque seems to have had an absolute distinction between verbal roots and all other roots, which I will loosely call "nominal roots" here. Only a verbal root could occur in a verb bearing the prefix * in its non-finite forms. And, as far as we can tell, only a verbal root could ever appear inside a directly inflected (synthetic, non-periphrastic) finite verb-form. In contrast, a nominal root could not do these things, but it *could* take a suffix to form the participle of a verb. That suffix was <-i> in the ancient language, and still so in some modern verbs, but in this function <-i> has long since been displaced by the innovating suffix <-tu> (borrowed from Latin), which is now the productive suffix for forming verbs from non-verbal stems. And this is what we find in , with the usual voicing after /l/. So, it appears that we must regard as derived from a nominal stem *, and hence as having nothing to do with the verbal root <-bil-> which appears in . > The bare-stem or radical , as in > , is found in a large number of compounds, and if I'm not mistaken, > almost always with the notion of "gathering up, collecting", e.g., > "joint, place of articulation; meeting place (from > with <(g)une> "space, segment, opening, moment"); "pilgrimage, > 'romeria', outing with a going and coming; reunion; ritual or communal turn > for recollection of goods, i.e., usually involving following an agreed upon > itinerary through the village or countryside (and hence 'movement'): from > where <-era> is the allative ending ("towards") also commonly > used to form nominal compound constructions. The allative ending is <-ra> > after vowels and <-era> after consonants. Yes; all of these are derived straightforwardly from the stem of . But cannot contain the allative case-ending, which is never used to construct nouns. Surely it contains the common noun-forming suffix <-(k)era>, which usually means 'way', 'manner', but which can also mean 'act', as in 'act of requesting', 'request', from 'ask for'. > Certainly * > (*) could be interpreted as "to move/turn on oneself, to roll > (oneself) up, to gather oneself up, to move toward oneself, to contract". Doubt it. In such a formation, would require a suitable case-suffix. Compare, for example, '(to) appropriate', 'take to oneself', from 'to oneself', with the animate allative <-gana>. > I would note that we find the following in Azkue: > () "redondear; agenciar; enroscarse una culebra"; > ()"envolver, apelotonar, ganar por astucia o deseza, > enredar; recoger el ganado." Yes, but all of these are merely derivatives of . > In addition there is the example of > and its variant which were coined to mean "automobil" and said to > be a compound translating quite literally the notion of "self-mover" (cf. > Llande's _Dictionaire...1926), at least that was how the word was explained > to me by Basque speakers many years back. But modern neologisms are of no historical relevance. > In addition, there are a number of bisyllabic and trisyllabic items that > appear to be compounds ending in a suffixing element in <-pil/-bil>, > () "wheel", "type of pastry; hinge", > (*?)"knot", whose meaning is not always entirely > clear. As explained above, the first two of these are transparent and regular. The third is obscure: very likely it does contain *, but its first element is opaque. > I'm quite certain that there a several other examples that simply > don't come to my mind right now, although Jon Patrick probably could pull > them up from his computerized list. The difficulties involved in retrieving > such items, compounds with a given suffix, is another reason that Azkue's > dictionary should be computerized in its entirety and without attempting to > modify the spelling of the entries in order to convert them all into Batua, > the written standard invented some thirty years ago. Yes, certainly. It is out of order to alter the recorded forms of words. Even so, the Aranist eccentricities of Azkue's notation could usefully be replaced by more conventional graphs. For example, Azkue's could be replaced by , and his by . > And following up on LT's comment about the meaning of , would "to go > about" be a better rendition of its meaning? Azkue translates it simply as > "andar". Furthermore, I would imagine that if LT once glossed the meaning > of "ibili" as "to go around", he probably meant by that to say the verb > often was used to mean "to go around/about (doing X or Y)." Yes. I'm about to reply to Ed Selleslagh's query about this. I was using 'go around' in its American sense of 'go about', 'go here and there'. Basque does not mean 'circle around', 'go around' as in 'go around an obstacle'. > Additionally, with respect to * giving rise to , there is > a curious aspect of Basque that might be related to the meanings cited > above for compounds such as and . I refer to the > fact that there is a certain amount of evidence that in Basque the notion > of "to turn into, transform (oneself)" is connected to the concept of > "twisted" but not from the point of view of our highly negative IE image > schemata which sets out "straightness" as a standard/base reality. Rather > "twisted" carries strong connotations of "resistance", of > "rolling up on itself/oneself" as a newly woven rope is prone to do, > twisting itself back into a series of loops, coiling itself up: when > pressure is applied it can be straightened out, but when the pressure/force > is removed it goes back to its "natural" shape, and curls itself back up." The original sense of the stem is hard to identify with confidence. I would cautiously suggest 'bent back upon itself', 'bent double' as the best guess, but it's only a guess. The stem and its derivatives have acquired such a broad range of senses in the modern language that we can hardly be sure of anything. Even in its earliest attestations, the stem has clearly negative senses like 'twisted', 'perverse', 'malignant'. > In Spanish for instance I believe that "twisted" implies that > force was applied to an object that was originally "straight" and that > produced its "twisted" appearance. In Basque the internal strength of being > is in , in the return to the rolled up or coiled up state in which > the being's innate energy is exercised and contained in the shape itself. > It would appear that in Basque the polarity of the gestalt is/was > fundamentally positive although certainly the resistance offered by the > rope, person or object to our will/desires can be problematic. Yet this > complex image schema that is at work here making it possible for > to mean "to twist up, coil up, curl up" as well as "to transform" ("to take > back its original shape" almost as if an inner force, as was the case with > the coiled rope, sets in motion the change). Keeping this in mind, it could > be argued that the meanings of * derive from or are in some > fashion related to this same gestalt. Debatable, since the earliest recorded senses of are negative. > Notice that in English we "bend someone to our will", implying that the > person's "resistance" is conceptualized or projected spatially as > "straightness" to which force is applied and in this way it will be > twisted/bend out of its original shape. The scene projected metaphorically > is one in which energy source comes from the outside and is then applied to > the object or person. Stated differently, there are two scenarios: 1) in > English when the object's resistance ("ego/individual will") is overcome, > the shape implied by the expression is "twisted" and when the external > force is removed, the object remains "bent" or "twisted" and 2) in Basque > while the external force iseing applied the object is offering resistance > to being "straightened out" by the will/force of the other and then once > the external force is removed the object is understood to immediately > spring back and recover its original shape. Also debatable, I think, but getting too abstract for me. > In short, generally speaking in English, as I mentioned above, > "straightness" is viewed as the "given", the natural state, and "twisted" > is what results from the application of an * external * force. Yes, but I know of no evidence that the case is different in Basque. > And a final aside. In the case of , certainly today we find it > used with negative connotations, much as it is in Spanish, but at the same > time it often carries a strong notion of "mischieviousness". Indeed, I've > heard Basque parents who when discussing the problem of > "educating/civilizing" their children, refer to this as a problem of > "domesticating" their off-spring. Yes, but this sense is modern, and seemingly not recorded in early texts. The case is perhaps comparable to that of English 'naughty'. This originally meant 'needy' (attested from 1377). It then became a common word for 'wicked', 'immoral' (attested from 1529, and for centuries afterward). Only from 1633 do we find the word applied to children in the sense of 'wayward', 'disobedient'. > Indeed, according to Azkue, the > abstraction refers to "caracter violento; indocil" which might > be rendered by the English term "wild(ness)" Again, I would emphasize that > in Basque the notion of "transformation" calls into play an image gestalt > or motion gestalt that doesn't appear to be present in Romance or English. Sorry; I'm not yet persuaded of this. > Actually is used today also to mean "to translate"). Yes; this derived verb has acquired the general sense of 'turn into' (tr. and intr.), and some associated more specific senses. > In summary, > I don't know of any general studies of this problem in IE languages, > especially diachronic ones since it is clear that the Basque data has > conceptual overlays that can be traced to the image schemata found in the > surrounding IE languages and firmly embedded in the metaphoric legacy of > Christianity, etc. Er -- "clear"? How? > And to conclude this perhaps already too lengthy discussion, I would > mention that in Mikel Morris's highly readable and well researched > Basque-English/English-Basque Dictionary (1998), we find that the English > word "coil" is translated by three terms containing the element : as > , and . Yes, but all three appear to be neologisms. So far as I can tell, none is recorded in this sense before the 20th century. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From stevegus at aye.net Mon Jan 24 12:52:27 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 07:52:27 -0500 Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: Ed Selleslagh writes: <> Hasn't Frisian also generalised a plural in -ar or -er, which also corresponds with what Norwegian and Swedish (and formerly Danish) did? -- Sella fictili sedeo Versiculos dum facio. From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Mon Jan 24 17:56:40 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 12:56:40 -0500 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 16 Jan 2000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > One of the criticisms that came up often when I asked some linguists to > comment on the tree was that it mixed apples and oranges. And cherries. > Syd Lamb wrote in a private message (repd w/permission) that lexical, > phonological and morphological items "are largely independent of one > another in how they are involved in change. ..." That's not true. For example, if a language inflects with suffixes and then undergoes phonological changes eliminating certain segments word-finally, this can result in the loss of morphological contrasts (thus, phonological and morphological change are not independent). Or to take another example, phonological change can help bring about lexical change; for example, "queen" and "quean" used to be pronounced differently, but after the ee/ea merger a few centuries ago, "quean" began to disappear from the language because of an unacceptable homonymy (thus, phonological and lexical change are not independent). Homonyms do exist, but languages seem to disprefer them. > "...Hence a tree constructed on > purely phonological grounds, for IE or Uto-Aztecan, or any complex > family, will come out quite different from one constructed on purely > lexical grounds, and both will differ from one constructed on purely > morphological grounds." The assumption you made was that lexical, morphological, and phonological change operate independently of one another _within_ a language. Here, you're talking about something else: you're talking about interaction _between_ languages. > There's no question that morphology can reflect different genetic > relationships than lexical or phonological items. I wouldn't use the term "reflect" here, since that indicates that we're talking about some reality here. A language has one genetic affiliation and not another. It's true that lexical items sometimes muddy the waters in determining this genetic affiliation. We can _usually_ detect loan words on the basis of sound changes which a word has or has not undergone. However, if a borrowing is early, it can sometimes chance that the sound changes in the donor and recipient languages have been such that a particular word would have the same outcome in both languages, in which case the loan is undetectable. This is a potential methodological pitfall which needs to be acknowledged. Acknowledging it is a very different thing from claiming that a _correct_ account can involve a language having one genetic affiliation for its lexicon and another for its morphology; that idea is simply incoherent. > This is precisely > what happened with Germanic in the UPenn exercise. It was pointed out > in another post that "there are a great many morphological and > constructional elements to be found in the earliest Indoeuropean texts > that are in opposition to apparent lexical similarities and > dissimilarities. One example is the accusative of specification > discussed by Hahn in 'Naming Constuctions in Indoeuropean languages' ... > This kind of morphology and syntax points in a very different direction > than mere homonyms." > It was also pointed out that the UPenn "outcome showed that their lexical > choices in German were older than their morphological choices,..." so that > it looks as if "the Germans got their words from Latin and Celtic first and > their syntax from Slavic later." Suggesting perhaps that the "problem is > trickier than it looks." This sounds like a somewhat mangled version of what Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor actually said. First of all, their study did not include syntactic characters; it included morphological, phonological, and lexical characters. The field of linguistics is not in a state of understanding historical change in syntax that syntactic characters could have been included. In any case, the team would most definitely not claim that "the Germans got...their syntax from Slavic"; I'm sure I'd be representing Don Ringe correctly to say that he'd vehemently disagree that syntax can be borrowed. What the team said up until recent versions of their work is that Germanic largely agrees with Balto-Slavic in terms of its morphology, but partially agrees with Italic and Celtic in terms of lexical characters. What they posited is that Germanic started out as a _genetic_ sister of Balto-Slavic, which accounts for the morphological characters on which they agree; but that it borrowed a number of lexical items from Italic and Celtic at such an early date that the words had not been detectable as loans on purely phonological grounds. However, in even more recent runs of the algorithm over the most recent version of the character table, the team found that the situation is worse than that: on different runs, Germanic pops up in different places in the tree. If you leave Germanic out, the same tree comes up over and over; but the placement of Germanic is simply a problem. This is something of a mystery at present. > Does all this reflect the possibility that an accurate and true morphological > IE tree would and should look different than an accurate and true lexical IE > tree? No, because a word is either borrowed or inherited. The borrowed words don't tell us anything about the genetic affiliation of a language, so we try to exclude them. The mismatch which sometimes occurs between trees computed over the two types of characters comes from the _methodological_ problem of not always being able to detect what's a loan word. > I was also given an example that I will try to repeat related to how > conservatism might affect the usable evidence of relatedness: > Two IE languages - possibly in contact - accidentially retain a feature from > PIE. All other IE languages lose that feature before any records exist. The > researcher would be forced to conclude that this feature is a shared > innovation, having NO WAY OF KNOWING of the PIE origins. He would have no > way of knowing that it should go in the "lost" category for the other > languages. On that basis, the two languages might have a common "character" > in the UPenn analysis and show evidence of relatedness. But in fact all that > is being measured is the relative conservatism of the two languages. Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor would code the other cases as "absent"; with a few exceptions, they generally don't make any claim as to whether this represents a loss. > (As far as non-borrowability of "syntactical morphology" goes, I was given > the example of the overwhelming and extensive use of the original Latinism > <-tion> in modern English. And the comment was that if that sort of thing > showed up in two ancient languages with no recorded history to explain how it > got there, "some historical linguists would probably say that it had to come > from the proto-language.") -tion is a _derivational_ affix; I have not seen the use of the term "syntactic[al] morphology". Derivational morphology can be borrowed, but borrowing of inflectional morphology (e.g. suffixes for verb tenses, noun case markers, etc.) is virtually unknown. It's for this reason that inflectional morphology is so valuable in determining the genetic affiliation of a language. The sort of case you bring up can be a problem, but it's not nearly as hopeless as you make it out to be. Even without any knowledge of the history, it's obvious that English has a huge stratum of words borrowed from Latin, because the words don't show the signs of having gone thru the Germanic sound changes. We can often detect this kind of borrowing even in ancient languages. > Which brings me back to the point of my original post. A language borrows > and innovates radically. To the point where let's say - to make the point > clear to the most obtuse degree - 99% of all lexical and morphological > features are not from the original parent. A large amount of borrowing can _obscure_ the genetic affiliation of a language, making it harder for the linguist to determine. This is a very different thing from saying that the genetic affiliation has changed. > This misses the point. The point is simply evidentiary. The radically > changing language could have little or no evidence left of its genetic > affilation. CRITICAL EVIDENCE OF THAT 'GENETIC' AFFILATION HAS BEEN LOST. > (And whether the borrowings happened before or after the sound changes is not > relevant here - the borrowings are the bulk of the language and all the > evidence you have.) > Saying that these attributes fall into the "lost" category on the UPenn grid > just won't do. And that's simply because there is no way of knowing if they > were lost or if they were ever there. Something that is "lost" looks and > acts exactly like something that was never there. > The UPenn tree uses some 300 features across all of IE and some 4000 years. > Is it possible that the absence of some of those features in some languages > is not due to recent innovations but losses in other languages? Is it > possible that things that are categorized as "lost" in the UPenn grid were > never there? It's for this reason that the team usually uses the neutral term "absent" rather than "lost". They do occasionally say "lost", but for the purposes of their methodology, it makes no practical difference. Either way, they code each language where an item is "absent" with a unique character. It's quite true that these absences (whether due to loss or due to original absence) represent noise in the data which make it harder to determine the correct tree. If you're trying to detemine the correct tree for a language family, this noise is something that you have to contend with, no matter what methodology you use. Despite the noise, the results are encouraging: a very coherent pattern arises (minus the problem with Germanic): multiple runs of the algorithm bring up the same tree again and again. > PS - Someone - I forget who - also wanted to know how the UPenn tree analysis > could claim to "confirm the Indo-Hittite hypothesize" when the actual > language used was Luwian. Ah- it was you who asked this. I already answered in a separate post, but here are the answers: 1) The team did use Hittite, not Luvian, to represent Anatolian. I don't know where the idea came from that they used Luvian. 2) It wouldn't matter anyway. Everyone agrees that Luvian and Hittite are members of the Anatolian branch of IE. Despite the misleading terminology, the "Indo-Hittite" hypothesis holds that the earliest branching in IE was between _Anatolian_ (not just Hittite) and Proto-Everything-Else. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Jan 24 18:40:10 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 19:40:10 +0100 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: <003e01bf650f$8492ef00$8401703e@edsel> Message-ID: "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >English Dutch >other ander >tooth tand: here the -n- has remained! >soft zacht: the ch (jota sound) - f correspondance is systematic: laugh lachen >(but English orthography is still witness of a similar pronunciation in times >past). With German:kraft kracht. These cases are not comparable. In English, there was a sound shift /x/ > /f/ (as well as /x/ > zero, cf. the split of the English interdental fricative into T ~ D). In Dutch, there was a sound shift /ft/ > /xt/. German mostly kept things as they were. So: sanft soft zacht < *samft- (Ingw. *sa~ft) Kraft craft kracht < *kraft- vs. lachen laugh lachen < *hlahhjan ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From gordonselway at gn.apc.org Mon Jan 24 14:11:50 2000 From: gordonselway at gn.apc.org (Gordon Selway) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 14:11:50 +0000 Subject: re PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: Some additional information: a) I'm not clear why telling us that 'balls' (sensu, testes) is 'rather transparently derived from the English word for "round object"' helps. Why should the derivation be that way round (except that it is more verbal than the visual image of a factory chimney being rapidly run up, then as quickly demolished, as I think in a sketch on BBC's celebrated "TW3" almost 40 years ago? An association made in 1200 BCE (or much earlier) is as likely as one made in 1200 CE (or more recently); b) the English 'bollocks', iirc, was earlier 'ballocks' (as passim in the verse of the Earl of Rochester, tempore Caroli secundi); c) Dennis King tells me that mod Ir Gaelic 'peil' ('peile' was my recollection of the spelling: it may be an alternative) probably comes from Latin 'pila', and confirms that he has no knowledge of any 'palla' at any stage in any form of Gaelic; d) Ga. 'ball' also means 'ball, globe' anglice - and 'ball-iomair' (ball-contest; Sc.) may also be used for 'football'. Gordon Selway From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Mon Jan 24 14:23:40 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 16:23:40 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 21 Jan 2000 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >> And how much support do such theories as e.g. Colin Renfrew's idea of the >> Anatolian origin of IE languages have? > -- very little, among linguists, because of the weird contortions in > linguistic development he assumes. I was in the (apparently false) belief that Renfrew had some support among linguists as well. > -- actually, early IE (and Indo-Iranian) loanwords in the Uralic languages > have been known for some time, and are commonly cited (eg., by Mallory). Yes, the fact that U languages possess relatively early IE / Aryan / Iranian loan words has been known among IE-ists for a long time, and Mallory correctly cites the Uralic loan word evidence in support for the Ukrainean original home. But what does not seem to be commonly known are the details of the IE loan word layers in Uralic. The picture has changed much during the last approx. 15 years and is still constantly changing. The details might shed light on the internal development / differentiation of IE (or, at least its northern branches) in the future. One thing worth noting is that dates have gone back conciderably. The Uralic expansion (for whatever reason it happened) may have been earlier than the IE one. Some descendant of proto-U (which would later evolve into Finnic and Saamic) was spoken in the Baltic Sea / Scandinavia area already 3200 bc, when the Indo-European battle axe culture arrived in southwestern Finland. There are some Finnic-Saamic loan words with proto-IE characteristics (e.g., laryngal reflexes) which are probably connected with the battle axe culture, such as Finnic-Saamic *kas?a- 'tip, end' < IE *Hak?-, *suki- 'family, kin' < IE *suH-. These words are unknown in U languages outside the Baltic Sea / Scandianavian area. There are also independent proto-IE loans in Saamic (e.g. *s?uki- 'sharpen' < IE *k?uH- 'pointed, sharp'), which possibly points towards a very early IE / pre-Saamic contact zone in mid-Scandinavia. At any rate, a uniform proto-U language cannot be assumed to have existed after 4000 bc, and 4500-5000 bc seems more likely. I am not sure how this correlates with IE dates - is 4000-5000 bc too early a date for proto-IE? A question that should be thoroughly researched is the possibility of U loan words in IE. Since there are massive amounts of IE loan words of varying age in the U languages, it seems overwhelmingly unlikely to me that there would be (almost) none in (proto-)IE. However, I know only two debatable cases that have been proposed, Germanic-Celtic *yeg- 'ice' < p-U *j?Ni id. (N = velar nasal), and IE *(s)kwalo- '?whale, ?fish species' < p-U *kala 'fish' (the first case seems convincing enough to me). Has anyone written anything on this? Ante Aikio The Department of the Finnish and Saami Language and Logopedics University of Oulu, Finland anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Mon Jan 24 15:22:52 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 10:22:52 -0500 Subject: SV: Indo-Hittite In-Reply-To: <01BF64F1.E81A5900.lmfosse@online.no> Message-ID: I've lost track of the attribution, but someone on the list objected to saying that Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor had found confirmation of the Indo-Hittite hypothesis in their computational cladistic work. The objection was that the team used Luvian rather than Hittite to represent Anatolian. This isn't correct; in every version of the work I've seen, the team used Hittite to represent Anatolian. It wouldn't matter, anyway; despite the terminology, the Indo-Hittite hypothesis holds that the earliest branching in IE was between _Anatolian_ and what became the other IE languages. Sorry if the traditional terminology "Indo-Hittite" is misleading; it's one of those less-than-ideal terms which we're stuck with. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Jan 24 05:32:09 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 23:32:09 -0600 Subject: IE etymological dictionary In-Reply-To: Message-ID: with all the talent on this list, something much better than Pokorny could be created it could also be translated into several languages to make it more accessible It is legal to use data from copyrighted sources although you have to create an original format Sean's idea would be a tremendous boost for your profession and those of you in major universities would be wise to help him come up with grant money so he could farm out work to your grad students In the meantime, all of you can help by posting your papers and raw data online and working to get professional journals to republish their older editions online The geeks at computing services can make you free servers from obsolete computers and free Linux software, so you can post as much material as you want Those of you who work with endangered languages can post audio very easily with free downloadable software --although the files can be humongous and if you want real quality audio you do have to pay a couple of hundred dollars [snip] >Pokorny is still under copyright; the most recent edition is copyright >1959. It will be a great many years before that edition passes into the >public domain. The U.S. government keeps extending the term of copyright >longer and longer; they just bumped it up another 20 years a few years >ago. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Jan 24 18:25:47 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 19:25:47 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Sean Crist wrote: >> Further, remember that there are other "satem" branches, such as >> Armenian and Albanian. >That's not correct; Armenian underwent an independent set of consonant >changes which roughly resemble Grimm's Law in Germanic. Armenian did not >undergo the satem consonant shift. It did: *k^ > s tasn < *dek^m *g^ > c [ts] gorc < *werg^om *g^h > j [dz] jeRn < *g^hesr- Additionally, *uk > us even if the velar was not palatal in PIE. (Also, like the other satem lgs., Armenian underwent the ruki-rule, although that's a bit harder to recognize). >As for Albanian, I can't say much; it's so heavily mutated that it's not >of much use in reconstructing PIE, and I know next to nothing about the >sound changes it underwent. I can say that I've never heard anyone claim >that Albanian underwent the satem shift. Albanian is satem, or rather "thatem" (*k^ > th). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Mon Jan 24 18:45:05 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 13:45:05 -0500 Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter In-Reply-To: <96.5b1c2.25b2347c@aol.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 15 Jan 2000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > Sean Crist wrote: > *A forking in a language follows from a forking in the community of speakers, > typically because of migration leading to geographical separation. When the > original single group splits into two groups who wander off from each other, > the copies of the language information in the minds of the members of both > groups start out basically identical. Over time, however, the norms in the > two communities DRIFT IN DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS, since the two groups are no > longer in contact* > Which does not answer the question why the proper model is a forking rather > than a branching. The DEGREE OF DRIFT may vary between the two groups. A > RADICAL DEGREE OF DRIFT in one group and a SMALL CONSERVATIVE DRIFT in the > other would suggest a branching not a forking. What is important to my post > is: WOULD YOU HAVE CALLED THE SMALL CONSERVATIVE DRIFT A NEW LANGUAGE IF THE > SPLIT HAD NEVER OCCURED? > Methodologically, it appears that you are "reifying" a new language because a > split has occurred - NOT because of any quality of change in the language. > A splits into B and C. You would have continued to call A "A" if no split > occurred. But because of the split, you call it "B." > I hope you understand there is a bit of a problem here. It's apparently a problem for you. Linguists are well aware that there is no clear criterion for looking at two lects and saying "same language" vs. "different languages." It is purely a matter of convention what distinctions we want to draw and what names we want to use. For example, consider the following two cases: -Earlier Dutch forked into Dutch and Afrikaans. -Latin forked into Italian, Spanish, French, etc. In the former case, we continue to use the term for the parent language for one of the daughters. In the latter case, we don't. What we choose to call the daughters is _purely_ a matter of convention. Linguistically speaking, the two cases are examples of exactly the same thing; it doesn't matter whether we've arbitrarily chosen to use the name of the parent language as the name of one of the daughters. If we wanted, we could extend the term "Latin" to replace "Italian" as the term for "the dominant Romance language spoken in Italy today." Likewise, we could come up with a new name for present-day Dutch to reflect that the common ancestor of present-day Dutch and Afrikaans has forked and that it no longer exists in its earlier form. Swapping the terminology this way would make no difference whatever in the actual linguistic facts. "Dutch" means "the grouping of lects in space and time which we find it convenient to call 'Dutch'". You seem to be having an awful time getting your mind around this, because you've been beating this same drum since last summer. > I suspect that the difference between branching and forking are > terminological and operationally cannot tell us about the degree of drift in > both or either language. I never drew any distinction between branching and forking. I use the terms to mean exactly the same thing. > My question was something like - could Anatolian, after say innovating > away from "narrow PIE", borrow back features that it had lost? I was > looking for borrowings that imitated genetics. As I've said, you occasionally get cases where a loan word cannot be detected on purely phonological grounds, but you _never_ get the wholesale borrowing of an entire system of inflectional morphology. This is why inflectional morphology is so valuable in determining genetic affiliation. In very, very rare cases, a single inflectional morpheme might have been borrowed; it's been claimed that English 3sg. -s (replacing -eth) represents a Norse influence. But there is not one recorded case where a whole system of inflectional morphology has been borrowed; it just _doesn't_ happen. > E.g., Mencken noted > that after abandoning the "King's English", Americans rediscovered and > adopted it. I don't know what you're referring to here. > But the real question is I think - can we > mistake the influence of one daughter on another and mistakedly call it the > remains of the parent? E.g., -if Slavic loaned the word for wheel from Greek > - or vice versa - could we mistake it as being a gift to both from the > reified parent - PIE? If it were borrowed from just one branch into another, I'd be willing to entertain the idea that the loan was early enough for the crucial sound changes not to have taken place, so that we couldn't identify the borrowing. However, the PIE word for "wheel" is attested in most of the branches of IE. It is vanishingly improbable that the word could be a loan word in all of these branches without ever showing any telltale phonological signs of the borrowing in any of the branches. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Mon Jan 24 19:43:25 2000 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 13:43:25 -0600 Subject: NW vs. E Gmc Message-ID: Since I haven't been diligently reading the list recently, I may be repeating what others have said. But still: Sean Crist wrote: >I'd like to bring up a few points which were discussed in connection with >the distinction between NW and E Germanic: > ... >2. Marc Pierce mentioned gemination before *j. Actually, this is a >strictly WGmc innovation, and thus isn't evidence one way or the other for >the grouping of the three Gmc branches. Doesn't North Germanic geminate -kj- -gj- to -kkj- -ggj-? (I don't have my handbooks at hand.) >3. Marc Pierce mentioned that Gothic retains the old IE passive verbal >morphology. It's true that this is lost both NGmc and WGmc, but since the >loss of a morphological category is something which can readily occur >independently, we once again can't take this as evidence for a NWGmc >grouping (even tho there are other grounds for making such a grouping). 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_). Since even Gothic uses synthetic forms for the preterite passive, it is likely that the synthetic forms are already PGmc., at least in preterite function. >4. Pete Gray said "...East Germanic cannot be seen as an early form of >North Germanic - it shares too much with Allemanic and Bavarian, for a >start." There are some Gothic loan words into Old High German, but this >is an event which happened well after the Germanic languages were well >differentiated. The better reason is that the defining features of East Germanic -- funny vocalism, almost complete devoicing of final stops and fricatives, peculiar vocabulary -- are precisely *not* shared with North Germanic, which in all these points agrees better with West Germanic. Neither is the almost complete elimination of grammatischer Wechsel in strong verbs, clearly a Gothic innovation that was not extended to modal verbs. But Sean is right that the (probable) loans prove nothing. Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at memphis.edu University of Memphis From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Jan 24 20:26:32 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 15:26:32 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >And what makes you think they occurred immediately after PIE was disunited? -- because that's what _defines_ the PIE (linguistic) breakup. If the language hasn't changed, it's still PIE. From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Mon Jan 24 06:27:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 06:27:00 GMT Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: Kommentar zu P56826 at H in der Gruppe Pers?nliche S> S>"What if all the IE words like *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- , and Gr. trochos S>are older than the wheel/chariot/wagon, .. of cause the word is older: cf hebrew golgatha< gol-gol-tha 'place of scull', where the scull is named after its rounded form, or cf. the Ngoro-ngoro-crater in eastern Africa, where of cause n- is the Swaheli class-prefix, and again we get the word for 'circle' < 'round-round'. But: the use for wheel seems to be specific IE. Mit freundlichen Gr?szen Hans J Holm - - et monere et moneri - - From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Jan 24 20:47:53 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 15:47:53 EST Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >This is an oversimplification. It depends on whether there *had* been any >relevant sound changes in the intervening period, and in general we can only >establish *relative* dates for sound changes, if we're lucky (many times not >even that). Sound changes can of course not be dated absolutely if there >are no written documents. -- you're quite right; that _was_ an oversimplification. From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Mon Jan 24 06:25:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 06:25:00 GMT Subject: IE etymological dictionary Message-ID: Kommentar zu P56820 at H in der Gruppe Pers?nliche Sorry, meanwile I have got the correct address to the Leiden IED-project 'managers' (Lubotzky/Beekes); but, anyway, perhaps there may be useful suggestions? Mit freundlichen Gr?szen Hans J Holm - - et monere et moneri - - From alderson at netcom.com Tue Jan 25 00:00:42 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 16:00:42 -0800 Subject: Making IE materials available [was Re: IE etymological dictionary] In-Reply-To: (message from Sean Crist on Sat, 22 Jan 2000 00:57:18 -0500 (EST)) Message-ID: Sean Crist wrote: >It's for this reason that I'm interested in taking old IE-related materials >whose copyright has expired and placing them online for free, with the intent >that volunteer effort can work to bring the materials up to date. If >volunteer effort can produce a first-rate and entirely free operating system, >I'm sure it can produce a set of quality online IE-related materials; we >simply need to do it. A couple of years ago I floated past Eric Hamp and Brian Joseph the idea of putting Schleicher, Osthoff & Brugmann, Brugmann & Delbrueck, usw., on CDROM in searchable PDF format, to make these materials available to the Indo-European student linguist. Both were of the opinion that this might qualify for grant money from the (U.S.) National Endowment for the Humanities or similar agency. Such a project could provide the kernel around which a more general effort could grow. Anyone else interested? Rich Alderson From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Mon Jan 24 06:51:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 06:51:00 GMT Subject: Indo-Hittite Message-ID: LT> LT>In fact, precisely this odd last view is the one commonly presented in LT>those IE family trees that we see everywhere. But not many linguists LT>are happy with such a massive sudden-disintegration scenario. .. In the forthcoming 'Journal of quantitative linguistics' I will present a much more differentiated model of the disintegration of IE. And Hittite is not the first, but the last language to depart - from Tokharian. The first to split were Germanic and Greek, as already stated by Prof D.G. Kendall in Ross JRSS.B12/1950:49. It must be noticed that the starting point or so called 'root' in the Ringe/Warnow tree is /not/ calculated, but inserted by Ringe as outcome of traditional, mainstream views perhaps too much preoccupied by the only early documentation of Hittite. And the 3 print-documents on this model are incomplete to a degree not enabling us to verify it. Hans J Holm - - et monere et moneri - - From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Mon Jan 24 09:29:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 09:29:00 GMT Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: Kommentar zu P56314 at H in der Gruppe Pers?nliche SF>What's the obvious inference? That migrations do leave evidence. Depends on the circumstances. I suggest to take a look at well-known examples. They should make clear that there are different ways for the spread of languages: 1) Lang's can be taken over without any migration, merely by way of economical dependence or cultural difference. Examples: The Wedda in S- India, some Pygmy-tribes, the Jakutes in N-Siberia (originally Evenks, who switched to the Turcic Dialect). There is no archeological evidence. 2) Language switching can be caused by a relativlely small class of military rulers. Examples: The Hungrians switching from Getic/Slavic /Ants/Dialects to an Ob-Ugrian lang. But where is the archeological or racial evidence? 3) Of cause migrations can be found: Nobody claims the Indo-Aryans to be the original inhabitants of India. But there is no prove that /they/ destroyed e.g. the culture of Mohenjo Daro. After all, pastoral nomads leave very little archeological evidence, if at all. SF>IE-style burials are known .. It is still an assumption that burials are 'IE'. Such an assumption still needs to be specified and substantiated. Hans J Holm - - et monere et moneri - - From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Jan 24 17:55:25 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 17:55:25 -0000 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Xavier and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Xavier Delamarre" Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2000 6:41 PM > Rich Alderson wrote (answering Rick Mc Callister) >> Since then, it has been argued that PIE had either (1) palatals and velars, >> and labiovelars are a late development, or (2) plain velars and labiovelars, >> and palatals are a late development. Today's consensus view seems to be a >> third alternative, that PIE had palatals and labiovelars, and plain velars >> are an odd development of one or both. > This is not true at all. There is no consensus for a two-series system of > tectals (whatever the arrangement). > The consensus seems to be, contrary to what stated, in favor of three > tectals for IE, as posited more than one century ago by our dear > Neo-grammarians. Pat comments: Personally, I am committed to a three-tectal (I would prefer 'dorsal') arrangement for reasons that are broached in Miguel's interesting recent posting. However, the real crux here is not what you or I or Rich believe is true but what the majority of IEists believe. Well you may well be correct in your view of the consensus so may Rich also so long as no systematic survey of IEist opinion has been made and documented. Do you not agree? The articles you cited might have convinced you and many others but not had that affect on other readers. 