 (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/
  _| ,| ,|   -----
  _| ,| ,|    [_]
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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., Berntejn 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 Berntejn 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.  Berntejn 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.
Berntejn, 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.