Refining early Basque criteria

Patrick C. Ryan proto-language at email.msn.com
Sun Jan 16 07:47:33 UTC 2000


Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: "Ralf-Stefan Georg" <Georg at home.ivm.de>
Sent: Saturday, December 18, 1999 10:44 PM

>> I would suggest rather that these very ancient words have been retained in a
>> substantially unchanged form because of the strong emotional significance
>> they have in most human societies.

>> Let us assume that, for reasons I cannot fathom, children all over the world
>> are *independently motivated* (by what, pray tell ???) to employ <mama> for
>> 'mother'.

> I don't see any difficulty here. When you do nothing, repeat nothing
> specific with your vocal tract or articulatory apparatus but keep your
> mouth shut and switch on your vocal cords you have /m/. If, then, you go
> one step further and open your mouth for a change, guess what is the most
> likely vowel to come out ? Right.

It is my understanding that oral consonants are articulated by children
before nasal consonants. Is this incorrect in your view?

> Now, what happens next is that mothers *do* like to be addressed by their
> infants as early as possible by something which could be interpreted as
> something in the way of a "word". What is more natural, then, to
> *conventionalize* the simplest audible syllable any infant is likely to
> produce very early in its career as a language-user as precisely that:
> "mother" ? To make it a bit more harder to meet this requirement for the
> infant, one introduces reduplication as a further requirement, and there
> you are. Of course, this doesn't *have* to happen in each and every speech
> community of mankind, it is only tremendously likely. Any different
> conventionalizations like Georgian /mama/ "father" or language without
> bilablials or whatnot should not disturb us here. In this respect, Pat may
> even be right in assuming that the first homines loquentes might have had a
> conventionalized "mother"-term closely resempling /mama/ or sthlth. *But*,
> the fact that it is still so wide-spread today among the world's languages
> would *not* cry for the explanation that it is a *retention* from olim's
> times. The very reasons outlined above make it clear that it is likely to
> be *innovated* time and again in languages. So, again, we have an attractor
> here, and the nursery words go out.

All you have written is, of course, very plausible.

But --- and there is always a but, is there not? --- this does not really
address my argument, I do not think.

I am *not* maintaining that *mama is the early term for 'mother' but rather
*ama.

Larry brushes by this difference but I am hoping you will not.

While *mama may be a perfectly plausible child's word for 'mother', the
frequently found form *?ama can, with an implausible level of difficulty, be
derived from it. Do you not agree?

Pat

PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th
St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE:
http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek,
at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er
mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)



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