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 Tue Jan 25 01:06:46 2000 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 17:06:46 -0800 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: (message from Sean Crist on Sun, 23 Jan 2000 08:31:06 -0500 (EST)) Message-ID: Sean Crist wrote, in response to my statement that Albanian and Armenian are (counted as) "satem" languages: > That's not correct; Armenian underwent an independent set of consonant > changes which roughly resemble Grimm's Law in Germanic. Armenian did not > undergo the satem consonant shift. *k' > s, *g' > c [ts], *g'h > j [dz]; *k{^w} > k`, *g{^w} > k, *g{^w}h > g. The Grimm's Law-like shifts in Armenian are independent of the "satem" status of the language. > As for Albanian, I can't say much; it's so heavily mutated that it's not > of much use in reconstructing PIE, and I know next to nothing about the > sound changes it underwent. I can say that I've never heard anyone claim > that Albanian underwent the satem shift. I pulled a handful of handbooks off the shelf at home this morning. Here's what I found. Buck, _Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin_, 1933: Page 124 (sec. 144), Armenian and Albanian are included in the list of _satem_ languages. Sihler, _New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin_, 1995: Page 7 (sec. 11), Armenian and Albanian are included in the list of _satem_ languages. Beekes, _Comparative Indo-European Linguistics : An Introduction_, 1995: Page 30 (sec. 2.4), Armenian and Albanian are included in the list of _satem_ languages. Szemere'nyi, _Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics_, 1996: Page 58 (sec. 4.7.4 and 4.7.5), Armenian and Albanian are included in the list of _satem_ languages. Mr. Crist also wrote, regarding my statement of the "consensus view": >> Since then, it has been argued that PIE had either (1) palatals and velars, >> and labiovelars are a late development, or (2) plain velars and labiovelars, >> and palatals are a late development. Today's consensus view seems to be a >> third alternative, that PIE had palatals and labiovelars, and plain velars >> are an odd development of one or both. > The first view, which you attribute to the Neogrammarians, is the majority > view today. And Xavier Delamarre wrote on the same topic: > This is not true at all. There is no consensus for a two-series system of > tectals (whatever the arrangement). The doubts cast on a three-series system > (k', k, k^w) goes back to Meillet in his _Introduction ` la gramm. comp. > des langues IE_ (last ed.1937), repeated by Lehman in his _Phonology_ (1952), > and taken up since by a variety of scholars in France & US. Let this be a lesson to us all. Too frequently, the "consensus view" of an issue is the view we learned in graduate school if the issue was not one that interested us at the time. Since the textbooks for my first courses in IE linguistics were Meillet 1937, Szemerenyi 1970 (the first edition of the book cited above), and a little later Buck 1933, I will plead ignorance of develop- ments on the "centum"/"satem" issue of the last 25 years, and ask forgiveness of those I have unintentionally misled, and admit that I should just have kept my mouth shut. Finally, I see that while stating what I thought was the consensus, I neglected to state that I disagreed with all three positions outlined, and thought that the Neogrammarians had it right all along--a view unpopular with the faculty at the time such things mattered to me. My thanks to Mr. Crist and M. Delamarre for bringing me up to date. Rich Alderson From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Jan 25 05:53:06 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 00:53:06 EST Subject: Horses in War Message-ID: In a message dated 1/17/00 6:48:58 PM, sarima at friesen.net wrote: <> Well, that was my original point - that PIE was apparently not being spoken by charioteers in the 2d millenium BC Near East. The whole thing went AOWL with my statement about the horse not being "a major factor in either seige or decisive warfare" - which should have read "being decisive in seige or major warfare" I see. Oops, I think. This I think came from the West Point Military History series called something like "Ancient and Medieval Warfare." Two interesting commentary on this matter - as nothing more than an FYI - one from I'm not sure where and the other from Tom Clancy's non-fiction "Armored Cav". Neither mentions what I think was a major role for the chariot - jeeping around the top brass - the guys who the court poets gave the credit for the victory that was probably actually won by the slingers, archers and your basic grunts. (from Tom Clancy - who also mentions cavalry's superiority to chariotry:) "Cavalry has rarely been a decisive arm by itself. For one thing, the size of the horse gave cavalry troopers lower combat density than the infantry. The breadth of a horse's chest and the space needed to avoid crushing a rider's legs against his neighbor's mount meant that two or three infantrymen occupied the same frontage as a single horse and rider. Two or three spears, swords, or bows in the hands of foot soldiers confronted each warrior on horseback. Less appreciated is a horse's unwillingness to plunge headlong into a barrier it cannot see through. Though a horse might not be the smartest living thing on earth, only men will knowingly hurl away their lives. Third, a horse is not a machine. To operate and perform properly, it needs food, water, and rest. Denied those things, it dies; and all the spare parts in an Army inventory can't fix that. And so it was a rule of the AmeriCan West that on any long-distance trip of more than five days, an infantry company could outmarch a cavalry troop. A horse afforded a trooper a relatively high dash-speed, but only over fairly short distances. A man sitting on a horse also made an easy target, especially after the development of firearms. And yet, despite these drawbacks, the horse remained important in war for three millennia. More precisely, the horseman performed several crucial missions: find the enemy before your main force collides with his; harass his flanks and communications; pursue him in defeat; screen your own forces when you are forced to withdraw." Also: "The two wheeled type was used for command and communications. It had an axle well centered under the body to support the weight of the vehicle. Wheels so far forward meant poor maneuverability and serious danger of turning over. The Sumerians tried to remedy this last problem by extending the axle to twice the width of the chariot but the change was only a stopgap. A better design was needed. The warrior in the Sumerian chariot had a javelin and spear but no bow. The main use of the Sumerian chariot was shock action, like the modern tank. The spoked wheel was developed in the last half of the Third Millenium BC. At the same time the axle was moved toward the rear for greater mobility. When horses came to replace onagers true mobility could be achieved with the chariot. There is no record of the development that went on after Sumeria fell but it obviously occurred. The real impetus to chariot warfare came from the introduction of the two wheeled, light horse-drawn chariot. This was introduced from India by the Mitanni around 1600 BC, soon adopted by Hatti and Babylon and then became common throughout the Near East. There are records indicating that the Egyptians were familiar with the chariot prior to the Hyksos conquest but the chariot did not come into use in Egypt until then... The Egyptians used the chariot differently from the rest of the Near East in that while they too carried a javelin, they abandoned the spear and adopted the bow. Their javelins were carried in a quiver on the side of the chariot. By contrast, the other peoples in the area carried a spear mounted in a socket in the rear of the chariot, for use by the driver.... Other peoples used a three man crew but had a driver, warrior and shield bearer, the latter due to the effect enemy archers tended to have on such promising targets as chariot crews. The biggest Egyptian development in chariot warfare was giving the warrior a bow as his principal weapon. This gave him a major advantage over the spear-wielding armies, if only in terms of fire power. The peak of chariot warfare was reached at the end of the Second Millenium BC. The chariot was a highly refined vehicle and the true cavalry was not yet developed. The war chariots were found throughout the civilized world. They were used by the Mycenaean Greeks, as Homer recounts... They had a sword and two spears in their chariots. The bow was considered a cowardly weapon, probably because you didn't have to get nose-to-nose to use it.... At the same time,...the Assyrians molded their cavalry into a strong combat arm,... essentially making the chariot obsolete. Cavalry is inherently better than chariots since it is more mobile. >> Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jan 25 08:24:28 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 03:24:28 EST Subject: Horses Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl >But if Renfrew is right, and PIE did come from Anatolia, an *ek^wos (or >however it sounded at *that* time) meaning "donkey" would have trivially >drifted to "horse" in the horse-rich (donkey-poor) environment of Northern and >Eastern Europe. >> -- but it doesn't mean "donkey" in Anatolian, the earliest attested IE language of the area, and Armenian is intrusive there. From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu Tue Jan 25 08:41:44 2000 From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 02:41:44 -0600 Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: >The quote from the UT Austin web page in my last post should assure >you that the 3000BC-2200BC dates are still around and quite clearly, even >with the benefit of the doubt, they were intended to reflect the earliest and >latest possible dates - and are simply repeating old and dated information. >This is not an indictment of historical linguistics. It started as and is >nothing more than an observation that old ideas die hard. The coordinator of the UT Austin webpage would like to call attention to the fact that those dates are from a link and do not represent a position necessarily held by anyone in Austin! The IE Languages page has, however, been recently updated, not with any date, but with wording that I hope makes it clear that information is being pulled together here for further discussion, not as a claim to truth or even belief. I think that Steve Long took it in this spirit, but just in case, I have tried to make the new wording less ambiguous. Kerilyn Cole's elaborate collection of data on IE languages, particularly modern ones and their relatives, is the fullest that I know of and represents a perspective that nicely complements the link to the UPenn project and reference to Gamkrelidze and Ivanov and theoretical models. A big hole still is any real reference to Wolfgang Meid's Time - Space hypothesis, among other things. Other Links, by the way, are quite incomplete, two important Anatolian ones having been mislaid, for example. The intent is to provide useful information. In addition to publications lists which we are currently trying to design an extensible indexing scheme for (and font solutions), original text corpora, journals indexes, and online materials would be welcome links. Does anyone know, for example, if Die Sprache's Indogermanishes Chronik is online in any part? As Sean Crist pointed out, many useful sources often have copyright constraints. We are fortunate in being able to scan in Lehmann's 19th Century Reader because he holds the copyright and has given us permission. The work has slowed, however, because of the time involved in creating gifs for the special characters. We have begun experimenting with Adobe Acrobat files for entire text segments, but I understand that such picture files take longer to load and may not ultimately be searchable. We have not yet experimented with Unicode in Austin, because Deborah Anderson is working on that in California. If anyone out there would like to put up pieces of the Lehmann Reader that are still missing and let us link to it, please let me know. Also, if anyone has other useful texts that could be part of the Documentation Center, please let me know. It is important, though, that the format be as accessible to all the common platforms as possible and checked as carefully as possible. Typos and such that readers find would also be appreciated. Thanks to Steve Long for the comment, Carol Justus, IE Documentation Center Coordinator From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jan 25 08:29:34 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 03:29:34 EST Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: In a message dated 1/24/00 3:43:27 PM Mountain Standard Time, Stporfiri at cs.com writes: >It seems to me that cavalry is important for breaking up the ranks; they >seem to have had this value in most contexts, regardless of knives. -- this is an extremely complex technical matter; but to oversimplify, before the invention of stirrups (long after our period) the most effective cavalry used missile weapons. Shock action wasn't impossible, but it wasn't as common or as effective as it became with the development of proper saddles (Iron Age) and stirrups (post-300 CE). Where chariots were extensively employed on the battlefield, they always seem to have been primarily mobile missile platforms, usually for archers, sometimes for spear-throwers -- this is certainly the case in the classic Bronze Age chariot armies of the Near East, and for the contemporary users of the Chariot in Iran, India and China. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jan 25 08:42:29 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 03:42:29 EST Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Renfrew's neolithic hypothesis stretches the information but how does it >stretch the linguistic assumptions? -- it doesn't just stretch them, it does massive violence to them. If Renfrew is right, then comparative/historical linguistics is completely wrong, and vice versa. Furthermore, for Renfrew to be right, the mechanisms of linguistic evolution must have been completely different in prehistoric times from anything observed since. Eg., for Renfrew's hypothesis to be true, proto-Celtic would have had to remain totally uniform over an area stretching from Central Europe to Ireland for 4,000 years, and then start changing rapidly as soon as we look at it. Is this likely? No. >Is it enough to simply say that the earliest possible date of PIE dispersal >is now 3300BC? Or is there something that now goes on with the linguistic >analysis that might alter other assumptions or conclusions? -- the data indicate that the period of PIE unity can't have been much earlier than that; the earliest attested IE languages are just too similar. Not to mention, again, the technological vocabulary. >You use the phrase assumptions that historical linguistics "is built upon." >And that is perhaps an issue I am running into. Is historical linguistics >finished being built? -- in detail, no. In broad outline, yes, as far as Indo-European is concerned. From edsel at glo.be Tue Jan 25 10:44:02 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 11:44:02 +0100 Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stanley Friesen" Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2000 7:20 AM > At 12:55 AM 12/22/99 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >> The point was, e.g., the Russians do not speak Mongul, Turkic, Gothic, Greek >> or Scandinavian - although all of these arguably represented the languages >> of various "dominant elite" - these speakers all seem to have been >> assimilated by Russian. > On the other hand Romania speaks Romanian, a derivative of the language of > a dominant elite that only ruled *there* for a short time. > Persistance of one language or another in a multilingual community is often > hard to predict. [Ed Selleslagh] Indeed it is: If one had visited Belgium in the third quarter of the 19th century, one could have predicted reasonably that Dutch would disappear there in the early 20th century, except for a few isolated rural pockets (Cf. Breton etc.). In fact, all the elites and their environment spoke French, and no education past primary school was available in Dutch. What did happen? Dutch had a come back and is now the only official (and actually spoken) language of the state of Flanders (60% of the Belgian population), and of 15% of the inhabitants of the bilingual Brussels-Capital Region (10%). While knowledge of French in Flanders, which was once pretty general except among the very lowest social classes, is fading fast, and being replaced by English. > -------------- > May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com Ed. From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Tue Jan 25 18:05:10 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 13:05:10 -0500 Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000122221116.0099a800@mf.mailbank.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 22 Jan 2000, Stanley Friesen wrote: > On the other hand Romania speaks Romanian, a derivative of the language of > a dominant elite that only ruled *there* for a short time. Actually, it doesn't appear that there's a continual Romance presence in what's now Romania from Roman times down to the present. There's a book by a Romanian scholar who claims that the area was underpopulated in early medieval times, and that two leaders from a Romance-speaking area near what is now Albania got permission from the Emporer to settle their people in this land. The names of the leaders happen to Romanian names. The author had to publish under a pseudonym, because this claim could be considered seditious by the Romanian government. There is a substantial Hungarian minority in Transylvania, and if this minority wanted to separate from Romania, this author's book would allow the ethnic Hungarians to claim that they were in the land first. The linguistic evidence seems to be consistent with this picture as well; there was a very dense and diverse set of Romance languages, including Dalmatian, etc. in the western Balkan area where the early Romanians are believed to have migrated from; but in the larger Romanian-speaking area to the east, there is much more uniformity. It's much like the case of British vs. American English; you get a tremendous and very dense diversity of local dialects within Britain, but a much greater uniformity in the huge area of America which the speakers of the language conquered. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From jer at cphling.dk Tue Jan 25 15:47:47 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 16:47:47 +0100 Subject: NW vs. E Gmc In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 22 Jan 2000, Sean Crist wrote: > I'd like to bring up a few points which were discussed in connection with > the distinction between NW and E Germanic: > 1. Both Marc Pierce and Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen cited *z > r as an > example of a shared innovation in NWGmc. It's true that a sound change > along these lines operated in both WGmc and NGmc, but it can be shown that > this is a parallel change which operated after the two dialects had > separated. The evidence is that there are rules both in WGmc and in NGmc > which are sensitive to the *z/*r distinction; the merger of the two > categories must have happened _after_ the two dialects had developed > separately for a while. I know that, but still there is also an s/z distinction in the rules, so the "/z/" phoneme appears to be in the process of turning into something else; that's why I wrote "is developed in the direction of /r/" - so, as far as it goes, this _is_ a point of agreement between North and West Germanic. Jens From jer at cphling.dk Tue Jan 25 16:04:27 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 17:04:27 +0100 Subject: NW vs E Germanic In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 22 Jan 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> That spells unity for Norse and West Germanic. However, then there is >> the Verschaerfung problem which seemingly combines Norse and Gothic >> to the exclusion of West Germanic. On balance I believe one must see >> this as secondary disappearance of (at least some) Verschaerfung in >> West Germ., so that the events that produced Versch. operated in the >> common prehistory of ALL the Germanic we know. > Excuse my ignorance. Can you explain Verschaerfung? Oh yes, but not any better than already done by Jasanoff (in the MSS back in 1978: A verb like *haww-i/a- was *kawH-e/o- (acut in Lith. ka'uti 'hammer, forge'), the loss of the laryngeal yielded hiatus in *hau.e/a- which was filled by a replica of the preceding glide, the result being *hauw-i/a-; likewise for, say, *woiH-es 'walls' > *wai.iz > *waijiz > *wajj-iz, root stem in ON veggr, secondary u-stem in Goth -waddjus. >>> Is there any merit to the idea that there was a separate branch of >>> Germanic including Anglian, Jutish and pre-Frisian, intermediate between N >>> & W Germanic, andf that modern English and Frisian are the result of a >>> fusion between this and W Lowland Germanic? [...] >> I would like to know what linguistic facts that idea is based on. > Me too :> > Seriously, the idea of an Ingwaeonic branch is something I've read > in passing in various places without any real elaboration. > I suppose they have in mind such things as retention of initial > /s-/, /_th_/ & /_dh_/ in English Oh, if you mean Ingwaeonic, that IS a fact you have to accept, note (1) the unit plural (old 3pl used of 1pl and 2pl also); (2) loss of nasal before voiceless spirants (Eng. mouth, goose). At least these are shared by Old Saxon, Old English and Frisian to the exclusion of OHG. You could perhaps add monophthongization of *ai (OS e:, OE a:, OFr. both) if this is not too trivial. My expression of amazement was prompted by the word "Jutish" which I take to denote a Danish dialect group; but if the old Jutes went to England they may well have been (or become) Ingwaeones. Jens From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jan 25 08:53:30 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 03:53:30 EST Subject: Northwest IE attributes Message-ID: Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >Not *so* unlikely, after all. Palatalizations are, so to speak, the >garden-variety of sound-changes. -- yes, but the same one in two adjacent groups for different reasons? This violates explicatory parsimony. And as you point out, this particular change is _not_ common in the IE languages. Only Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic show it with any degree of consistency (Armenian possibly too). From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Tue Jan 25 17:51:41 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 12:51:41 -0500 Subject: Northwest IE attributes In-Reply-To: <005f01bf6382$b07acf40$239001d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Thu, 20 Jan 2000, petegray wrote: > As I understand the debate about NW attributes, it has reduced to an > either-or which I believe is misleading. People appear to be arguing > either that the NW group split off early, in which case satemisation is a > problem, or that the language groups concerned remained in contact with I-I, > in which case we cannot say there is a NW group. > I think, on the contrary, that we can talk of a group even within a > spectrum. We can talk of the three colours at the red end of the rainbow > as a "group" in a meaningful sense (they are the "warm" colours, etc); we > can talk of the three "blue" colours at the other end as another group. > Likewise, I see no problem in talking of a group within a spectrum of > languages. Within the Romance spectrum from Portugal to the toe of Italy, > we could talk meaningfully of a group from Catalan to Piedmont, or a > Galician-portuguese group, or a Southern Italian group. > Therefore I think the debate is misguided. To talk of a "NW group" does > not imply that these languages must have split off early from the other IE > dialects. The boundaries can also remain fuzzy: Celtic and Germanic can > be seen as central to the group, with Baltic and Slavonic on the one hand, > and Italic on the other, sharing some characteristics but not others. This is the old debate between "Stammbaumtheorie" and "Wellentheorie" (tree theory vs. wave theory): should our representations of the relations between the IE branches look like a tree, or like a a group of overlapping set boundaries? Notice that the set of possible trees is a fairly small _proper subset_ of the set of possible wave models. You can represent any tree using a wave model, but not vice versa. The wave representation of a tree will have the special property that all of the set boundaries will be nested: you won't get any overlapping lines. Wave models in general do allow overlapping lines; we can define trees as that subset of wave models where there are no overlapping lines. 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. So now a further question arises: what does it mean for the data to "allow" a tree representation? We've discussed this on the list before, so I'll just make reference to the page http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~histling/home.html , where you can click on "A short course in Phylogeny". An algorithm was recently developed to get around the NP-completeness problem of computing the optimal phylogeny over a set of character-based data. As we've discussed at length on this list, 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. So, what I'm saying is that the IE family is such that a tree representation of the family is possible; and since this is the more restructive formalism, it is the one we should choose. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jan 25 09:05:16 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 04:05:16 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >But remember both the horse and the wagon are now pretty much "neolithic" in >Europe. -- late neolithic, early Copper Age. After 4000 BCE for the horse, considerably after that for the spread of horse domestication. >Is it possible that language did not come along with or follow those >innovations, but instead made their quick diffusion possible? -- here we run up against the time-depth problems again. The technological vocabulary dates from the period of unity of the PIE language. There's just no getting around this. >Homer's "winged words" outrun traders and armies and chariots and >bookeepers, so that the idea of wheel (along with maybe those wheeled models >we call toys) gets to Europe before any physical wheels get there? -- changing languages in a preliterate setting requires close, prolonged contact with native speakers of the tongue to be adopted. There's no way to transport languages in such a setting except inside heads. And one language does not replace another easily, or without very good reason. For adults to learn another language is _hard_. >Transferred along various dialects of PIE that maintain their mutual >intelligibility because they are the language of new ideas and new material >goods? -- languages spread over a large area develop dialects and then eventually split into separate, related languages. This is one of the fundamentals. And we are speaking of a time before literacy or "standard" languages, as well. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jan 25 20:11:10 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 15:11:10 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: In a message dated 1/25/00 12:42:18 PM Mountain Standard Time, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: << Where specifically do you find this? And I mean in Renfrew. >> -- Renfrew (in Language and Archaeology) says that the pre-Celtic IE language reached Ireland with the first farmers -- that's 4000 BCE, roughly -- and that the Celtic languages developed _in situ_ all across their historic range, except for some outliers (Italy, Anatolia). Yet when the Celts are first observed, in the last couple of centuries BCE, their languages are quite strikingly uniform, all the way from Ireland to the Danube Valley. Eg., take the Ogham (early Irish, 4th-7th centuries CE) inscription verstion of "the women" -- 'indas mnas'. This is _precisely_ the same as a Gallic form of 100 CE. 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). This requires either no change, or perfectly synchronized change, in pre-Celtic across thousands of miles, for 4000 years. Which is in blatant violation of everything we know about languages and how they develop. Then the Celtic languages -- once we can "look" at them through literate observers -- start changing quite rapidly; the restructuring of Insular Celtic between the 300's CE and early medieval times, for example, which transformed a perfectly standard early IE language not unlike Latin in its grammatical structure into something quite different. The usual explanation for the uniformity of early Celtic is that the Celtic language(s) had spread recently from a relatively small area. This fits much better with the observed data. From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Tue Jan 25 16:51:34 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 11:51:34 -0500 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <388dad6f.239131022@mail.chello.nl> Message-ID: On Thu, 20 Jan 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > "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) > Only ON hwel < *kwelo-. The English and Dutch vowels can only > derive from *ew. The development was: *kwekwlo- > *hwegwlo ~ > *hweGwlo > *hwewlo > { OE hwe:ol > wheel | ODu. *hwi at l > wiel }. > Curiously, the loss of -g- here is only semi-regular (or we > wouldn't have OE hweogul), which makes me wonder why Szemere'nyi, > in his "Introduction", chose this example to illustrate the > regularity of sound laws in general Looks like a Verner's Law variant to me, tho I'd have to hit the books to see if it actually checks out. In Proto-Germanic, you could very well get a *g/*h alternation within a noun paradigm because of Verner's Law (the *h, of course, was deleted between two vowels in OE, so that something like *hweohul > *hwe:ol). Most cases of Verner's Law variation within noun paradigms were destroyed by analogy, but there wouldn't be anything surprising about both variants managing to survive into historical times. Another case is point is the word for "tooth"; both Verner's Law variants survived into Gothic. One of the variants got fossilized as the second element of the compound name of some kind of flower. (Sorry not to be more specific; I don't have time to dig out the actual forms at the moment.) What I'd need to check is whether the Pre-PGmc word for "wheel" belonged to one of the paradigms with shifting stress; if it did, I'd attribute hwe:ol/hweogul to Verner's Law. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Jan 25 21:49:29 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 16:49:29 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 1/25/00 3:49:28 PM, mclasutt at brigham.net wrote: <> Forgive me, but I'm having trouble seeing why you say this. Doesn't the word follow (or even preceed) the object? Are you saying that as the word was traded or communicated along the way there would have been some other sound changes than the expected ones? The assumption here of course is that the word wheel is introduced before the regular sound changes occur. I just read another post on this: In a message dated 1/24/00 3:18:16 PM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <<[with regard to the wheel]The sound-changes would reveal the date of the borrowing.>> <> You wrote: <> Well the wheel is one way, isn't it? I mean the actual wheel. Like the computer or the telephone or the automobile. That would account for the word being so widespread, wouldn't it? I certainly don't see any geographic or other necessity that would make it difficult. As far as the roots, well you have these archaeologists a year ago arguing with some strong data that the thing was actually invented maybe up in Germany or Poland about 3500BC. So the roots went with the package, maybe. But does this throw everything off so badly? I mean you get a bigger spread of the language when the wheel hits, but it doesn't seem to be breaking any linguistic rules (of course, I may be wrong about that.) But is the outcome that different? The dates don't go ballistic. It's not like saying that word for wheel was introduced into French in 1957 - we are still dealing with the dawn of the languages. And I'm still pretty sure the word for wheel in Greek was trochos , so it gives a little leeway for "semantic drift" or an earlier borrowing in some places. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Jan 26 14:39:31 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 09:39:31 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote (1/22/00 12:12:34 AM): <> I wrote: <<...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?>> (caps mine.) JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote (1/22/00 12:12:34 AM): <<-- because that's what _defines_ the PIE (linguistic) breakup. If the language hasn't changed, it's still PIE.>> Even I know that the sound changes after PIE split up DID NOT happen all at once. And even I know that the SPECIFIC CHANGES observed in "wheel" words may not have occured until the IE dispersal was well on its way. Even I know that if "the language has changed" and is no longer PIE, the SPECIFIC sound changes in *kwelo, etc., may not have happened until later. Those changes may NOT be the ones that defined "PIE (linguistic) breakup." But my question was not really rhetorical. What ARE the SPECIFIC SOUND changes identified in early 'wheel' words and what suggests that they are even exceptionally early? I would value anything you might offer regarding this. Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote something arresting with regard to the "other" word for wheel that fills the "semantic slot" in many IE languages (Latin, rota; Lith, ratas; OHG, rod; Ir, roth - cf. Skt, ratha). <<...I wonder, though, whether another word for wheel, *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 X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Jan 26 14:55:07 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 09:55:07 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 1/26/00 8:53:39 AM, Hans J Holm wrote: <> And that is an oddity in itself, isn't it. Everything from skulls to craters to a circle of elders (in Homer) - one would think that the application of the circle/round word to the wheel would be very direct and expected in other languages. If in fact the wheel did first come out of northern Europe (not advocating, just hypothesizing) then how would that word have passed into non-IE Near East languages? Would borrowing from IE explain the glaring non-use of native round/circle words in those non-IE languages? Regards, Steve Long From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Jan 26 18:56:12 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 19:56:12 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <200001240827.p65329@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) wrote: >S>"What if all the IE words like *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- , and Gr. trochos >S>are older than the wheel/chariot/wagon, >.. >of cause the word is older: cf hebrew golgatha< gol-gol-tha 'place of >scull', where the scull is named after its rounded form, or cf. the >Ngoro-ngoro-crater in eastern Africa, where of cause n- is the Swaheli >class-prefix, and again we get the word for 'circle' < 'round-round'. >But: the use for wheel seems to be specific IE. Not really. Gamqrelidze and Ivanov quote Sumerian gigir, Hebrew gilga:l, galgal, Georgian borbal, gorgal, "wheel" or "chariot". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jan 25 09:09:38 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 04:09:38 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Betraying my ignorance, I must once again ask why this exchange must have >happened with PIE and not with an early daughter. -- because if it was early enough for these word forms, it would BE the PIE language. >PIE originates just south of where Uralic originates? -- yes. >So that Uralic did not expand south because PIE speakers were already there? -- the Uralic languages were, and mostly remained, languages of the forest zone north of the steppe and forest-steppe of the Pontic zone. They remained predominant there until historic times, when Slavic replaced them. >Or is the assertion that they were all once one language and perhaps >this wasn't borrowing at all. -- no. They're very distinct languages. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jan 25 09:25:09 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 04:25:09 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >What are the ideological reasons which lead people to what you call extreme >anti-diffusionism and anti-migrationism ? -- As Martin Luther once said, humanity in general behaves like a drunken peasant trying to ride a horse; it falls off on one side, gets back on, then falls off on the other. Prior to the 1960's, and especially prior to WWII, it was fashionable among archaeologists and prehistorians to attribute every cultural change or new style of pot to the in-migration of a new ethnic group, and to assume that nothing was ever invented more than once and necessarily spread from that center. That was the way to get published. (Coon, for example, sometimes went overboard that way, although he's a giant compared to some of the pygmies who've attacked his work.) Since then, in the English-speaking world, they've swung to the opposite extreme and there's been a systematic down-playing of evidence for population movements. Until recently (there are signs of a welcome swing of the pendulum) _that_ has been the way to get published. Renfrew's an example, trying to rule out migration/diffusion explanations unless there is the most exhaustive and unambiguous sort of archaeological evidence for them -- hence he attributes the spread of Indo-European to something that _can_ be directly traced in the physical record, namely the spread of agriculture in the early Neolithic, claiming there must be some grand technological innovation to account for it. Even though there are historically attested migrations (the Scotii to Scotland, for instance) which _did_ result in language change but which did _not_ leave much stones-and-bones trace. He does leave an "out" for cases of "elite dominance", although unfortunately in his first article on that (which I read in Scientific American) he used an example (the Mongol conquests) which did _not_ result in the spread of the conqueror's language. A critic of Renfrew's once remarked that if it weren't for the written records, Renfrew would confidently assert that the site of Jamestown in Virginia was the result of indigenous developments in Pohwatan Indian culture, with at most the arrival of a "cult-package" or some intermarriage from abroad. "British Archaeology" published an editorial not long ago predicting that soon some graduate student would write a paper "proving" that the first human beings in the British Isles were not immigrants, but instead purely indigenous, symbolically transformed reindeer. The reasons are both ideological and methodological. Migration often implies conflict, which many archaeologists have attempted to read out of the record because of a distaste for the idea of war. It was also associated peripherally with racist explanations of change in the past, which gave it a political "taint". Migration also presents very serious methodological problems for archaeologists who are trying to focus on long, continuous sequences of indigenous change. If a migration can come in from outside their area of study and "reformat" the local culture, and also do so without leaving much in the way of an unambiguous physical trace, then the long sequences of culture-change they delight in mapping out become meaningless. This would require a much higher degree of modesty on the part of prehistoric archaeologists... 8-). 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. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jan 25 09:32:15 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 04:32:15 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >jer at cphling.dk writes: >If the Uralic Urheimat is placed for independent reasons somewhere in >Central Ukraine and the IE ditto has been put in the southern part of the >Ukraine, the two protolanguages were in fact once contiguous and the old >loan relations stem from some period within that contact. -- as far as I know, the Uralic Urheimat is generally placed around the Ural mountains (hence the name). A bit further east than the central Ukraine, although not much further. Subsequent spread was to the west _and_ east; hence Uralic (or Finno-Ugric) languages are found from Siberia all the way west to Finland (further, counting Sammi). >As for the position of Anatolian, there are very few things that >distinguish Proto-IE as it was before the break-off of pre-Anatolian from >what it became during the time up to its next split when the second branch >(Tocharian?) left the remaining stock. Consequently, we cannot tell from >the form of an IE loanword in Uralic whether it was borrowed before or >after the separation of Anatolian from the rest. -- that, I think, is a fair statement. >That being so, we cannot quite exclude that the IE homeland was in Anatolia >and that the rest had moved to the north of the Black Sea and there met the >(pre-)Proto-Urals and handed them a bag of loanwords. -- true, but this requires all the other languages to derive from a _single_ movement northwards from Anatolia. There's also the matter of the strong evidence that the Anatolian IE languages were intrusive in the areas they were occupying when the first records are written. Eg., the very large stock of Hattic loanwords in Hittite, for instance. >there are enough laryngeal-sensitive phonetic changes >in the individual branches to guarantee that laryngeals survived as >segmental units well into the separate lifelines of the other >subbranches also. -- I think that's fair. The survival of the laryngeals in Hittite and Luvian is, I think, at least partly an artifact of the very early date at which the written records of those languages begin. If we had written records in Balto-Slavic from the early 2nd millenium BCE, who knows what archaic features might be found? From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Tue Jan 25 15:07:52 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 17:07:52 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 23 Jan 2000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > Betraying my ignorance, I must once again ask why this exchange [of > words between proto-Uralic and IE] must have happened with PIE and not > with an early daughter. In principle, it could have - providing that the early daughter of p-IE still had laryngals. But the wide distribution of the loan words in Uralic speaks against this, since proto-U must be dated 4000 bc or before. Unless one accepts that p-IE had already differentiated to several daughter languages by then, the loans must be proto-IE. There are also IE loan words with a narrower distribution within Uralic, which actually seem to derive from "early daughter languages" which still had laryngals (see my previous mail to the list). The example words I put forward in my first mail must be older loans, since they go back to proto-U. > I MUST also find out someday why Uralic would need to borrow words for water, > move, bring and wash from IE. Words can be borrowed for many reasons, not only because there is a "need" for them. If the contact is intensive enough and/or the prestige great enough, basic vocabulary can be borrowed. I see no reason why proto-U could not have borrowed these words from Indo-Europeans. Similarly, Finnish has borrowed words for e.g. 'mother' and 'food' from Germanic, and 'tooth' and 'neck' from Baltic, and North Saami has borrowed words for e.g. 'son', 'meat', 'man' and 'moon' from proto-Scandinavian. These examples are not exhaustive; there are lots of relatively late "basic vocabulary" loans from IE languages in Finnic and Saamic. Furthermore, there is internal evidence in Uralic supporting the loan origin of p-U *weti 'water'. This item does not have cognates in Saamic and Khanty. Instead, these two languages share a lexeme p-U *s??c?, whose reflexes mean 'water' in Saamic and 'flood water' in Khanty. This was probably the original U word for 'water', which was replaced in the other languages by the IE loan word *weti. The word *s??c? has no cognates in languages that show reflexes of *weti. (The Khanty meaning 'flood water' is probably secondary, since the Khanty word for 'water' derives from the p-U word for 'ice'). > anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fiwrote: > < Europe north of the Black Sea. This area is just about south from area where > current research usually places the center of the Uralic expansion.>> > PIE originates just south of where Uralic originates? So that Uralic did not > expand south because PIE speakers were already there? Or did somebody move > in? Or is the assertion that they were all once one language and perhaps > this wasn't borrowing at all. I am not sure if understood the question correctly. But yes, p-IE probably originated south of p-U, and Uralic has probably never expanded south (with the exception of Hungarian in approx. 900 ad), for the reason stated above. On the contrary, IE has expanded north at the cost of U languages. This process is partially traceable through historical records. As for the assumption of "Urverwandtschaft" between U and IE, we are obviously dealing with loaning here. The loan explanation has more explanatory power: the proto-U forms of the loan words are (largely) predictable from the proto-IE ones and they conform to phonetically natural sound substitution patterns. This is not the case if one assumes common genetic origin: it is not possible do demonstrate regular sound correspondences between the items. There have been no convincing attempts to link IE and U genetically. These language families also differ typologically radically from each other, which makes demonstratable genetic connection highly unlikely. Ante Aikio anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Jan 25 07:59:12 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 01:59:12 -0600 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Is it possible to tell whether these are loanwords or cognates from Nostratic? Why? Why not? Examples? [to be continued on Nostratic list --if the discussion goes that way] >In his mail of Tue, 18 Jan 2000, Ante Aikio speaks, I believe, a word of >common sense. > If there are pan-Uralic words of IE origin that look as old as our >reconstructions, they may very well be loanwords from Proto-IE into >Proto-Uralic or one of its prestages. They may of course also be older >than PIE; since it is apparently only lexical material, there is little to >tell us anything about the time depth of the donor forms. Therefore, it is >not absolutely compelling to draw the conclusion that the two >protolanguages were contiguous, but it is still one very fair possibility. >It is also a quite strong argument that, if the Uralic Urheimat is placed >for independent reasons somewhere in Central Ukraine and the IE ditto has >been put in the southern part of the Ukraine, the two protolanguages were >in fact once contiguous and the old loan relations stem from some period >within that contact. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Jan 26 03:31:37 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 22:31:37 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: In a message dated 1/25/00 7:57:07 PM Mountain Standard Time, anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi writes: << There are some Finnic-Saamic loan words with proto-IE >characteristics (e.g., laryngal reflexes) which are probably connected >with the battle axe culture, such as Finnic-Saamic *kas?a- 'tip, end' < IE >*Hak?-, *suki- 'family, kin' < IE *suH-. These words are unknown in U >languages outside the Baltic Sea / Scandianavian area. -- now, that's interesting. Are they present in Estonian as well? >is 4000-5000 bc too early a date for proto-IE? -- that's a matter of debate. Post-4000 BCE is generally considered the most credible range. From ECOLING at aol.com Wed Jan 26 15:05:29 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 10:05:29 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: Ante Aikio Kiitoksia! (No, I don't speak Finnish, just visited once, can count to ten, did my dissertation on Finnish vowel harmony.) But seriously, thank you very much for the info on the current status of IE-Uralic interactions. Is there a bibliography of the last 15 years of work on this anywhere? Care to produce one? I remember reading Collinder's proposals for laryngeal matches many years ago, wonder whether any of them still hold up? Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Tue Jan 25 17:55:05 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 12:55:05 -0500 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: <003e01bf650f$8492ef00$8401703e@edsel> Message-ID: On Sat, 22 Jan 2000, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: > Somehow, Dutch (21 million native speakers) (including S. Dutch, also > called Flemish, my mother tongue: my name means that my ancestors were > from a 'gens Salica'), and even non-Saxon Low German, is strangely > missing from this picture. Where does it fit in your schematic picture? No comment. I've heard that Dutch represents a mixture of more than one northern West Germanic dialect, but I don't know the details and can't give any evaluation of this claim. I understand that this mixture is a late medieval development; this is a good bit later than the stuff I work on myself. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Jan 25 19:15:41 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 14:15:41 EST Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: In a message dated 1/22/00 3:22:22 AM, mclasutt at brigham.net wrote: <> My purpose in giving extreme examples was to get at some sense of the basic mechanics that are going on. (E.g., you can't detect gravity's democratic effect on some objects unless you test them in a vacuum. A feather and a cannonball will fall at drastically different rates under normal circumstances.) My original post was meant to apply to the Upenn tree's methodology. Without repeating what I wrote in prior posts, my fundamental questions don't change, I think, despite the very impressive processes you described in your post. Relatedness to *PIE is one thing. The relatedness between the daughter IE languages is another. And that difference is because PIE is reconstructed and its relatedness is entirely based on the evidence given by its daughter languages. There therefore should in theory be no "conflicting indicia of relatedness" in *PIE. In terms of relatedness between IE daughter languages, you can and do find conflicting indicia of relatedness. (The recent posts regarding the Germanic family tree illustrate how you can read shared attributes both ways. I think there is a map in Larry Trask's textbook of shared characteristics in Germanic (p.186) and I swear you it is positively maddening when you try to follow the enclosing circle lines as they criss-cross each other.) The same thing happens very often in biology, geology and even particle physics. This is what the kind of methodology used in the UPenn tree is really meant to tackle. There are a number of problems that arise when one decides how to handle conflicting indicia of relatedness. For the sake of space, let me give but one. What if five lexical attributes appear as shared innovations between IE languages A and B and therefore evidence a greater relatedness between the two than a language C - which has none of them. What if however Language C shares a totally valid morphological innovation with B not found in Language A? How is this reconciled? Hidden within this problem are the questions of loss (loss in A can reconcile the dilemma, but loss itself may be "an innovation") and whether retained characteristics versus pure innovations should be used in a true cladistic model - i.e., whether shared attributes descended from PIE are proper in this sort of analysis. There is also the "count" problem - do five lexicals beat one morphological? I've tried to mention these in other posts. But let me here just make this one point - different solutions shape the tree differently. One alternative in the example above is to give each language an independent branch on the tree - very unsatisfactory as a showcase tree but accurate in terms of the uncertainty created by the data. This is a very common solution in paleobiology. But the dilemma mentioned above can also be reconciled if the inconsistent attribute is eliminated. You can do that accidentially if you limit your sampling to attributes that cause less problems - e.g., where the "etymology is certain." This is far easier to do if you limit yourself to 300-400 attributes across 12 language families over 3000-4000 years - most of them apparently lexical. Some cladists will tell you that Deep Time is never a matter of years, but a matter of unrecoverable information. Time of course is relative - change accelerates the effects of time. In fact, time theory says it is possible that the conflicting indicia of relatedness between A, B and C may not be resolvable by human means - like "deep time" events that happen every day when viruses reproduce in a petri dish. And that was one problem I was addressing in my original post - the degree of uncertainty that varying rates of change in language MUST create. The accepted thinking in other fields is that you deal with uncertainty with MORE data, not less. If you are going to assure me that all such conflicting indicia of relatedness are resolvable by internal reconstruction, then perhaps this is a non-problem. But if that's not the case - then one problem with the UPenn may be its way of handling varying rates of change in the IE daughter languages - precisely because varying rates of change SHOULD produce different levels of loss and unknowability among related languages. And that would mean that one may not be measuring filial relatedness with those 300-400 attributes, but rather an artifact - one may be measuring nothing more than the varying rates of internal change among those languages. Regards, Steve Long From edsel at glo.be Wed Jan 26 11:03:05 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 12:03:05 +0100 Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" Sent: Monday, January 24, 2000 7:40 PM > "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >> English Dutch >> other ander >> tooth tand: here the -n- has remained! >> soft zacht: the ch (jota sound) - f correspondance is systematic: laugh >> lachen (but English orthography is still witness of a similar pronunciation >> in times past). With German:kraft kracht. > These cases are not comparable. In English, there was a sound > shift /x/ > /f/ (as well as /x/ > zero, cf. the split of the > English interdental fricative into T ~ D). In Dutch, there was a > sound shift /ft/ > /xt/. German mostly kept things as they were. > So: > sanft soft zacht < *samft- (Ingw. *sa~ft) > Kraft craft kracht < *kraft- > vs. > lachen laugh lachen < *hlahhjan > Miguel Carrasquer Vidal > mcv at wxs.nl [Ed] My remark about f - ch was actually about ft - cht. I should have said so. Anyway, it was a side remark, not related to the subject at hand (-n- > zero). The comparison with -gh > f was unjustified. Ed. From edsel at glo.be Wed Jan 26 21:34:38 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 22:34:38 +0100 Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: [Ed Selleslagh] [ snip message addressed to moderator ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Gustafson" Sent: Monday, January 24, 2000 1:52 PM > Ed Selleslagh writes: > < characteristics of NGmc., like the preservation of -isk (Eng. -ish, Du. > -is(ch), pronounced -is) and similar Danish (Jutish?) sounding features. I > think that the idea that Ingwaeonic is halfway between N and WGmc is due to > the different use of the term (namely coastal continental WGmc). >> > Hasn't Frisian also generalised a plural in -ar or -er, which also > corresponds with what Norwegian and Swedish (and formerly Danish) did? [Ed] I'm anything but a specialist in Frisian, but I hear and read some from time to time. Many (most) plurals of diminutives - which are used frequently - are in -(e)s, but I don't know if there are any other or irregular ones in -er (cf. German rad - raeder). But one should take into account that it has been strongly influenced by Dutch: there are no (and haven't been for quite some time) monolingual Frisians. All local lects in Holland are under immense leveling pressure from the 'Randstad' (i.e. the large western conurbation of Rotterdam, Amsterdam etc.), although there is a movement to preserve Frisian (even a kind of autonomy movement for a Fryske Frystaet [Frisian Free State], but that isn't really taken seriously - I don't know if it is still alive). There is a very limited programming in Frisian on Dutch TV (we have it on cable TV in Flanders). With 'external characteristics' I only meant 'what it looks and sounds like' to the more or less (un)trained observer. I don't have any other reliable information. Ed. From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Jan 27 00:58:50 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 19:58:50 EST Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: I quoted Syd Lamb: > One of the criticisms that came up often when I asked some linguists to > comment on the tree was that it mixed apples and oranges. And cherries. > Syd Lamb wrote in a private message (repd w/permission) that lexical, > phonological and morphological items "are largely independent of one > another in how they are involved in change. ..." In a message dated 1/25/00 8:44:27 PM, Sean Crist replied: **That's not true. For example, if a language inflects with suffixes and then undergoes phonological changes eliminating certain segments word-finally, this can result in the loss of morphological contrasts (thus, phonological and morphological change are not independent).** Sean Crist returned to Prof. Lamb's quote: > "...Hence a tree constructed on purely phonological grounds, for IE or > Uto-Aztecan, or any complex family, will come out quite different from one > constructed on purely lexical grounds, and both will differ from one > constructed on purely morphological grounds." Then Sean Crist replied: **The assumption you made was that lexical, morphological, and phonological change operate independently of one another _within_ a language. Here, you're talking about something else: you're talking about interaction _between_ languages.** I'll forward your post to Prof Lamb and perhaps he'll want to reply. But I have every reason to believe the two quotes above were connected since 1) they are connected and 2) as I said in the post this is Lamb's reaction to the UPenn tree - not an individual language. In fact, I believe if you had read the two parts together as they were posted, that would have been clear to you. I do also want to point out that the division between phonological, lexical and morpological come out of the UPenn report and treats them as separate pieces of evidence with different ramifications as to their value as genetic proof. I believe I was qouting someone else here: > There's no question that morphology can reflect different genetic > relationships than lexical or phonological items. **I wouldn't use the term "reflect" here, since that indicates that we're talking about some reality here. A language has one genetic affiliation and not another.** And of course, since linguistic analysis first began, some of those "genetic affilations" have sometimes changed. That's because genetic affilation among languages is not something we can see first hand. It is always inferred. It is always dependent on secondary evidence. The items of lexical, etc., evidence I mentioned above are not THE genetic relationship between whole languages. They are pieces of evidence accumulated to show that relationship. If one lexical or morphological item alone were enough to show a genetic relationship, that would be different - but obviously it's not, based on the UPenn tree. So you can use any term you prefer, but "refects" is fine with me - physicists use it to talk about evidence "reflecting" the presence of gravity. No affront should be taken. <> I don't even know if this has been ever been tested in any way but... if the UPenn tree methodology were conducted in this manner (lexical separately, etc.) and the evidence actually was that these languages showed "one genetic affiliation for its lexicon and another for its morphology" - then you are faced with some alternatives. One is saying you believe the opposite is true but you have no proof of it. Or perhaps saying that there is some problem with the UPenn methodology - since it should show the same affilation for all three? Or you can simply disregard it because it doesn't fit preconceived notions. But that would NOT be "the right way to think"? Right? That's always the biggest problem with objective evidence. It doesn't always do what we expect - or want - it to. I'll pass your comments on to Prof Lamb and see if he has any response. Regards, Steve Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jan 25 19:18:50 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 19:18:50 -0000 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: Dear Miguel and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2000 1:53 AM [ moderator snip ] [MC] > It is clear that a system with both palatalization and > labialization, as I advocate for (Pre-)PIE, is not stable. [PR] What makes that so "clear"? [MC continued] > Old > Irish (as the result of a much later and independent development) > had both i-coloured (palatalized, slender) and u-coloured > consonants, but the u-colouring quickly became marginal and was > lost before Middle Irish. The loss of jers in Slavic has led to a > full series of palatalized consonants, but not to a parallel set > of labialized/velarized consonants (not at the phonological level > at least). By the time of common PIE, the plain-palatalized- > labialized distinction had only been retained in the velar stops, [PR] I prefer the explanation of the odd circumstance of many roots of apparently identical form with apparently unrelated meanings in IE as an evidence that palatalizated and velarized as well as plain consonants allowed them to be distinguished until root extensions began to fulfil the same function. [MC continued] > and there too the system was in the process of breaking down, > with confusions between palatalized-plain or plain-labialized, > which account for the hesitations we find even among the ranks of > the two main blocks ("satem" and "centum"). The generalization > of front *e as the "default" vowel may have favoured the > palatals, while certain positions may have had specific effects > (e.g. de-palatalization before *r [*k^r > *kr], or > de-labiaization before *u [*kwu > *ku]). But that still leaves > plenty of non-palatal, non-labiovelar "plain velars" which cannot > be explained away. [PR] I heartily subscribe to this conclusion. My reconstructions are based on an earlier system of Ce/Ca/Co breaking down in C{y}V, CV, and C{w}V, with subsequent loss of the glides. 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 georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Thu Jan 27 14:57:20 2000 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 09:57:20 -0500 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >>That's not correct; Armenian underwent an independent set of consonant >>changes which roughly resemble Grimm's Law in Germanic. Armenian did not >>undergo the satem consonant shift. >It did: >*k^ > s tasn < *dek^m >*g^ > c [ts] gorc < *werg^om >*g^h > j [dz] jeRn < *g^hesr- Not quite, Miguel; this is the palatalization/assibilation part of the satem-story. The whole story, however, envolves a merger of velars and labiovelars. Is this the case in Armenian ? chem xossum. >Albanian is satem, or rather "thatem" (*k^ > th). See above, Albanian also has evaded the required merger. 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 Jan 26 11:48:52 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 12:48:52 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" Sent: Monday, January 24, 2000 7:25 PM >> Sean Crist wrote: >> As for Albanian, I can't say much; it's so heavily mutated that it's not >> of much use in reconstructing PIE, and I know next to nothing about the >> sound changes it underwent. I can say that I've never heard anyone claim >> that Albanian underwent the satem shift. > Albanian is satem, or rather "thatem" (*k^ > th). > Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl [Ed Selleslagh] Miguel, Forgive me my ignorance, but could you elaborate on the relationship (or not) of this phenomenon with a similar one in Greek, at least in some positions or cases: thermos, -te, etc.? Another note on Albanian: Yesterday I saw a picture in the newspaper showing a woman (in Prishtin?) waving a poster with the picture of some loved one and the caption "Ku ?sht?? [Ku e/?shte/?] Where is he?". Isn't it remarkable that such an extremely short text (2 words) could reveal so much about the kind of language it is in, if e.g. Albanian had died out and only this text had been found. BTW, in this case apparently *k^ > k, correct me if I'm wrong, not unlike Greek in some cases (even though in this particular case it would have been 'pou'), cf. *kwekwlos > kyklos. Ed. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jan 26 06:44:18 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 00:44:18 -0600 Subject: Albanian [was: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions"] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Given that Albanian's unique status: the only member of its branch; i.e. a relic location in an area with no recorded pre-IE substrate languages located not too far from the more likely proposed IE homelands It would that Albanian would be one of the most valuable languages in reconstructing IE True, it's said to have a very high percentage of loanwords and outside influence. But wouldn't that make it a tool for double checking phenomena in the neighboring languages? So, I'm curious why it's not considered more often Is it more to do with its inaccessibility? Is there a fundamental lack of investigation? Can someone offer more details about its "mutiliation"? [ moderator snip ] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Jan 26 05:40:49 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 00:40:49 EST Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter Message-ID: In a message dated 1/25/00 11:20:10 PM, Sean Crist wrote: **It's apparently a problem for you.... I never drew any distinction between branching and forking. I use the terms to mean exactly the same thing.** The problem is yours. You do not seem to even keep track of what you yourself are writing. You just wrote: **I never drew any distinction between branching and forking. I use the terms to mean exactly the same thing.** HOWEVER, in a message dated 1/11/00 12:05:57 AM, you wrote: **A forking in a language follows from a forking in the community of speakers,... In this post and in others, you've conceived of language branching as a main trunk which continues, and a daughter which separates off of this trunk and goes its own way (e.g., when you use the phrase "...a daughter branches off"). I'd argue that this is not looking at things the right way. THERE ARE ONLY FORKINGS. IT'S NOT POSSIBLE FOR JUST ONE DAUGHTER TO BRANCH OFF; if there's been a forking, then you have two daughters.** (Caps are mine.) You further wrote: **You seem to be having an awful time getting your mind around this, because you've been beating this same drum since last summer....** Let me respond that I think it may be you who are having "an awful time" with it. Read the quote above and look back at your posts. You are switching positions and are now suggesting the two ways of looking at this matter are merely terminological - which of course was the point I made in my post. It is not what you were saying in your prior posts. Let's just say that the statement about a parent co-existing with a parent merely involves terminology - something I suggested when it was first brought up -- and end it there. Regards, Steve Long [ Moderator's note: I think that is a very good suggestion. Any further discussion of this topic should be taken to private e-mail. --rma ] From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Thu Jan 27 17:37:00 2000 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 12:37:00 -0500 Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >In very, very rare cases, a single inflectional morpheme might have been >borrowed; it's been claimed that English 3sg. -s (replacing -eth) >represents a Norse influence. But there is not one recorded case where a >whole system of inflectional morphology has been borrowed; it just >_doesn't_ happen. Oh, it *does* happen; not so tremendously often, actually, but it does. I was raised myself in lx. believing that there's no such thing as a "mixed language", but there are such things. The most famous cases which have been brought to attention in the last decades are the Aleut variant spoken on Mednyj Ostrov (which remained lexically basically Aleut and glued Russian verbal inflections to its roots); other examples include the notorious Inner Ma'a/Mbugu of Kenya (Cushitic/Bantu lexical-morphological mix) and some others, now prominently described in the literature. In fact, a lot of others. The moribund Moghol language of Afghanistan (Mongolian lg. family) shows many morphological borrowings from Persian/Tadzhik, inflectional elements among them; the same holds for the more northerly dialects of Tadzhik, which seem very prone to adopt Uzbek morphology into their systems. A.P. Volodin and yours truly may or may not be right in claiming that most of the inflectional verbal morphology of Itelmen is borrowed from neighbouring Chukchi-Koryak languages. I wholeheartedly agree that the role of morphology in the determination of language relationship can hardly be overemphasized. Sadly enough, this is not recognized everywhere, with some comparativist schools even explicitly downplaying this role ("morpho-what ?"). But it is equally incorrect to say that morphological borrowing doesn't happen. It does. 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 X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Jan 26 05:52:25 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 00:52:25 EST Subject: Wheel as an early loan. Message-ID: In a message dated 1/25/00 11:20:10 PM, Sean Crist wrote: **If it were borrowed from just one branch into another, I'd be willing to entertain the idea that the loan was early enough for the crucial sound changes not to have taken place, so that we couldn't identify the borrowing. However, the PIE word for "wheel" is attested in most of the branches of IE. It is vanishingly improbable that the word could be a loan word in all of these branches without ever showing any telltale phonological signs of the borrowing in any of the branches.** If the loan was "early enough for crucial sound changes not to have taken place," then what "telltale phonological signs of borrowing" would you expect? Perhaps if we identified them, they can be looked for. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Jan 26 05:57:02 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 00:57:02 EST Subject: SV: Indo-Hittite Message-ID: In a message dated 1/25/00 10:15:53 PM, Sean Crist wrote: <> It was me. Let me apologize. The paper was on the screen in front of me and the authors clearly say in a number of places that Hittite represents Anatolian. My statement was inexcusably incorrect. Regrets, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Jan 26 17:01:00 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 12:01:00 EST Subject: Indo-Hittite Message-ID: In a message dated 1/26/00 11:23:23 AM, Hans J Holm wrote: <> Since it is mainly based on prior scholarship and selected PIE reconstructions, I suspect there is nothing particularly novel about the UPenn tree findings. It's clear that the methodology is originally designed to find the best possible internal consistency for particular theories, rather than testing the theories themselves. As you say, adjustments were made in the data to give a relative chronology to the tree afterwards. Some of these adjustments were geographical and relate to presumed contact or lack of it. Specific adjustments made to date Hittite are not clear in the texts I have. There is no indication that the UPenn group ever hypothesized or attempted to execute a tree where Hittite and PIE were hypothesized to be sisters decended from a common ancestor to see if it was also consistent with the data. Such a procedure might have been methodologically necessary to properly 'test' the IndoHittite hypothesis. These findings also might have carried assumptions that Hittite was a descendent of PIE (e.g., some of the established reconstructed PIE that Ringe, et al used to identify cognates for co-categorization presumably were reconstructed with Hittite included in the comparative data) and the computer confirmed that this was not inconsistent - a finding that could have also possibly come out of hypothesizing Hittite as being a sister language. I'm not saying anything here of course about the correctness of the Indo-Hittite hypothesis. Regards, Steve Long From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Thu Jan 27 19:49:05 2000 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 14:49:05 -0500 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) In-Reply-To: <200001241129.p65346@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: >Depends on the circumstances. >I suggest to take a look at well-known examples. They should make clear >that there are different ways for the spread of languages: >1) Lang's can be taken over without any migration, merely by way of > economical dependence or cultural difference. Examples: The Wedda in S- > India, some Pygmy-tribes, the Jakutes in N-Siberia (originally Evenks, > who switched to the Turcic Dialect). There is no archeological evidence. The case of the Yakuts is mere speculation, I'm afraid. It is next to impossible that the spread of Turkic to the lower Lena was not at least, say, accompanied by some movement in space of some people, to put it mildly. To put it less mildly, the assumption in the paragraph above is simply wrong. Yakut oral traditions have never forgotten about their earlier more southerly homes, and that their adventure in the North was not even a smooth and peaceful one is equally well-recorded by Yakut reminiscences of wars with the Ewenks. The very distance of Yakut to the their Turkic next-of-kin in Southern Siberia with no trace of the missing links between Lake Bajkal and the Upper Lena bespeaks the migratory nature of their northward movement. It is equally mere conjecture that the Yakuts are "originally Ewenks". Yakut and Ewenk do show clear signs of areal convergence, but nothing which would make the assumption of language-switch Ew. ---> Yak. necessary or even likely. This does of course not preclude that some Yakut clans were originally Ewenki (or, more likely, Yukaghir) clans who *have* actually switched their language. If I miss something, I'd like to learn about it. Of course, it is correct that language switch does not necessarily involve large-scale migration, but the gradual shift of economical, political, cultural and finally linguistic balance you seem to have in mind presupposes that the populations in question have been neighbours for a long time, participating in essentially the same (or two mostly overlapping) social networks. However, the Yakut migration to the north, beginning roughly in the 12th/13th centuries, was a rather sudden event. The Wedda and Pygmy-examples are more interesting, but here also I find it hard to operate without some kind of movement of people. It seems hard to imagine how the Indo-Aryan language reached the island of beautiful Lanka without at least some speakers accompanying it and settling down on the island. Of course, one doesn't have to have in mind the rather naive picture of a "migration" which consists of "the people" following Moses in ordered columns. But the renfrewian alternative, the "wave-of-advance-model" (which is very interesting and should not be thrown out with the washwater, just because the whole of the Renfrew theory meets with considerable difficulties; it is more than likely that it may provide explanations for *some* dislocations of people/cultures/languages in the Old World. Only which ones is the question), this renfrewian alternative, though different in detail, *does* involve a movement of concrete people in space and time, n'est-ce pas ? >2) Language switching can be caused by a relativlely small class of > military rulers. Examples: The Hungrians switching from Getic/Slavic > /Ants/Dialects to an Ob-Ugrian lang. But where is the archeological or > racial evidence? The residents of Pannonia switched to a *Ugric* language, the Ob'-Ugric languages being those the people of Pannonia had no opportunity to switch to, because the ancestors of today's Khants and Mansis decided to try their luck further east (which is why the world missed the chance to have an Austrian empress talking in Ostyak to her servants). >3) Of cause migrations can be found: Nobody claims the Indo-Aryans to be > the original inhabitants of India. Oh yes, some people do. There is a linguistic/cultural historical school in India, which, following the teachings of Sri Aurobindo, does exactly say that. And that Indo-Aryans and Dravidians are the same. St. G. PS: I'm not one of them. 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 Jan 25 15:26:12 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 15:26:12 +0000 Subject: "is the same as" Message-ID: Stanley Friesen writes: [snip account of ring species among salamanders] > It seems absurd to say that just because the end-points are clearly > distinct that each of the intermediate steps must *also* be held to be > distinct! Ergo, I must use "same" to refer to a purely "local" state of > affairs - any two *specific* populations are either the same or not, > irregardless of the situation with other pairs of populations in the same > series. Why "absurd"? 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? > The same sort of situation can, and *does* hold for languages. The West > Romance area is a dialect continuum, with chains of locally similar > dialects connecting all of the separate "languages" in West Romance. So, > does one treat all of West Romance as one language? It seems silly to call > French and Portugese the same language, does it not. Yet they are connected > by a series of pairwise similar dialects. 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. [LT, earlier] >> But, if we agree to a fuzzy interpretation of 'is the same as', and hence to >> its negation 'is not the same as', then we can no longer manipulate these >> relations as though they had non-fuzzy interpretations, and draw non-fuzzy >> conclusions -- which I think is the practice I was objecting to in the first >> place. > I am a little confused here. I do not remember ever actually applying > "sameness" in a non-fuzzy manner in this discussion. (Of course, given the > time lags, my memory is a little fuzzy itself). As far as I can recall now, the objections of which I speak were not to Stanley Friesen's postings, but rather to somebody else's. But it's been a while. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jan 25 16:15:12 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 16:15:12 +0000 Subject: Re Personal pronouns Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Pat Ryan writes: > I have no problem with Larry's definition of 'determiner' as recorded in his > dictionary; and I have no problem acknowledging the usefulness of > categorizing several different kinds of words > ("articles...demonstratives...quantifiers...", etal.) as 'determiners'. > But Larry seems to me to be denying the validity and usefulness of the term > 'possessive pronoun' altogether though, of course, "possessive" is included > as one of the various categories of 'determiners'. > Larry's definition of pronoun contains all the classses traditionally > considered pronouns *except* possessive pronouns though it seems odd in the > extreme that, in spite of the rejection of possessive pronouns, > demonstrative pronouns are included *as well as* being listed under > 'determiner' as "demonstrative". > Perhaps you could explain to me why you think "demonstrative" may occur in > both classifications but "possesive" may not. OK; I'll have a shot. The labels 'pronoun' and 'determiner' denote *syntactic* categories -- that is, categories established on the basis of grammatical behavior, such as distribution and inflection. Such categories are set up without regard for the meanings or functions of their members. But the labels 'possessive' and 'demonstrative' are quite different. These are not syntactic categories at all, but rather semantico-functional categories, set up on the basis of the meanings or functions of their members, regardless of their grammatical behavior. Now, there is no requirement that any syntactic category should exactly correspond to any semantico-functional category. Often, of course, we observe a high degree of overlap, but perhaps never perfect overlap, and sometimes the match is not good at all. Now, in English, we can set up the syntactic categories 'pronoun' and 'determiner' by the usual grammatical criteria. When we do this, we find that the class of pronouns includes, among others, the items 'she', 'mine' and 'this'. And we find that the class of determiners includes, among others, 'the', 'my' and 'this'. Simple test for pronouns: ___ is nice. Simple test for determiners: ___ book is nice. So that's that: 'my' is strictly a determiner, while 'mine' is strictly a pronoun, and 'this' can be either a pronoun or a determiner. Now to the semantico-functional categories. We can set up a class of 'demonstratives' on the basis of deictic properties, and we find that both determiner 'this' and pronoun 'this' must be included in the demonstratives. And we can perhaps set up a class of 'possessives' on some basis or other (this is not so easy), and find that both determiner 'my' and pronoun 'mine' deserve to be included in this possessive class. But the two very different types of class are independent in nature and independent in membership. The observation that the pronoun 'mine' is a pronoun does not entail that the determiner 'my' is also a pronoun, merely because both are possessives -- just as noting that 'my' is a determiner does not make 'mine' a determiner. In the same way, the observation that the event-word 'destruction' belongs to the syntactic category 'noun' does not entail that the event-word 'destroy' must also be a noun. Syntactic categories are independent of semantico-functional categories. That's just the way languages are. > Finally, I think it useful to retain the term "possessive pronoun" because > it overtly identifies the fact that the pronoun stands for a noun in the > possessive --- in addition to its function of deteremination. No; I'm afraid I can't agree. Whatever the intended meaning of "stands for" might be, a pronoun does not "stand for" a noun. A pronoun doesn't even belong to the category 'noun'. Instead, it belongs to the category 'noun phrase', and, in many cases, it takes its reference from another noun phrase overtly present in the discourse. Example: Q: "Where's the woman we're supposed to meet?" A: "She's over there." And *not*: * "The she we're supposed to meet is over there." A pronoun does *not* "stand for" a noun in any coherent sense. Now, of course, 'my' is somehow related to 'I', at least semantically. Depending on your theoretical tastes, you might like to state a rule -- say, a lexical rule -- of the following approximate form: [I] + [Poss] --> [my] This rule is comparable to other conceivable lexical rules; for example: [arrive] + [-al] --> [arrival] But 'arrival' is not a verb because 'arrive' is a verb: it's a noun, as shown by its grammatical behavior. Likewise, 'my' is not a pronoun because 'I' is a pronoun: it's a determiner, as shown by its grammatical behavior. Finally, I might add that 'possessive' is a rather elusive category anyway. Whatever 'possessive' might mean -- and this is far from being a trivial question -- it has no uniform grammatical expression in English. In fact, English has *at least five* different sets of forms and constructions for expressing relations we might reasonably call 'possessive': (1) Determiners ('my', 'your', 'their') (2) Pronouns ('mine', 'yours', 'theirs') (3) The Saxon genitive: NP + 's ('Bill Clinton's affairs) (4) Prepositions ('the capital of France', 'the man with the gun') (5) Juxtaposition ('the Microsoft story') These highly varied forms and constructions have nothing in common syntactically, and they cannot be coherently squeezed into any single syntactic category -- even though we *might* like to say that they all express possession, whatever that is. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Jan 25 19:49:12 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 14:49:12 EST Subject: Drift vs. common innovations; satem Message-ID: Edward Sapir had the very useful concept of "drift". The concept simply acknowledges that there can be causes for shifts, and that changes may happen by stages, in degrees, a language can move a part of the way towards a shift. This can be the case as a matter of fact, without our necessarily being able to know all the details. It is a useful way of thinking. (I am of course *not* suggesting that we posit things for which we have no evidence, simply that we do not rule out hypotheses consistent with a small amount of data available to us, posited developments for which we have actual known parallels.) I believe the concept of "drift" helps to synthesize the two views, that of family tree and that of dialect area, which we find so often debating each other, each having a part of the truth in view. (I strictly distinguish "dialect area" in my thinking from the concept of "Sprachbund" or areal effects, which is appropriate when the languages involved are unrelated, or when the effects are demonstrably after a period of separation and return to contact so the results are different for reasons of intervening changes. The mere overlap of waves of innovation across a persisting dialect network are somewhere in between?) Consider the obvious possibility that there were several *stages* in developments *towards* a satem-shift (NOTE THAT WORD *towards*). (In what follows I am neglecting Tocharian and the obvious other small details. Do not misunderstand the simple terminology used merely to explain the concept.) If some of the exact details can be improved, someone else please do so, and then critique the best version you can create. *** Common innovation: stage 1 of satem drift the entire area of the eastern IndoEuropean shared a portion of the drift, including even Baltic and Greek. Did not go far enough to be manifested in Greek (at all?). *** Common innovation: stage 2 of satem drift Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian shared this stage of the drift *** Common innovation: stage 3 of satem drift Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian shared this stage of the drift *** Common innovation: stage 4 of satem drift Slavic and Indo-Iranian shared this stage of the drift *** Common innovation: stage 5 of satem drift Indo-Iranian shared this stage of the drift *** Even possibly stage 6 of satem drift Did Iranian go farther than Indic? *********************************************** I always try to think in concrete terms, not to resolve real questions via strict definitions (where the definitions answer the question and therefore make the question less an empirical one). So the following does make more precise wherein certain languages differ, but does not satisfy me fully. >When the issue of satemization is defined very strictly, it consists - not >of the assibilations and spirantizations - but of the merger of velars and >labiovelars (with the old palatals showing distinct reflexes), as opposed >to kentum lgs., where palatals and velars merged and labiovelars show >autonomous reflexes. If this definition is fololwed strictly, Armenian and >Albanian are out (no merger at all); Baltic and Slavic are mostly in (but >not entirely, because of the sizable number not-at-all satemized elements). >Which leaves us with Indo-Iranian as the only real and true-blue satem >branch (and if we look at the remnants of labiovelars there, even that is >not entirely sure). From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Jan 25 22:53:07 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 17:53:07 EST Subject: Peripheral promotes "common innovation" ? Message-ID: [Sent to IE list on 25 January, 2000] I have quite a number of questions regarding what may be relatively unquestioned assumptions underlying decisons about what qualify as "common innovations". *** One of these questions I raised in a separate message sent today on what Sapir's concept of "Drift" does for us, if major changes are taken as going through a number of stages in the process of "drift". Can we distinguish clearly between dialect areas and branches in family trees (not confusing dialect areas which have been constantly contiguous with Sprachb?nde which result from later contact, or contact of languages not closely related). As a consequence of that perspective... Is it perhaps the case that innovations which are restricted to a very narrow dialect area are more likely to be considered common innovations justifying a branch on a family tree, while innovations which covered a much wider area, and are perhaps much more fundamental (!), *BECAUSE WE CAN DETECT THE TIME THEY TAKE FROM THEIR ORIGIN AT THEIR CORE UNTIL THEY REACH THEIR FARTHEST EXTENTS* will be classed as borrowings of tendencies between related neighboring languages, and thus excluded from consideration for family-tree groupings? *** Another has to do with how geographic position, central vs. peripheral in a dialect-area network, may possibly affect judgements about common innovations. I'm wondering whether, methodologically, the effects of contiguity in dialect areas tend to bias the Penn. approach, and perhaps many others, to indicating an early separation (separate branches) of the dialect groups which are at the geographical extremes of the total composite dialect space? (Thinking perhaps of Italic & Celtic.) That is, because the groups at the edges do not have genetically related dialects on all sides of them, matters which were really dialect-area phenomena, interpreted as common innovations on nodes on a tree, will tend to segment off the outermost areas first? That is not necessarily a wrong result, from some point of view, but it may be a much too discrete result, as opposed to a more accurate result which might have to be gradient. More generally, I would love to receive references to the most recent productive thinking on how to combine dialect-area perspectives with branching-tree perspectives. To me, branching is most fully secure only when LATER borrowings clearly postdate some internal change, and do not show the effect of that change. That is asking more of the evidence than merely common innovation, I think, but not sure how to state this with absolute precision. *** I think these are each important questions of how method interacts with the content which the method is applied to. (In statistics, at least, it is known that all methods are appropriate or inappropriate depending on the structure of the data they are applied to, etc. etc., that they may give wrong results when applied to the wrong kind of data.) *** Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Jan 25 23:07:41 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 18:07:41 EST Subject: early IE dialect areas diagram Message-ID: I use visual aids to help my thinking. The following dialect map I did recently, and was assisted by conversations with Joat Simeon during the process. It is in a Monospaced font, using only spaces not tabs, so after you receive it, convert it into a Monospace font (like Courier on the Macintosh). The horizontal positions should then align nicely. Rotate it 45 degrees or so counterclockwise, to get the right results. You should have a dialect chain from Indo-Iranian to Armenian to Phrygian-Thracian-Illyrian-Albanian to Greek, and another from Indic to Indo-Iranian to Slavic & Baltic to Germanic etc. Different time periods are shown, so the separation of Anatolian is much earlier, and it can be excluded when considering later isoglosses. Finno-Ugric has loans from Indo-Iranian (though not many from PIE), and Finnish has loans from German. They were placed off to the sides in the appropriate relative positions as reminders of this. In a map of dialect areas which is done correctly, it should be possible to draw most isoglosses as convex ovoids with no concave portions (within the limitations that a single two-dimensional positioning cannot represent a history of different contacts during migrations, first with one group, then with another). See whether you think this one helps the deliberations. It is designed to reflect the possibility that the Armenian-to-Greek dialect chain, and the IndoIranian-to-Indic dialect chain, both migrated southwards at about the same times. If anyone can suggest the scenario for the positions of Celtic and Italic especially at the very ealiest stages, and whether their neighbors changed very much during the expansion of IE dialects westwards, I would be grateful for any help with thinking. Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics Celtic Italic Germanic Finnish Baltic Greek Slavic Albanian (Illyrian- [Ukraine Thracian Homeland of PIE] Phyrgian Armenian (Anatolian Isolated) Indo-Iranian Finno-Ugric Iranian Indic From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Jan 25 23:31:10 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 18:31:10 EST Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? Message-ID: I was just recently contemplating the augment *e- which precedes certain completed-action verbs in Indic and in Greek, and which, I gather from one correspondent, is usually taken as an inheritance from some common stage, one of several manifestations of a close Greek-Vedic relationship. If one takes that point of view, then it implies a Greek-Indic common innovation compared with PIE. Is that branch on a tree supportable? (differs from UPenn, right?) If not, then must one take it as an inheritance from PIE, lost elsewhere? it occurs to me to wonder about German ge- of past participles, which (with loss of /g-/) shows up also in the "e" of the English form "enough", related to German "genug", from o-grade of a verb *nek- 'to reach, attain'. What is the origin of that prefix in German? Is it just barely conceivable that it might be related to the Sanskrit and Greek augment, and that it began with a laryngeal? (I am fully aware that affixes do not always follow the same sound changes as do roots - but also very hesitant to posit an otherwise unproven irregularity of sound change, so would want some pretty good demonstrations of cognate functions, at least ones which could develop from a common origin. I think the functions of German and of the Greek and Sanskrit augment, in completive contexts, are highly similar. Could the origin have been something like this? (or with a different vowel, reduced to /e/ as for many other German unstressed verbal prefixes, then generalized ...?) *He- ?? Pardon, I am not a Germanicist and have no immediate access to something that would tell me. Pokorny's Comparative Germanic Grammar pp.205-206 states a relation to Latin co(m)-, but such a hypothesis is to me much more improbable on semantic grounds. In this view, I would assume, the /gV-/ prefixes gradually spread from their point of origin at the expense of other prefixes. Perfectly possible. Was that hypothesis posited long ago for simply for lack of anything better, or because shows up only in some of the western Germanic languages (OHG, English, etc.)? Or is there substantial support behind it, such as details of the gradual stages of infiltration from Latin? Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From ECOLING at aol.com Wed Jan 26 15:05:31 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 10:05:31 EST Subject: Refining what trees show Message-ID: We often make much too little use of the capabilities of visual diagrams. Choices in these do have strong implications for our thinking. Sean Crist responded to Steve Long on questions of parts of one language changing substantially, while other parts do not. (still under the title "When a mother becomes a daughter" - small excerpt quoted below) I agree completely with Crist that the matter is in many cases purely a matter of terminological convention. Italian might still be called Latin, just as modern Dutch still is called that. One branch retains the name. Steve Long, incidentally, also said that the debate may be purely terminological. However, Steve is also pointing to situations which are not purely terminological, where in standard treatment we would say that one branch innovated *a lot*, and the other innovated *very little*. Never mind that "a lot" and "a little" are not absolute or discretely different. There can be cases in which they are different enough to be highly significant. I am fully aware of the view that the tree diagrams are also purely conventional, that even where there is a continuing "stem" shown, there are also innovations on that stem, so it is equal to the branch. Differences don't matter. But taken as a matter of degree, not of absolutes, there is still some considerable sense in what Steve is pointing to on this issue. It may sometimes be useful to indicate large differences of degree by a more subtle use of our family trees and other diagrams. *** Family trees need not always divorce themselves completely from real geography, showing the innovating branches off to one side, and what appears as a continuing smooth flow of the remainder to the other side (witness Italo-Celtic branching to the East in the UPenn trees I have seen pictured). Rather, they can also incorporate some hints to geography, showing innovating branches in different directions. This is not merely formal, as it makes it more possible by one degree to think in terms of both dialect areas and family trees at the same time, or in terms of migrations and family trees at the same time. Personally I usually prefer a map of dialect areas on which a tree is superimposed, as to me more *practically* useful, there may be quite a number of mixtures which can be useful in visual diagramming. Each will of course be conventional and cannot show infinite detail. As mentioned long ago, noting some salient innovations on branches, or using convex ovals for innovating dialect areas, or both, are very useful tools in aiding understanding. Many devices which incorporate some notations for actual data into diagrams which show the overall patterning of that data can be useful, by allowing us to focus easily on EITHER THE TREES OR THE FOREST, by showing (some of) both at the same time. *** It can be useful, in cases of a tree in which there are indeed large differences in degree of innovation, many innovations of one branch clearly branching off, and few innovations on the remaining core, to show a vertical with a branch, rather than a forking which visually conveys equality. (And yes, there will be intermediate cases where we cannot easily choose between these two representations - that in no way suggests that the distinction is not most often quite useful.) Footnotes can be added to anything, to add to, limit, or clarify what is or is not signaled by a diagram. That is we CAN do both /\ / \ / \ / \ and |\ | \ | \ | \ /| \ / | \ / | \ and have that visual distinction aid us. We tend to greatly UNDERUTILIZE the facilities of even two-dimensional paper. Sincerely, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics >It's apparently a problem for you. Linguists are well aware that there is no >clear criterion for looking at two lects and saying "same language" vs. >"different languages." It is purely a matter of convention what distinctions >we want to draw and what names we want to use. >For example, consider the following two cases: > -Earlier Dutch forked into Dutch and Afrikaans. > -Latin forked into Italian, Spanish, French, etc. >In the former case, we continue to use the term for the parent language for >one of the daughters. In the latter case, we don't. What we choose to call >the daughters is _purely_ a matter of convention. Linguistically speaking, >the two cases are examples of exactly the same thing; it doesn't matter >whether we've arbitrarily chosen to use the name of the parent language as the >name of one of the daughters. From gwhitta at gwdg.de Wed Jan 26 17:43:15 2000 From: gwhitta at gwdg.de (Gordon Whittaker) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 17:43:15 -0000 Subject: Hawk /siiiii/ ! Message-ID: What "bird names in Sumerian are the same as in the present day"?! What could you be thinking of? What possible source could validate this comment? Please provide some specifics, if you have any. Gordon Whittaker Institut f|r Ethnologie Theaterplatz 15 37073 Gvttingen Germany -----Urspr|ngliche Nachricht----- Von: ECOLING at aol.com An: Indo-European at xkl.com Datum: 21 January 2000 05:10 Betreff: Hawk /siiiii/ ! [ moderator snip ] >For *kukurru*, *miaou*, *mu*, *me*, the case is a rather easy one. >For many other bird names equally so (though it is not to be sneezed >at that some bird names were the same in Sumerian as in the present >day, there can also be historical influences at work simultaneously). [ moderator snip ] From rohan.oberoi at cornell.edu Thu Jan 27 06:11:50 2000 From: rohan.oberoi at cornell.edu (rohan.oberoi at cornell.edu) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 01:11:50 -0500 Subject: Origins of Indo-Aryan Message-ID: To the list: I've been following and am writing an article about the somewhat strange fact that the origin of old Indo-Aryan has become a "hot-button" political issue in India. Briefly put: the politically popular theory in India is apparently that Vedic culture is indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, and that the civilisation that built the Indus Valley Civilisation (ca. 2800-1800 BC) was the one that wrote the Rig Veda (otherwise normally dated to 1500 BC, I believe). There has been a spate of books in the last ten years from people without backgrounds in history or linguistics arguing this point. They generally refer to the standard understanding of the arrival of Indo-Aryan as "the debunked Aryan Invasion Theory". The party now in power in India, the BJP, strongly supports this view and I understand that it is being pushed along with other educational changes the party wants to introduce. I've already sounded out a few people on the list with questions. I wonder if I could ask anyone who has taken an interest to consider this and provide any information or references they think would be of interest. 1. This theory, it seems obvious to me, would require PIE to be located in India or thereabouts, which runs into at least three problems I can think of: 1. PIE connections to Finno-Ugric; 2. No PIE connections to Dravidian; 3. Horses not securely established in India till end of second mill. BC. 2. Is anything along these lines taken seriously in IE studies? Are there recent papers that have considered the problem one way or another? Obviously, I am familiar with Mallory's (1989) summation of the consensus as finding IE generally intrusive in Asia. Thoughts welcome (indeed, solicited). Regards, Rohan. From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Thu Jan 27 08:27:45 2000 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 09:27:45 +0100 Subject: Northwest IE attributes In-Reply-To: <34.97a598.25bebe8a@aol.com> Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >>Not *so* unlikely, after all. Palatalizations are, so to speak, the >>garden-variety of sound-changes. >-- yes, but the same one in two adjacent groups for different reasons? This >violates explicatory parsimony. Only with less-than-natural sound changes. This one is quite natural. >And as you point out, this particular change is _not_ common in the IE >languages. Only Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic show it with any degree of >consistency (Armenian possibly too). Albanian, Romance, Modern Cretan, Swedish aso. But, then, I'm not arguing against an areal explanation of some phenomena (among them palatalization and assibilation of palatal stops) in Baltic, Slavic and Indo-Iranian. Only against viewing satemisation as a shared innovation of a "satem" node in IE. 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 mcv at wxs.nl Thu Jan 27 23:38:55 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 00:38:55 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <007b01bf6769$037094c0$be9f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >[MC] >> It is clear that a system with both palatalization and >> labialization, as I advocate for (Pre-)PIE, is not stable. >[PR] >What makes that so "clear"? There aren't (to my knowledge) many languages around which maintain a full set of labialized and palatalized and plain consonants (I forgot to mention the plains). Ubykh? Centum/satem reflect two ways of simplifying this situation (merger of plain-palatalized or labialized-plain). Slavic did not create a separate labialized series, Old Irish lost the u-coloured consonants. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Jan 28 00:10:34 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 01:10:34 +0100 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <006b01bf67f3$6ff36840$0801703e@edsel> Message-ID: "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" >Sent: Monday, January 24, 2000 7:25 PM >> Albanian is satem, or rather "thatem" (*k^ > th). [ moderator snip ] >Forgive me my ignorance, but could you elaborate on the relationship (or not) >of this phenomenon with a similar one in Greek, at least in some positions or >cases: thermos, -te, etc.? Albanian is an inderdental fricative, presumably from /c/ (/ts/) from *k^. Cf. (Northern) Spanish. Palatalized consonants tend to develop into affricates /c/ or /c^/, which in turn tend to the fricatives /T/ (< /c/), /s^/ (< /c^/) or /s/ ( < either). Greek t/th/d < *kw, *gwh, *gw (before e/i) is an entirely different phenomenon (and a rare one, as far as I know). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Thu Jan 27 08:30:26 2000 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 09:30:26 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) wrote: >>S>"What if all the IE words like *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- , and Gr. trochos >>S>are older than the wheel/chariot/wagon, >>.. >>of cause the word is older: cf hebrew golgatha< gol-gol-tha 'place of >>scull', where the scull is named after its rounded form, or cf. the >>Ngoro-ngoro-crater in eastern Africa, where of cause n- is the Swaheli >>class-prefix, and again we get the word for 'circle' < 'round-round'. >>But: the use for wheel seems to be specific IE. >Not really. Gamqrelidze and Ivanov quote Sumerian gigir, Hebrew >gilga:l, galgal, Georgian borbal, gorgal, "wheel" or "chariot". And there's Sino-Tibetan *golo. 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 [ Moderator's comment: We could certainly magnify the list of coincidences as is common sport on the sci.lang newsgroup, but I think the point is made. Those who wish to pursue the real possibilities of long-range comparisons should move the discussion to the Nostratic list. --rma ] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Jan 27 09:19:14 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 04:19:14 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >You wrote: <>branch of Indo-European (Indo-Iranian, Hellenic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, >>Italic, and Tocharian)is that the word was borrowed when PIE was still a >>unity. Unless the word was borrowed when PIE was a unity, then there is no >>other way to account for this widespread occurrence in the family.>> >Well the wheel is one way, isn't it? I mean the actual wheel. Like the >computer or the telephone or the automobile. That would account for the word >being so widespread, wouldn't it? I certainly don't see any geographic or >other necessity that would make it difficult. -- we're talking about the WORD. If the word was borrowed or invented _before_ PIE split up, it would develop according to the usual sound laws for each of the daughter languages. If introduced afterwards, it would not. What is difficult about this? In point of fact, there's no question that the first eventuality -- the word for "wheel" being present before the dispersal of PIE -- is what actually happened. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Jan 27 09:38:22 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 04:38:22 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Even I know that if "the language has changed" and is no longer PIE, the >SPECIFIC sound changes in *kwelo, etc., may not have happened until later. >Those changes may NOT be the ones that defined "PIE (linguistic) breakup." -- those changes were not confined to those words, of course. Eg., the PIE *k ==> Germanic 'h' transition is characteristic. Hence *kmtom (100) ==> hundrad (100), or many other transitions of this kind. >What ARE the SPECIFIC SOUND changes identified in early 'wheel' words and >what suggests that they are even exceptionally early? I would value anything you >might offer regarding this. -- PIE *kwekwlom (pl. kwekwleha) -- wheel >From which: Old English: hweogol (note characteristic Germanic *k ==> h) Sanskrit: cakra Greek: kuklo Tocharian: kukal ('wagon') etc. PIE *hwergh -- wheel Hittite: hurki Tocharian: yerkwanto PIE *dhroghos -- wheel Old Irish: droch Armenian: durgn Greek: (I forget, but something similar) PIE *rotho -- wheel Old Irish: roth Latin: rota OHG: rad Lith. ratas Albanian: rreth Avestan: ratha (chariot) Sanskrit: ratha (chariot) Plus, of course, PIE *ueghnos, 'wagon', *uoghos, 'wagon' and the related *ueghitlom, 'vehicle', which produce: Old Irish: fen Welsh: gwain Tocharian wkam Mycenaean: wokas (chariot, from a related form *uoghos) OHG: wagan Latin: vehiculum Sanskrit vahitram From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jan 27 09:57:53 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 03:57:53 -0600 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: It's certainly possible for a word to be borrowed into all the IE languages; especially if it represents a radically new technology or trendy commodity. International words still crop up from time to time and enter most if not all branches of IE [and other families]; e.g. banana, coffee, tobacco, computer, telephone, tea [cha/chai/chay is cognate, of course] I agree that if there are regular reflexes, then the word would have borrowed either during a period of unity OR during a period of adjacent dialects in the same sense that Romance is [or recently was --due to standardization] This begs the question of how long IE languages existed as a chain of dialects. If Romance could have persisted for roughly 2000 years as a chain of dialects, how long could IE have remained in that state? [snip] >Absolutely not. If PIE had already dispersed into separate languages or >speech areas, then there is absolutely no reason to assume that a word >borrowed into one end of the Indo-European region into one dialect/language >would necessarily spread throughout all the languages in the family. The >ONLY way to account for the very existence of the word in nearly every >branch of Indo-European (Indo-Iranian, Hellenic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, >Italic, and Tocharian) is that the word was borrowed when PIE was still a >unity. Unless the word was borrowed when PIE was a unity, then there is no >other way to account for this widespread occurrence in the family, whether >or not specific sound changes had or had not occurred yet. If the word only >existed in, say, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, and Tocharian, then the borrowing >is quite likely one that only penetrated the eastern end of PIE. The same >would be true on the western end of PIE if the word only existed in Celtic, >Germanic and Italic. However, since *kwelos has reflexes throughout >Indo-European, and the sound changes that have affected it in each of the >daughters are completely regular, the only logical assumption that we can >make is that the word was borrowed when PIE was still a unity. Any other >assumption requires a leap of faith and violates the principle of Occam's >Razor. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Jan 27 23:59:47 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 00:59:47 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Sean Crist wrote: >On Thu, 20 Jan 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> The development was: *kwekwlo- > *hwegwlo ~ >> *hweGwlo > *hwewlo > { OE hwe:ol > wheel | ODu. *hwi at l > wiel }. >> Curiously, the loss of -g- here is only semi-regular (or we >> wouldn't have OE hweogul), which makes me wonder why Szemere'nyi, >> in his "Introduction", chose this example to illustrate the >> regularity of sound laws in general >Looks like a Verner's Law variant to me, tho I'd have to hit the books to >see if it actually checks out. The -gw- is Verner's law allright, but there is no Vernerless variant with *h(w). It's just that PIE *gwh (+ Verner *kw) have no stable reflexes in Germanic (/g(w)/ or /w/). >What I'd need to check is whether the Pre-PGmc word for "wheel" belonged >to one of the paradigms with shifting stress; It's an o-stem (fixed stress). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Jan 27 09:37:11 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 04:37:11 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: I wrote: << Where specifically do you find this? And I mean in Renfrew. Where specifically do you find this? And I mean in Renfrew. What book? What page?>> In a message dated 1/26/00 11:19:04 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: <<-- Renfrew (in Language and Archaeology) says that the pre-Celtic IE language reached Ireland with the first farmers -- that's 4000 BCE, roughly -- and that the Celtic languages developed _in situ_ all across their historic range, except for some outliers (Italy, Anatolia).>> I've looked through Renfrew and I do not find any reference to either "Celtic" or "pre-Celtic" reaching these areas at that time. I do find him saying the precise same thing about "an early Indoeuropean language." I suspect the difference is critical. <> I can only ask here what these Celtic language sources from BCE are. Once again I mean what specifically? I do not believe you will find this kind of evidence in the period you are speaking of in the Danube area. This despite the fact that Celtic migrations out of Gaul into the Danube area are attested to by the Romans (so that you would expect some uniformity.) Nor will you find it in Ireland (where there is history, folk memories and other evidence of a series of migrations from the continent ABOUT OR AFTER this time. - and therefore you also might expect some uniformity - if there was any such evidence.) I am willing to be corrected. I believe we have fragmentary evidence of Gallic Celtic, Lepontic and Celtiberian and many centuries later we have the more substantial evidence of the Celtic of the British Isles. I do not believe either Lepontic or Celtiberian demonstrate what anyone has called "striking uniformity." Gallic is specifically limited to only a third of Gaul by Caesar and I am not aware of actual evidence of it being found anywhere else - with the possible exception of an accountable presence in the British Isles. Once again I may be wrong, but I do hope there is specific evidence that I can look to. <> You are saying that here is Celtic was unchanging for 700 years. But then Celtic changes very quickly in the eyes of literate observers. Well perhaps literate observers would have observed the same rate of change earlier, but they weren't there and we have no record of them. (And of course the Galatians were identified by both the Greeks and by Cicero as being Volcae and from the tribe of the Gallic Volcae - and I believe the observer, mentioned in Renfrew, did not know Celtic and merely said they sounded the same. And the ogham use of a word for women - what about the rest of the words in ogham? is "the women" the only match? - does not prove a lot geographically and I'm not sure it is particularly strong proof of 'striking uniformity from Ireland to the Danube.") <> You have demonstrated 700 years of very little change with two pieces of rather circumstantial evidence. The evidence of Celtic in the BC years is very small indeed and comes from a very limited number of sources. (Once again I'm ready to be proved wrong but I would like to know of specific evidence -especially real textual evidence. I don't believe Lapontic or Celtiberian supports your claim based on the difficulty in deciphering them. And I don't believe there is much else evidence besides Gallic - and not much of it.) I don't know if I agree with Renfrew but it is not hard to see that a lot could have gone on between "an early Indoeuropean language" and pre-Celtic. The intervening period could have witnessed all sorts of changes that would eventually lead to a lot of different dialects, one or some of which became dominant or more universal through trade in the early Iron Age. On the other hand many dialects may have persisted into the Roman period and simply been unrecorded, after all - we know at some point some Celts acquired a taboo against writing. And of course Celtic had to turn into Celtic somewhere - what is the difference between IE>Celtic in the Danube or in France? Any expansion - wherever it happened - could have been at the expense of other dialects or IE languages wherever Celt started. And 4000 years versus 3000 years or even 2000 years would not seem to solve the problem of the this telling striking uniformity in 275BC, would it? The scenario Renfrew describes certainly seems adjustable to linguistic processes. The problem of the evidence of what happened during those 4000 years is precisely the problem you face anywhere you don't find written records. Myceanean records are after all just over 3000 years old but there are plenty of folk comfortable calling it not pre-Greek, but Greek. If we had no intervening evidence of Greek until modern Greek in the year1999AD in the same location - what would we make of the difference between the two languages? Why is "an early indoeuropean language" turning into the Celtic languages with no record of the intervening years expected to perform so differently - if an early indoeuropean language analogous to Mycenaean existed in 4000BC? I think all this may appear to be a bigger problem than it really is. Once again, I may be wrong. However, I would like to have some substantiation of the uniformity that you speak of in Celtic from Ireland to the Danube in the pre-Christian era. Regards, Steve Long From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jan 27 07:59:05 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 01:59:05 -0600 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I don't claim any knowledge of Old Irish but something has to be responsible for the radically different look of Gaelic as compared to other IE languages So keep in mind that my questions are rooted in ignorance What exactly are we looking at when we see Old Irish? How do we account for what seems to be a radical change in the language? Are we looking at an elite language of a recently arrived group? --perhaps later radically changed by the influence of earlier languages as their speakers/former speakers entered the elite group? Are we looking at a stylized orthography that ignored lenition and mutations? Was there a deliberate attempt by clerics to make the language look more latinate? Gaelic has to be the strangest language I've ever sat down and looked. As you all know, I'm not a linguist although I teach Spanish and have studied [long ago] other Romance languages, Arabic, Ixil and Swahili --all of which were very easy to get a handle on compared to Gaelic What weirds me out most are A. declarative [is this the right term?] negative, interrogative, negative interrogative and dependent forms of verbs; e.g. is, ni/, an, nach, gur for "to be --characteristics; present tense"; and bi/ for present habitual ta/, ni/l, an bhfuil & bhfuil for "to be --conditions/location; present tense"; and bi/onn for present habitual [question: Is ni/l < ni/ + bhfuil ?] B. conjugated prepositions and the multitude of verb-like uses for them C. the multitude of rules for lenition and initial mutation --although these can be explained D. the initial mutations/lenitions associated with numbers E. as per TYI, a seeming dearth of individual verb forms [as in English] except for conditional and 1st person present There are many other things as well but they're hard to get a handle on from just reading TYI Any explanations, expansion, etc. welcome! [ moderator snip ] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Jan 27 09:41:09 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 04:41:09 EST Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: In a message dated 1/27/00 2:21:06 AM, you wrote: <<>Betraying my ignorance, I must once again ask why this exchange must have >happened with PIE and not with an early daughter. -- because if it was early enough for these word forms, it would BE the PIE language.>> I must ask you how you know that. How specifically do you know the word forms given do not belong to a daughter? How would these specific word forms be different if they belonged to a daughter? I'm looking forward to your reply. Steve Long From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Thu Jan 27 10:45:51 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 12:45:51 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <6a.51fac4.25bfc499@aol.com> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >> There are some Finnic-Saamic loan words with proto-IE characteristics (e.g., >> laryngal reflexes) which are probably connected with the battle axe culture, >> such as Finnic-Saamic *kas?a- 'tip, end' < IE *Hak?-, *suki- 'family, >> kin' < IE *suH-. These words are unknown in U languages outside the Baltic >> Sea / Scandianavian area. > -- now, that's interesting. Are they present in Estonian as well? Yes, they are: Finnic-Saamic *kas?a- > Estonian (Southern Dialect) kadsa 'corner of the back of an axe blade' Finnic-Saamic *suki- > Estonian sugema 'arise, develop, be born etc.', sugu 'family, kin' From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Thu Jan 27 11:58:08 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 13:58:08 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > As for the position of Anatolian, there are very few things that > distinguish Proto-IE as it was before the break-off of pre-Anatolian from > what it became during the time up to its next split when the second branch > (Tocharian?) left the remaining stock. Consequently, we cannot tell from > the form of an IE loanword in Uralic whether it was borrowed before or > after the separation of Anatolian from the rest. That being so, we cannot > quite exclude that the IE homeland was in Anatolia and that the rest had > moved to the north of the Black Sea and there met the (pre-)Proto-Urals > and handed them a bag of loanwords. Note that laryngeals are not retained > only in Anatolian; there are enough laryngeal-sensitive phonetic changes > in the individual branches to guarantee that laryngeals survived as > segmental units well into the separate lifelines of the other subbranches > also. This is an interesting point of view. Is there strong evidence for the claim that the first split in IE was between Anatolian and the rest? If only very few things distinguish P-IE before and after the break-off of Anatolian, are these differences substantial enough to warrant the reconstruction of a separate, intermediate proto-language for the rest of the IE branches? > 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 (the words > for "earth", "bear" or "fire" would be interesting) It appears that these words were not borrowed to Proto-Uralic: P-U has *myxi- 'earth', *tuli- 'fire', *el?- 'carry, lift' and *kan-ta- 'carry', which appear to be native Uralic words. The last one is actually a causative derivative of P-U *kani- 'go'. There are some later loans, however. Samoyedic has *pura- 'burn' < IE *pur- 'fire', and Hungarian and Ob-Ugric have replaced P-U *tuli- 'fire' with *t?wV-s (perhaps from IE *dhew-, although the vowel causes some difficulties). > Flaunting my ignorance, I may perhaps ask the silly question: How can > you exclude that the Uralic homeland had a prehistory south of the Black > Sea? If Proto-Uralic was only one language when it split into the many > that have become known, can one really exclude that the speakers of that > language had earlier lived somewhere else? I'm not advocating that one > should make up all sorts of fanciful scenarios, far from it, but it just > could be playing a trick on us. In principle, it cannot be totally excluded. However, the idea of a P-U homeland south of the Black Sea would not be a very fruitful hypothesis, since it would only create a new, very difficult question to answer: why and how would the P-U speakers have migrated north to become hunter-gatherers in the taiga/tundra zone of northern Eurasia? There is no evidence suggesting that the P-U Urheimat would have been -outside- the area where U languages are spoken today. - Ante Aikio From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Thu Jan 27 12:14:44 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 14:14:44 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <63.cc6d89.25bec79f@aol.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 25 Jan 2000 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > -- as far as I know, the Uralic Urheimat is generally placed around the Ural > mountains (hence the name). A bit further east than the central Ukraine, > although not much further. Subsequent spread was to the west _and_ east; To be more precise: the region between Volga and Urals is the usual theory these days, although some suggest more fanciful scenarios. Lexical substrate suggests that the Siberian U languages (Khanty, Manysi, Samoyedic) have moved to the current areas from Europe (e.g., roughly 75% (!) of the proto-Samoyedic lexicon is without a credible etymology). A strong lexical substrate from an unknown language seems to exist in Saamic too; as for Finnic, the case is not as clear. > hence Uralic (or Finno-Ugric) languages are found from Siberia all the way > west to Finland (further, counting Sammi). Saami must of course also be taken into account, since it as much a Uralic language as all the others. Thus, in 1800's Uralic languages were spoken from mid-Scandianavia (South Saami) to Baikal (Mator Samoyed, which is now extinct). - Ante Aikio From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Thu Jan 27 07:25:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 07:25:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: "Loans"? That appears as an extremely narrowed view. Of cause, resemblances between two langs/Protolangs alone do not prove borrowing, let alone any direction of of it. Steve Long is quite right in asking "I MUST also find out someday why Uralic would need to borrow words for water, move, bring and wash from IE." But of cause the question is rhetorical... Additionally to the possibility of loans it must be found out wether the resemblances could be due to - only chance (about 2 to 8 %, decreasing e.g. with word-length), - common origin. Mit freundlichen Gr?szen Hans J Holm - - et monere et moneri - - From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Jan 27 10:56:53 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 05:56:53 EST Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >What if five lexical attributes appear as shared innovations between IE >languages A and B and therefore evidence a greater relatedness between the two >than a language C - which has none of them. What if however Language C shares >a totally valid morphological innovation with B not found in Language A? -- these are known as isogloss boundaries, and present no fundamental problems. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jan 27 05:51:23 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 23:51:23 -0600 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: <005101bf6669$df0f8a00$57c407c6@oemcomputer> Message-ID: >Ed Selleslagh writes: [ moderator snip ] >Hasn't Frisian also generalised a plural in -ar or -er, which also >corresponds with what Norwegian and Swedish (and formerly Danish) did? Can you elaborate a bit more on the -ar/-er plural? While the English strong plural was -en, there seems to be some relic forms with -r-; actually -ren e.g. child-r-en, eyren Middle English dialect plural for [unless the -r- of eyren was part of the singular stem and perhaps lost in the presumed singular ] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Thu Jan 27 11:47:24 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 11:47:24 GMT Subject: Horses in War Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:- > ... At the same time,...the Assyrians molded their cavalry into a strong > combat arm,... essentially making the chariot obsolete. Cavalry is inherently > better than chariots since it is more mobile. Likely the war chariot gradually went out as horses were gradually bred to be bigger. I am reminded here of a children's book about ponies that I read:- > ... [the pony is descended from] the wild pony ... Those who were careless > enough to let their children get bigger until they became what are now > known as horses got what they deserved, namely a lot of hard work. ... Whereabouts in the modern scale of horse sizes and types (pony, hack, charger, etc) do wild horse skeletons come which died before the wild stock could have been mixed genetically with escaped domestic horses? From HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu Thu Jan 27 15:13:57 2000 From: HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu (Herb Stahlke) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 10:13:57 -0500 Subject: NW vs. E Gmc Message-ID: On Sat, 22 Jan 2000, Sean Crist wrote: > I'd like to bring up a few points which were discussed in connection with > the distinction between NW and E Germanic: > 1. Both Marc Pierce and Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen cited *z > r as an > example of a shared innovation in NWGmc. It's true that a sound change > along these lines operated in both WGmc and NGmc, but it can be shown that > this is a parallel change which operated after the two dialects had > separated. The evidence is that there are rules both in WGmc and in NGmc > which are sensitive to the *z/*r distinction; the merger of the two > categories must have happened _after_ the two dialects had developed > separately for a while. As one only generally familiar with linguistic issues of early Germanic, I'm puzzled by Sean's clause "after the two dialects had separated". I've rather gotten the impression from sources like Orrin Robinson's Old English and its Closest Relatives and Hans Frede Nielsen's The Germanic Languages: Origins and Early Dialectal Interrelations that Sean's presupposition is something of an oversimplification. Rather, I've gathered, early Germanic, even after the Gothic migration, had very much the characteristics of a dialect continuum. Certainly, one can distinguish EGmc as a separate group earlier than N or W, but N and W don't become clearly distinct branches, rather than extremes on a continuum, until quite late, perhaps after the continental period. Or is Sean simply using a convenient shorthand that I'm being overly critical of? Herb Stahlke From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jan 27 06:09:11 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 00:09:11 -0600 Subject: NW vs E Germanic In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I read somewhere, I believe in a post on this list, that Ingwaeonic speakers once occupied mainland Denmark and either migrated SW along the North Sea coast or were pushed out of the area by North Germanic speakers. I also seem to remember seeing somewhere that the area even included present S. Sweden --although I wonder if that could be based on an identification of the Jutes with the Geats from Beowulf and presuming them to have been Ingwaeonic speakers. In general, I've seen a great deal of contradictory opinions in non-linguistic works on the Jutes relating them to Geats, Goths and even claiming they never even existed as a group. Is it a case of them being not much more than a historical name? [snip] >Oh, if you mean Ingwaeonic, that IS a fact you have to accept, note >(1) the unit plural (old 3pl used of 1pl and 2pl also); (2) loss of nasal >before voiceless spirants (Eng. mouth, goose). At least these are shared >by Old Saxon, Old English and Frisian to the exclusion of OHG. You could >perhaps add monophthongization of *ai (OS e:, OE a:, OFr. both) if this is >not too trivial. My expression of amazement was prompted by the word >"Jutish" which I take to denote a Danish dialect group; but if the old >Jutes went to England they may well have been (or become) Ingwaeones. >Jens Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From ECOLING at aol.com Thu Jan 27 18:16:07 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 13:16:07 EST Subject: Is "satem" a gradient? Message-ID: "Satem" may be defined in a number of different ways, and which languages are fully or partly included will be determined by how one defineds it. Merger of palatals and velars is *one* way of defining it. Shift of palatals to /s, ts, dz/ and the like is another way of defining it. Each has validity, and using a combination of varying ways of defining "satem" should yield a *gradient* list of languages included, which may be a *much more realistic* answer than trying to raise a giant wall and arguing till doomsday over whether a language is included or not. >From one perspective, a language may be included, from another, not. "Satem" may very well be a gradient concept, with fuzzy edges. If so, no amount of "defining" can remove the fact of the gradient. All it can do is reveal that using that definition (from among various ones possible) yiels such-and-such results. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jan 27 06:22:23 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 00:22:23 -0600 Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords In-Reply-To: Message-ID: There's a also a very much ballyhooed list of cognate substrate in Albanian and Rumanian, as well as the presence of Rumanian dialects [or extinct dialects] in the W & S Balkans: Istro-Rumanian [is it still around?], Megleno-Rumanian, Aromanian and the extinct Vegliot/Dalmatian, as well as some disputed [moribund] Istro-Romance language [evidently different from Istro-Rumanian from posts I've read] [ Moderator's note: The material quoted below is from a posting by Sean Crist. --rma ] >Actually, it doesn't appear that there's a continual Romance presence in >what's now Romania from Roman times down to the present. There's a book >by a Romanian scholar who claims that the area was underpopulated in early >medieval times, and that two leaders from a Romance-speaking area near >what is now Albania got permission from the Emporer to settle their people >in this land. The names of the leaders happen to Romanian names. >The author had to publish under a pseudonym, because this claim could be >considered seditious by the Romanian government. There is a substantial >Hungarian minority in Transylvania, and if this minority wanted to >separate from Romania, this author's book would allow the ethnic >Hungarians to claim that they were in the land first. >The linguistic evidence seems to be consistent with this picture as well; >there was a very dense and diverse set of Romance languages, including >Dalmatian, etc. in the western Balkan area where the early Romanians are >believed to have migrated from; but in the larger Romanian-speaking area >to the east, there is much more uniformity. It's much like the case of >British vs. American English; you get a tremendous and very dense >diversity of local dialects within Britain, but a much greater uniformity >in the huge area of America which the speakers of the language conquered. [ moderator snip ] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Thu Jan 27 06:08:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 06:08:00 GMT Subject: IE etymological dictionary Message-ID: SC>Pokorny is still under copyright; ... if the publisher (Bern: Franke) SC>wanted to release the dictionary on CD ... The Copyright is now owned by Narr-Verlag, Tuebingen; and of cause I have contacted them before posting. They are interested, if there is not too much work to do for them. What we need are two or more versions to compare and a Font (perhaps of the TITUS-series) to be furnished with it. Hans J Holm - - et monere et moneri - - From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Jan 27 21:24:27 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 16:24:27 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: In a message dated 1/27/00 2:55:47 PM, georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl wrote: << But the renfrewian alternative, the "wave-of-advance-model" (which is very interesting and should not be thrown out with the washwater, just because the whole of the Renfrew theory meets with considerable difficulties; it is more than likely that it may provide explanations for *some* dislocations of people/cultures/languages in the Old World. Only which ones is the question), this renfrewian alternative, though different in detail, *does* involve a movement of concrete people in space and time, n'est-ce pas ?>> Just what thoes considerable difficulties are is still something I am trying to get at. The wave of advance model of course is a slow migration model and does not exclude language transfer the quicker way - someone close enough to this matter said he was 'pretty darn sure' that Renfrew would not argue that Turkish in Asia Minor was the result of a 4000 year wave. He also reminded me that Renfrew's book was not "the Bible." I have to remember that, as even Mallory points out, what Renfrew was after was a start, despite the way his work is *sometimes* portrayed on this list. Actually if you read A&L you can see that what Renfrew was first of all doing was chastising archaeologists for accepting presumptive dates based on linguistics - which he points out were often based on old archaeology. (He was in a particularly good position to do that because of his role in the C-14 revolution.) Where once linguistics had old archaeological data to hang its hat on - old evidence of migrations, especially - that evidence had disappeared, but archaeologists were still dating their findings as if it were still there - and wondering why the C-14 dates were so early. The migrations hadn't happened yet! So that even in the early 50's - before Linear B had been worked out - some archaeologists were still dating anything presumed IE at the old 1250BC date - and saying that there must be some problem over at the Cambridge lab because the base brackets with C-14 had become + or - 1000 years. The next backdate was 1600BC for the IE invasion. And then that wouldn't hold up. It took a while to get the idea that the data might not supply a migration date anytime during that period. Some archaeologists think Renfrew should have never got involved in the language/ethnic thing at all - the strict Brit archs refuse to talk about language or ethnic affilations at all. Others think it was a good thing to cut the Gordian knot - even if it would take a little talk between linguists and archaeologists to fix it and make things right again. So let's see if we in some small way can start making it right again - what considerable difficulties do you find in Renfrew's (not the Bible) hypothesis? "I think we got a can-do situation here" (- old US Marine expression of optimism in somewhat difficult circumstances.) Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jan 25 10:03:43 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 10:03:43 +0000 Subject: Basque butterflies again Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Roz Frank writes: [on Basque 'alive' and its likely derivative ~ 'pretty', 'pretty little thing', 'jewel'] > I would note that there are other words based on the same root-stem that > mean "small, tiny", e.g., "little, little bit" and > from < pixka-kin> "little sticks of wood as well as others > in where there <-tx-> appears to have been replaced with a > palatalized /tt/. The latter term is used to refer not just to "little, > tiny" in general but also to one's "little finger". Again the replacement > in question is not unusual in Basque, e.g. "little" with > palatalization turns into . Actually, I don't think these words have anything to do with or ~ . Their source is quite different. Basque has a stem , of expressive origin, meaning roughly 'tiny little thing', 'tiny amount'. This stem is shared with Romance and may be of Romance origin. All this is discussed in Corominas, but I don't have that book handy. This stem appears in the Roncalese dialect as an independent word , meaning 'crumb', 'mote', 'spot', and the like. There it commonly occurs in the negative as 'not a bean', 'nothing at all'. Elsewhere, is commonly encountered as a stem with some kind of expressive extension added to it. Examples include , and , all of which mean 'tiny thing' or 'tiny amount' in various dialects. However, Basque words intrinsically denoting smallness almost invariably undergo expressive palatalization. In the case of /t/, this segment palatalizes either to (a palatal plosive) or to (like English ). On the whole, eastern varieties favour , but also exhibit , while western varieties use only . Hence palatalization of yields either or . Both of these are derived directly from , and neither is derived from the either. It is these palatalized stems and which are generally the sources of the numerous derivatives of the type cited above, like 'small amount', from + <-ka>, and 'scraps of wood'. In some cases, though, we may have palatalization directly from an extended form. For example, since both and exist (and also ), it may be that the last two derive directly from by palatalization. We cannot tell, but I doubt that the issue is of any significance anyway. All that matters is that the expressive stem , commonly in its palatalized forms and , is used to construct a range of items with senses centering on 'tiny thing', 'tiny amount'. There are quite a few of these, and I can't resist citing my own favorite: the Bizkaian nursery word 'penis' -- though I suppose I can't be certain that this word is derived from the same stem as the others. Bet it is, though. As for the adjective meaning 'small', 'little', this is interesting. The base form appears as both and . In both variants, this word has a truly extraordinary form for a native word, and it is unquestionably of expressive origin, like English 'teeny' and 'teensy'. The regional /p/ ~ /k/ variation is also unique to this word, as far as I can think. In our earliest texts, is much the more widespread form. Today, on the whole, we find in the east but in the west. And everywhere the word almost invariably undergoes the usual expressive palatalization, leading to the observed eastern but western . This east-west distinction is pervasive. For example, the word 'few, little, not many, not much' is commonly palatalized to in the east but to in the west. And the ancient diminutive suffix <-to>, which still survives as such in a few fossilized formations like 'little girl' ( 'girl'), is commonly palatalized to <-tto> in the east but to <-txo> (Bizkaian <-txu>) in the west. So, for example, from 'mountain', the diminutive 'little mountain' is usually in the east but or in the west. However, I do agree that it can sometimes be difficult to disentangle the words from the ~ words. For example, the common Bizkaian endearment , extended form , is probably derived from , but we perhaps can't be quite certain of this. Contamination between and is highly likely, and I suspect that even native speakers are not always sure of the source of a particular word. Not that they should care anyway, of course. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jan 25 10:47:51 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 10:47:51 +0000 Subject: Basque butterflies again (again) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Roz Frank writes: > I would note that in addition to its meaning of "butterfly", Azkue (I:173) > lists (B) with the meaning of "daisy" ("margarita de los > prados") while refers simultaneously to the following three > objects: a butterfly, a daisy and a poppy. Yes. A point I refrained from making in my earlier postings is this: a single Basque expressive formation often has a rather startling array of quite different senses, sometimes in a single variety, but more commonly, perhaps, in different varieties. This is yet another characteristic which distinguishes expressive formations, even if not entirely sharply, from ordinary lexical items, which on the whole do not exhibit such a range of unrelated meanings. The interpretation I place upon this observation is the following. Basque-speakers favor certain stems and certain patterns of formation for constructing expressive words. As a consequence, identical or similar formations are frequently coined independently and applied to a diverse array of referents. This view is entirely in line with my general position that expressive words in Basque have been subject to ceaseless renewal and replacement for many centuries, and that any given expressive formation is most unlikely to be of any great antiquity in the language. > In what are now non-Basque speaking zones of Navarre we find evidence for > the prior existence in the Basque of the zone for > (<*bitxi/pitxi(n)-gorri> from "red"). Jose Maria Iribarren (1984) > records this expression, spelling it as and listing its > meaning as "poppy". The compound might be glossed as "pretty little red > thing". Indeed. I didn't know this particular word, but it is entirely in line with the usual Basque patterns of expressive coinages. Azkue's dictionary records many hundreds, probably even thousands, of localized expressive formations, but even the indefatigable Azkue couldn't manage to pick up all the ones in use in his own day, and moreover it is clear that further instances have been coined since his day. There are doubtless many more of these things, living and extinct, littering the Basque linguistic landscape, and often recorded by nobody. But the lesson I draw is again that these formations are, in general, neither ancient nor long-lived, nor even stable in form and meaning. Hence they are of no relevance to the reconstruction of Pre-Basque, a task which must be performed by using words for which there is a strong case for considerable antiquity. [snip 'butterfly' words] > Finally, based on the implications of the data sets discussed above, I'm > not convinced that LT's closing remark, cited below, fully reflects the > semantic realities (and complexities) of the situation: > [LT] >> I therefore conclude that Lloyd's efforts at linking some of the Basque >> words to words in other languages (and also to one another) are without >> foundation. The Basque 'butterfly' words are numerous and severely >> localized; they conform strongly to observed patterns for coining >> expressive formations; and they can scarcely be of any antiquity. Well, I stand by these words, and I think the point raised above by Roz (multiple unrelated senses for individual formations) constitutes evidence in favor of my position. Anyway, I can't really see that the issues here are primarily or largely "semantic". Rather, the central issues are phonological and morphological. Expressive formations in Basque do indeed tend to fall into certain semantic domains, but what really sets them apart from other words is their highly distinctive and highly variable phonology, together with their peculiar morphology -- or, I might almost say, their lack of morphology. Expressive formations often contain familiar stems, but they also often contain unidentifiable, and essentially non-morphological, stretches of phonological material, material seemingly selected for its agreeable sound, but representing no Basque morpheme. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jan 25 15:39:46 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 15:39:46 +0000 Subject: Basque butterflies again (final) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Roz Frank writes: > Returning now to the discussion concerning the possible relationship > between the Basque and Spanish (Castilian) items. First we should note that > it is well known that Moliner (1966:I, 373) and others (I don't have > Corominas at hand) derive from Vulgar Latin and Clas. > Lat. . Yet there does seem to be room to question whether the > Basque term might not have played some role also, in the > development of the Romance item. Possible, certainly, but doubtful. The problem, as always, is that Romance influence upon Basque has been immense, while influences in the other direction are few and mostly confined to local Romance varieties in direct contact with Basque. There is another point that needs to be made clear. Like Basque, Romance has its own expressive formations, including its own expressive stems and its own patterns of expressive formation. Some of these are clearly shared with Basque. In most cases, this arises because Romance forms and patterns have diffused into Basque. A good example is the Romance stem , meaning something like 'large round object', which occurs in a number of formations and is even present in the source of our own 'coconut'. This stem has diffused into Basque, where it serves to derive several terms pertaining to the head. When Basque shares something with Romance, we must always take Romance influence on Basque as the default view, and we can only consider the reverse direction when there is good evidence for it. That's just reality. > Indeed, when I learned Spanish, my > understanding of was that it referred to any sort of (small) > flying/creeping insect. It was used by metaphoric (ironic) extension, in my > opinion, to apply to large animals, e.g., a horse or cow. Again, I > emphasize that that was the way that I learned the expression from those > around me. Sure, but Basque does not have anything to do with creepy-crawlies. > Furthermore, the extension of a word meaning "butterfly" to a class of > "flying insects" or to some other kind of flying objects that look like > more or less like butterflies would not be unusual, particularly if > speakers were no longer able to disambiguate the components of the compound > in question. But I know of no evidence for such a semantic development in Basque, and I don't know of much evidence for it in Romance, either. As for the alleged compounds, I stress again that the Basque words are *not* compounds, and indeed have no identifiable morphological structure at all. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Jan 25 19:49:05 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 14:49:05 EST Subject: Basque butterflies live! Message-ID: I am very happy to see the continued discussion of various Basque words for 'butterfly'. I intend to prepare an integrated treatment of where the evidence and the discussion have led, as far as I understand, but that will have to wait for late in February. Here I will merely mention some salient points which bear on the lines of reasoning, without citing again the Basque forms which we all have in our archives of these messages. And to clarify at the outset, Larry Trask's goal at the moment is something he defines very narrowly and precisely, as looking for native monomorphemic lexical items which are the best candidates to have been present in pre-Basque or ancient Basque (I don't remember which term to use here), approximately 2000 to 1700 years ago, a time at which one can distinguish at least many loans from Latin or Romance. That excludes all verbal roots, for example. The way Trask implements those goals, his (to me excessively strict) notions of evidence, not preponderance but restricted to certain kinds of evidence, lead him to exclude much relevant data. My goals are (as concerns Basque) to encourage explorations of its early stages, using careful linguistic techniques and archaeological etc. techniques as guides. My goals are (as concerns words for 'butterfly') to use the knowledge I have of these combined with what Trask has so generously provided us to provide a "best estimate" of which of those forms might with high probability go back to earlier Basque forms, whether those earlier Basque forms were ultimately borrowed or not. Here are the contributions to the topic that stand out for me: *** 1. Roz Frank just pointed to Basque scholarship which differs with Trask's view, in that words with initial /p-/ are not thereby automatically excluded from being considered as possibly ancient Basque. *** 2. I have noted in some of the extensive private communications Larry and I have had on 'butterfly' that Japanese permits expressive words with initial /p-/ such as /parapara/, while not allowing it in ordinary vocabulary and I think not in earlier loans from Chinese, for example. *** 3. Larry points to the tendencies of the L. dialect of Basque to have forms with initial /pin-/ or /pan-/ plus labial, as indicating that L. dialect forms for 'butterfly' must be innovated there because different in that dialect. Linguistic method does not require that conclusion. All we can say, much more conservatively, is that the ASPECT of the L. words for butterfly which begin with initial /pin-/ or /pan-/ plus labial may not be old, it could easily be innovated within L. dialects in accordance with their general tendencies. So it is quite legitimate to project backwards to possible (ONLY possible) earlier forms which lacked one or another of these characteristics. The fact that certain aspects COULD have been innovated within L. dialects does not prove they all were. Perhaps some partial resemblance of an earlier word for 'butterfly' to such L. dialect preferred templates led to their attraction all the way into the core of the template. So it is perfectly possible (though not provable) that L. dialect pinpirin < *pitil... (taking the rule backwards by removing the /n...n/ and by removing the reduplicated /p/; on /l/ and /r/ please see below). *** 4. Larry pointed out in private communication that ancient Basque *l became /r/, so he argues forms with /l/ cannot be ancient. On further questioning, he noted that some Basque /l/ does derive from some other kind of *l which might have been geminated or something (I am not quoting in any of this, simply repeating from memory, and some of this was in private communication so Larry would have to state this publicly in whatever words he finds most precise, I cannot do it for him.) If that is the case, then we could have the /r/ of the L. dialects going back to earlier simple /l/. That does not solve all of our problems, I mention this only to make it clear that the reasoning is, as so often, very complex, and conclusions not at all cut-and-dried, not even with the best linguistic techniques. All rediscovery of the past shares such dilemmas. *** 5. Larry pointed out in a recent public message that *t > Basque /tx/ is quite normal. This rather strongly supports the possibility at least that the quite prominent forms for 'butterfly' with /tx/ might once have had *t. (Larry did not mention this in our private communications, so far as I remember.) So we can consider the following not unreasonable as a tentative hypothesis for projecting backwards at least one sound change. pitxilota < *pitilota *** 6. Larry pointed to /txitxi/ 'chick' (again citing from memory, pardon if I got the form slightly wrong) as an exceptional item, standing out by a mile, not merely by being one of the few words for young of animals not formed with a derivational suffix, but also with its double voiceless stops, not fitting what Larry believes is the canonical form for earlier Basque. If however these supposed "exceptions" are gathered together, then /txitxi/ and /pitilota/ or /pitxilota/ may both be part of a group of expressives, which *did* allow exactly that canonical form. By not attempting to exclude so much, but attempting to find multiple clusters of similarly structured forms which may have been in earlier Basque, we at least avoid the risk of excluding that which truly *was* in earlier Basque. To be fair to Larry, it must be pointed out that he gives evidence that earlier Latin etc. loanwords with two voiceless stops in initial positions underwent changes, did not preserve them when brought in as loanwords. If this were shown also generally for loanwords which were expressives, I would concede that it would be a strong argument against assuming an ancient Basque *pitilota loanword. Hence the relevance of the items under 1. and 2. above. *** 7. Larry recently noted that quite a number of words, perhaps he was talking mostly about the 'butterfly' words, did not have identifiable morphemic components, that the suffixes were not early Basque, etc. etc. There has I think been some more discussion on some of these. But assuming Larry is correct about this, it then follows that the 'butterfly' words may be mostly monomorphemic, so on that criterion he cannot exclude them even from his own much more limited set of data which his own goals are seeking. (If monomorphemic, this would be fitting for loanwords whose internal morphology may not be transparent to speakers of a borrowing language.). *** 8. While my estimate is that indeed Greek *ptilota (Thanks to Steve Long for bringing this to our attention) is a very good candidate for the origin in an earlier stage of Basque of modern-day /pitxilota/ and many forms similar to it, I do not claim evidence for that, only lots of evidence which would be consistent with that. Quite a different matter altogether. Not a hypothesis to be discarded recklessly. *** 9. There is a great underestimation, among those who want sound laws to be exceptionless and want evidence always to be completely conclusive, of the degree of unexplained changes (called sometimes "irregular", but that usually means we simply don't yet know the rules). In my first message attempting a partial analysis of the Basque 'butterfly' words, I mentioned the fact that we cannot project backwards from modern English "sparrowgrass" to its actual origin "asparagus" because the word has been reformed. Note that it is a loanword which does not fit English morphology which has been reformed in this way. If we allow that among the Basque words for 'butterfly' many might have been reformed (including some in ways fully in accord with the preferences such as Larry Trask notes for L. dialects with /pinp-/ and /panp-/), then we certainly cannot exclude the possibility of reconstructing earlier Basque forms as the common origin of quite a range of modern Basque forms, if we are lucky enough to have a wide enough range of sources of evidence. Larry's enormous collection of Basque words for 'butterfly' gives us the chance of having such a wide enough range of evidence, and I hope we fully use it. Words for 'butterfly' in neighboring language families are also potentially relevant, whether or not the word is borrowed, and cannot be excluded a priori. Just so, we cannot by regular sound laws reconstruct both "asparagus" and "sparrowgrass" back to a common original form. But we can reconstruct them back to a common original form. In this case we have enough information to do so. In Basque we lack written records in sufficient quantity, but linguistic techniques should allow us to make some progress at least towards plausible hypotheses. *** 10. As yet another example of just how very different the numerous descendants of a *single original* may at first sight appear to be, I cite the various forms of the nursery rhyme which English children use: For the first half of the first line, the following: 1) Eine meine mine me 2) Eenie meenie minie mo 3) Meeny meeny miney mo 4) One-erzoll, two-erzoll, zickerzoll zan 5) 1-ery, 2-ery, ickery Ann 6) Hana mana mona mike 7) Ene tene mone mei 8) Yan tan tehtera pethera For the second half of the first line, the following (numbers match), with translations given where appropriate. As you can readily see, just as with "sparrowgrass", there need be no relation of meaning, the reformation is based on sound. 1) Und draust bist du (and you're out) 2) Catch a rooster by the toe 3) Cache ton poing derierre ton do (hide your thumb behind your back) 4) Bob-tail vinegar little tall tan 5) Fillisin follasy Nicholas John 6) Barcelona bona strike 7) Pastor lone bone strei (this is German, "pastor") 8) Pimp sethera lethera hovera dovera dick. The last line contains the Celtic Lake-district sheep-scoring numerals, argued by some to be the origin of all of the other versions. In Yarmouth, the last three are: "cothra hothra dic". Given this known example of actual historical descent, and similar examples on a smaller scale can be multiplied almost without limit in the annals of historical linguistics, it seems absurd to me to argue that the much more similar dialect variations in Basque words for 'butterfly' are absolutely not derivable from a much smaller number of common origins (i.e. much smaller than the 9 groupings in which Larry Trask supplied them to us). Not that they necessarily *do* go back to a small number of origins (perhaps in the extreme case seven groups of forms all going back to one origin, excluding the two obvious items derived from non-expressive vocabulary). But simply that this kind of change cannot be excluded absolutely, based on the kind of reasoning we have had presented to us. We cannot reject as possibilities of historical descent the kind of historical descent which we know *does* occur. So I hold out great hope that we will be able to reconstruct one or a few ancient Basque words for 'butterfly'. With a high level of justified confidence in our answer, though not absolute confidence. Sincerely, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jan 26 06:18:29 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 00:18:29 -0600 Subject: Basque butterflies In-Reply-To: <15092768341801@m-w.com> Message-ID: So then the American English spelling schmuck is a folk etymology? What are the proposed origins, then? [ moderator snip ] >The actual origin of Eastern Yiddish , a vulgar word for >"penis," has been much debated. >Jim Rader [ moderator snip ] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jan 25 18:40:03 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 18:40:03 -0000 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stefan Georg" Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2000 9:06 AM [PR previously] >>It is my understanding that oral consonants are articulated by children >>before nasal consonants. Is this incorrect in your view? [SG] >Yes, this is incorrect in my view. You will not repeat that keeping your >moputh shut and simply turn on your vocal cords ("/mmm/") is such a >difficult thing that it invariable comes after, say, /p/, /ts/ or /r/, will >you ? [PR asks] Aside from the idea that /mmmm/ is not a traditional syllable, is this, in fact, what studies of early childhood speech learning have documented? [SG] >A different question is, however, whether this very simple, let's >call it an "articulatory gesture", is really a "consonant". It might be >sensible to reserve this technical term for non-vocalic articulatory >gestures *when they form part of linguistically meaningful items*, which is >certainly not the case for infants who first try out their articulatory >tracts. >So, again, the nasal /m/ is articulated *very* early, and it's association >with whatever semantic content - done by the parents, of course - is an >artefact of adults fancying that the child is actually speaking to them. [PR] All well and good. But if we assume --- as we need to for this argument to cohere --- that the FIRST syllable produced by the child should be the one which the mother assigns to herself, then "*very* early" is just not early enough. [SG] >At this stage, the child is certainly *not* "using" "language"; it's babbling. >Babbling-research has established that, in phonetic terms, the sounds produced >by infants vary greatly in frequency: at the top of the list are /m/ and /b/ >alike, with the same frequency, followed by, in this order, /p/, /d/, /h/, >/n/, /t/, /g/, /k/, /j/, /w/, /s/, aso. (Locke, J.L.: Phonological >Acquisition and Change, NY: AP 1983). [PR] Where is the glottal stop in this list? [PR previously] >>All you have written is, of course, very plausible. [SG] >Yes, it very obviously is ;-) [PR previously] >>But --- and there is always a but, is there not? --- this does not really >>address my argument, I do not think. >>I am *not* maintaining that *mama is the early term for 'mother' but rather >>*ama. [SG] >Some societies conventionalize the fully reduplicated form /mama/, some >don't. Some languages do know initial labials, some don't (and among these, >some may allow for such a thing in a marked nursery term, some won't). Some >cultures chose to conventionalize /deda/ for "mother", reserving /mama/ for >"father". Some will conventionalize a one-syllable /ma/, some won't. When >it comes to the act of conventionalizing, which is to be kept sharply apart >from the "pre-speech-act" of babbling, the phonotactic rules of the >language the poor child is about to learn from now on, do play a role >(after all, the happy parents of a Tlinkit child do of course think that >their napper is talking Tlinkit to them, and not Abkhaz, so even when the >little one constantly babbles /mama/ they'll assume for convenience' sake >that it actually wanted to say /ama/ [for argument's sake I assume that >Tlinkit is one of the labialless languages of the American NW,. and that >/ama/ is "mother" there; if this is not the case, take any language, where >it is, and replace this example]). There may be other reasons, apart from >phonotactics, and in some individual cases they may be hard to tell. So >what ? [PR] Frankly, you are not too bad at childish babbling yourself! (:-O) Languages lacking initial labials are fairly rare. And while your proposal might be of some interest in connection with them, IE does *not* lack initial labials; and we find the word *Hama. Would you propose that *Hama is a loanword into IE from a language lacking (initial) labials? [PR previously] >>Larry brushes by this difference but I am hoping you will not. [SG] >This is not brushing by. The word is "linguistics" (;-). [PR] Excuse. The phrase is "Ralf-Stefan's understanding of the application of linguistic principles to this problem". [PR previously] >>While *mama may be a perfectly plausible child's word for 'mother', the >>frequently found form *?ama can, with an implausible level of difficulty, >>be derived from it. Do you not agree? [SG] >Of course, such words may change, once they have become conventionalized >items of a language, they may be subject to any systematic change of the >sound structure of this language. They may, however, and this is the point, >why such terms shouldn't be allowed to play a decisive role in any >classificatory work, escape this, either remaining stable in spite of >sound-changes in other parts of the lexicon, or be innovated over and over >again to maintain their emotional connotations (or, for that matter, in the >case of imitative words, their iconicity). [PR] Just when do you believe *?ama was "conventionalized"? [SG] >PS: Shoot, "mother" is /tla/ in Tlinkit, so think up a different example ... [PR] Of course, this fact is completely immaterial to the discussion. 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 Jan 25 18:49:51 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 18:49:51 -0000 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stefan Georg" Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2000 9:17 AM [PR previously] >>Unless you are arguing that *mama almost invariably is produced *first*, >>and that the mother is inclined to accept the baby's *first* "word" as >>referring to herself, then it is equally likely that the mother will >>reinforce *baba or *papa as a self-designation --- a very rare occurrence. [SG] >No, Pat, this is independent of what a given child utters "first" to its >given mother. [PR] This is truly a Grimm explanation. *What* child babbled /ma/ first so that its pristine syllable could be adopted by its mother as a self-designation, and with what authority did she insist (conventionalize) the syllable so that all subsequent mothers had to accept her choice? [SG] >Language is social convention, and even if in Arkansas >children are so linguistically gifted that they utter /tata/ or /kaka/ long >before they manage to produce the enormously difficult nasals, their >parents won't have the power to change the *conventionalization* of /mama/ >= "mother" all on their own. They may well tell everyone that their child >"said" /takata/ long before /mama/, and they may even decide that in their >family from now on, /takata/ "means" "mother". Why not ? But it won't have >any consequences for the speech-community on the whole, which has >conventionalized "mummy" and the like long ago. [PR] I was not born in Arkansas, educated here, or have I lived most of my life here, so gentle gibes against Arkansas and Arkansans are absolutely without interest to me. 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 Jan 26 06:01:11 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 07:01:11 +0100 Subject: Basque In-Reply-To: Message-ID: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote: > 'cartwheel', 'wheel' >This is from 'cart' + *. The phonology is absolutely regular: >* --> * --> * --> * -> . > 'small round bread roll or pastry' >This is from 'bread', and again the phonology is perfect: >* --> * --> * --> * --> . 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 ? Of course, -b(i) [?], -d(i), -g(i) compounded before initial vowel give -t, which then becomes harder to explain. Maybe an initial vowel was formerly preceded by a glottal stop in Basque (which isn't the case now), and we might suppose that the fortis variant of /?/ became /t/: begi + *?ile > beg?ile > be??ile > betile ardi + *?ile > ard?ile > ar??ile > artile. > 'fist' >This is from the archaic 'forearm', recorded in Oihenart in the 17th >century, and again the phonology is perfect: > * --> (In old compounds -i and (usually) -u are dropped, while -a/-o/-e become -a-). I wonder about the motivation for that last change. Could it have gone through a stage */@/ (schwa), which later became Basque /a/? So, in this case: uko [*uggo] + bil > uk at bil > ukabil. >Now, the common word 'round' looks like a reduplication. Certainly >an original * would develop regularly to , since /l/ > /r/ >between vowels is a regular change. Although not necessarily between i..i, where it might have been expected to remain as palatal /l^/. >But this admittedly leaves that medial >/i/ unaccounted for, and opinion is divided here. Some posit an original >*, with an interfix for phonological or expressive reasons. >Others favor a purely expressive formation, consisting of an arbitrary >sequence plus *. A third possibility would be that the item was originally *bili (redup. *bili-bili), and the final vowel was lost. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From edsel at glo.be Wed Jan 26 11:31:59 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 12:31:59 +0100 Subject: Basque Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Monday, January 24, 2000 12:51 PM > Roz Frank writes: >> (*?)"knot", whose meaning is not always entirely >> clear. > As explained above, the first two of these are transparent and regular. The > third is obscure: very likely it does contain *, but its first element > is opaque. [Ed] What about *gorda-bil, where the first element could be a Romance loan (< corde, cuerda), i.e. coiled up rope? Ed. From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Thu Jan 27 08:29:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 08:29:00 GMT Subject: Basque Message-ID: In a nutshell: What about being 'bili' a loan from Gaulish? PIE *kwel- > Cel *kwi:l- > Gaul *pi:l >!> bask. pil/bil cf PIE *penque > Cel *kwinkwe > Gaul *pimpetos (ordinal) Mit freundlichen Gr??en Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover. From ALDERSON at mathom.xkl.com Fri Jan 28 23:46:50 2000 From: ALDERSON at mathom.xkl.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 15:46:50 -0800 Subject: Origins of Indo-Aryan Message-ID: Dear Readers, Yesterday evening I sent out a message with the subject line "Origins of Indo-Aryan" which, in retrospect, I ought not to have allowed on the list. We are not here for the purpose of political or religious commentary, and I apologize for exposing our list to the temptation. I have already received a few responses to this posting; I will forward them to the original author. Those who are interested in pursuing this topic should find a different forum than the Indo-European list. My apologies to all concerned. Rich Alderson list owner and moderator From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Sat Jan 29 00:43:31 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 19:43:31 -0500 Subject: Goodbye for now In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear all, I want to thank everyone for the conversation. I regret that I'm going to have to unsubscribe; I'm finding that I am taking too much time out from my dissertation to respond to messages on this list. The temptation is just too great. I'll probably resubscribe again when I'm ready to start organizing some volunteer efforts to put expired-copyright texts about the IE languages online (hopefully this coming summer, with any luck at all). If you decide to work on something like this and you're needing web space to post stuff, drop me an email. I still have a few posts which haven't made it to the list yet; if you want to respond to me personally about those posts, it's OK with me if you do so thru private email. Bye for now, --Sean \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From maxdashu at LanMinds.Com Fri Jan 28 02:18:47 2000 From: maxdashu at LanMinds.Com (Max Dashu) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 18:18:47 -0800 Subject: Frisian In-Reply-To: <003001bf6845$40ffc7c0$0803703e@edsel> Message-ID: 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. Max Dashu From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Jan 28 02:44:30 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 21:44:30 EST Subject: Sumerian bird names Message-ID: A sumerologist who lived and fished for six months in the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates told me in personal communication. If you want to follow up on it, remind me the last week in February, I'm gone on vacation tomorrow morning. Lloyd Anderson >What "bird names in Sumerian are the same as in the present day"?! What >could you be thinking of? What possible source could validate this comment? >Please provide some specifics, if you have any. >Gordon Whittaker >Institut f|r Ethnologie >Theaterplatz 15 >37073 Gvttingen >Germany From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Jan 28 02:44:25 2000 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 21:44:25 EST Subject: "is the same as" Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Larry Trask writes: >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. Why? Because that is what most of us do in ordinary life, and as was established long ago in these discussions, it is what Trask himself does (or did). Direct quotations of his writings demonstrated that. Because people do, perfectly normally, and readily understood by each other, apply the "same" language name to varieties which of necessity do differ. But past a certain degree of difference, OR when certain cultural-political factors intervene, they usually insist that two varieties are not the same language. It is simply what people in fact do. Therefore what they mean by "is the same language" is in fact not a transitive relation. As linguists, we normally are not supposed to be prescriptive. We cannot change the fact that people use this as a non-transitive relation. It *might* be "better" not to (in Trask's view, explicitly), but we might give up much of the flexibility and usefulness of language if we tried to insist on definitions made by logicians, instead of definitions made in practice in the real world. Just as with the biological circles (ring species) mentioned by Stanley Friesen, where neighbors interbreed but the ends of the circle, though in contact, do not, which seems a paradox, so there are paradoxes in using the terms "is the same language as". That is no argument against the usefulness of either "is the same species as" or "is the same language as", as these are *actually* used. The paradoxes are rare, and we deal with them as special cases, sometimes we learn from them that they are more normal and less special than we had thought... What one person thinks is "better" is also not necessarily what one's interlocutors may be saying, nor can they be refuted by attacking something which they did not say, as was attempted to exceeding lengths on this list earlier. We should really stop discussing this, and accept that Trask does not want others to use the term "is the same language" in a gradient-edge and non-transitive sense, and that others do use the term that way and will most likely continue to do so (they may find it useful to do so, without thereby committing any fallacies whatsoever). Discussions tend to be fruitless if one tries to reply to someone while using the *same* term they used in a different sense than they used it, because then the propositions being analyzed by the conversation partners are not even the same propositions, and pretending that they are the same propositions can only misrepresent the conversation partner. Lloyd Anderson [ Moderator's note: I think this topic is thoroughly argued out now. I will accept no further postings on it. --rma ] From stevegus at aye.net Fri Jan 28 03:53:37 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 22:53:37 -0500 Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? Message-ID: ECOLING at aol.com writes: > I was just recently contemplating the augment *e- > which precedes certain completed-action verbs in > Indic and in Greek, Weeeell, you shouldna' be a-doin' that. It's dangerous, y'hear? > If not, then must one take it as an inheritance from PIE, > lost elsewhere? > it occurs to me to wonder about German > ge- of past participles, > which (with loss of /g-/) shows up also in the "e" of the English form > "enough", related to German "genug", > from o-grade of a verb *nek- 'to reach, attain'. > What is the origin of that prefix in German? That the g- in that prefix is truly g- and not, say, an originally Anglo-Saxon way of writing initial /y/, is shown by the German dialect versions -kenuch- of the same word. The conventional wisdom is that ge- (and that lingering feature of American English, a prefixed a- before a present participle) represents *kom, meaning -with- or -together-, here weakened in meaning to a merely intensive role. It does seem to be a West Germanic feature that was mostly lost in Norse, though common enough in Anglo-Saxon and German. It would seem to be an unlikely counterpart to the Greek and Sanskrit augment, since that augment attaches itself to conjugated forms, not participles. It can, however, appear in the Gothic inflected -passive- verbs, e.g. -gabairada- (was born) from -bairan-; but the Gothic passive at least resembles the weak past participle, so this may not be significant. -- Sella fictili sedeo Versiculos dum facio. From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Fri Jan 28 05:51:07 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 00:51:07 -0500 Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? In-Reply-To: <7d.50441d.25bf8c3e@aol.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 25 Jan 2000 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > I was just recently contemplating the augment *e- which precedes > certain completed-action verbs in Indic and in Greek, and which, I > gather from one correspondent, is usually taken as an inheritance from > some common stage, one of several manifestations of a close > Greek-Vedic relationship. > If one takes that point of view, then it implies a Greek-Indic common > innovation compared with PIE. Is that branch on a tree supportable? > (differs from UPenn, right?) > If not, then must one take it as an inheritance from PIE, lost elsewhere? Represented in a flattened form, the tree computed by Ringe, Warnow and Taylor is as follows: (Anat (Toch ((Ital Celt) {(Gk Arm) (BS IIr)}))) (Notice that I've left Gmc out in this version; in earlier versions it was grouped with BS and IIr, but the placement of Gmc has turned out be a bigger problem tham expected.) The augment is found in Greek, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian (and Phrygian, which wasn't included in the tree). There is no evidence for the augment prefix outside of the grouping which I have enclosed in the curled brackets. Thus, the augment could have been innovation in proto-Gk-Arm-BS-IIr, and then have been lost in Balto-Slavic. A morphological loss of this kind is not surprising. > it occurs to me to wonder about German ge- of past participles, which > (with loss of /g-/) shows up also in the "e" of the English form > "enough", related to German "genug", from o-grade of a verb *nek- 'to > reach, attain'. What is the origin of that prefix in German? > Is it just barely conceivable that it might be related to the Sanskrit > and Greek augment, and that it began with a laryngeal? (I am fully > aware that affixes do not always follow the same sound changes as do > roots - but also very hesitant to posit an otherwise unproven > irregularity of sound change, so would want some pretty good > demonstrations of cognate functions, at least ones which could develop > from a common origin. I think the functions of German and of the > Greek and Sanskrit augment, in completive contexts, are highly > similar. > Could the origin have been something like this? (or with a different > vowel, reduced to /e/ as for many other German unstressed verbal > prefixes, then generalized ...?) > *He- > ?? > Pardon, I am not a Germanicist and have no immediate access to > something that would tell me. Pokorny's Comparative Germanic Grammar > pp.205-206 states a relation to Latin co(m)-, but such a hypothesis is > to me much more improbable on semantic grounds. In this view, I would > assume, the /gV-/ prefixes gradually spread from their point of origin > at the expense of other prefixes. Perfectly possible. Was that > hypothesis posited long ago for simply for lack of anything better, or > because shows up only in some of the western Germanic languages > (OHG, English, etc.)? Or is there substantial support behind it, such > as details of the gradual stages of infiltration from Latin? Your speculation that there might be a connection between the augment and Germanic ge- is a natural thing to wonder. I know because I wondered this myself, but when I asked Don Ringe about it, he said that there is no connection. Actually, you are in luck, because I can quote the email he sent to me on 27 May 1997 (I'm sure he wouldn't mind me quoting this private email): (I asked something like, "I guess there no connection between Gmc. ge- and the augment?") > Sean-- Right, none whatever. The "augment" (= marker of past tenses) > has clear cognates in Indo-Iranian, Armenian, and Phrygian, but not > elsewhere. The fact that there are no clear cognates in Anatolian or > Tocharian (or Italic or Celtic, for that matter) could mean that it > isn't PIE and was just an innovation of the central group; that would > still mean that pre-Germanic once had it, though, and lost it. > German ge- is < PGmc. *ga- (cf. Gothic ga-); actually appears to be > cognate with Latin com-/con-/co-, to judge from equations like Goth. > gamains = Lat. commu:nis (and it *was* an i-stem in PGmc.: note > *gamainiz --> pre- OE *gamainijaz > *gaema:ni: (where "ae" is the low > front vowel) > OE gemae:ne, with umlaut) and loan-translations like late > Lat. compa:nio: --> Goth. gahlaiba (pa:nis = hlaifs 'bread'). The > phonology is screwed up, though; in particular, it looks like Verner's > Law has applied to a word- initial unstressed syllable, which is frankly > weird. 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. -Also, if there were a laryngeal, it would make its presence felt in Greek and Indo-Iranian. It's too late in the evening for me to go digging thru my notes, but a laryngeal would affect the vowel quality in Greek, and if I remember right, a larygeal usually comes out at *a in Indo-Iranian. I'm not sure what happens to a word-initial larygeal before a vowel in IIr (I do seem to remember that word-initial augment + HC- > a:C, i.e. where the laryngeal belongs to the stem; but I'm not sure if HaC- would give aC- or a:C-). -As Don alludes to, the meaning of *ga- in Germanic has changed over time (consider the German nouns _Gebirge_, _Geschirr_, etc., where the meaning of ge- is "collective", not "perfective"). . It appears that an early meaning was very much like that of Latin co(m)-, roughly "together". If you want to claim that *ga- and co(m)- are cognate, the semantics at least will work out. However, as Don points out, the ordinary phonology doesn't work out for co(m)- to be cognate with *ga- (PIE short *o _would_ give PGmc *a, so the vowel checks out; but the consonant doesn't work.) I'm a little surprised that Don accepts the suggestion that co(m)- might be cognate with *ga-; the claim looks weak to me. It's true that *ga- is often used in forming calques from Latin words with co(m)-; but this doesn't strike me as a particularly good argument that the two are cognate. You can certainly use a word or affix in forming a calque without the word or affix being cognate with anything in the language that you're calquing on. Personally, I think we need to say that we just don't know where Gmc. ge- comes from. In any case, it definitely can't be cognate with the augment, because there would be much worse phonological problems with that claim than with the claim that Gmc. *ga- is cognate with com-. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From edsel at glo.be Fri Jan 28 17:24:03 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 18:24:03 +0100 Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2000 12:31 AM > I was just recently contemplating the augment *e- > which precedes certain completed-action verbs in > Indic and in Greek, and which, I gather from one > correspondent, is usually taken as an inheritance from > some common stage, one of several manifestations > of a close Greek-Vedic relationship. [Ed Selleslagh] I am no specialist in this matter, but I'm also wondering about the following: 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? > If one takes that point of view, then it implies a Greek-Indic > common innovation compared with PIE. > Is that branch on a tree supportable? (differs from UPenn, right?) > If not, then must one take it as an inheritance from PIE, > lost elsewhere? > It occurs to me to wonder about German > ge- of past participles, > which (with loss of /g-/) shows up also in the "e" of the English form > "enough", related to German "genug", > from o-grade of a verb *nek- 'to reach, attain'. > What is the origin of that prefix in German? [Ed] And in Dutch, Afrikaans and Low-German (and Old English). On the other hand, Dutch Saxon dialects don't use it (or lost it? - like English). BTW, if the verb begins with certain prefixes (be-, ver-, ont-/ent-, zer-....) there is no ge-prefix in any of these lgs. > Is it just barely conceivable that it might be related to > the Sanskrit and Greek augment, > and that it began with a laryngeal? > (I am fully aware that affixes do not always follow > the same sound changes as do roots - but also very > hesitant to posit an otherwise unproven irregularity > of sound change, so would want some pretty good > demonstrations of cognate functions, at least ones > which could develop from a common origin. > I think the functions of German and of the > Greek and Sanskrit augment, in completive contexts, > are highly similar. > Could the origin have been something like this? > (or with a different vowel, reduced to /e/ as for > many other German unstressed verbal prefixes, > then generalized ...?) > *He- [Ed] Note also the e- verbal prefix in Basque (the 'infinitives' are actually participles, like - vice versa however - in Modern Greek). Phonetically, the evolution ke > he > e is perfectly possible and normal in Basque. There is still some discussion whether initial k or similar existed in PB, but it isn't totally excluded any longer. This makes the question all the more interesting, doesn't it? > ?? > Pardon, I am not a Germanicist and have > no immediate access to something that would tell me. > Pokorny's Comparative Germanic Grammar > pp.205-206 states a relation to Latin co(m)-, > but such a hypothesis is to me much more improbable on > semantic grounds. In this view, I would assume, > the /gV-/ prefixes gradually spread from their point of > origin at the expense of other prefixes. Perfectly possible. > Was that hypothesis posited long ago for simply for > lack of anything better, or because shows up only in some > of the western Germanic languages (OHG, English, etc.)? > Or is there substantial support behind it, > such as details of the gradual stages of infiltration from Latin? [Ed] That 'Latin explanation' looks like the result of the lack of a better idea. Isn't the ge- prefix likely to be much older than the contact with Latin? Anyway, this problem is extremely intriguing to me. > Best wishes, > Lloyd Anderson Ed. Selleslagh. From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Jan 28 04:04:24 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 23:04:24 EST Subject: PIE and Uralic (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics) Message-ID: In a message dated 1/27/00 3:26:03 AM, anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi wrote: <> Now I have somewhat earlier dates here for the existence of proto-Uralic (Dolukhanov 1996) -- 10,000 - 7,000BP -- citing (Hajdu 1975). I also have it extending all the way to the Black Sea and eastern Caucasus to the Urals. Do you have newer data? It appear here that they are giving a 5000BC date (consistent with your 4000BC OR EARLIER). 5000BC is a very early date for PIE in this area - even for Renfrew. I wrote: <> anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi also replied: <> Without advocating too much, let me suggest that you might want to familarize yourself with the thinking that says that the first (but not the last) expansion of PIE was connected to the spread of agriculture. (This view at least at this early date is neither anti-migratory nor anti-diffusionist - quite the contrary.) This view would have a very early IE language hitting the Dnieter, Bug and Dneiper between 4500 and 4000BC. Since under this hypothesis, the time of the sound changes in early IE is relative (I guess they are 'relative' in any view) it might be possible your largynals can still be present. You wrote: <> Well, I don't know that the earliest daughters of PIE have been identified or dated to the degree that you should automatically rule them out. The evidence that I've seen so far woulds suggest there is some leeway in the dating - although much earlier than 4000BC would be quite tricky. You wrote: <> How you identify the difference between PIE and the IE daughters in this region - I think - would be interesting. The specific attributes of daughters in that region might be of value to IEists, especially if they retain laryngals. I am not sure what IE daughter language is supposed to have been spoken in the Ukraine at such an early time. <> The vocabulary you mention is both quite basic (it would be at 4000+BC) and I believe you said quite extensive - I forget, hundreds of words? Consider that the retained presence of hundreds of basic cognates from PIE in a language that was attested when? - well, for 6000+ years would probably entitle Uralic to a special place on the Swadesh chart - possibly better than some IE languages. Perhaps more importantly, it would seem like Uralic might have been in the process of being Indo-Europeanized. The neolithic hypothesis needs to include the idea that many pre-existing mesolithic cultures were assimilated, often over a long period of time - the archaeology demands this. I can't think of a better way to start than by a transfer of hundreds of basic vocabulary items. So perhaps it was not simply contact or prestige, but the appeal of the neolithic or some of its products that encouraged the borrowings you find. I wrote: << PIE originates just south of where Uralic originates? So that Uralic did not expand south because PIE speakers were already there? Or did somebody move in? >> anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi replied: << But yes, p-IE probably originated south of p-U, and Uralic has probably never expanded south... >> Is there any reason why this borrowing could not have been done west-east? >From the direction of the Balkans, the Danube or of Poland? I mean are you presuming IE speakers at this point could only make contact with PIE or early IE in the south? Renfrew already has early IE at the Danube and moving north and east at this point. What or who would have come between the two regions at that point in time? You wrote: <> Okay, so please follow me here. If p-U and PIE are both at their place of origin "4000BC or before" one just north or south of the other - one would think they would have been in some way related or there would have been contact between the parents of these two unrelated languages - suggesting that perhaps one was intrusive. (Can a language be intrusive in its own homeland?) Since you find these PIE elements as definite loans happening at a definite time - might that not suggest that PIE entered the area - or the loans would have happened earlier - in the proto-proto-period? As Jens mentioned in his elegantly fair message: <> If the date maybe in fact be 5000BC, then another question comes to mind. I remember very early dates for agricultural evidence along the Caucasus. What is the archaeological evidence regarding the earliest dirt farming or domestication in its proto-region or after its proto-period? Regards, Steve Long From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Fri Jan 28 10:14:43 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 10:14:43 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de wrote:- > Of cause, resemblances between two langs/Protolangs alone do not prove > borrowing, let alone any direction of of it. Steve Long is quite right in > asking "I MUST also find out someday why Uralic would need to borrow words > for water, move, bring and wash from IE." If a language has been through a period of the type of phonetic change that causes an excessive homophone load, then its speakers will be tempted to take just about any word with just about any meaning from neigbors' languages to avoid ambiguity in speech. E.g. Persian took the word {wa} = and" from Arabic. From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Fri Jan 28 11:12:03 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 13:12:03 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <200001270925.p53@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, Hans Holm wrote: > "Loans"? That appears as an extremely narrowed view. > Of cause, resemblances between two langs/Protolangs alone do not prove > borrowing, let alone any direction of of it. There is a misunderstanding here. We are -not- dealing with random phono-semantic look-alikes between Proto-U and Proto-IE. Instead, there is a substantial amount of thoroughly argumented loan etymologies (for details, one should refer to the publications of Jorma Koivulehto). Besides, the etymologies precisely -prove- that the direction of loaning was IE > U and not vice versa. This is because the Proto-U form is predictable from the Proto-IE form, but not the other way round. Given the phonological structure of P-U (which differed radically from P-IE), it is predictable that e.g. P-IE *kwelH- was nativized as P-U *kulki- and P-IE *wed- as P-U *weti. But there is no reason why e.g. P-U *kulki- would become P-IE *kwelH- (and not *kulk- or something like that). > Additionally to the possibility of loans it must be found out wether the > resemblances could be due to > - only chance (about 2 to 8 %, decreasing e.g. with word-length), > - common origin. It has already been found out. As for common origin, it is not possible to discredit semantically and phonologically natural loan etymologies by replacing them with Nostratic speculations. There have been multiple attempts to relate IE and U genetically, and all of them have failed. Of course, it is impossible to -prove- (in the strict sense of the word) that the lexical similarities are not due to common genetic origin. But then, it is impossible to disprove -any- proposed genetic relationship. 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. Chance correspondeces are naturally another matter. However, given that there are only about 300 semantically and phonologically credible P-U etymologies, and these contain at least 30 proto-IE loans, I'd say that chance correspondence is ruled out. One also has to bear in mind that the U languages contain substantial amounts of later loan words of varying age (eg. proto-/pre-Baltic, proto/pre-Germanic, proto/pre-Aryan, proto-Iranian); this makes it natural to assume that contacts between U and IE were possible at a still earlier date (i.e., when at least the former still was a proto-language). - Ante Aikio From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Jan 28 06:51:03 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 00:51:03 -0600 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Is there any lexical substrate (from an unknown source) common to Uralic and any IE languages? e.g. between Uralic (or its branches) and Germanic/Balto-Slavic (ot their sub-branches)? What was the farther western boundary of Uralic speakers? Does it correspond to historically known boundaries between Saami and Scandinavian, & Estonian et al. and Baltic languages? Or was Uralic once spoken in S. Scandinavian and farther west along the southern Baltic? [ moderator snip ] >To be more precise: the region between Volga and Urals is the usual >theory these days, although some suggest more fanciful >scenarios. Lexical substrate suggests that the Siberian U languages >(Khanty, Manysi, Samoyedic) have moved to the current areas from Europe >(e.g., roughly 75% (!) of the proto-Samoyedic lexicon is without >a credible etymology). A strong lexical substrate from an unknown language >seems to exist in Saamic too; as for Finnic, the case is not as clear. [ moderator snip ] > - Ante Aikio Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Fri Jan 28 12:00:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 12:00:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: 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! Mit freundlichen Gr?szen Hans J Holm - - et monere et moneri - - From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Fri Jan 28 11:59:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 11:59:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: >Consequently, we cannot tell from the form of an IE loanword in Uralic >whether it was borrowed before or after the separation of Anatolian >from the rest. >-- that, I think, is a fair statement. .. I agree; but I think it would be helpful in this discussion to read Austerlitz and all the following literature on this topic. Or, just to start with, the citations in Anttila 89:164. Mit freundlichen Gr?szen Hans J Holm - - et monere et moneri - - From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Jan 28 04:37:14 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 23:37:14 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: In a message dated 1/27/00 10:56:07 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- we're talking about the WORD. If the word was borrowed or invented _before_ PIE split up, it would develop according to the usual sound laws for each of the daughter languages. If introduced afterwards, it would not. What is difficult about this?>> What is difficult is that you continue to avoid my question. I'll ask it again: How do you know that the SPECIFIC sound changes in the wheel word happened at the time of dispersal? How do you know that those changes didn't happen some time well after dispersal? And how do you know the wheel was not introduced in the intervening period? So far I've gotten no answer from you that justifies saying that the wheel word HAD to be introduced before dispersal. Here's someone elsewith more credibility than I have saying it : "It depends on whether there *had* been any relevant sound changes in the intervening period, and in general we can only establish *relative* dates for sound changes, if we're lucky (many times not even that)." Here's the chronology. PIE disperses. The sound changes you see in the wheel word have not occurred yet. The wheel word is introduced to most of the daughters. Then afterwards the sound changes occur. I'm not saying this is right. But you haven't yet given me a reason why it is wrong. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Jan 28 04:58:44 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 23:58:44 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 1/27/00 11:19:14 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote wrote: <<-- those changes were not confined to those words, of course. Eg., the PIE *k ==> Germanic 'h' transition is characteristic. Hence *kmtom (100) ==> hundrad (100), or many other transitions of this kind.>> 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 PIE dispersal. Also with regard to the sound changes in the other group of wheel words (Latin, rota; Lith, ratas; OHG, rod; Ir, roth - cf. Skt, ratha) consider what Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote -if you might have missed it: <<...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.>> Consider that this is at least some evidence that the wheel word is not PIE but pre-Celt - BASED on the sound changes suggested above. So once again what you've said so far does not force the conclusion that the wheel word was introduced before PIE dispersed. Regards, Steve Long From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Jan 28 06:36:20 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 00:36:20 -0600 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <17.100fef8.25c16c0e@aol.com> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] I get the impression that the word goes back to a root meaning "round", giving rise to a set of secondary roots *ker-, (s)ker- "to bend", root of "circle" [cw] *kwel- "to revolve", root of "cycle", "wheel" [cw] *bhel- listed as "to blow, inflate, puff up" --which makes sense-- but why not influeced by *kwel- in derivatives such as ball In any case, all of these roots, with the possible exception of *wegh-, would seem to go back before the invention of the wheel [snip] >-- PIE *kwekwlom (pl. kwekwleha) -- wheel >>From which: >Old English: hweogol (note characteristic Germanic *k ==> h) >Sanskrit: cakra >Greek: kuklo >Tocharian: kukal ('wagon') >etc. >PIE *hwergh -- wheel >Hittite: hurki >Tocharian: yerkwanto this looks as if it could be cognate with *kwekwl-o- "circle" [cw], if /kw/ > /hw/ & /l/ > /r/ >PIE *rotho -- wheel Watkins gives *ret- "to roll, run" >Plus, of course, PIE *ueghnos, 'wagon', *uoghos, 'wagon' and the related >*ueghitlom, 'vehicle', which produce: Watkins gives *wegh- "to go, transport in a vehicle" Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From edsel at glo.be Fri Jan 28 18:05:46 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 19:05:46 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2000 10:19 AM >> X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >> You wrote: > <>> branch of Indo-European (Indo-Iranian, Hellenic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, >>> Italic, and Tocharian)is that the word was borrowed when PIE was still a >>> unity. Unless the word was borrowed when PIE was a unity, then there is no >>> other way to account for this widespread occurrence in the family.>> >> Well the wheel is one way, isn't it? I mean the actual wheel. Like the >> computer or the telephone or the automobile. That would account for the >> word being so widespread, wouldn't it? I certainly don't see any geographic >> or other necessity that would make it difficult. > -- we're talking about the WORD. If the word was borrowed or invented > _before_ PIE split up, it would develop according to the usual sound laws for > each of the daughter languages. > If introduced afterwards, it would not. What is difficult about this? > In point of fact, there's no question that the first eventuality -- the word > for "wheel" being present before the dispersal of PIE -- is what actually > happened. [Ed Selleslagh] Actually various words, as you state in your next mail. But: 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. 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. Such a hypothesis also leads to a - possibly not reconcilable - dating of the synchronous spread of both the technology and the word(s). Ed. From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Fri Jan 28 11:58:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 11:58:00 GMT Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: Steve Long wrote >then how would that word have passed into non-IE Near East languages? .. Who maintains that? Perhaps you misunderstood me saying "of course the word is older"? But I ended with the meaning 'round-round' as the assumed original meaning giving the motive for the labelling of the wheel. So *wheel* would refer to the _form_, +rotHa- to a _function_ of the wheel. Mit freundlichen Gr??en Hans J. Holm, D-30629 Hannover From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Fri Jan 28 12:32:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 12:32:00 GMT Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: SG>>>But: the use for wheel seems to be specific IE. SG>>Not really. Gamqrelidze and Ivanov quote Sumerian gigir, Hebrew SG>>gilga:l, galgal, Georgian borbal, gorgal, "wheel" or "chariot". SG>And there's Sino-Tibetan *golo. After all these additions I try to summarize by two interpretations: 1. With the meaning 'wheel,chariot' it can be assumed as a cultural "Wanderwort". 2. With the meaning 'round' (often redublicated) it seems to be a universal. Mit freundlichen Gr?szen Hans J Holm - - et monere et moneri - - From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Jan 28 08:26:48 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 03:26:48 EST Subject: Peripheral promotes "common innovation" ? Message-ID: >ECOLING at aol.com writes: >if major changes are taken as going through a number of stages >in the process of "drift". -- that's often the case. Eg., when two sounds collapse into a single one, it often creates lexical or morphological ambiguities, which in turn require other changes. >BECAUSE WE CAN DETECT THE TIME THEY TAKE FROM THEIR ORIGIN AT THEIR CORE >UNTIL THEY REACH THEIR FARTHEST EXTENTS -- actually, it's rare to be able to precisely date this sort of thing -- relatively, yes, precisely, no. Satemization is a classic example. One of the rare instances when we _can_ date sound shifts is the first bunch distinguishing proto-Germanic, which occurred after the borrowing of some technical vocabulary to do with ironworking from an early form of Celtic (which means it had to be after about 700 BCE). That's valuable because it's surprising those changes were so late; without that information, they would have been assumed to be much earlier. >That is, because the groups at the edges do not have genetically >related dialects on all sides of them, matters which were really >dialect-area phenomena, interpreted as common innovations on >nodes on a tree, will tend to segment off the outermost areas first? -- what happens is that the peripheral dialects, especially if the language-group is expanding rapidly, tend to become isolated from developments in the core. The archaism of say, Baltic, vs. a vs. say, Indo-Iranian, is partly due to this. Or for that matter, in a much milder way, American vs. British Standard English. From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Jan 27 20:04:46 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 20:04:46 -0000 Subject: Making IE materials available [was Re: IE etymological dictionary] Message-ID: I would be particularly interested in data rather than books on-line or in CDROM. Books one can get from a book shop (ironic laughter!) but raw data in a searchable form is much more difficult to find. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Jan 27 20:25:23 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 20:25:23 -0000 Subject: Northwest IE attributes Message-ID: Sean said: > So, what I'm saying is that the IE family is such that a tree > representation of the family is possible; and since this is the more > restructive formalism, it is the one we should choose. Thank you, Sean, for a full and clear (and patient!) response. Allow me to blunder further into an area where I probably should hesitate to tread. I guess I would reword my initial posting to say that an either-or between a wave model or a tree model obscures the evidence; and either model has implications for the history of PIE (or IE dialects) which we may not wish to make. A tree model implies a separation of branches to a degree which may at times be untrue - the status of Baltic between Germanic and Slavonic seems to indicate that. I am sure that a purely wave model has its inadequacies as well. Hence my preference for a spectrum with fuzzy groupings within it, with all the historic implications that go with that! Sean also said: >The wave representation of a tree will have >the special property that all of the set boundaries will be nested: you >won't get any overlapping lines. Wave models in general do allow >overlapping lines; we can define trees as that subset of wave models where >there are no overlapping lines. Pardon me if I'm wrong - but isn't the pattern of isoglosses in IE precisely a set of overlapping lines, like spokes in a wheel? I know there is a debate about the nature and choice of isoglosses, but there are so many that cut every which way, that I find myself compelled to believe the dialects remained in contact, which would allow wave phenomena - which happen, whether we like it or not, across any area where speech is spoken. So I find belief in a system of separated branches difficult, and therefore resist too strong a stress on the tree model. Peter From edsel at glo.be Fri Jan 28 17:39:34 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 18:39:34 +0100 Subject: Refining what trees show Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2000 4:05 PM > We often make much too little use of the capabilities of visual diagrams. > Choices in these do have strong implications for our thinking. > [snip] [Ed Selleslagh] Mr. Moderator: Shouldn't a generally accepted and readable picture format be allowed on this list, e.g. *.GIF, which is readable by all systems (PC, Mac) and internet software, and which allows a serious compression so that files can be pretty short. The graphic, non-verbal communication can be very important in matters like these: e.g. family trees. Pure text isn't really capable of rendering lots of subtleties and belongs to another age, and I am not speaking only about computers. I am NOT pleading for a fancy all-graphic type of communication as is fashionable, because that yields grossly bloated files, and compatibility problems because of the very different types and versions of hardware and software used by the members. Only for a minimalist graphic extension that everybody can at least read/visualize. I would appreciate it if you would publish this message and ask members if they have any objections. Kind regards, Ed. Selleslagh [ Moderator's reply: I have no simple way to look at the content of any binary file sent to these lists: The system on which they are run is *strictly* 7-bit ASCII, which often causes me a problem with text which is not MIME-encoded (and I have taken to keeping a printout of the Windows character set from 128 to 255 (octal 200 to 377, hexadecimal 80 to FF) simply so I can get a feel for what is being sent--and this obviously does not work if the post is from a Mac or a Unix system. Further, the mail programs on this system physically cannot handle a message which exceeds 300,000 characters in length. I have yet to see an image that encodes to much less than 1,000,000 characters, so such messages will never be delivered to the input queue--and there is no way to transmit them if they *did* arrive. If you have graphics, include the URL for an FTP or HTTP server which holds them in a message to the list, and those who can make use of them will do so, and those who cannot will ignore them. --rma ] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Jan 28 09:24:21 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 04:24:21 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >I do find him saying the precise same thing about "an early Indoeuropean >language." I suspect the difference is critical. -- no, it's trivial. Celtic was widespread in the last centuries BCE. If it didn't spread by migration (which Renfrew denies), then it must have evolved _in situ_ across its range. "It is most improbable that the (proto-)Celts were able to maintain parallel linguistic development from Ireland across western continental Europe from the beginning of the Neolithic to the historical period, a time-span on the order of 4000 years. For this reason, linguists have generally confined the search for the Proto-Celts to the later Bronze Age (c.1200 BCE onwards) or the Iron Age. As the Celtic languages spread in the early historic period, they provide us with cautionary evidence concerning the relationship between the process of linguistic expansion and visibility within the archaeological record. Even where we can trace in time the course of Celtic movements, such as the spread of Goidelic speakers from Ireland to Scotland in the first millenium CE, such a migration is in no way supported by hard archaeological evidence." -- Encylopedia of Indo-European Culture, p. 101. >Nor will you find it in Ireland (where there is history, folk memories and >other evidence of a series of migrations from the continent ABOUT OR AFTER >this time. -- now you're agreeing Celtic was brought to Ireland by Iron Age migrations from the Continent? I agree, but Renfrew doesn't. >I am willing to be corrected. I believe we have fragmentary evidence of >Gallic Celtic, Lepontic and Celtiberian and many centuries later we have the >more substantial evidence of the Celtic of the British Isles. -- the Ogham inscriptions are about on the same order as the evidence for Continental Celtic. Insular Celtic later has much more abundant written sources. There's more than enough, however, to show that Insular Celtic developed its peculiarities _after_ the period of the Ogham inscriptions. The Celtic languages, when first encountered, lack all the stranger features of, for example, Old Irish -- augmentation of verb forms, for instance. >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. >Well perhaps literate observers would have observed the same rate of change >earlier, but they weren't there and we have no record of them. -- you're missing the point completely. Renfrew's hypothesis requries that either _all the Celtic areas_ changed not at all, or identically, across 4000 years. When we can observe them, the Celtic languages undergo distinct and _different_ changes in each of their areas... which is exactly what one would expect from a relatively recent dispersal from a small nuclear area. When a language is both widespread and uniform, that means that it spread recently from a single core area. If it's widespread, it can't stay uniform. >as being Volcae and from the tribe of the Gallic Volcae -- you are aware that "Gallic" simply meant "Celtic-speaking" in Classical times? That any area where Celts lived would be called "Gaul"? (Hence "Galatia" in Anatolia). Incidentally, Celtic tribal names were widespread. Many of the tribal names in Gaul, Britain and Ireland were the same, and the Boii lived in both Bohemia and northern Italy, and so forth. >I don't know if I agree with Renfrew but it is not hard to see that a lot >could have gone on between "an early Indoeuropean language" and pre-Celtic. -- not uniformly, over 4000 years, and across half of Europe. Which is exactly the point. Of course Celtic evolved from an earlier IE form _somewhere_. Renfrew's theory requires that it do so across the entire area from Ireland to Austria. Which is just not the way things work. >And of course Celtic had to turn into Celtic somewhere - what is the >difference between IE>Celtic in the Danube or in France? -- It can't turn into Celtic _simultaneously_ in the entire area between Austria and Ireland, is the difference. >And 4000 years versus 3000 years or even 2000 years would not seem to solve >the problem of the this telling striking uniformity in 275BC, would it? -- striking uniformity in 275 BCE is exactly what one would expect if the Celtic languages had been confined to a small area and then spread rapidly, not long before first being observed. >Myceanean records are after all just over 3000 years old but there are plenty >of folk comfortable calling it not pre-Greek, but Greek. -- it's not "Greek" as spoken today. You're using terminological quirks to cloud the process again. Mycenaean, Classical, and modern "Greek" are distinct languages, as different from each other as modern English is from Proto-Germanic. >If we had no intervening evidence of Greek until modern Greek in the >year1999AD in the same location - what would we make of the difference >between the two languages? -- there would be no problem. That one was ancestral to the other would be perfectly obvious. >Why is "an early indoeuropean language" turning into the Celtic >languages with no record of the intervening years expected to perform so >differently - if an early indoeuropean language analogous to Mycenaean >existed in 4000BC? -- an early IE language turning into Celtic simultaneously, across half of Europe, is the problem. Greek evolved in one place and spread from there. So, of course, did Celtic... except in Renfrew's opinion. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Jan 28 09:28:31 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 04:28:31 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: << I don't claim any knowledge of Old Irish >but something has to be responsible for the radically different look of >Gaelic as compared to other IE languages -- a "brusque restructuring" during the early medieval period. Ancient Irish (and other Celtic languages of comparable date) are quite conventional Indo-European languages, no 'stranger' than say, Latin. What comes out the other end is, to be sure, very odd. From sonno3 at hotmail.com Fri Jan 28 21:19:38 2000 From: sonno3 at hotmail.com (Christopher Gwinn) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 16:19:38 -0500 Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: > I am willing to be corrected. I believe we have fragmentary evidence of > Gallic Celtic, Lepontic and Celtiberian and many centuries later we have the > more substantial evidence of the Celtic of the British Isles. I do not > believe either Lepontic or Celtiberian demonstrate what anyone has called > "striking uniformity." Gallic is specifically limited to only a third of > Gaul by Caesar and I am not aware of actual evidence of it being found > anywhere else - with the possible exception of an accountable presence in the > British Isles. Once again I may be wrong, but I do hope there is specific > evidence that I can look to. For the Gaulish material try Wolfgang Meid "Gaulish inscriptions," Pierre Yves Lambert "La Langue Gauloise," Michel Lejeune (ed) "Recueil des Inscriptions Gauloises 1, 2," Joshua Whatmough "Dialectc of Ancient Gaul," and especially Pierre Billy "Thesaurus Linguae Gallicae." For Celtiberian try Meid "Celtiberian Inscriptions" as an intro and for Lepontic try Lejeune "Lepontica." For Ogam - there is an excellent web site by Jost Gippert featuring several hundred Ogam inscriptions on the TITUS site. http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/ogam/index.html (you will need to get the TITUS font OGAM to see the site properly). The corpus of Continental Celtic can no longer be considered small - though we are not sure about many aspects of grammar - especially verbal forms - as well as proper etymologies for many words, there are literally thousands of attested words (I am in the process of creating an alphabetical Gaulish glossary - I already have 2,652 words and I have only just finished the i's) > You are saying that here is Celtic was unchanging for 700 years. But then > Celtic changes very quickly in the eyes of literate observers. Well perhaps > literate observers would have observed the same rate of change earlier, but > they weren't there and we have no record of them. (And of course the > Galatians were identified by both the Greeks and by Cicero as being Volcae > and from the tribe of the Gallic Volcae - and I believe the observer, > mentioned in Renfrew, did not know Celtic and merely said they sounded the > same. And the ogham use of a word for women - what about the rest of the > words in ogham? is "the women" the only match? - does not prove a lot > geographically and I'm not sure it is particularly strong proof of 'striking > uniformity from Ireland to the Danube.") Obviously the Celtic languages underwent change - I think what the original poster might have meant was that the languages underwent minimal change between their first written attestations on the continent (the oldest of which may be 6th century BC) and the oldest Ogam inscriptions. Irish and Celtiberian are more conservative branches of Celtic, retaining the PIE -kw- whereas Lepontic, Gaulish and Brittonic transform it into a -p-. There is a lot of uniformity within the Celtic branches, however, in the ancient period which did seem to survive somewhat into Old Irish and Welsh - for example, the Gaulish phrase Bnanom Brictom "Spells of women" matches the Irish phrase Brichtu Ban "spells of women." From Gaul we find a cognate of Welsh Annufyn "hell" in Antumnos (*Ande-dubnos "under-world") - from a Gaulish curse-tablet discovered in the '80's > < pre-Celtic across thousands of miles, for 4000 years. Which is in blatant > violation of everything we know about languages and how they develop.>> well, we do see a very important change in the P/Q split prior to the 6th or 7th century BC, as well as the Irish and Celtiberian treatment of vowels, which seem to differ in some cases from Gaulish, Lepontic and Brittonic. It is interesting to note that the characteristically Celtic loss of PIE -P- seems to be reaching its completion by the earliest Lepontic inscriptions - which have a letter -v- where we might expect a PIE -P- (ex: UVAMO- possibly from PIE *UP-eM-O). The value of the -v- is unsure - perhaps it is a consonantal -w- or an -f- sound. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Jan 28 10:08:57 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 10:08:57 +0000 Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister writes: [somebody else] >> Hasn't Frisian also generalised a plural in -ar or -er, which also >> corresponds with what Norwegian and Swedish (and formerly Danish) did? > Can you elaborate a bit more on the -ar/-er plural? > While the English strong plural was -en, > there seems to be some relic forms with -r-; actually -ren > e.g. child-r-en, eyren Middle English dialect plural for > [unless the -r- of eyren was part of the singular stem and perhaps lost in > the presumed singular ] Old English, like a good Germanic language, had many different classes of nouns exhibiting different sets of inflectional endings. So far as I know, a nominative plural in /r/ was found only in a rather small class of neuter nouns which formed their plurals in /-ru/ or sometimes in /-ra/. One of these was /?g/ 'egg', whose plural was /?gru/ or /?gra/. This plural developed regularly to Middle English (and variants). But the rarity of the r-plurals eventually allowed this to be assimilated into the (then) much larger class of n-plurals, and so a new double plural was created. This continued in use in the south of England until the northern form (of Scandinavian origin) displaced it. And 'children' is rather similar. In OE, this was a masculine noun with plural , but the word went walkabout and wandered into two or three other declensional classes. Most particularly, it entered the 'egg' class and acquired a new plural or . This gave rise regularly to ME or , which again finally acquired an n-ending to yield the double plural . English is not alone here. Roger Lass cites similar examples from other Germanic languages: Dutch 'egg', plural ; Afrikaans 'egg' (with incorporation of the old plural marker into the stem), plural ; Dutch 'child', plural ; Afrikaans 'child', plural . Compare standard German 'child', plural . So far as I know, the OE /-ru/ plurals are not cognate with the Scandinavian /r/ plurals. The OE forms appear to derive from PIE nouns with stems in */-es/ ~ */-os/. The addition of a vocalic plural suffix allowed the */s/ of the stem to undergo first Verner's Law (to */z/) and then rhotacism, yielding the observed /-rV/. But the Scandinavian /r/ plurals, on the whole, appear to derive from PIE */-Vs/ (note Greek /-os/ and Latin /-us/, for example). This became */-Vz/ in Proto-Germanic, and then /-r/ in Scandinavian, but the final consonant was lost entirely in Old English. But I'm no Germanist, and I'll be happy to be corrected if I've screwed this up. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From stevegus at aye.net Fri Jan 28 12:46:55 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 07:46:55 -0500 Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: Rick McCallister writes: >> Hasn't Frisian also generalised a plural in -ar or -er, which also >> corresponds with what Norwegian and Swedish (and formerly Danish) did? > Can you elaborate a bit more on the -ar/-er plural? > While the English strong plural was -en, > there seems to be some relic forms with -r-; actually -ren > e.g. child-r-en, eyren Middle English dialect plural for > [unless the -r- of eyren was part of the singular stem and perhaps lost in > the presumed singular ] Plurals in -r were one of a rather variable number of plural suffixes available in Old English. My understanding is, that they were one of the first to be marginalized, and the other semi-irregular plural suffix, -en, was compounded with it once they began to be felt as less than adequately marked for plural. (Not sure, but isn't the plural of 'egg' -Eier- in standard German?) What these plurals in -ren resemble, though, is NGmc -definite- plurals. All of the Norse-derived language have a definite -suffix- in -inn or -it, marked for case when case survives, which is attached to the suffix. In Swedish, this becomes -arna in the animate gender plural. Some dialects realize this suffix as /-ren/. AAR, where I got my ideas about Frisian was from Robinson's -Old English and Its Closest Relatives-, which observes that the oldest Frisian texts had generalized a masculine plural suffix of -ar or -er, and speculates that this plural suffix was borrowed from Old Norse. [I don't know what modern Frisian uses.] -- Sella fictili sedeo Versiculos dum facio. From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Jan 28 19:35:02 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 14:35:02 EST Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 1/28/00 3:15:15 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- these are known as isogloss boundaries, and present no fundamental problems.>> Good solution. Wrong methodology. I had been talking about about the UPenn tree in these posts. Isoglosses apply to maps. Basically an isogloss is nothing but a boundary line. And in simple location or wave or other diachronic maps, isoglosses can be used to help untangle what would appear to be conflicting evidence and make it subjectable to explanation, as with cultural explanations given for the Benrath and Urdingen isoglosses - the "Rhenish Fan." Maps add those kinds of dimensions to the analysis. HOWEVER, these kinds of conflicts need to be either resolved, avoided or disregarded BEFORE a tree is drawn, because there is no way to portray these variables in a SINGLE tree. The 'pure phylogeny' approach used in the UPenn tree is to draw MANY trees to arrive at the ones that minimize these kinds of conflicts (called I believe convexity in this approach). So in effect you are given the trees that avoid the conflicts best. Conflicts not reconciliable by realignment of the branching do not show up as conflicts in the final tree or trees. Regards, Steve Long From alex at AN3039.spb.edu Fri Jan 28 10:55:24 2000 From: alex at AN3039.spb.edu (Alexander S. Nikolaev) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 13:55:24 +0300 Subject: Horses Message-ID: JoatSimeon wrote: >>But if Renfrew is right, and PIE did come from Anatolia, an *ek^wos (or >>however it sounded at *that* time) meaning "donkey" would have trivially >>drifted to "horse" in the horse-rich (donkey-poor) environment of Northern >>and Eastern Europe. >> >-- 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 Thus the Sumerogramme (used instead of *Hek^wos-word [?]) means something like 'Gebierge Esel, mountain ass' and some (e.g. Vyach.Vsel.Ivanov) thought that this meaning could be chronologically prior to the meaning 'horse' Though i must say i personally do not believe in this... The real meaning of Luwian azuwa is also opaque... Alex Nikolaev From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Jan 28 08:34:43 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 08:34:43 -0000 Subject: Re Personal pronouns Message-ID: Dear Larry (,Ralf-Stefan) and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2000 4:15 PM >> [PR previously] >> Larry's definition of pronoun contains all the classses traditionally >> considered pronouns *except* possessive pronouns though it seems odd in the >> extreme that, in spite of the rejection of possessive pronouns, >> demonstrative pronouns are included *as well as* being listed under >> 'determiner' as "demonstrative". >> Perhaps you could explain to me why you think "demonstrative" may occur in >> both classifications but "possesive" may not. [LT] > OK; I'll have a shot. > So that's that: 'my' is strictly a determiner, while 'mine' is strictly a > pronoun, and 'this' can be either a pronoun or a determiner. [PR] This all seems very reasonable, and I thank you for this civil, patient and clear exposition of your ideas. However, under the entry "pronoun" in your _Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics_, pp. 221-222, you list several categories into which pronouns may be classified: personal ("(I, they)"), reflexive, demonstrative, indefinite, interrogative, and relative. You have told us above that a word like 'mine' is "strictly a pronoun". Which category among those listed in your dictionary encompasses 'mine'? [LT continued] > Now to the semantico-functional categories. We can set up a class of > 'demonstratives' on the basis of deictic properties, and we find that both > determiner 'this' and pronoun 'this' must be included in the demonstratives. > And we can perhaps set up a class of 'possessives' on some basis or other > (this is not so easy), and find that both determiner 'my' and pronoun 'mine' > deserve to be included in this possessive class. [PR] A gracious concession. [PR previously] >> Finally, I think it useful to retain the term "possessive pronoun" because >> it overtly identifies the fact that the pronoun stands for a noun in the >> possessive --- in addition to its function of deteremination. [LT] > No; I'm afraid I can't agree. > Whatever the intended meaning of "stands for" might be, a pronoun does not > "stand for" a noun. A pronoun doesn't even belong to the category 'noun'. > Instead, it belongs to the category 'noun phrase', and, in many cases, it > takes its reference from another noun phrase overtly present in the > discourse. > Example: > Q: "Where's the woman we're supposed to meet?" > A: "She's over there." > And *not*: > * "The she we're supposed to meet is over there." > A pronoun does *not* "stand for" a noun in any coherent sense. [PR] I am frankly rather surprised by your apparent uncertainty regarding the intended meaning of "stands for". And your example seems (no offense intended) trivial and the result of a knee-jerk application of your method. Your first sentence, of course, omits the relative pronoun that in a more formal register would have been present. "Where is the woman that we are supposed to meet?" Though such a sentence is not commonly seen, it would be perfectly acceptable to let "she" stand for "woman": "Where is she that we are supposed to meet?' Similarly, though rather stilted, "She that we are supposed to meet is over there." Obviously, articles do not precede pronouns in English (usually). It is obvious that "she" can stand for either "(the) woman" or the fuller NP: "(the) woman (that) we are supposed to meet". [LT continued] > Now, of course, 'my' is somehow related to 'I', at least semantically. > Depending on your theoretical tastes, you might like to state a rule -- > say, a lexical rule -- of the following approximate form: > [I] + [Poss] --> [my] > This rule is comparable to other conceivable lexical rules; for example: > [arrive] + [-al] --> [arrival] > But 'arrival' is not a verb because 'arrive' is a verb: it's a noun, as shown > by its grammatical behavior. Likewise, 'my' is not a pronoun because 'I' is > a pronoun: it's a determiner, as shown by its grammatical behavior. [PR] Perhaps the discussion could be foreshortened. 'My' could perhaps be termed a "pronominal determiner". [LT continued] > Finally, I might add that 'possessive' is a rather elusive category anyway. [PR] An interesting question for another time. Frankly, I believe that the definition of "possessive" can be rather simply stated. 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 kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Fri Jan 28 14:48:07 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 09:48:07 -0500 Subject: NW vs. E Gmc In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, Herb Stahlke wrote: (I had previously written that *z > r can be shown to be an independent change in NGmc and WGmc.) > As one only generally familiar with linguistic issues of early > Germanic, I'm puzzled by Sean's clause "after the two dialects had > separated". I've rather gotten the impression from sources like Orrin > Robinson's Old English and its Closest Relatives and Hans Frede > Nielsen's The Germanic Languages: Origins and Early Dialectal > Interrelations that Sean's presupposition is something of an > oversimplification. Rather, I've gathered, early Germanic, even after > the Gothic migration, had very much the characteristics of a dialect > continuum. Certainly, one can distinguish EGmc as a separate group > earlier than N or W, but N and W don't become clearly distinct > branches, rather than extremes on a continuum, until quite late, > perhaps after the continental period. Or is Sean simply using a > convenient shorthand that I'm being overly critical of? Okay, here's the details. There are three rules, one in NGmc and two in WGmc, which are sensitive to the *z/*r contrast, which therefore must not have collapsed until after some of the specifically NGmc and WGmc sound changes had occurred. In NGmc, but not in WGmc, the following rule occurred: *ai > a: / _ h, r (but not *z) Hence Old Icelandic *sair > sa'r "wound", but *maizan > meiri "more" (Noreen, 1904, p. 75). In WGmc, there is a sporadic rule which deletes *z before *n, *d with compensatory lengthening. The details are quite messy, because you get deletion in some words in some WGmc languages but not in others, and sometimes not in any: Goth OHG OE OFris OS mizdo me:ta me:d/meord me:de me:da "reward" -- lerne:n leornian lerne:n li:no:n "learn" (*z > r) huzd hort hord -- hord "treasure" razda rarta reord -- -- "language, speech" gazds gart gierd -- gard "sting, switch, goad" (There are alternate spellings in some cases which, for clarity, I haven't listed, but which have the same outcomes of *z as those listed above.) This is a mess, but the point is that while the deletion applies variably to *z, the deletion _never_ applies to original *r; so WGmc was sensitive to the the *z/*r contrast. Another such case occurred in Ingvaeonic, where word-final *z in stressed monosyllables deletes with compensatory lengthening (word-final *-z in unstressed syllables had already gone): OE OS OHG Goth. PGmc me: mi: mir mis *miz "me (dat.)" we: wi:, we wi(:)r weis *wi:z "we" ma: me:r me:r mais *maiz "more" (The -r was restored in OS me:r, and later in OE, by analogy with the comparative adjectives. Notice that rhotacism later applied in OHG.) Notice that this deletion never happens to original *r, as in *he:r > he:r "here". So we have one rule in North Germanic which is sensitive to the *r/*z distinction, but which is clearly NGmc only, hence postdating the WGmc/NGmc split. Thus, the merger cannot yet have happened when NGmc and WGmc separated. We likewise have two rules within WGmc which are sensitive to the contrast; same conclusion. (As I noted in a previous post, Ingv. is securely WGmc; it undergoes none of the NGmc sound changes, but it undergoes some seven different sound changes shared by all the WGmc languages before starting to innovate on its own, as with the Ingv. rule I listed above. Thus, the *z/*r contrast must have survived in WGmc until WGmc itself was already beginning to break into dialects.) There's one further bit of evidence: runic inscriptions clearly postdating the breakup of Germanic by centuries maintains a clear distinction between *r and *z. The inscribers don't get them mixed up, even in a period where NGmc and WGmc must have already separated, based on external historical evidence. If we didn't have such clear evidence of a *z/*r contrast within NGmc and within WGmc, we'd say that *z > r is an innovation which occurred in Proto-NWGmc before the split between NGmc and WGmc. But we clearly can't say this; the evidence is just too strong that this is not so. So the question is, what do we make of this? One perfectly reasonable possibility is that rhotacism is a purely independent parallel development in the two branches; rhotacism rules are not uncommon (one occurred in Greek, for example). Another possibility is that *z had already come to be somewhat phonetically rhotacized in Proto-NWGmc (without actually collapsing the contrast yet), so that the merger was phonetically likely, but didn't actually occur until later. A third possibility is that rhotacism was an innovation which spread across dialect boundaries after NGmc and WGmc had become clearly differentiated from one another but were still in relatively close contact. It can't be an _inherited_ common innovation, however. I should probably mention what I'm working on in my in-progress dissertation, which is about conspiracies of historical sound changes; it's relevant to this discussion. The elimination of *z in West Germanic is a complicated picture; there are actually several other rules which eliminate it in various ways, with rhotacism taking care of the residue. Traditionally, these processes eliminating *z have been treated as separate, unconnected rules; there is no way under traditional rule-based to conflate them, even tho they all mysteriously have the effect of eliminating *z within a fairly short period of time. What I'm saying is that conspiracies of this sort are no accident. I'm working in a recent formal model of phonology known as Optimality Theory, which makes use of ranked constraints rather than conventional rewrite rules. Previous authors working in OT have suggested that historical phonological change is to be modeled as a change in the relative ranking of the constraints. I accept this, and the point of my dissertation is to discuss a previous unexplored consequence of this idea: namely, that a change in the ranking of constraints can sometimes result in clusterings of seemingly connected surface phenomena for which traditional rule-based accounts can give no unified formal account. One of my chapters looks at the WGmc *z elimination conspiracy in close detail; I'm saying that all of the historical rules eliminating *z are actually the outcroppings of a single change in the grammar; namely, the rise in ranking of a constraint prohibiting *z, with the details of the individual rules (deletion with or without compensatory lengthening, rhotacism, etc.) falling out automatically from other, independently motivated aspects of the grammar. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Fri Jan 28 15:08:12 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 10:08:12 -0500 Subject: NW vs. E Gmc In-Reply-To: <01JL31OJQDSI9TK4D7@LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU> Message-ID: On Mon, 24 Jan 2000 CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU wrote: (I wrote:) >> 2. Marc Pierce mentioned gemination before *j. Actually, this is a >> strictly WGmc innovation, and thus isn't evidence one way or the other for >> the grouping of the three Gmc branches. > Doesn't North Germanic geminate -kj- -gj- to -kkj- -ggj-? (I don't have my > handbooks at hand.) Yes. (Gordon 1957, p. 282) However, WGG applies to a much broader range of cases: all of the consonants except *r (and *z) get geminated before *j, and there also sporadic gemination of *p, *t, *k, and *h before *r and *l. This broader gemination is strictly West Germanic. I actually don't know of a good argument against the idea that the gemination of velars could have been a common NWGmc innovation; I'd have to do a good bit of looking to see if there's anything in the relative chronology which would prevent this. Anyone know? > 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_). 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". \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Fri Jan 28 17:14:37 2000 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 12:14:37 -0500 Subject: Computing phylogenies (was: Re: Indo-Hittite) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 26 Jan 2000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > Since it is mainly based on prior scholarship and selected PIE > reconstructions, I suspect there is nothing particularly novel about the > UPenn tree findings. It's clear that the methodology is originally designed > to find the best possible internal consistency for particular theories, > rather than testing the theories themselves. *Sigh* You still haven't understood the significance of this work. Let me summarize again, partly for you and partly also for the benefit of those who weren't on the list when we went of this last summer. Computing a phylogeny over character-based data is a very difficult computational problem. Together with the classic "travelling salesman" problem, it belongs to the class of NP (non-polynomial) complete problems. I could discuss exactly what this means, but what it means in practical terms is that computing the problem in a deterministic manner would take an impractical stretch of time, such as twenty years or a million years, even with the fastest computers. If you have 10 taxa (species, or languages in this case), there are 34,459,425 possible trees (17 x 15 x 13...) representing the relations among those taxa. 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. This would just take too long over any data sets of larger than trivial size. This is too bad, because there are obvious applications for being able to compute a phylogeny over character data. The best known example is that biologists would like to compute the evolutionary family tree for biological species based on the characteristics of the species. 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. Don Ringe and Ann Taylor (both Indo-Europeanists) got together with Tandy Warnow, and the team had the bright idea of using this algorithm, which was originally developed for biologists, to compute the phylogeny of the IE language family. This has never been done before. Because the technology to do this didn't previously exist, it _couldn't_ have been done before. Your statement that "there is nothing particularly novel" about this work is simply a misunderstanding about what has been done here. The first thing the team had to do was to come up with a data set encoding various characteristics of the IE languages. You state that 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. As for your statement "It's clear that the methodology is originally designed to find the best possible internal consistency for particular theories, rather than testing the theories themselves", I'm not sure what you're saying here. Perhaps you mean that if one chose a different character set, the algorithm might compute a different optimal tree. This is true, but as I've said before: another competent Indo-Europeanist might come up with a slightly different character set, but it could not be very different. There is only so much data to work with, and many of the interpretations of the data are non-controversial. Still, if you feel that the character set could be improved, you are free to do so and to set your results against those of Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor. This would be a very good thing to do. > As you say, adjustments were made in the data to give a relative chronology > to the tree afterwards. This looks like a garbled version of what the team actually did. _After_ the team produced the unrooted phylogeny and made a claim for where the root should be, they made a diagram showing the century where each language was first attested, and plotted the phylogeny against those dates. This involves graphically stretching the tree out a bit, but it doesn't involve any changes to the actual structure of the tree. Producing a diagram of this sort allows us to make some statements about absolute dates before which particular branchings must have occurred. For example, the team claims that the nearest relative of Greek is Armenian. Since a clearly differentiated Greek is attested in the middle of the second millenium BCE, it must be the case that the Greco-Armenian branching took place _before_ that date. > Some of these adjustments were geographical and relate to presumed > contact or lack of it. They made no such adjustments. The phylogeny was computed strictly based on what is actually found in the languages in question, without regard to geography. > There is no indication that the UPenn group ever hypothesized or > attempted to execute a tree where Hittite and PIE were hypothesized to > be sisters decended from a common ancestor to see if it was also > consistent with the data. You're misunderstanding their methodology if you believe that they would "attempt to execute" a particular tree. They feed the character data into the algorithm and take the tree that comes out. Second, the tree you describe is in fact the phylogeny which the team arrived at: they do believe that Anatolian is a sister of Proto-Everything-Else, which you refer to as "PIE" (and Steven, I am determined to ignore into the ground any objections over the labeling of the nodes). > Such a procedure might have been methodologically necessary to > properly 'test' the IndoHittite hypothesis. These findings also might > have carried assumptions that Hittite was a descendent of PIE (e.g., > some of the established reconstructed PIE that Ringe, et al used to > identify cognates for co-categorization presumably were reconstructed > with Hittite included in the comparative data) and the computer > confirmed that this was not inconsistent - a finding that could have > also possibly come out of hypothesizing Hittite as being a sister > language. Let me say it again: the phylogeny which the team arrived at is as follows: X / \ / \ Y Anatolian I'm referring to X as "PIE" and to Y as "Proto-Everything-Else". You're referring to Y as "PIE" (so I guess X would be "Proto-Indo-Hittite" in your nomenclature). From the perspective of the team's methodology, the two claims are identical and indistinguishable. Again, this is purely a matter of what we arbitrary labels we choose for the nodes, and I am determined to ignore any argument about it. Also, let me respond to someone else: > In a message dated 1/26/00 11:23:23 AM, Hans J Holm wrote: > < Ringe/Warnow tree is /not/ calculated, but inserted by Ringe as outcome of > traditional, mainstream views perhaps too much preoccupied by the only > early documentation of Hittite. >> (Responding to Hans Holm): Yes, it's quite true that the algorithm that Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor used produces an unrooted phylogeny. It would be a possible and coherent point of view to accept their unrooted phylogeny but to argue for some other point in the phylogeny as the root. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Jan 28 05:59:19 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 23:59:19 -0600 Subject: early IE dialect areas diagram In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I've read that Italic was in contact with Germanic before Celtic was My impression was that Italic would have been somewhere around the upper Danube, i.e. present Bavaria, Bohemia, Austria and/or Switzerland before moving into Italy I don't know what the exact time frame was, ?2000-1500 BC? or whether Celtic would have been east or west of Latin at the time or which languages it was in contact with --although I have seen in passing some references to "Illyrian" influences in Ibero-Romance [in either Lapesa or Bola?os] but I don't know if this is just a wild guess or what Given that it seems that Celtic would have moved into former Italic-speaking territory, this conceivably may have resulted in Italic influence on Celtic. Any arguments one way or another? There's also the question of Lusitanian. Is it Celtic? Is it Italic? Does it form a W. IE branch along with Celtic and Italic [and possibly Venetic]? [snip] >If anyone can suggest the scenario for the positions of Celtic >and Italic especially at the very ealiest stages, and whether >their neighbors changed very much during the expansion of IE >dialects westwards, I would be grateful for any help with thinking. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From edsel at glo.be Fri Jan 28 18:58:28 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 19:58:28 +0100 Subject: Indo-Hittite Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Hans Holm" Sent: Monday, January 24, 2000 7:51 AM > LT>In fact, precisely this odd last view is the one commonly presented in > LT>those IE family trees that we see everywhere. But not many linguists > LT>are happy with such a massive sudden-disintegration scenario. > .. In the forthcoming 'Journal of quantitative linguistics' I will present > a much more differentiated model of the disintegration of IE. > And Hittite is not the first, but the last language to depart - from > Tokharian. The first to split were Germanic and Greek, as already stated > by Prof D.G. Kendall in Ross JRSS.B12/1950:49. [Ed Selleslagh] I think most of us would be grateful if you could present a summary (with a tree?) on this list. In tempore opportuno, of course. Personally, I'm glad to hear this about the split of Germanic and Greek, as I (not being a specialist) have always had a nagging suspicion that these two have something in common (apart from being IE) that sets them apart, notwithstanding important differences in various areas (Q-P-lgs., verbal flection,...). [snip] > Hans J Holm > - - et monere et moneri - - Ed. From michalov at uiuc.edu Fri Jan 28 20:48:46 2000 From: michalov at uiuc.edu (Peter A. Michalove) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 14:48:46 -0600 Subject: Indo-Hittite In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask observed on this list recently that Sturtevant's Indo-Hittite hypothesis is terminologically awkward, but that if we call it Indo-Anatolian (which is more correct), then it's not substantively different from saying merely that Anatolian was the first branch to split off from Indo-European, a position that many Indo-Europeanists agree with. That is, there's no substantive difference between the following trees, (1) and (2), other than which level you choose to call PIE: (1) Indo-Anatolian / \ / \ Anatolian PIE | | Germanic, Hellenic, Slavic, etc. (2) PIE / \ / \ Anatolian Non-Anatolian | | Germanic, Hellenic, Slavic, etc. (Please forgive the difficulty of drawing trees in email.) (:-) But I wonder if anyone on this list does see a substantive difference between the two models. That is, does tree (1) (which says PIE and Anatolian were sister languages on a par) imply that features characteristic of PIE but not Anatolian (like the feminine gender, the more elaborate system of verbal moods and tenses, etc.) are innovations in (non-Anatolian) PIE? Conversely, does tree (2) imply that these features were present in PIE (or whatever you want to call the predecessor of Anatolian and non-Anatolian) and subsequently lost in Anatolian? Or is tree (2) less likely to imply any position on how early these features were present? Similarly, if you're comparing Indo-European to other languages on a Nostratic level, and you want to avoid "reaching down" (that is, attributing features of only one branch to the entire family), does tree (1) mean that you should only cite features that are present in Anatolian and elsewhere in IE, while tree (2) makes no such requirement? 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 JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Jan 28 20:17:00 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 15:17:00 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Just what thoes considerable difficulties are is still something I am trying >to get at. -- just for starters: Ridiculous time-depth. Even if all the IE languages changed as slowly as Lithuanian, a 7000 BCE date for PIE is grotesque; and that's leaving aside the question of the technical vocabulary. Ignorance of the interrelationships of the IE language (according to Renfrew's theory Greek ought to be closely related to Hittite and distantly related to Sanskrit, whereas the reverse is true). Dogmatic insistance that human behavior, linguistic and otherwise, was somehow completely different in prehistory. >Actually if you read A&L you can see that what Renfrew was first of all doing >was chastising archaeologists for accepting presumptive dates based on >linguistics - which he points out were often based on old archaeology. -- in which he's simply wrong. What he's resistant to is the idea that linguistics can tell things about the past that archaeology cannot. It's methodological imperialism. >Some archaeologists think Renfrew should have never got involved in the >language/ethnic thing at all -- he shouldn't have. At least, not before he _understood_ what he was trying to critique. From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Fri Jan 28 12:27:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 12:27:00 GMT Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: SG>the paragraph above is simply wrong. .. Though SG is known as an expert in Tungus and Mongolian langs, not the arguments nor our style of communication allow such a decision. I think also of the immense impact of Mongolian on Evenki (cf Doerfer M-T, 1985) - in this case also without a migration. And according to Heissig (in Weiers 1986) Turcic began to become the dominating lang of the Golden Horde since 1262. Of course SG is correct that Hungarian is an *Ugric* language by relating it to the Ob-Ugric languages. I apologize for the slipage. Hans J. Holm From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Jan 28 12:25:02 2000 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max Wheeler) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 12:25:02 +0000 Subject: [was: Basque butterflies again] Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Larry Trask writes: > However, given the restriction of the expressives to French Basque, > and largely to Lapurdian, an economical view might be that is an > expressive pattern in Occitan which has been borrowed into neighboring > varieties of Basque and used there to coin new formations. I don't know > enough Occitan to say if this is plausible, but it can't be ruled out *a > priori*. There is evidence of the areality of . I've looked in S. Palay Dictionnaire du B?arnais et du Gascon modernes. I find numbers of head entries as follows: pamp- 29 pemp- 7 pimp- 21 pomp- 0 pump- 31 And its not just Gascon. Mistral, Tresor d?u Felibrige (pan-Occitan, including Gascon) gives entries: pamp- 27 pemp- 3 pimp- 26 pomp- 0 pump- 45 By way of comparison, Lewis & Short's Latin dictionary gives: pamp- 10 pemp- 0 pimp- 0 pomp- 12 pump- 0 These dictionaries are of very roughly comparable dimensions. A high proportion of the entries in question have a plausible affective component, though derivatives of POMPA 'show, display' account for most of the Latin pomp- words, while in Occitan/Gascon a good proportion of the pump- words are contain the sense 'pump'. If I get time I'll pursue the question whether any of the specific Lapurdian words Larry cites have plausible Occitan cognates. Max ______________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences University of Sussex Falmer BRIGHTON BN1 9QH, G.B. Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975 Fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 Email: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk ______________________________________________________________ From sonno3 at hotmail.com Fri Jan 28 21:40:54 2000 From: sonno3 at hotmail.com (Christopher Gwinn) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 16:40:54 -0500 Subject: Basque Message-ID: There is indeed a Gaulish word which might have this root - Pilentum, a Latinized Gaulish word for a type of Vehicle - which should be *Pil-ont-on in Gaulish (perhaps meaning "wheeled thing"). ----- Original Message ----- From: "Hans Holm" Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2000 3:29 AM In a nutshell: What about being 'bili' a loan from Gaulish? PIE *kwel- > Cel *kwi:l- > Gaul *pi:l >!> bask. pil/bil cf PIE *penque > Cel *kwinkwe > Gaul *pimpetos (ordinal) Mit freundlichen Gr|_en Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover. From Georg at home.ivm.de Fri Jan 28 22:30:11 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 23:30:11 +0100 Subject: Good Natured Ribbing (1) [was Re: Refining early Basque criteria] In-Reply-To: <005101bf6763$990c3300$be9f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: Further discussions should move to private e-mail. I believe that the topic has moved beyond interest for this list. --rma ] >[PR] >All well and good. But if we assume --- as we need to for this argument to >cohere --- that the FIRST syllable produced by the child should be the one >which the mother assigns to herself, then "*very* early" is just not early >enough. What the language community decides to conventionalise with whatever meaning is not dependent on any absolute "first" here. >[SG] >>At this stage, the child is certainly *not* "using" "language"; it's >>babbling. >>Babbling-research has established that, in phonetic terms, the sounds >>produced >>by infants vary greatly in frequency: at the top of the list are /m/ and /b/ >>alike, with the same frequency, followed by, in this order, /p/, /d/, /h/, >>/n/, /t/, /g/, /k/, /j/, /w/, /s/, aso. (Locke, J.L.: Phonological >>Acquisition and Change, NY: AP 1983). >[PR] >Where is the glottal stop in this list? Don't know. Probably quite late. >[PR] >Frankly, you are not too bad at childish babbling yourself! (:-O) Well, I was a child, before I was a linguist, at least so I'm told. >[SG] >>This is not brushing by. The word is "linguistics" (;-). >[PR] >Excuse. The phrase is "Ralf-Stefan's understanding of the application of >linguistic principles to this problem". These expressions are coextensive. >[PR] >Just when do you believe *?ama was "conventionalized"? 6478 B.C., 13th April, late afternoon. (which is the kind of answer your question deserves, of course) As ever, St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From Georg at home.ivm.de Fri Jan 28 22:51:35 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 23:51:35 +0100 Subject: Good Natured Ribbing (2) [was Re: Refining early Basque criteria] In-Reply-To: <005801bf6764$f7475160$be9f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: Further discussions should move to private e-mail. I believe that the topic has moved beyond interest for this list. --rma ] >[SG] >>No, Pat, this is independent of what a given child utters "first" to its >>given mother. >[PR] >This is truly a Grimm explanation. *What* child babbled /ma/ first so that >its pristine syllable could be adopted by its mother as a self-designation, >and with what authority did she insist (conventionalize) the syllable so >that all subsequent mothers had to accept her choice? This is of course not an answerable question. It extends to the question what kinds of individuals must possess what kinds of powers to make other community members his speech habits ? Of course, there are no such things which could be enumerated. Language change is an invisible-hand process. Some changes do spread through the community, some don't. The notion of selectional advantage plays some role hear. Syllables like /mama/, /ama/ aso. do possess a selectional advantage in that any future mother is quite likely to be able to tell that her child is "talking" to her very early in its career as a language-user. This is not so easy with sequences like "mushroom", "gobble-dee-gook" or "Proto-Language", which uis why they rather seldom get conventionalized with any meaning resembling "mum" or "dad". What is so difficult to understand about this, that we have to go over and over the same few points again ? Or, in other words, what are you going to tell us ? That /mama/, /ama/ and stuff lth. are as conventional and arbitrary as "asparagus", "cruise missile" or "Little Rock" ? If you do think that after all, we can end this discussion rather painlessly, since I won't be able to say anything to this. >[SG] >>Language is social convention, and even if in Arkansas >>children are so linguistically gifted that they utter /tata/ or /kaka/ long >>before they manage to produce the enormously difficult nasals, their >>parents won't have the power to change the *conventionalization* of /mama/ >>= "mother" all on their own. They may well tell everyone that their child >>"said" /takata/ long before /mama/, and they may even decide that in their >>family from now on, /takata/ "means" "mother". Why not ? But it won't have >>any consequences for the speech-community on the whole, which has >>conventionalized "mummy" and the like long ago. >[PR] >I was not born in Arkansas, educated here, or have I lived most of my life >here, so gentle gibes against Arkansas and Arkansans are absolutely without >interest to me. Oh, so that's why you simply ignored this gibe, I see ;-) Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 03:01:50 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 19:01:50 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <3a.730bb6.25babc56@aol.com> Message-ID: 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: ><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. 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) >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. > 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. So, bring in axle, and metal, and horse, and so on. They cannot *all* have fortuitously involved only sounds that changed relatively late! >(And BTW how drastic are the sound changes do we see in one of the other >wheel words: > Latin, rota; Lith, ratas; OHG, rod; Ir, roth - cf. Skt, ratha?) 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. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From tj at nysol.se Sat Jan 29 11:51:42 2000 From: tj at nysol.se (tj at nysol.se) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 11:51:42 GMT Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE / archeology Message-ID: Do anyone of you know where the first archeological evidences on the use of wheels has been found? It could be interesting to compare archeological evidences on wheels and different kinds of wheels with linguistics. /Torbjvrn Jerlerup Stockholm From mclasutt at brigham.net Sat Jan 29 17:28:33 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 10:28:33 -0700 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I think I finally get what you're really trying to ask here, Steve. You want to know how we can be sure that the actual DATE of the wheel's adoption into Indo-European culture preceded the breakup of PIE as defined by the sound changes that we use to describe the different families. Is that a fair summary? What you're looking for, however, can't really be answered linguistically. Let's look at some scenarios. 1) A small community (about the size of Liechtenstein) of people discovers that this round thing solves their transportation problems (that's worded so that it could have either been borrowed or invented). They name it *kwelos. The community grows and spreads and divides into different speech areas. Over time, the sounds change and words come and go. Modern linguistic evidence consists of words for 'wheel' in most, if not all, of the subfamilies descended from that small community and the modern reflexes show the effects of the sound changes. We can't date the adoption of the wheel with linguistic evidence alone other than using the general date assumed for the proto-language since the linguistic evidence points to an adoption while the language was unified. 2) A large group of people live in several communities over an area (about the size of Estonia), but still speak the same language with only minor dialect differences. One of those communities discovers that this round thing solves their transportation problems. They name it *kwelos. The other communities see this marvelous thing during visits for weddings and festivals and take it home with them along with *kwelos as its name. Now we have the same history and evidence as above, but note that the date of adoption is later than in Scenario 1. Linguistically, however, the two are indistinguishable. 3) A very large group of people live in a widespread area (about the size of Poland) speaking languages that are borderline between separate languages and very disparate dialects. There is some mutual intelligibility in the central regions, but speakers from opposite ends of the area cannot understand one another. One of the communities discovers that this round thing solves their transportation problems. They name it *kwelos. The immediately surrounding communities see this thing relatively soon (as in Scenario 2) and since their speech is similar adopt *kwelos as the name for it. It takes a while for it to spread across the entire area, however. Some of the other groups adopt *kwelos without changing the phonetics to match their own dialect; some of the other groups use their own word for it. In this case, the modern linguistic evidence will show that the borrowing occurred after the sound changes that define the modern subgroups had already been changing the dialects into separate languages. Once again, however, linguistic evidence alone cannot supply any date other than a relative one. Note that while Scenarios 1 and 2 are different in terms of their relative dating for the adoption of the wheel, linguistic evidence alone cannot distinguish between them, and the language in Scenario 2 would, in general linguistic terms, be considered the same language as that in Scenario 1. Both would be considered Proto-Indo-European and linguists would refer to both situations as "linguistic unity" since modern evidence cannot distinguish between them. Scenario 3, however, is quite different and modern linguistic evidence would be able to identify the relative date of wheel adoption in relation to the development of the family. Now, if I understand you correctly, you are trying to find out: 1) How can linguists distinguish between Scenario 1 and Scenario 2; and 2) What are the actual dates that distinguish Scenario 2 and Scenario 3. I've already answered the first question--we can't. The answer to your second question is also--we can't. We can determine relative dating and make fair estimates of dating, but we can never give you a specific date without other evidence (such as written records before and after a change or unequivocal archeological evidence [usually just more written records]). We can also sometimes supply very circuitous dating such as, "Since Language A borrowed Word B from Language C, and since Word B shows the effects of Sound Change D in Language A, then Sound Change D must have occurred after Language A was in contact with Language B." Linguistics cannot give you dates other than relative ones in the absence of written records. Only in concert with specific types of archeological and historical evidence can linguistics give you absolute dates (I consider "within the 2nd century BCE" to be as absolute a date as linguistics can provide for any changes before about the 19th century CE). 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 Sat Jan 29 20:26:20 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 15:26:20 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: << So once again what you've said so far does not force the conclusion that the >wheel word was introduced before PIE dispersed. >> -- given the broad range, it makes it overwhelmingly probable. Linguistics is not an experimental science; it deals in probabilities, not definitives. You are, to be frank, resisting the probabilities for reasons external to linguistics. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Jan 29 20:28:44 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 15:28:44 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: 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. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Jan 29 20:54:01 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 15:54:01 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >How do you know that the SPECIFIC sound changes in the wheel word happened >at the time of dispersal? -- both the sound-changes and the dispersal are _processes_, not specific datable events. The -process- of dispersal and the -process- of sound-changes are the _same thing_, functionally. "At the time of dispersal" is meaningless. It would have to be _during_ the time of dispersal. Which is also the time when the sound-changes must, by definition, have started. That's how language-change works. As contact decreases in frequency due to distance, uniformity decreases and isogloss boundaries appear. What we can say about the _words_ (plural) for 'wheel' and the parts of the wheel and for vehicles and travel by vehicle, is that the words date to a time before the changes which characterize the daughter languages (which _define_ them) had advanced very far. Or to put it another way, they arose during a time when interdialect communication was still common and rapid. >And how do you know the wheel was not introduced in the intervening period? -- the words all have PIE roots; "round thing", "shoulder-joint", "neck". They're not loan terminology at all; they developed from parts of the original language. And the probability of _all or most_ of the subsequent languages using the _same_ roots to describe a _new_ technology is somewhere between zip and nothing. >Here's the chronology. PIE disperses. The sound changes you see in the wheel >word have not occurred yet. The wheel word is introduced to most of the >daughters. Then afterwards the sound changes occur. -- well, in that case, the dispersal can't have gone very far, can it? You're playing games with the definition of "PIE" and "dispersal" -- this is what is known as "saving the hypothesis". From sarima at friesen.net Sun Jan 30 18:14:36 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 10:14:36 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 03:57 AM 1/27/00 -0600, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > I agree that if there are regular reflexes, then the word would >have borrowed either during a period of unity OR during a period of >adjacent dialects in the same sense that Romance is ... This latter case does NOT generally result in regular reflexes. Indeed your recent examples, such as coffee, tobacco, and telephone demonstrate this. The French version and the Spanish versions of these words *do* *not* show the sound correspondences found in inherited words. This *despite* the current existence of a dialect continuum between French and Spanish. > This begs the question of how long IE languages existed as a chain >of dialects. Not at all. A late borrowing, even while there was still a chain of dialects, would fail to incorporate the regular sound changes, unless it happened so very early the dialects were barely divergent. (And the 2000 or so years from the beginning of the Neolithic to the Late Neolithic origin of the wheel and wagon is *far* too long for such to be the case). > If Romance could have persisted for roughly 2000 years as a chain >of dialects, how long could IE have remained in that state? Actually, rather less than 2000. Latin was not really established in western Europe until circa 100 or 200 AD, and Latin did not really lose its unity until sometime around 500 AD or so. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 05:45:03 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 21:45:03 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <22.1121215.25bc124d@aol.com> Message-ID: At 03:14 AM 1/23/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 1/13/00 11:25:47 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: ><<-- except that it's linguistic nonsense, which requires Celtic to remain >completely unchanged for 4000 years,>> >Where specifically do you find this? And I mean in Renfrew. What book? >What page? It is not explicit, but rather implicit in the claim that the words for things like 'wheel' were borrowed into IE *after* it spread throughout Europe - by over a thousand years! -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 06:33:07 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 22:33:07 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <42.d64405.25bec14c@aol.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_. 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. >-- languages spread over a large area develop dialects and then eventually >split into separate, related languages. This is one of the fundamentals. >And we are speaking of a time before literacy or "standard" languages, as >well. Even now, *with* those things, and TV as well, dialects develop. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From edsel at glo.be Sat Jan 29 17:05:50 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 18:05:50 +0100 Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Friday, January 28, 2000 10:28 AM >> rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: > << I don't claim any knowledge of Old Irish >> but something has to be responsible for the radically different look of >> Gaelic as compared to other IE languages > -- a "brusque restructuring" during the early medieval period. > Ancient Irish (and other Celtic languages of comparable date) are quite > conventional Indo-European languages, no 'stranger' than say, Latin. > What comes out the other end is, to be sure, very odd. [Ed Selleslagh] What is the currently accepted explanation of this 'oddity'? Could it be the substrate influence of a typically insular non-IE language or languages (e.g. 'Pictish' - whatever that may actually mean) ? All the Celtic languages with the 'modern' characteristics are in fact insular (Breton is a Brythonic import). There are indeed some weird characteristics (see e.g. Rick McCallister's mail, and the tendency toward ergativity in certain circumstances) for IE languages, and right across the Goidelic-Brythonic divide. Archaeology (e.g. megaliths, some decorative motifs,...) might indicate some cultural relationship with the Basques, a very old and eminently seafaring people (there was even a Basque-Icelandic pidgin a few centuries ago), so why not a linguistic one (with the insular non-IE-ans I mean)? Note that the same archaeological traces are found along the continental European Atlantic coast, from N. Spain to S. Scandinavia, but one may safely assume that older non-IE languages died out there long before they did in the isolation of (parts of) the British Isles. But they probably survived, be it in more or less isolated pockets, the Celtic and Roman invasions of Britain. Still very intrigued, Ed. From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Jan 29 20:48:07 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 15:48:07 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: In a message dated 1/26/00 11:19:04 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- Renfrew (in Language and Archaeology) says that the pre-Celtic IE language reached Ireland with the first farmers -- that's 4000 BCE, roughly -- and that the Celtic languages developed _in situ_ >> I wrote: <> In a message dated 1/29/00 9:48:31 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: <<-- no, it's trivial. Celtic... If it didn't spread by migration (which Renfrew denies), then it must have evolved _in situ_>> No. I really think if one permits oneself a close look, one will see that the difference between saying "an early indoeuropean language" and "Celtic" is very important here. I'm sure that the author does not want to misrepresent what Renfrew wrote. And I'm sure that a closer look will convince him that Renfrew is not making the above claim. All that Renfrew's statement 'requires' is that "an early indoeuropean language" arrive in europe 'north and west of the alps' before 4000BC. AND that the Celtic languages were - perhaps very distant - descendents of that language. ***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.*** All that is required is that some ancient and distant parent or great-great-grand parent IE language arrived in western europe in the middle-late European neolithic. (As a side-note: copper metallurgy arrives in that area very soon after.) The idea that that early indoeuropean language had to be a 'proto-Celtic' or 'Celtic' or even distinctly 'Pre-Celtic' language is simply not to be found in the text of A&L. And the addition of that idea is not I'm sure the conclusion any reader would come to with a fair reading of the text. (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.') This may create a problem in dealing with the unknowable - what linguistically occurred in the region between the arrival of "an early indoeuropean language" and what will emerge as Celtic. But it most definitely does NOT mean that Celtic arrived in western Europe in 4000BC. The gap should not be a surprise to the holder of any theory about how and where Celtic emerged - unless you hold the belief that Celtic was born full-blown out of the head of PIE. And IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO NOTE that the gap between PIE and that 'early european language' could be - under Renfrew's scenario - much shorter in time than the gap between that 'early IE language' and Celtic. Based on this, the language that arrives in western Europe at 4000BC should be much closer to PIE than to Celtic. Going further - if you compare this early indoeuropean language in western Europe to the so-called post-Anatolian 'narro w PIE' - there could be as little as 500 years difference under Renfrew's analysis. To repeat that's as little as 500 years difference between narrow PIE and the first IE language in western Europe. Attested Celtic will be a long way off. I will try to address other issues brought up in another post. But I think that the basic fairness of readers on this list will come into play here if a careful consideration of what I've just written is given a chance. Celtic does not arrive in western Europe in 4000BC under Renfrew's scenario. A distant - and perhaps very distant ancestor does. Once this is understood, I think the harshness of the counterpoints made will be alleviated. Here by the way is the pertinent quote (remembering again that A&L is 'not the Bible' and that the argument is not about something written in stone): (C. Renfrew, A&L, Cam Univ Press, p. 249): "Celtic languages are seen to emerge, by a process of differentiation or crystalization, from an undifferentiated early Indo-European language spoken in Europe north and west of the Alps, and may be preserved in certain river names.... The earliest Indo-European speakers will have reached these areas by 4000BC, although the differentiation into individual languages may have taken place very much later." Others have mentioned before often enough that the reference to "individual languages" is expressly NOT to individual Celtic languages - and there is good reason for this (Renfrew possibly also had non-Celtic languges in mind 'north of the Alps' in mind.) And so this understanding of what was written here may raise other issues. But as to the issue raised here - it should be clear that nothing in it prevents Celtic from arising with LaTene for example - or even after it. Regards, Steve Long From sarima at friesen.net Sun Jan 30 18:21:30 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 10:21:30 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 04:37 AM 1/27/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >I've looked through Renfrew and I do not find any reference to either >"Celtic" or "pre-Celtic" reaching these areas at that time. I do find him >saying the precise same thing about "an early Indoeuropean language." I >suspect the difference is critical. Actually, that is *worse*, since it requires that the various dispersed dialects that became the various Celtic languages develop the characteristic Celtic phonetic changes *in* *parallel* while spread over several thousand square miles. In other words it effectively denies the very *existence* of Celtic as a branch of IE, and requires the similarities be late. Yuck! ><their languages are quite strikingly uniform, all the way from Ireland to the >Danube Valley.>> >I can only ask here what these Celtic language sources from BCE are. Once >again I mean what specifically? Greek colonies in southern Gaul make contact with the Celtic tribes, and indeed existed mainly in order to trade with the Celts. There is also the pre-Roman incursion of Celts into Asia Minor, where they established an important kingdom (which became the Roman province of Galatia). Now it is true there are few extended texts, but there are plenty of word and name citations. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 03:09:46 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 19:09:46 -0800 Subject: NE Germanic In-Reply-To: <000501bf6518$566d7e20$17c407c6@oemcomputer> Message-ID: At 03:36 PM 1/22/00 -0500, Steve Gustafson wrote: >So, I don't think you can say that the presence vs. absence of reduplication >is something that distinguishes Gothic from NWGmc. It's rather that we have >Gothic texts before this inherited distinction got hammered. >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. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 06:02:07 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 22:02:07 -0800 Subject: NW vs. E Gmc In-Reply-To: <01JL31OJQDSI9TK4D7@LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU> Message-ID: At 01:43 PM 1/24/00 -0600, CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU wrote: >The better reason is that the defining features of East Germanic -- funny >vocalism, almost complete devoicing of final stops and fricatives, peculiar >vocabulary -- are precisely *not* shared with North Germanic, which in all >these points agrees better with West Germanic. Neither is the almost complete >elimination of grammatischer Wechsel in strong verbs, clearly a Gothic >innovation that was not extended to modal verbs. But Sean is right that the >(probable) loans prove nothing. However, all of these are retained *ancestral* features in non-Gothic, and so tell us nothing about branching sequence. As autapomorphies in Gothic, they just define Gothic, they contain no information about its relationships. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From edsel at glo.be Sun Jan 30 10:52:54 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 11:52:54 +0100 Subject: NW vs. E Gmc Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sean Crist" Sent: Friday, January 28, 2000 4:08 PM [snip] >> 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? > 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". [Ed] Wasn't the verb 'forlose'? FYI: In Du. the verb 'to lose' is still 'verliezen (verlieren in some dialects), ik verlies, ik verloor, ik heb verloren'. 'I am lost' = 'Ik ben verloren'. >Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) Ed. From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 03:16:19 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 19:16:19 -0800 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] In-Reply-To: <388c4028.19433494@mail.chello.nl> Message-ID: 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. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Jan 30 15:15:31 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 15:15:31 -0000 Subject: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes] Message-ID: Ed Said: >Forgive me my ignorance, but could you elaborate on the relationship (or not) >of this phenomenon with a similar one in Greek, at least in some positions or >cases: thermos, -te, etc.? Greek thermos < gwher... and -te < -kwe. I think you are thinking of reflexes of the labialised velars in Greek, rather than the palatalised ones being discussed in Armenian? Peter From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 03:27:25 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 19:27:25 -0800 Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter In-Reply-To: <72.114fa83.25bbf21c@aol.com> Message-ID: At 12:56 AM 1/23/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>rao.3 at osu.edu writes: ><< Wouldn't the rise of new species be a better parallel to the rise of new >>languages? Ancestral species can exist at the same time as a species >>that has split off. >-- not generally. Actually, yes, quite generally. > Eg., we and the chimps (and gorillas and bonobos) are >descended from a common ancestor, and chimps are much more _like_ that common >ancestor, but we can't be said to be descended from chimps. Not a good example, we diverged over 5 million years ago, and there have been several species in each lineage in between then and now (humans are at least five speciation steps removed from the common ancestor, and probably more). You need to look at more recent speciation events to see co-occurrence of parent and daughter species. Better examples might be found in Hawaiian fruit flies, or Sonoran butterflies, or African chiclid fish. In fact the analogy is an excellent one, since exactly the same issue of "transitive" identity makes the exact moment of speciation impossible to identify, except in special cases. With few exceptions, parental generations are always able to interbreed with their offspring. This is exactly analogous to the parent-child similarity in speech that has come up here before. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From rao.3 at osu.edu Sun Jan 30 12:44:06 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 07:44:06 -0500 Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter Message-ID: wrote >>rao.3 at osu.edu writes: >>> << Wouldn't the rise of new species be a better parallel to the rise of >>> new languages? Ancestral species can exist at the same time as a species >>> that has split off. > -- not generally. The claim says 'can'. To give on example: Polar bears are generally thought to have descended from brown bears or grizzlies. Should we set up two species for the latter, one before and one after the split, just because of the split? Homo habilis seems to have survived till about 30000 BP. So it co-existed with a lot of other species in Homo which are usually derived from H. habilis or a descendent species. > Eg., we and the chimps (and gorillas and bonobos) are descended > from a common ancestor, and chimps are much more _like_ that > common ancestor, but we can't be said to be descended from chimps. I fail to understand the logic. You cannot deny the existence of counter-examples by giving examples. BTW, it is not at all clear that chimps are more like the common ancestor. There was an article in New Scientist several years ago which pointed out similarities between Homo and the common ancestor and suggested, tongue partly in cheek, that chimps were descended from humans. [The title was something like ``When we took to the trees''. This was a cover story.] From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Jan 30 15:18:03 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 15:18:03 -0000 Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter Message-ID: On inflectional morphology being borrowed, isn't the English plural -s exactly such an example? Peter From varny at cvtci.com.ar Sat Jan 29 04:09:23 2000 From: varny at cvtci.com.ar (Vartan and Nairy Matiossian) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 01:09:23 -0300 Subject: Horses Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > Sean Crist wrote: >> A few months ago, I made a post to the list in which I stated that the PIE >> word *ekwos "horse" is not probative in the question of the PIE homeland, >> since one need not have domesticated the horse to have a word for it. >> I want to retract that post. Beekes (1995) reports that horses (wild or >> domesticated) were not found in Anatolia in the period which Renfrew >> claims for the final IE unity, and Ringe (personal communication) has >> corroborated this claim. This is an important incongruity between the >> firmly reconstructed IE vocabulary and the homeland which Renfrew posits; >> it is a strong argument against Renfrew. > But Armenian eys^ (< *ek^wos) means "donkey". Actually, it's es^ (<*ek^wos), genitive is^oy "donkey" (the s^ is phonetically "sh"). Interestingly, Hurrian eshshi and ishshiya mean "horse". It has been suggested that the name of the land of Ishuwa from Hittite times, corresponding to the Classical Sophene, in the Southwestern corner of the Armenian Highland, is related to the Indo-European word for "horse". From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Jan 29 19:05:35 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 14:05:35 EST Subject: Horses Message-ID: In a message dated 1/29/00 12:56:50 PM, alex at AN3039.spb.edu wrote: <> My understanding is that later in cuneiform the same basic character would be the symbol for horse. Am I correct? This was actually pointed out by Childe (1954). Regards, Steve Long From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Jan 29 19:28:57 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 20:28:57 +0100 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: <2000Jan28.135524@AN3039.spb.edu> Message-ID: 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). Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 06:30:00 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 22:30:00 -0800 Subject: Horses in War In-Reply-To: <65.107fb5a.25be9442@aol.com> Message-ID: At 12:53 AM 1/25/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 1/17/00 6:48:58 PM, sarima at friesen.net wrote: ><post-PIE unity in date.>> >Well, that was my original point - that PIE was apparently not being spoken >by charioteers in the 2d millenium BC Near East. Umm, I am still not sure we are in synch. To be clear: I would suspect that the earliest charioteers spoke an IE language (perhaps Proto-Indo-Iranian), but not PIE itself. >Cav". Neither mentions what I think was a major role for the chariot - >jeeping around the top brass - the guys who the court poets gave the credit >for the victory that was probably actually won by the slingers, archers and >your basic grunts. That was actually a *later* development, after it ceased to be an effective 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. >(from Tom Clancy - who also mentions cavalry's superiority to chariotry:) Only once the modern stirrup was invented. >"Cavalry has rarely been a decisive arm by itself. Well, naturally. That is why the major powers also kept infantry. >The real impetus to chariot warfare came from the introduction of the two >wheeled, light horse-drawn chariot. This was introduced from India by the >Mitanni around 1600 BC, soon adopted by Hatti and Babylon and then became >common throughout the Near East. >There are records indicating that the Egyptians were familiar with the >chariot prior to the Hyksos conquest but the chariot did not come into use in >Egypt until then... The light chariot is known even earlier from northeast of the Caspian. (Still Indo-Iranian, just not Indian). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From rao.3 at osu.edu Sun Jan 30 12:47:00 2000 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 07:47:00 -0500 Subject: Horses and chariots. Message-ID: Steve Long (quoting Tom Clancy?) wrote: > The Egyptians used the chariot differently from the rest of the > Near East in that while they too carried a javelin, they > abandoned the spear and adopted the bow. If chariots came to Egypt from Mittani Aryans, this doesn't make sense. In India, all chariot mounted warriors used the long bow. I think that the same is implied by Avestic evidence. Anthony and Vinogradov suggest this as the reason for the switch from riding to chariotry among Indo-Iranians (to answer the question of why anybody would do so). JoatSimeon wrote: > development of ... stirrups (post-300 CE). There is an old article of Littauer in Antiquity (mid to late 60's) about the history of stirrups. The oldest known representation of stirrups is on a Scythian (something) where one mounted warrior is clearly shown with a foot in a loop hanging from the horse. This artifact was dated to 3rd c. BCE, if memory serves right. Sanchi sculptures show a rope with loops at the ends used like stirrups (this would date to about 100 BCE). From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Sat Jan 29 05:40:07 2000 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 23:40:07 -0600 Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? Message-ID: Lloyd Anderson wrote, wondering whether the Greek and Sanskrit augment (found also in Armenian) might in some sense be "cognate" with ge- found in German past participles, asks: >What is the origin of that prefix in German? >Is it just barely conceivable that it might be related to >the Sanskrit and Greek augment, >and that it began with a laryngeal? Since no one has otherwise proposes even one instance in which a laryngeal has yielded *initial* Gmc. g-, the etymology would be entirely ad hoc It has been proposed that intervocalic or preconsonantal laryngeals have been "hardened" to a velar in certain forms -- I've even accepted some such suggestions in print -- but they are far from certain, and nothing warrants extending them to initial position. >I think the functions of German and of the >Greek and Sanskrit augment, in completive contexts, >are highly similar. Hardly. Greek and Sanskrit apply the augment to the imperfect indicative, a form which is anything *but* completive. Germanic ge-/gi-/ga- once had completive meaning: Middle High German _sitzen_ 'to be sitting' contrasted with prefixed _gesitzen_ 'to sit down'. It could occur on any form of the verb. But the other prefixed verb forms also had perfective meaning; ge- was not unique in this regard. Meanwhile, the augment had purely past meaning. So Anderson's proposal fails on both phonetic and semantic grounds. >Pardon, I am not a Germanicist and have >no immediate access to something that would tell me. >Pokorny's Comparative Germanic Grammar >pp.205-206 states a relation to Latin co(m)-, >but such a hypothesis is to me much more improbable on >semantic grounds. In this view, I would assume, >the /gV-/ prefixes gradually spread from their point of >origin at the expense of other prefixes. Perfectly possible. >Was that hypothesis posited long ago for simply for >lack of anything better, or because shows up only in some >of the western Germanic languages (OHG, English, etc.)? All West Germanic languages show some form of ge-. But so does Gothic, which has ga-. Old Norse doesn't have it -- not surprising, since it doesn't have the other familiar prefixes either. Semantically, ge- matches Latin com- very well, since on nonverbal forms it (like com-) it often has collective meaning. >Or is there substantial support behind it, >such as details of the gradual stages of infiltration from Latin? There was no "infiltration from Latin"; if they are related, they are truly cognate, i.e. lineal descendants of a form existing PIE, the ancestor of both Latin and Germanic. Phonetically, this is difficult, since initially, PIE k- should yield Gmc. h-, not g-. But g can result from h < k when "Verner's Law" applied. This is also difficult, since Verner's Law did not apply to initial consonants. Or did it? The prefix be- is sometimes derived from PIE *(H)epi-, the ancestor of a common Greek prefix; the Germanic form would have b- rather than expected f- if Verner's Law applied. So at least there would be a parallel. But all of this is *very* uncertain, and it may well be true that the connection between ge- and com- is indeed for lack of any better explanation. But the laryngeal solution you proposed is significantly worse, not better. Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at memphis.edu University of Memphis From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Jan 29 11:52:22 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 12:52:22 +0100 Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: 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/. >-Also, if there were a laryngeal, it would make its presence felt in Greek >and Indo-Iranian. It's too late in the evening for me to go digging thru >my notes, but a laryngeal would affect the vowel quality in Greek, and if >I remember right, a larygeal usually comes out at *a in Indo-Iranian. >I'm not sure what happens to a word-initial larygeal before a vowel in IIr >(I do seem to remember that word-initial augment + HC- > a:C, i.e. where >the laryngeal belongs to the stem; but I'm not sure if HaC- would give aC- >or a:C-). aC- The augment might well have contained a laryngeal, indeed it must have for those who think that no PIE word started with a vowel. The usual reconstruction is *H1e- (> Greek e-). >I'm a little surprised that Don accepts the suggestion that co(m)- might >be cognate with *ga-; the claim looks weak to me. It's true that *ga- is >often used in forming calques from Latin words with co(m)-; but this >doesn't strike me as a particularly good argument that the two are >cognate. You can certainly use a word or affix in forming a calque >without the word or affix being cognate with anything in the language that >you're calquing on. The "default" development of PIE *k in Germanic is *g, unless in absolute initial (i.e. directly preceding the PGmc. accent), or when directly following the *PIE* accent. Although the preverb ga- is initial, it is always unstressed. Unstressed *ko- > ga- might be perfectly regular. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jan 29 07:05:47 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 07:05:47 -0000 Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? Message-ID: Dear Sean and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sean Crist" Sent: Friday, January 28, 2000 5:51 AM > On Tue, 25 Jan 2000 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: >> I was just recently contemplating the augment *e- which precedes >> certain completed-action verbs in Indic and in Greek, and which, I >> gather from one correspondent, is usually taken as an inheritance from >> some common stage, one of several manifestations of a close >> Greek-Vedic relationship. >> If one takes that point of view, then it implies a Greek-Indic common >> innovation compared with PIE. Is that branch on a tree supportable? >> (differs from UPenn, right?) >> If not, then must one take it as an inheritance from PIE, lost elsewhere? 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. Based on all usages, the best definition of the function of the suspected Nostratic predecessor of both, *?e-, is, in my opinion, not so much completed action but simply alteriority, i.e. a time-setting different from that of the non-prefixed main verb in the discourse. Thus, if the setting is present, *?e- could indicate a past or future setting. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Jan 30 20:07:33 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 20:07:33 -0000 Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? Message-ID: > German > ge- of past participles, and the augment. The question has been asked - sensibly - but universally rejected. Alas I don't know details, but I do know that the ge- prefix shows completeness rather than past activity (as the augment does in I-I, Armenian, and Greek). The ge- prefix is related to (or identical with) the collective ge- prefix in Gebirge, Geschwester, Gelaende etc. From memory, its histroy is well enough known for the connection with the augment to be ruled out. The Greek-Armenian- IndoIranian grouping is widely accepted. There remains a question as to whether it is highly innovating (my approach, and I am not alone) or conservative (the older approach). Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Jan 31 15:42:43 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 15:42:43 -0000 Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? Message-ID: Ed suggested: >In Greek only the sigmatic aorist has an augment (grapho - igrapsa), not the >asigmatic one Untrue, I'm afraid. Both equally have an augment, in identical situations, as far back as we can go in Greek. The failure of the augment to survive into Modern Greek in some words is a totally different kettle of bananas. Examples of athematic aorists with augment are: ebalon, elipon, ebe:n, egno:n, eidon, ephagon, and hundreds of others. Peter From stevegus at aye.net Sat Jan 29 03:33:23 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 22:33:23 -0500 Subject: Frisian Message-ID: 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. -- Sella fictili sedeo Versiculos dum facio. From edsel at glo.be Sat Jan 29 10:54:25 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 11:54:25 +0100 Subject: Frisian Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Max Dashu" Sent: Friday, January 28, 2000 3:18 AM > 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. > Max Dashu [Ed Selleslagh] 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. Ed. From tj at nysol.se Sat Jan 29 12:03:49 2000 From: tj at nysol.se (tj at nysol.se) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 12:03:49 GMT Subject: Frisian Message-ID: > 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. > Max Dashu I knowa bit of the frisian history. It seems like they lived in the area of present day Netherlands, the present day German North-sea coast when the Romans fought with them and conquered them some years before Christ. That is one of the reasons why they did not expand beyond this area, because they where a part of the Roman empire (lat: Frisii later Frisones). As far as I know they expanded a bit (up to present day Slesvig) after the Roman empire collapsed but not much. They where a country of great traders so their influence on the Danes and the Germans must have been big. /Torbjvrn Jerlerup Stockholm From jharvey at ucla.edu Sun Jan 30 08:23:26 2000 From: jharvey at ucla.edu (Jasmin Harvey) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 00:23:26 -0800 Subject: Frisian In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 06:18 PM 1/27/00 -0800, you 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. >Max Dashu Yes, it extended in its greatest range from the Weser to the Rhine along the North Sea Coast, just before Charlemagne came along. Currently most of West Frisian is in the province of Friesland, in the Netherlands, while North Frisian is along some of the west coast and islands off Denmark, and the little remains of East Frisian are around Saterland in Germany. For rather full reference, with maps, I'd refer you to Thomas Markey's 1981 _Frisian_ (Trends in Linguistics: State of the Art Reports 13), The Hague/Paris/New York: Mouton Publishers. For a briefer overview, the chapter on Frisian in Orrin Robinson's 1992 _Old English and its Closest Relatives_, Stanford: Stanford UP is pretty good. Jasmin Harvey Rolfe-Campbell GTC/ Germanic Linguistics, UCLA jharvey at ucla.edu From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Jan 29 17:01:14 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 18:01:14 +0100 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: <005101bf6669$df0f8a00$57c407c6@oemcomputer> Message-ID: "Steve Gustafson" wrote: >Hasn't Frisian also generalised a plural in -ar or -er, which also >corresponds with what Norwegian and Swedish (and formerly Danish) did? Frisian (at least as spoken in the Netherlands) has no plurals in -r- at all, not even in cases where Dutch still has -eren. The Frisian plural ends in either -en or -s, with a few irregular cases of -ens and zero (ko, pl. kij "cow(s)", skiep "sheep", bern "child(ren)"). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 06:40:26 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 22:40:26 -0800 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <8e.624d74.25bec5f5@aol.com> Message-ID: 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 From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Jan 29 09:28:55 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 10:28:55 +0100 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <200001281400.p121@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: >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). 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. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Sat Jan 29 09:54:42 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 11:54:42 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: <200001281400.p121@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: On Fri, 28 Jan 2000, Hans Holm wrote: > 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 ! Of course P-U *weti 'water' and P-IE *wed- might be of common origin. It is impossible to prove that they are -not-. But then again, in etymology it is pretty much impossible to prove -anything-, when it comes to prehistoric times. The question is rather: which is more likely, a semantically and phonologically flawless loan etymology, or a Proto-Indo-Uralic or Proto-Nostratic guess? Besides, even if Proto-U *weti is not an IE loan, this of course has no implication on the other loan etymologies. > I do not know a single linguist who would confirm that a word like 'water' > could be object to borrowing! Consider this: in the classical Helsinki slang of Finnish, 'water' was not vesi (as in standard Finnish), but voda (borrowed from Russian). Now this was of course only a social dialect, but it is nevertheless a speech form where the word for 'water' was replaced with a loan word. I would also like to know what makes 'water' so different from other basic vocabulary (mother, man, moon, food, meat, neck, tooth etc.) that it can absolutely -not- be borrowed (the examples in brackets can be borrowed and they have been). Note that I never said that borrowing a word for 'water' would be common or likely; nevertheless, I can't see why it would be impossible. - Ante Aikio From colkitto at sprint.ca Sat Jan 29 18:49:30 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 13:49:30 -0500 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] > 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! Myself, for starters. I will take the liberty of quoting myself: "It should always be borne in mind that linguistically unsophisticated native speakers are unable to distinguish borrowings from native words. In many instances words may have been borrowed and then, at some later stage, after they had become properly established in the language and thus indistinguishable from native words to native speakers, undergone a semantic shift and replaced original native terms for, e.g., "hand", "head", etc; cf. Russian ruka (probably an original borrowing from Baltic, see, e.g., Bern?tejn 1961:92; Klimas 1970:265), and German Kopf, an original borrowing from Latin; neither of those forms would have been borrowed in their respective meanings of "hand" or "head", but would have shifted to these meanings after being "naturalized", parallel to the development of Latin testa to French t?te. The arguments put forward by Bern?tejn and Klimas are interesting: the Baltic form (Lithuanian rank?, Latvian roka) can be etymologized on the basis of Baltic forms ("the gatherer" < Lithuanian ri?kti; renk? "gather") while Common Slavic *roka is isolated within Slavic. Bern?tejn suggests that originally *roka may not have been borrowed in the meaning of "hand". While this proposal may well be correct, the implied evolution of the semantics of *roka, and the manner in which it became the Slavic word for "hand' would in any case be very complex, and, unhappily, in the absence of actual records, unrecoverable with our present state of knowledge." (Diachronica XVI) Refs. Bern?tejn, Samuil B. 1961. Ocerk sravnitel'noj grammatiki slavjanskix jazykov. Moscow: Izd. "Nauka". Klimas, Antanas. 1970. "Baltic, Germanic, and Slavic". Donum Balticum ed. by Velta Ruk e- Dravin a, 263-269. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. I can't think of any actual examples where this would have happened with "water", but it seems quite plausible. Robert Orr From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Mon Jan 31 12:01:54 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 14:01:54 +0200 Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 28 Jan 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Is there any lexical substrate (from an unknown source) common to > Uralic and any IE languages? e.g. between Uralic (or its branches) and > Germanic/Balto-Slavic (ot their sub-branches)? None has been found, but then again, no serious attempts to find it have been made. However, even if there is, it seems likely that it is very hard or maybe even impossible to detect it, since the substrate language could not have surviving daughters. But still, it might be worth the while to compare e.g. the corpus of Proto-Saami words without etymology (there are at least 500 of them) with e.g. the Germanic words of unknown origin. (Does anyone have or know where to find a list of these? I have compiled a list of Saamic words of unknown origin, which I'd be interested in comparing with e.g. Germanic). > What was the farther western boundary of Uralic speakers? Does it > correspond to historically known boundaries between Saami and Scandinavian, > & Estonian et al. and Baltic languages? Yes, most probably. > Or was Uralic once spoken in S. > Scandinavian and farther west along the southern Baltic? Probably not, but there are a couple of researchers who claim otherwise. However, their views have been received severe criticism from other Uralists. - Ante Aikio From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Mon Jan 31 13:26:18 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 15:26:18 +0200 Subject: PIE and Uralic In-Reply-To: <76.1547e69.25c26f48@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 27 Jan 2000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > Now I have somewhat earlier dates here for the existence of proto-Uralic > (Dolukhanov 1996) -- 10,000 - 7,000BP -- citing (Hajdu 1975). I also have it > extending all the way to the Black Sea and eastern Caucasus to the Urals. Do > you have newer data? I didn't have a chance to get a copy of Hajdu 1975 now, so I'll possibly get back on this (as well as some other comments/questions in yor mail) later in more detail. However, the area from Volga to Urals is the most common view these days, at least among Finnish researchers. I'm interested in finding out on what basis Hajdu assumes that the PU homeland reached south to the Black Sea and Caucasus - I have seen no evidence that would support such a view. As for dates, 7000BP is a sensible estimate and quite compatible with my "4000BC or earlier", while 10000BP seems -very- early. (I wrote:) > < which actually seem to derive from "early daughter languages" which still had > laryngals (see my previous mail to the list). The example words I put forward > in my first mail must be older loans, since they go back to proto-U.>> (Steve Long replied:) > How you identify the difference between PIE and the IE daughters in this > region - I think - would be interesting. The specific attributes of > daughters in that region might be of value to IEists, especially if they > retain laryngals. I am not sure what IE daughter language is supposed to > have been spoken in the Ukraine at such an early time. ("Ukraine" seems to be a misunderstanding - the loans I originally referred to appear only in the Baltic Sea / Scandinavia area, i.e. Finnic and Saamic, and were probably adopted from the Indo-European battle axe culture in that region around 3000-2000BC.) 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-t?- (> Germ. *radha- 'row etc.') 2) Finn. lehti 'leaf' (< *leSti) < PIE / Pre-Germ. *bhlH-t?- (> Germ. *bladha- id.) 3) Finn. rohto 'herb, medical plant' (< *roSto) < PIE / Pre-Germ. *ghr?H-to- (> Germ. *gro:tha- 'herb, plant etc.') 4) Finn. puhdas 'clean' (< *puStas) < PIE *puH-to-s (> Old Indic pu:t?h id.) 5) Finn. tahdas 'dough' (< *taStas) < PIE *taH-i-s-to-s (> Cymric toes, Russian testo id.) (Pre-Finnic *taStas instead of *taSistas because the latter was excluded on phonotactic grounds.) We have thus two chronologically distinct layers of IE loans in Uralic that show different laryngal reflexes. With a bit more speculative approach on the data, it seems possible to add a third layer (pre-Uralic). The loans that on distributional criteria seem to be the oldest ones show two kinds of substitutives fro IE *H in word-initial and postconsonantal position: PU *k on the hand and zero on the other (e.g. PIE *Hokw- 'see' > PU *koki- and PIE *kwelH- > PU *kulki-, but PIE *Hag?- 'drive' > PU *aja- and PIE *pelH- 'frightening etc.' > PU *peli-). It is hardly a coincidence that PU *x can be reconstructed only for preconsonantal and intervocalic position, but it seems to have been phonotactically excluded from postconsonatal position and word initium. Thus, it seems possible that these are pre-Uralic loans where PIE *H actually was substituted with Pre-U *x, and subsequently a sound change *x > zero in the aforementioned postions took place in PU. If this is the case, we have at least the following Pre-Uralic loans: 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 *Hag?- PU *k?liw- 'brother/sister-in-law' (-w- is a suffix) < Pre-U ?*k?lxiw- < PIE *ghlHi- When the change *x > zero had already happened, PU had to substitute PIE *H in these positions otherwise and thus we have e.g. PIE *kwelH- > PU *kulki- (and not ?*kulxi- > *kuli-). The above reconstructions are of course tentative, and no doubt other possible explanations for the correspondence IE *H = U zero exist, too. However, it seems at least possible that there were not only PIE loans in PU, but also (Pre-)IE loans in Pre-U. (Steve Long wrote:) > The vocabulary you mention is both quite basic (it would be at 4000+BC) and I > believe you said quite extensive - I forget, hundreds of words? Consider > that the retained presence of hundreds of basic cognates from PIE in a > language that was attested when? - well, for 6000+ years would probably > entitle Uralic to a special place on the Swadesh chart - possibly better than > some IE languages. There are not hundreds of them. The reconstructed PU vocabulary amounts to only approximately 300-350 items, and among these there there are 35-50 PIE loans (the number depending on how critically one views the etymologies, 35 reflecting a very critical attitude). (I wrote:) > < obviously dealing with loaning here. The loan explanation has more > explanatory power.... This is not the case if one assumes common genetic > origin: it is not possible to demonstrate regular sound correspondences > between the items.>> (Steve Long replied:) > Okay, so please follow me here. If p-U and PIE are both at their place of > origin "4000BC or before" one just north or south of the other - one would > think they would have been in some way related or there would have been > contact between the parents of these two unrelated languages - suggesting > that perhaps one was intrusive. (Can a language be intrusive in its own > homeland?) Since you find these PIE elements as definite loans happening at > a definite time - might that not suggest that PIE entered the area - or the > loans would have happened earlier - in the proto-proto-period? I can only say that on linguistic grounds, there is very little we can say about Pre-U and Pre-IE. Consequently, it is hard to identify Pre-IE loan words in Pre-U since we cannot reconstruct these languages. This creates a tempting, but possibly false picture that the IE and U groups came into contact when they still spoke their relatively uniform proto-languages. But we can't exclude the possibility that there was contact between the predecessors of the proto-languages even in very remote past - we simply cannot say, because without reconstructed pre-proto-languages the loan words may have chaged beyond our recognition. But even if we knew that there was contact between Pre-U and Pre-IE, this of course would not make it any more likely that the languages are ultimately related. (Steve Long wrote:) > As Jens mentioned in his elegantly fair message: < older than PIE; since it is apparently only lexical material, there is little > to tell us anything about the time depth of the donor forms.>> Yes; what I presented above only strengthens the Pre-IE > Pre-U loaning hypothesis. But then again, this implies that speakers of Pre-IE and Pre-U were neighbors, and subsequently also PU and PIE were. Ante Aikio From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 06:06:57 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 22:06:57 -0800 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) In-Reply-To: <200001241129.p65346@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: At 09:29 AM 1/24/00 +0000, Hans Holm wrote: >3) Of cause migrations can be found: Nobody claims the Indo-Aryans to be > the original inhabitants of India. But there is no prove that /they/ > destroyed e.g. the culture of Mohenjo Daro. In fact there are dating factors that suggest they were *not*. The basic decline in Mohenjo Daro begins about the time that trade with Mesopotamia broke down. >SF>IE-style burials are known >.. It is still an assumption that burials are 'IE'. Such an assumption >still needs to be specified and substantiated. Overall, I think the evidence is, at least,strongly suggestive. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jan 30 05:04:38 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 00:04:38 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com writes: <> In a message dated 1/29/00 4:24:49 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> Well, I've seen recent dates- coinciding with the Balkan-Anatolian pottery group - putting the intial expansion into Europe at 6000-5500BC. From the Balkans to the Ukraine and northern and western Europe between 4000 and 3500BC. So that IE languages would effectively have been present (if not alone) across that range by 3500BC. The hypothesis does not require that those languages change slowly at all. It may suggest a larger group of intermediate and unknown descendents between PIE and the first attestation of the various IE families. And because rates of change logically vary, I'm not sure that the string of sound changes reflected in many PIE reconstructions cannot easily survive the difference between say 6000BC as a latest date and the earliest date of 4500BC (mentioned a number of times as the assumed earliest possible date used by the UPenn tree on this list.) If post-Anatolian "narrow PIE" is the measure (Hittite being generally considered a very odd IE language) then 5500-5000BC as a dispersal date becomes even less compelling. There's no requirement of course that any of the attested languages would have developed at that point or even by 3500BC. The UPenn tree (only as an example) might not even 'require' that Tocharian (the second branch-off on that tree) to break off at this point. It should be remembered that 75 years ago - even after Hittite was discovered - it was commonplace to associate the date of PIE dispersal with the arrival of the Medes, the Achaeans at Troy and of course with the "Aryan" invasions. V. Gordon Childe actually set the clock going backward by postulating a pre-2000BC. If reconstructed PIE can survive a 2500 year change in that time, it surely can handle another millenium and a half more. JoatSimeon at aol.com also wrote: <> That conclusion is not required. 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. 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. It is after all a problem IN ANY THEORY as to why Greek and Sanskrit should show a 'closer' relationship. (See Lloyd's map.) 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. (The UPenn tree (again only as an example) actually has only Tocharian and Italo-Celtic separating Greek from Hittite and I-Ir splitting off later.) <> This is a very large accusation. The range of human behavior reflected in history doesn't seem - to me at least - to prohibit Renfrew's conclusions. But perhaps this enters the ideological area that is beyond the scope of this list. <<-- in which [Renfrew's] simply wrong. What he's resistant to is the idea that linguistics can tell things about the past that archaeology cannot.>> I'm pretty sure this is not true. Renfrew actually relies on established linguistics much more than I think many archaeologists and prehistorians do. And he certainly hasn't attacked the fundamental methods or principles. He has however challenged historic linguistics to consider how a change in data (which is there whether we like it or not) affects specific theories. Such challenges I'd suggest should be seen as opportunities to expand the reach and grasp of historical linguistics. Rather than acts of unrationalized destructiveness. Regards, Steve Long From Georg at home.ivm.de Sun Jan 30 09:16:30 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 10:16:30 +0100 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) In-Reply-To: <200001281427.p123@h2.maus.de> Message-ID: >SG>the paragraph above is simply wrong. >.. Though SG is known as an expert in Tungus and Mongolian langs, not the >arguments nor our style of communication allow such a decision. I think >also of the immense impact of Mongolian on Evenki (cf Doerfer M-T, 1985) - >in this case also without a migration. True. But it is hardly the case that the Mongolian influence on Ewenki happened under the circumstances of the present distribution of these languages. In NE Buryatia, there is physical contact even today, true enough, but the large-scale M-E influence must antedate the spread of E to (most of) its present habitat (e.g. touching the Yenissey in the West). And this involves migration (on the part of the Ewenki). > And according to Heissig (in Weiers >1986) Turcic began to become the dominating lang of the Golden Horde since >1262. True again. But that's because Mongolian dominance there was only the matter of a very thin layer of Mongolian lords and officials; the bulk of the population there was never Mongolian-speaking. >Of course SG is correct that Hungarian is an *Ugric* language by relating >it to the Ob-Ugric languages. I apologize for the slipage. So do I. I just couldn't resist the temptation to imagine Romy Schneider speaking Ostyak or Vogul in one of those German post-war B-Movies ... ;-) St.G. PS: if you feel I should alter my tone or, for that matter, apologise for it, OK, I didn't mean to sound too offensive and I hope noone feels unduly under personal attack. On the other hand, is "wrong" really such an offensive term ? I have been "wrong" myself more often than I really like to admit, and welcome every correction to this effect, however ruthless. It's the refreshing air of candor I'm after, like in most of Pat Ryan's postings, to which I - much to the chagrin of our list-owner, who more than once had to remind us that we've long since strained everyone's patience beyond the limits - usually answer in the same spirit. But we're not enemies, only antagonist thinkers. Polemike: me:te:r panto:n (but not polemos). Btw.: I feel much closer to your basic line of argumentation than I made myself sound, it's only your examples I felt I had to take issue with. St.G. Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 05:57:37 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 21:57:37 -0800 Subject: SV: Indo-Hittite In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 10:22 AM 1/24/00 -0500, Sean Crist wrote: >This isn't correct; in every version of the work I've seen, the team used >Hittite to represent Anatolian. It wouldn't matter, anyway; despite the >terminology, the Indo-Hittite hypothesis holds that the earliest branching >in IE was between _Anatolian_ and what became the other IE languages. Actually, I would find the result more convincing if they *had* used Luwian! (Or, even better, both Luwian and Hittite). 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. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 06:16:21 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 22:16:21 -0800 Subject: Northwest IE attributes In-Reply-To: <34.97a598.25bebe8a@aol.com> Message-ID: At 03:53 AM 1/25/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >>Not *so* unlikely, after all. Palatalizations are, so to speak, the >>garden-variety of sound-changes. >-- yes, but the same one in two adjacent groups for different reasons? This >violates explicatory parsimony. Only if no other features contradict the grouping. The way parsimony works in cladism in biology is that one uses multiple shared features, allowing for convergent development in some, if that leads to fewer *total* steps across all features. Besides, there is a *third* alternative - Sprachbund, that is cross-language phonetic influence in a cultural area. Looked at this way the change is not purely independent, even though it may happen between quite separate languages. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jan 29 06:55:31 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 22:55:31 -0800 Subject: "is the same as" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] At 03:26 PM 1/25/00 +0000, Larry Trask wrote: >Why "absurd"? >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. B) language differentiation acts *very* much like biological speciation, except for happening much faster. C) the 'mutual comprehensibility' definition of separate languages is almost exactly equivalent to the biological species definition as a criterion for recognizing species. 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. In other words, the two sets of phenomena are so extremely similar that it is ineffective to try and treat them very differently. [P.S. the salamander ring I mentioned is formally considered one species for taxonomic purposes]. >> The same sort of situation can, and *does* hold for languages. The West >> Romance area is a dialect continuum, with chains of locally similar >> dialects connecting all of the separate "languages" in West Romance. So, >> does one treat all of West Romance as one language? It seems silly to call >> French and Portugese the same language, does it not. Yet they are connected >> by a series of pairwise similar dialects. >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". -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From mclasutt at brigham.net Sat Jan 29 16:23:23 2000 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 09:23:23 -0700 Subject: Making IE materials available [was Re: IE etymological dictionary] In-Reply-To: <001501bf696b$a13e6020$64b001d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: If anyone gets REALLY interested in an IE etymological data base, interested to the point of looking for funding, I've spent the last six years building just such a data base for the Numic languages of Uto-Aztecan with NSF and NEH funding. I'd be happy to share my experiences, failures, redirections, and successes over that time with whoever wants to be the project director for the PIE data base. It would make a stronger proposal to show that you've examined what has and has not worked in the past. 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: Indo-European mailing list [mailto:Indo-European at xkl.com]On Behalf > Of petegray > Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2000 1:05 PM > To: Indo-European at xkl.com > Subject: Re: Making IE materials available [was Re: IE etymological > dictionary] > I would be particularly interested in data rather than books on-line or in > CDROM. Books one can get from a book shop (ironic laughter!) but raw data > in a searchable form is much more difficult to find. > Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Jan 29 09:13:59 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 03:13:59 -0600 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? What's the time difference? Is the difference between Avestan and Old Persian as great as the chart would indicate? Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Jan 31 15:30:59 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 15:30:59 -0000 Subject: Is "satem" a gradient? Message-ID: There are two potential gradients: sibilation and merger. A sibilation gradient certainly exists, between "centum" languages showing one reflex of *k' or *k, and one of *kw (eg Latin), and an ideal "satem" language showing one reflex of *k', and one of *k or *kw (eg Indic, almost). This gradient falls entirely within the group that merge original *k and *kw, and is based on the degree to which all original *k' have maintained their palatalisation, rather than merging with the common reflex of *k and *kw (Baltic - Slavic - Iranian - Indic). Armenian and the Luwian group of Anatolian do not fit this gradient, because in these languages it is not a question of how far original *k' sibilates. Armenian sibilates all *k', keeps all *k plain, merging them with *kw before a back vowel, and differently sibilates *kw (*gw, *gwh) before an original front vowel. Because of the sibilation and the merger of most *k and *kw, it could be called a satem language which maintains the distinction of some *kw from *k by sibilation. The Luwian group sibilates *k', and, like all the Anatolian languages, maintains the difference between *k and *kw. Because *k and *kw are never merged, it could be called a centum language group which maintains the distinction of *k' from *k by sibilation. Thus on a merger gradient, we would have only Armenian - all the others show complete merger or complete separation of *k and *kw. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Jan 31 15:31:14 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 15:31:14 -0000 Subject: Is "satem" a gradient? Message-ID: Lloyd said (rightly in my opinion) > "Satem" may be defined in a number of different ways, ... > "Satem" may very well be a gradient concept, > with fuzzy edges. To my mind this is not just a matter of definitions, but a very important reflection of the actual nature of IE and the inter-relationship of IE dialects. I think this is why a tree structure for PIE or IE dialects is in some ways unhelpful - it implies distinct boundaries and divisions despite actual evidence to the contrary. The "UPenn Tree" being discussed on a separate list is a poor model for some aspects of IE study. Peter From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jan 31 16:33:04 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 16:33:04 +0000 Subject: Re Personal pronouns Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Pat Ryan writes: [LT] >> Whatever the intended meaning of "stands for" might be, a pronoun does not >> "stand for" a noun. A pronoun doesn't even belong to the category 'noun'. >> Instead, it belongs to the category 'noun phrase', and, in many cases, it >> takes its reference from another noun phrase overtly present in the >> discourse. >> Example: >> Q: "Where's the woman we're supposed to meet?" >> A: "She's over there." >> And *not*: >> * "The she we're supposed to meet is over there." >> A pronoun does *not* "stand for" a noun in any coherent sense. > [PR] > I am frankly rather surprised by your apparent uncertainty regarding the > intended meaning of "stands for". > And your example seems (no offense intended) trivial and the result of a > knee-jerk application of your method. > Your first sentence, of course, omits the relative pronoun that in a more > formal register would have been present. > "Where is the woman that we are supposed to meet?" > Though such a sentence is not commonly seen, it would be perfectly > acceptable to let "she" stand for "woman": > "Where is she that we are supposed to meet?' Sorry; not relevant. The required form is *'the she', and not merely 'she'. > It is obvious that "she" can stand for either "(the) woman" or the fuller > NP: "(the) woman (that) we are supposed to meet". Nope. That 'she' cannot take the place of 'woman', and that is the end of it. [on 'possessive'] > An interesting question for another time. Frankly, I believe that the > definition of "possessive" can be rather simply stated. Well, I'd certainly like to see your effort! ;-) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Sat Jan 29 02:28:27 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 20:28:27 -0600 Subject: Basque butterflies again (again) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] At 10:47 AM 1/25/00 +0000, Larry Trask wrote: >Roz Frank writes: [RF] >> I would note that in addition to its meaning of "butterfly", Azkue (I:173) >> lists (B) with the meaning of "daisy" ("margarita de los >> prados") while refers simultaneously to the following three >> objects: a butterfly, a daisy and a poppy. [LT] >Yes. A point I refrained from making in my earlier postings is this: a single >Basque expressive formation often has a rather startling array of quite >different senses, sometimes in a single variety, but more commonly, perhaps, >in different varieties. This is yet another characteristic which >distinguishes expressive formations, even if not entirely sharply, from >ordinary lexical items, which on the whole do not exhibit such a range of >unrelated meanings. [snip] [RF] >> In what are now non-Basque speaking zones of Navarre we find evidence for >> the prior existence in the Basque of the zone for >> (<*bitxi/pitxi(n)-gorri> from "red"). Jose Maria Iribarren (1984) >> records this expression, spelling it as and listing its >> meaning as "poppy". The compound might be glossed as "pretty little red >> thing". [snip] [LT] >But the lesson I draw is again that these formations are, in general, neither >ancient nor long-lived, nor even stable in form and meaning. [snip] >> [LT] >>> I therefore conclude that Lloyd's efforts at linking some of the Basque >>> words to words in other languages (and also to one another) are without >>> foundation. The Basque 'butterfly' words are numerous and severely >>> localized; they conform strongly to observed patterns for coining >>> expressive formations; and they can scarcely be of any antiquity. [LT] >Well, I stand by these words, and I think the point raised above by Roz >(multiple unrelated senses for individual formations) constitutes evidence in >favor of my position. 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. Stated differently, a compound expression such as 'poppy' cited above seems to me to be fully motivated by its component parts: * 'pretty, little, lively', derived from in its palatalized form, and 'red' (cf. Agud & Tovar 1991, III, 34; Azkue for derivations of from ). And you yourself stated in a previous email, if I am not mistaken, that you agreed with Ed that the origin of in compounds meaning "butterfly" could be traced back to , although in your first message you didn't mention explicitly that it was the palatalized/diminutive form of that appears to have given rise to this formation. 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.) 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). 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. 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 *. 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'. 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. 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. 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 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. 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. And in the case of <-le>, it, too, is quite common in Basque being an agentive suffix (does it have another name?), regularly used with verbal stems to refer to 'actors', e.g., from the non-finite verbal form '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. 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. Also, it is clearly related to 'to live; to be alive', 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. 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>. In the case of , the final /i/ is lost in the compound. 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. That means a non-finite verb in produced a free-standing stem. I mention this since Larry has argued that this never happens, 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>. 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. 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'. 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. 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? 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. However, given that 1) the old collective suffix in <-eta> gaves rise to the plural marker in oblique cases in Basque and 2) it is found as a semi-fossilezed form in toponyms, it follows that previously formations in <-eta> were more common and that consequently if *<-le-eta> was once a producive suffixing element, a formation like * could be considered to date back to Pre-Basque. It's all in how one looks at the data. 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> are subjected to rigorous analysis, the case for * must remain a highly tentative one. 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. Ondo ibili, Roz Frank From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Sat Jan 29 04:01:48 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 22:01:48 -0600 Subject: Basque Message-ID: At 12:31 PM 1/26/00 +0100, you wrote: >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Larry Trask" >Sent: Monday, January 24, 2000 12:51 PM >> Roz Frank writes: >>> (*?)"knot", whose meaning is not always entirely >>> clear. >> As explained above, the first two of these are transparent and regular. The >> third is obscure: very likely it does contain *, but its first element >> is opaque. >[Ed] >What about *gorda-bil, where the first element could be a Romance loan (< >corde, cuerda), i.e. coiled up rope? That would require or at least be more convincing if the word * was attested in Basque while is, cf. Spanish 'rope'. Actually does exist in Basque but it is used to mean "to keep, preserve; save' and would appear to be nothing more than a borrowing based on Message-ID: In a message dated 1/28/00 2:09:09 PM, edsel at glo.be wrote: << Roz Frank writes: (*?)"knot" <> Taking it a little further back - Greek - corde (F. 'rope') is nearly always explained as < chordam, chorde (Gr.) gut, dried gut as in 'catgut', string, (cf sausage) PLUS ( L-S): -ileos [or eileos] - intestinal obstruction -eile^don (eile^)/ile^don - by twisting or coiling round -eilo^ - shut in, prevented from flowing away AND: - sumpileo^ - force together [like felt]: of the intestines, to be obstructed SEE ALSO: -pileo^ - compress wool, make it into felt; generally, compress, close up, tighten -pile^sis - compression of wool, felt; generally, compression, contraction by cold -pile^ma - compressed wool or hair; generally compression, balled up *gorda-bil = (chorde^ + (p)ile^)? - blocked, closed up, compressed, tightened gut or string = knot? (cf. the knots at the ends of a sausage) perhaps -bil- has Greek relatives? Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Jan 30 14:08:09 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 14:08:09 +0000 Subject: Basque Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Miguel Carrasquer Vidal writes: [LT] >> 'cartwheel', 'wheel' >> This is from 'cart' + *. The phonology is absolutely regular: >> * --> * --> * --> * -> . >> 'small round bread roll or pastry' >> This is from 'bread', and again the phonology is perfect: >> * --> * --> * --> * --> . > 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/. > Of course, -b(i) [?], -d(i), -g(i) compounded before initial > vowel give -t, which then becomes harder to explain. Maybe an > initial vowel was formerly preceded by a glottal stop in Basque > (which isn't the case now), and we might suppose that the fortis > variant of /?/ became /t/: > begi + *?ile > beg?ile > be??ile > betile > ardi + *?ile > ard?ile > ar??ile > artile. But the analysis endorsed above generalizes neatly to handle such cases, without the positing of any hypothetical sounds. >> 'fist' >> This is from the archaic 'forearm', recorded in Oihenart in the 17th >> century, and again the phonology is perfect: >> * --> > (In old compounds -i and (usually) -u are dropped, while -a/-o/-e > become -a-). I wonder about the motivation for that last change. > Could it have gone through a stage */@/ (schwa), which later > became Basque /a/? So, in this case: uko [*uggo] + bil > uk at bil > ukabil. Precisely this reduction to schwa, followed by the change of svchwa to /a/, has been cautiously posited. But we have no evidence. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Jan 30 14:22:39 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 14:22:39 +0000 Subject: Basque Message-ID: Hans Holm writes: > What about being 'bili' a loan from Gaulish? > PIE *kwel- > Cel *kwi:l- > Gaul *pi:l >!> bask. pil/bil > cf PIE *penque > Cel *kwinkwe > Gaul *pimpetos (ordinal) First, no such item as * exists in Basque. Second, Basque * 'round' is always *, and never *, a form which would have been impossible in Pre-Basque. In compounds like 'cartwheel', the /p/ is strictly secondary, resulting from a well-understood internal Basque process of word-formation. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Mon Jan 31 06:50:58 2000 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (roslyn frank) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 00:50:58 -0600 Subject: Basque Message-ID: At 04:40 PM 1/28/00 -0500, Christopher Gwinn wrote: >There is indeed a Gaulish word which might have this root - Pilentum, a >Latinized Gaulish word for a type of Vehicle - which should be *Pil-ont-on >in Gaulish (perhaps meaning "wheeled thing"). >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Hans Holm" >Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2000 3:29 AM >In a nutshell: >What about being 'bili' a loan from Gaulish? > PIE *kwel- > Cel *kwi:l- > Gaul *pi:l >!> bask. pil/bil > cf PIE *penque > Cel *kwinkwe > Gaul *pimpetos (ordinal) >Mit freundlichen Gr|_en >Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover. In constructing an argument that would derive the Basque item as a loan from Gaulish one should keep in mind the following set of facts: the structure of the verb demonstrates that it belongs to a class of verbs with a prefix in /i-/ or /e-/ (cf. Trask 1995). These are considered to be "ancient Basque verbs" where a prefix appears in all non-finite forms, highly unusual in a suffixing language such as Basque. Furthermore, is a Class I or <-i> class verb which takes the suffix <-i>. There are several hundred Class I verbs in Basque, although certainly not all of them have the prefixing element in (or * as proposed by Michelena 1997). As Larry has noted in his detailed and thoughtful study of these non-finite forms, the function of the prefix * has never been established, although its antiquity in the language is evident. In my own discussions with Larry on the IE list, I have taken the position that <-bil->, the radical of , was utilized in (*ibildu> and that <-bil> in compounds such as is related to the same verbal stem. However, because is a Class I verb, it's radical is contained in the verb itself and as Larry has rightfully pointed out, we have no evidence for free-standing parent-stems that then go on to become the radicals of Class I verbs. It simply doesn't happen. What can occur, however, is for the radical to break free of the non-finite form and then become available for reprocessing as a member of Class III non-finite forms through the utilization of the suffixing element <-tu>. This appears to be what happened in the case of where the radical from the non-finite form , a Class I ( class) verb became the root-stem/radical of the new verb form. After undergoing palatalization became and that palatalized version of the Class I radical was reprocessed as the stem of a Class III verb, i.e., , also recorded as . 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. 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. In my own case, my knowledge of IE linguistics is limited so I'd rather provide the data on Basque, to the best of my ability, and let the rest of you figure out how it ought to be interpreted. Best regards, Roz Frank From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jan 31 16:04:05 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 16:04:05 +0000 Subject: Basque * 'round' Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Ed Selleslagh writes: [on my observation that * 'round' cannot be present in 'be in motion'] > I learned it (i.e. "go around") from you, maybe two years or so ago, on the > Basque-l list. Ah, mea culpa. I may well have used this gloss, unfortunately, but I meant it in the sense of 'go about', 'go here and there'. > In that case I don't understand your statement of a few years ago. Have you > changed your opinion? (which I would readily accept). No; it just means I'm correcting a thoughtless and misleading gloss. My apologies for misleading you. [on * 'round' and the verb <-- *] > Do we really know the kind of root *bil originally was? Yes. The one in is demonstrably verbal. But the one meaning 'round' is equally demonstrably non-verbal. The second occurs as the final element in compounds. No verbal root ever occurs bare inside a compound. And even a verbal stem ( in our case) can only occur as the first element in word-formation, not as the final element. Hence the <-bil> of , , , and so on cannot be verbal. [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'. 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. 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. [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? 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? [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. > Quite a few Iberian toponyms could just as well be Basque (Oriola, Looks vaguely Basque, but what would the Basque etymology be? > 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? > 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/. > 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/. > 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? [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. 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 *. [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. > 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? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jan 31 16:25:02 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 16:25:02 +0000 Subject: Basque Message-ID: 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? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Mon Jan 31 08:34:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 08:34:00 GMT Subject: What is Relatedness? Message-ID: SL>Isoglosses apply to maps. SL>BEFORE a tree is drawn, because there is no way to portray these SL>variables in a SINGLE tree. .. in fact there has been /one/ attempt to combine isoglosses with trees: FCSouthworth in Language 40:557ff. Mit freundlichen Gr?szen Hans J Holm From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Mon Jan 31 08:00:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 08:00:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: A>Persian took the word {wa} = and" from Arabic. .. and Turcic seems to have done so, too; but without some more arguments this is speculation in the moment. And these are not just "any" words but belonging to the language of very long lasting islamic regimes. I think, as a reason for borrowing, a "homophone load" alone will not do. Mit freundlichen Gr?szen Hans J Holm - - et monere et moneri - - From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Mon Jan 31 16:07:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 16:07:00 GMT Subject: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] AA>There is a misunderstanding here. We are -not- dealing .. who is 'we'? AA>precisely - AA>radically AA>has already been found out AA>all of them have failed AA>this has not been succesful .. ? aha... Besides: There are some more arguments required to "prove" borrowing. (See Anttila e.g. 89 for details). E.g. it is much more likely for a cultural concept like 'wheel' to be borrowed - as opposed to 'water', isn't it? AA>Of course, it is impossible to -prove- (...) that the lexical similarities AA>are not due to common genetic origin. But then, it is impossible to AA>disprove -any- proposed genetic relationship. .. 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'. AA>Because of this, the task of proving belongs to those who propose a AA>genetic relationship, and this has not been succesful for proto-Indo- AA>Uralic or Nostratic. .. you know everything about that to be so sure? AA>these contain at least 30 proto-IE loans, I'd say that chance AA>correspondence is ruled out .. 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". or see e.g. LCampbell in Diachronica VII-2/1990:174. There are indeed some serious attempts. Mit freundlichen Gr?szen Hans J Holm - - et monere et moneri - - From Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de Mon Jan 31 06:38:00 2000 From: Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de (Hans Holm) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 06:38:00 GMT Subject: German ge- ptcpl cognates? Message-ID: SC>the tree computed by Ringe, Warnow and Taylor is as follows: ..How can we discuss a Hypothesis that never has been completely published? Until now I have read three articles on the 'Ringe-Warnow-Taylor-Tree': - 1996 Warnow/Ringe/Taylor: "Reconstructing the evolutionary history of natural languages" in Procds 7th annual AMC-SIAM Symp discr. algorithms, ch.36; - 1997 Warnow: "Mathematical approaches to comparative linguistics" in PNAS 94:6585-90; - 1997 Bonet/Phillips/Warnow/Yooseph: "Inferring Evolutionary Trees from Polymorphic Characters, and an Analysis of the Indo-European Family of Languages" in DIMACS 37:43-55. - the html-page as abridged form. Compared with e.g. Dyen/Kruskal/Black 1992 or even Krishnamurti/Moses/ Danforth 1983 the 'UPenn-tree' is not as completely documented as to be comprehensible. *I* am not able to trace the decisions leading to /this/ mystery tree in detail. Perhaps can anyone help me. Warnow, Ringe did not. Mit freundlichen Gr??en Hans J. Holm, Meckauerweg 18, D-30629 Hannover Tel=FAX x39-511-9585714.